At six in the morning, dawn tore through the sky like a rose piercing the early light, descending from heaven. Outside the psychiatric consultation room of a private hospital, under dense tree shadows, sat two ordinary Santana cars that hadn’t been washed for a long time, coated in a grayish film of dirt.
“Quan Siyun seems to have taken leave recently. She’s planning to travel abroad.”
As Liang Yunan got into the car, he pulled out a sandwich from a bag and tossed it to Li Jinyu in the passenger seat. The wealthy young master had spent several nights with the police team, his eyelids showing three layers of fatigue, yet he remained strikingly handsome. This made the other pandas with dark circles in the car extremely envious—his fair, tender complexion was truly captivating.
Li Jinyu leaned back in his seat with the drowsiness of someone who had just woken up. He unwrapped the sandwich but didn’t rush to eat it, leisurely waiting for the cigarette hanging outside the car window to finish burning. He asked, “Where to?”
“America. Her flight is on the 28th,” Liang Yunan had just checked, and glanced at the time on his phone, “which is next Wednesday. She probably knows we’re investigating her and is trying to escape. Otherwise, why would she go to a country with which we happen to have no extradition treaty?”
Li Jinyu extinguished his cigarette, lowered his head to take a bite of the sandwich, and said, “Can a US visa be approved that quickly? She must have planned this for some time.”
“Maybe she applied a long time ago? A long-term visa? I heard you can apply for a ten-year visa to the US,” Liang Yunan speculated.
Li Jinyu leaned sideways against the car door and shook his head, “When I was on the team, Professor Lu said she had never been abroad. Plus, Teacher Quan is very frugal. She rarely wears makeup or buys luxury items. A woman like that shouldn’t have the hobby of traveling abroad—”
Liang Yunan, chewing on his sandwich, looked at him and added indistinctly, “Besides, she has no record of leaving the country in the past few years.”
Li Jinyu took only two bites before putting the sandwich back in the bag and setting it down. He twisted open a bottle of mineral water for himself, saying as he did so, “Such a person wouldn’t casually apply for a long-term US visa. A US visa must be processed at least one or two months in advance, which means she had plans to leave at least one or two months ago.” At this point, Li Jinyu turned to look at Liang Yunan.
Those eyes, combined with the morning dew and dawn light, were clear and dark black. As the wind blew, it seemed as if hope had scattered. He said, “So, what happened in this city one or two months ago?”
“Those two suicide cases?”
Li Jinyu hung his hand outside the car window and lazily made an affirmative sound. “She must have realized that some things were gradually slipping out of control, such as the emergence of disobedient disciples, like Wang Xingsheng and that girl who jumped off the building.”
Liang Yunan said dubiously, “Where did Wang Xingsheng go on March 17th? If he intentionally brought this ‘Master Yinzhen’ to the attention of the police, he must have left clues. But we checked all the surveillance footage, and it’s like he vanished into thin air.”
“No, Wang Xingsheng must have discovered something. He wanted to stop it but was powerless. Is Wang Xingsheng’s secretary still in a coma?”
“I’m afraid she’ll remain like that for the rest of her life,” Liang Yunan said helplessly, his tone low. “She’s unlikely to ever wake up.”
Li Jinyu lit a final cigarette. “Is there still surveillance footage from the entire city on March 17th?”
“We’ve requested that all surveillance footage from the past three months be preserved.”
“Let’s go take a look.”
Reviewing surveillance footage is an exceptionally tedious and boring task, but Liang Yunan noticed that Li Jinyu seemed to find it quite engaging—or not exactly engaging, but he lazily spread his legs, leaned back in the chair, with his shirt buttons fastened meticulously, sleeves rolled up to his forearms, one hand holding a cigarette, the other occasionally tapping the keyboard to drag the progress bar.
Liang Yunan had heard the previous technicians complaining endlessly, grumbling to him about how it was like finding a needle in a haystack, truly an inhuman task. But Li Jinyu remained calm and composed as if watching a complex, particularly boring art film. Li Jinyu wasn’t agitated at all, maintaining a consistently expressionless face, his cold gaze fixed on the constant flow of people passing through the intersections on several surveillance screens. Because of the large volume of people, sometimes a blink was enough for the target to disappear.
Liang Yunan and the technicians around him found it quite remarkable—this man’s self-control was truly amazing. Liang Yunan even wondered if Li Jinyu would maintain the same expression while watching adult content in private.
Li Jinyu probably felt that watching the surveillance footage this way was too slow. He tapped the keyboard to pause, looked around, and finally pointed at the wall opposite them, asking Liang Yunan, “Let’s project it onto the wall. This is too slow.” Then he stood up, moved the chair aside, and patted the technician sitting next to the computer, saying sincerely, “Come on, brother, help me move the table to that wall.”
The technician did as asked, and then arranged all ten intersection surveillance feeds from one street side by side. “Is this okay?”
Li Jinyu crossed his arms and leaned against the edge of the table, all traces of his usual laziness gone. He tilted his head back, staring at the surveillance footage on the wall. The chaotic light vaguely projected onto his face, making him appear exceptionally serious. “Yes, it’s fine.”
Liang Yunan couldn’t help but lean over and ask, “What’s the maximum number you can watch at once?”
Li Jinyu took a sip of water, putting down the police station’s special paper cup while keeping his extremely serious expression fixed on the chaotic images on the wall. Without turning his head, he licked the corner of his mouth slightly and said, “I don’t know, I’ve never tried before. Let me try fifty-first.”
Liang Yunan: “F-f-f… fifty at once?”
“Yes.” He didn’t speak further, and Liang Yunan didn’t dare disturb him, only silently closing his mouth.
Ye Meng had been idle lately, gaining weight at the villa and joking around with the flowers and plants in the garden. There was a period when she didn’t dare step on the scale, feeling she had become unbearably fat. But yesterday, after a shower, she mustered the courage to weigh herself and found she had lost nine or ten pounds. There was also a psychological effect—she discovered her breasts had grown larger, her waist had become slimmer, her legs were more proportionate, and the two straight, slender, fair legs stood on the ground while her buttocks had begun to become more pert. Her figure had become devilishly attractive. She wished Li Jinyu could see her; she had become increasingly beautiful longing for him.
Her figure had always been universally recognized as good—not skinny, but full and graceful, with slender shoulders and a slim waist. She had the kind of body that teenage boys would fantasize about all night after just one glance. Before sleeping with Li Jinyu, Ye Meng thought she was doing alright; despite being nearly thirty, there was still some girlishness in her features. After that night together, she looked at herself in the mirror and vaguely felt her eyes brimming like water—she had truly become a mature woman. When she turned to look at the man sleeping in the bed, his expression remained cold and clean, as if he had just satisfied some insatiable older woman and was now desperately trying to sleep it off. It was evident he still didn’t particularly enjoy the act of lovemaking.
She took a photo and casually forwarded it to Fang Ya’en, who replied almost immediately: [Wow, my goodness, what are you doing? Your figure is sizzling hot. Li Jinyu is so lucky.]
Ye Meng: [We haven’t seen each other for a long time. I’m afraid I might gain it all back in a few days, so I wanted someone to witness my peak. Hahahahaha]
Fang: [Then send it to Li Jinyu.]
Ye Meng: [Ah, I want to surprise him. But I have a feeling I’m about to gain it all back. Maybe I should start running tomorrow morning.]
Fang: [Yes, you abandoned a wealthy family bride, maintained that good figure, made him drool.]
Li Changjin stood on the second-floor balcony, watching the figure running circles in the garden below, and couldn’t help saying to the secretary beside him, “You know, this child is quite disciplined.”
The secretary nodded in agreement: “Yes if it were an ordinary person, they would probably be crying and making a fuss about seeing the young master by now.”
“She hasn’t mentioned anything to you all?” Li Changjin took a sip of tea, put down the saucer, and asked casually.
The secretary answered, “No, Auntie Zhang says she probably doesn’t know that you’ve forbidden the young master from contacting her, but she must have guessed about seventy or eighty percent of it. She’s learning to cook with Auntie Zhang every day, not bothering with anything else.”
“If Jinyu weren’t forced to, he probably wouldn’t have confronted me and sent her here,” Li Changjin sat in a chair on the balcony, both hands folded on top of his cane. Then he picked up the tea saucer again, looked at the dawn-lit sky, took a sip of tea, and sighed, “That boy never intended to stay here. I heard that the house in Fenghui Garden is still the same as it was before. The money I gave him, he hasn’t touched a penny. This kid was truly hurt by his mother; he has no attachment to this place whatsoever. But if he wants to see Ye Meng, he must stay in Beijing.”
The secretary refrained from commenting on this, remembering another matter, and bent down to say, “I received news a few days ago that Mr. Oliver will be publicly auctioning the ‘Chang Zhongding’ in England next month, but this time the starting price is set very high. Many senior figures in the country are hesitant. Do we still want to participate? Because of Ms. Li’s situation, there are many opinions about us in the industry now.”
“Yes, we’ll go,” Li Changjin rested both hands on the tiger head of his cane, his eyes like those of a deep eagle, looking slowly at the verdant mountains in the distance. “But this time, we won’t go under the name of Hanhai Langan. We’ll go under Jinyu’s name.”
Before going to sleep, Ye Meng was dripping with sweat, having done a few minutes of plank exercise. She realized she had been focusing too much on chest exercises lately, neglecting the muscle lines of her back. While supporting herself with sweat pouring down, she was on a video call with Fang Ya’en. The towel around her neck was soaked through, and tiny beads of sweat covered her smooth, full forehead.
“I recently discovered that my backlines are a bit slouched. I must have learned it from spending too much time with Li Jinyu,” Ye Meng said, gritting her teeth as she held the position. “Strangely enough, even though he usually likes to lean lazily here and there, his shoulder and back lines are still straight—straight where they should be straight, upright where they should be upright. And he was never in the military.”
Chen Jiayu was probably trying to slack off on the other end. Fang Ya’en scolded him, and he reluctantly went back to do his homework. Then Fang Ya’en said to the camera, “Men and women are quite different. Men’s physical functions deteriorate more slowly than women’s in various aspects. He’s already two years younger than you, and you’re at that awkward age. Don’t learn from him—his posture is youthful, but when you hunch your back, you look like an old lady.”
After Fang Ya’en finished speaking, seeing that she was still practicing silently, she began encouraging her son to do his homework while cracking sunflower seeds, “If you keep exercising like this, my son is going to have a nosebleed. Are you trying to drain Li Jinyu dry?”
Li Jinyu returned to the villa area on Saturday, but Ye Meng didn’t pay much attention when his car drove in from below. When she saw a familiar figure get out of the passenger seat, her entire being exploded with emotion. All the blood in her body seemed to rush to her brain in that instant, her heart pounding heavily. Without a word, she went back to her room to change clothes.
After trying on several outfits, the footsteps downstairs sounded like drums in her ears, each step seeming to press on her heart. She hadn’t realized her breathing had become rapid.
However, instead of coming to her room, the person went into the old master’s study.
By the time Li Jinyu came out of the study, two hours had passed. Who knows what they had been discussing for so long.
After Ye Meng had taken two baths and come out, Li Jinyu was already sitting on the sofa smoking, the tips of his leather shoes gleaming, though he looked somewhat dejected.
The room was dim, lit by a small orange lamp that cast a warm light, covering his tall, cold figure. Li Jinyu had one hand resting on the back of the sofa, the other holding a cigarette to his mouth, taking occasional drags. The spark brightened and dimmed with his breaths, but those eyes remained fixed on her from beginning to end, like a patient, gentlemanly wolf.
Except those eyes remained bright throughout,
Like the light of a seventeen-year-old boy. Any youth is extraordinary—vibrant and spirited, that rare light of life. We were all once light, all once ran determinedly toward the sun, and all once vowed to become someone’s moon.
That’s what Ye Meng was thinking at that moment—she wanted to embrace the moon before her.
However, Li Jinyu raised his hand and turned off the light. The cigarette was extinguished too. Ye Meng had night blindness and couldn’t see anything, so she was forced to stop. “What are you doing, Li Jinyu?”
He had somehow come to her side. In the darkness, his breathing gradually quickened, hot airbrushing her ears as he kissed her neck from behind, biting her earlobe heavily as if unsatisfied: “It’s not easy to see you, Sis.”
“…”
Li Jinyu even went straight to the point: “Do you want to, Sis? This time from behind? I hear it’s deeper that way.”