The old scholar’s estate was extremely secluded, separated from the other villagers’ homes by a wide expanse of lotus ponds. Combined with the constant wind and rain, picking out any sounds from the village was genuinely difficult.

If Bai Youwei hadn’t pointed it out, Shen Mo would have noticed nothing at all — that woven through the sound of the rain was a faint, lilting opera singing, the voice of a woman.

While the two of them were still puzzling over it, the door to the adjacent room opened as well. Fu Miaoxue pulled Du Lai outside, saying, “There’s clearly a sound — the sound is *this* loud — how can you not hear it?!…”

She noticed Shen Mo standing beneath the eaves and startled slightly. “You heard it too?”

Shen Mo said, “Weiwei heard it. I caught a little of it once I opened the door.”

Upon hearing this, Du Lai listened again for a while and finally, within the piercing shriek of the wind, managed to catch just a trace of it — something resembling a melody.

“I can only hear a little too,” Du Lai said, his expression grave. He set aside his usual easy-going air from outside the game and looked seriously at Shen Mo and Bai Youwei. “It should be the Bone-Carrying Woman coming out. But for some reason, her singing seems to only affect women. Perhaps the key to this game also lies with women.”

Shen Mo considered this for a moment. “I’ll go take a look. You stay here and keep an eye on the two of them.”

Du Lai frowned and immediately made his position clear: “Let me say upfront — this house isn’t safe either. If something happens, the most I can do is get Miaoxue out. I can’t look after more than one additional person.”

Shen Mo thought: *Bai Youwei doesn’t need you to look after her.*

Still, they had only just formed an alliance — no need to assert himself at every turn. Sometimes it was appropriate to show a degree of restraint.

He said evenly, “Then I’ll stay. You go take a look.”

“I am not letting my boyfriend go off alone!” Fu Miaoxue immediately clung to Du Lai’s arm.

Bai Youwei rolled her eyes. “Then you two can go together~”

Fu Miaoxue gave a cold sniff and snapped, “Why should we?! Why don’t *you* go with *your* boyfriend?!”

Bai Youwei had been fairly irritated, but upon hearing the words “your boyfriend,” her mood inexplicably lifted. She couldn’t even work up her earlier anger anymore — she actually found Fu Miaoxue a little endearing.

*Boyfriend…*

She quietly looked at Shen Mo beside her and suddenly realized: she now had a boyfriend too!

Across from her, Fu Miaoxue was still clinging to Du Lai and refusing to let go.

Du Lai remained patient throughout. “Right now,” he reasoned gently, “only you two can hear the Bone-Carrying Woman’s singing clearly. So the sound likely has some effect on women — you both need to stay behind. I’ll go alone and be back quickly.”

Fu Miaoxue asked, “How quickly is ‘quickly’?”

Du Lai: “Twenty minutes.”

Fu Miaoxue turned her head away, refusing: “Absolutely not! That’s way too slow! I’m giving you twenty seconds — twenty seconds and you must be back!”

Bai Youwei and Shen Mo: “……”

Twenty seconds — was that humanly possible?

But Du Lai seemed entirely unsurprised. He calmly negotiated: “Can we do fifteen minutes? Twenty seconds isn’t enough time.”

“Fifteen minutes and you call that ‘quickly’?! How can you say ‘I’ll be back quickly’ and mean *fifteen minutes*?! That’s not quick at all!” Fu Miaoxue’s voice rose with indignation. “Forty seconds! That’s the absolute most!”

Bai Youwei: “Pfff…”

She wanted to laugh — she couldn’t hold it in…

Du Lai deliberated for a moment, then said, “Ten minutes. I’ll run over, see what’s going on, and come straight back.”

“No no no, absolutely not!” Fu Miaoxue said angrily. “I’ll give you at most 6—”

“Six minutes, is it?” Du Lai cut her off, cradled her face in his hands, gave her a quick kiss, and said quickly, “I’ll be back in six minutes — I’m off~”

Without giving Fu Miaoxue a moment to react, Du Lai broke into a sprint, and to save time, he bypassed the covered corridor entirely and scaled the wall with his bare hands to leap over it.

He had a real knack for wall-scaling. First he launched himself upward, both hands gripping the edges of the gaps between the brickwork, then his feet kicked off the wall twice in rapid succession, and he flipped himself clean over the top.

Bai Youwei stared in amazement. “Has your boyfriend been training in qinggong or something?”

Flying across rooftops and vaulting walls — truly something else.

Fu Miaoxue raised her chin proudly. “Hmph — of course my boyfriend is incredible~”

But then her expression darkened, and she stared fixedly at the wall Du Lai had just leapt over, murmuring: “I was clearly going to say sixty seconds…”

—