Xu Huaisong and Ruan Yu stood frozen in the doorway. Thirty seconds later, they looked at each other.

Ruan Yu hesitantly asked: “I think the front desk just asked you which type of suite you wanted?”

“Mm.” Xu Huaisong’s expression was entirely innocent. “I said whatever.”

So…

Ruan Yu looked around the room once more — even the lighting was bubbling with pink. If this was what passed for the “whatever” option, then the problem was not with Xu Huaisong.

She took a few steps back and looked at the hotel logo in the hallway. Two lively little figures in a rather unmistakable arrangement.

They must have been blind just now.

So what now?

Xu Huaisong glanced down at his wristwatch, apparently calculating how long it would take to find somewhere else.

Seeing that he was prepared to leave, Ruan Yu thought it over and decided it would be a waste.

She said, “No rush, no rush — let me go in and look around first. It could be useful writing material later…”

Watching helplessly as she wandered in like a curious cat, Xu Huaisong had no choice but to follow behind her.

Once inside the pink-bubble world, Ruan Yu completely forgot the goosebumps that had risen on her all the way there, and looked left and right as though she had stepped into a whole new world.

She crouched down beside an S-shaped reclining chair and studied its shape. Her imagination failing her, she stayed silent for quite a while before looking up and hesitantly asking Xu Huaisong: “What is this for…”

He choked, looked away, and kept his expression blank. “How would I know.”

She gave a thoughtful “oh,” then turned her gaze toward a large wooden tub inside the bathroom, standing about waist-height. She walked in and pulled at the shower curtain, murmuring quietly: “Oh, it has a curtain…”

That wasn’t so bad then.

“Seen enough?” Xu Huaisong called from outside the door, urging her along.

She said to give her a moment, then came back out and walked to the edge of the bed. She tilted her head back and looked up at the large mirror on the ceiling, turning her head this way and that to look at her own reflection, and said: “This design is actually quite beautiful — in the early morning when the sun comes through, you could open your eyes and be dazzled awake by your own reflection…”

Xu Huaisong walked over to the bed with a helpless sigh and lifted her up by the arm. “Are we going or not? If not, we’re staying here.”

There were far too many novel furnishings — even the lighting had seven or eight different settings that could be switched between. Ruan Yu pressed this, peered at that, and seemed reluctant to leave.

Perhaps because she had grown so used to lying under the cotton blanket chatting idly with Xu Huaisong, she felt no particular awareness of nervousness. She thought it over and said: “What does it matter where we sleep — we’re already here, we might as well make do…” And with that she went back to fiddling with the lighting settings.

Xu Huaisong looked on. This was clearly not making do. She obviously loved it.

Fine, then.

He closed the door and opened his briefcase, plugging his nearly dead laptop in to charge — only to find there was no desk in the room.

Thinking about it, anyone who came to a place like this would hardly be expected to get work done. He looked around, then had no choice but to set the laptop on a chair that looked at least marginally more normal than the rest of the furnishings. He turned back to Ruan Yu: “I’m going to go over the case again — you go wash up first.”

Ruan Yu’s hand froze mid-fiddle with the lighting. She glanced at the bathroom.

From the perspective of her earlier tour, the transparent glass with a shower curtain had seemed perfectly manageable — but now that she was actually meant to go in and use it, the level of exposure suddenly jumped up several notches.

Noticing her stiff gaze, Xu Huaisong also realized the issue. “Why don’t I go in and check first,” he said. He was worried something strange in the bathroom might frighten her.

Having said that, he took off his jacket. Ruan Yu gave an “mm,” then watched as he began undoing his shirt buttons — and quickly turned her back: “I — I’ll play on your laptop for a bit, you go ahead…”

With that, she picked up his laptop, set it on her knees, and found a spot to sit with her back to him.

Listening to the sound of his belt buckle clinking against the wooden tub from the bathroom behind her, Ruan Yu’s heart gave a small lurch.

That bathroom had absolutely no soundproofing whatsoever.

The sound of water started up, and she blinked hard several times, forcing her attention onto the laptop screen. In that one glance, she spotted a folder on the desktop labeled “Jiang Yi Case.”

Ruan Yu knew that, in preparation for Zhou Jun’s case, Xu Huaisong had recently been revisiting this decade-old matter, hoping to draw on his father’s defense approach from back then by comparing the similarities between the two cases.

She moved the cursor over the folder and double-clicked.

Looking at the case would help take her mind off things.

The folder contained a great deal of text and image files. She skipped over several that looked particularly technical and opened one with a general overview of the case.

Since the overview was written from a lawyer’s perspective, it focused on the client’s side of things.

The overview mentioned that the victim at the time had been a female student at Su Shang University, while Jiang Yi had been a senior student in the same department who was about to graduate.

On the day the incident occurred, Jiang Yi and the victim had dined together with several other classmates from the same department, after which they went to a bar. When the bar closed for the night, the two of them — who were at the time in an ambiguous stage of their relationship — slipped away from their classmates together. Under the influence of alcohol, they had a sexual encounter in a public restroom at the roadside.

Afterward, Jiang Yi received a phone call from home and left hastily without walking the victim home. The next news he received of her was that her body had been found in one of the restroom stalls.

The autopsy report indicated that the back of her head had struck the toilet cistern — she had died on the spot.

Jiang Yi at the time, just like Zhou Jun, had panicked as his first reaction, and chose to evade the police investigation.

But he could not escape.

The criminal profile indicated that the perpetrator was, with high probability, a male around twenty-three years of age and of tall stature.

Classmates confirmed that the victim had left that night together with Jiang Yi.

More critically, the biological fluid found on the victim matched his DNA. And the time at which he received that phone call was extremely close to the victim’s time of death — too close to determine any accurate sequence of events, and thus unable to clear him of suspicion. The public restroom was rather rudimentary, and as luck would have it, there were no surveillance cameras in the vicinity.

Under the crushing pressure of public opinion and police interrogation, Jiang Yi’s mental state deteriorated into disorder. He began to doubt whether he truly had caused the victim’s death, and for a time his statements became contradictory and incoherent.

It was not until Xu Huaisong’s father took over the case at the behest of the Jiang family that Jiang Yi was ultimately acquitted and released.

Ruan Yu finally understood why Tao Rong and Xu Huaishi had been unable to comprehend Xu Huaisong’s father. Because from the perspective of an outside observer looking at the entire case, Jiang Yi truly did look very much like the murderer.

No wonder Zhou Jun had also said that Xu Huaisong’s father was a man who could turn black into white.

Ruan Yu was so absorbed in reading the case that she did not notice the sound of water from the bathroom behind her had stopped.

She closed the document and returned to the folder. Scrolling the cursor down a little, she came across a photograph — taken the evening of the incident — of the students at their gathering.

Jiang Yi, who had a distinctly handsome appearance, stood at the center of the group, laughing and chatting with the classmates around him, looking every bit the person of great promise.

It was difficult to imagine that this very person in the photograph would, ten years later, be making a living picking up discarded bottles.

Ruan Yu let out a quiet sigh. She was just about to close the photo when she suddenly noticed a figure at the corner of the dining table that looked somehow familiar.

She frowned and enlarged the photo, zooming in.

At that very moment, the bathroom door opened behind her and Xu Huaisong stepped out. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

Ruan Yu made a startled sound.

Xu Huaisong was taken aback. He walked over, noticed the photo on the laptop screen, and let out a sigh. “I told you you’d be frightened, and you went and looked anyway.”

Ruan Yu shook her head, gesturing that she had not been frightened.

She pointed at the screen. Her index finger was trembling slightly: “This person…”

“What about him?”

Her eyes went wide with surprise: “He looks like Wei Jin!”

Xu Huaisong had never come face to face with Wei Jin, and when he had been going through the old photographs, he hadn’t paid much attention to people who appeared to be unrelated to the case.

He asked: “Are you certain?”

Ruan Yu looked back at the laptop screen and studied it with her head tilted: “The resolution isn’t high enough to be certain, but they really do look alike — especially the eyes… But if it really is Wei Jin, what would he be doing there? Is there any way you could look into his academic records?”

Someone like Wei Jin would certainly have very thorough measures in place to protect his personal information. The police were already quietly investigating him in connection with suspected drug-related activities, and if Xu Huaisong were to look into him directly under his own name, it could easily tip Wei Jin off.

He thought for a moment, then flipped open his phone contacts: “My dad has reliable contacts he can use.” With that, he made a few phone calls.

Half an hour later, Wei Jin’s academic records were sent to his email.

Ruan Yu sat beside him, staring without blinking at the file download progress, until the PDF popped open — at which point she grabbed hold of Xu Huaisong’s sleeve with both hands.

He had indeed graduated from Su Shang University. And from the same department and the same cohort as Jiang Yi.

Ruan Yu broke out in a layer of goosebumps all at once and clutched his arm: “What does this mean?”

Xu Huaisong frowned and shook his head: “It doesn’t mean anything.”

He knew what she was thinking.

A decade-old case, the real perpetrator never apprehended. And Wei Jin had also been present that night, his age and build both similar to Jiang Yi’s.

But could someone with a possible history of drug use and sexual assault necessarily be a murderer? Of course not necessarily.

The fact that Wei Jin had not appeared on the list of suspects at the time meant that the police had already ruled out the possibility of him being the perpetrator.

Ruan Yu understood this logic as well. Based solely on her own subjectively colored speculation, the police would have no grounds to add Wei Jin to the suspect list again.

If things worked that way, China would need a hundred million police officers just to keep up.

But still: “Isn’t Officer Fang investigating Wei Jin? If we tell him about this, what if it happens to lead to some clue along the way?”

Xu Huaisong shook his head: “Setting aside how groundless your suspicion of Wei Jin is, the Jiang Yi case happened in Su Shi ten years ago. Cross-provincial investigations and reopening old cases both require specific conditions to be met — that ‘along the way’ is far from simple. Ten years ago, even the officers who were closest to the clues and the truth couldn’t uncover anything. What could he possibly find now? The only real breakthrough at the moment is the drug enforcement operation.”

Ruan Yu nodded: “So how is that investigation going?”

Xu Huaisong was, after all, not a police officer, and had no access to too many internal details: “They apparently suspect that there is a drug organization operating behind Wei Jin, and are quietly feeling their way forward step by step. Word is that he traveled to Vietnam a couple of days ago, and has since made reservations for a trip to Las Vegas in the United States. Cross-border tracking is extremely difficult, and it all has to be done covertly — so progress isn’t particularly fast.”

Still, it was fortunate that Wei Jin was the sort of person involved in “bigger affairs” — someone who had no interest in giving Sun Miaohan a second thought, and who, by extension, paid no attention to Ruan Yu either.

On the advice of the police, Sun Miaohan had already left Hang Shi, keeping up the appearance of letting the matter rest quietly. And what Ruan Yu needed to do right now was the same — act as though nothing had happened.

Only then would Wei Jin remain unsuspecting, and the police investigation be able to inch forward gradually.

Xu Huaisong arranged the Zhou Jun case, the Wei Jin case, and the Jiang Yi case side by side on the laptop screen. He scrolled through them back and forth and went over the related images several more times.

Ruan Yu kept stealing glances from beside him — the way one watches a horror film: frightened, yet unable to suppress the urge to peek.

Noticing her gaze, Xu Huaisong moved the laptop away from her: “Stop looking. You’ll be calling out that you can’t sleep in a moment. Go wash up.”

She gave an “oh,” stood up, started to move away, then turned back and took her earphones from her bag. She plugged them into her phone, adjusted the volume, put on a song, and set it to repeat on loop.

Xu Huaisong looked at her: “What are you doing?”

She gave a little laugh: “Letting you listen to some music for a bit.” With that she gently placed one of the earbuds into his ear.

Xu Huaisong glanced toward the bathroom, smiled, and silently sighed to himself.

Fair enough.

After five songs’ worth of time, Ruan Yu emerged.

Xu Huaisong closed the laptop, ushered her under the covers, then turned off the lights.

Ruan Yu lay down fully clothed, and the moment she settled flat on her back, let out a sudden shriek.

One fright from another is enough to kill — Xu Huaisong, who had only just sat down on the edge of the bed, lurched in surprise.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She clutched her chest with one hand, her voice still shaken: “I forgot there was a mirror above me — I saw a shadow and nearly jumped out of my skin…” She stared up at the ceiling for a few more moments, the hair on her arms standing on end, then rolled onto her side and buried her face in the pillow. “What kind of design goes against basic human decency like this!”

Xu Huaisong pulled back the covers and climbed in: “And just now you were calling it beautiful.” He reached over and gently turned her face back around. “The pillows on the outside are not clean — don’t bury your face in them.”

Ruan Yu stole another glance upward at the ceiling: “But this way I can’t sleep. My head is full of…” The case photographs from his laptop.

“I told you not to look just now.” Xu Huaisong sighed, then pulled her into his arms. “Then bury your face here — that work for you?”

It was the first time in his life that Xu Huaisong learned a love hotel could be slept in like a haunted house.

The entire night, Ruan Yu clung to him like an octopus — not treating him as a man, but as a charm against evil spirits.

He endured until dawn, then gently removed her arms and legs one by one and prepared to get out of bed.

She drowsily tangled herself around him again.

Having reached his limit, he reached over and pinched her cheeks until she woke up.

Ruan Yu frowned, rubbed her eyes, and still looked entirely innocent: “What are you doing…” She stretched her legs out as she spoke.

Xu Huaisong caught her knee with one hand, said through gritted teeth: “Don’t move around.”

Ruan Yu was hit with a sudden moment of clarity. She froze, then slowly, carefully, shifted herself away.

Xu Huaisong gave a quiet cough, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom. After fifteen minutes of rushing water, he came back out, and pulled Ruan Yu — who had burrowed under the covers with both ears covered — out from the blankets: “Had enough sleep?”

She said “mm,” her face red.

“Then it’s my turn to sleep. Get out of bed and go amuse yourself for a bit.”

She gave an “oh,” climbed out of bed, then turned back and leaned close to ask: “You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you?”

Xu Huaisong glanced at her and said nothing.

She bit her lip: “I’m sorry…”

He reached out and gave her ear a gentle ruffle: “You owe me. I’ll collect the debt properly one of these days.”

Author’s Note: Ruan Ruan: What are you doing… Song Song: If you don’t go, I’ll be doing something to you.