In the end, Qi Xi fell asleep in a sour mood, and so she didn’t wake up naturally the next day. The Legal Aid Center was farther from Gu Xuehan’s place than the firm was, and she barely made it there ten minutes early.
The Legal Aid Center under the Judicial Bureau was established with state funding, specifically to help disadvantaged groups who found themselves in legal disputes and needed legal services but couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. Monday through Friday, law firms took turns sending an attorney to staff the center and provide free legal services to those who came in for consultations.
The Legal Aid Center in Rong City wasn’t the imposing kind of building Qi Xi had imagined, like a courthouse or procuratorate. It was just a small office inside the Government Services Center next to the Judicial Bureau, with legal slogans on the walls and a logo made up of a shield, a heart, and two clasped hands, giving the space a solemn, dignified air.
Qi Xi had rushed over in a hurry and hadn’t checked her phone the whole way. Only now did she pick it up and find a pile of unread notifications—some from the legal team at one of Gu Xuehan’s long-term retainer clients with minor questions, others from potential clients she’d previously consulted with. She dealt with them all efficiently and concisely, and it was only after clearing through them that she came across a message from Gu Yan.
He’d sent her a Word document.
Was this some assignment Gu Xuehan had arranged for her to help with?
The file looked fairly large—was it something urgent?
Qi Xi opened it curiously, only to discover it wasn’t a task from Gu Xuehan at all—
“There’s nothing to be especially nervous about for the Legal Aid Center shift. The login password is taped under the keyboard on the desk, and the duty guidelines are in the left drawer. Once you’re logged in with the password, you’ll see the Legal Aid Case Management System on the desktop—open it and just log everything from your shift there.”
“The shift mostly involves answering phone calls—the consultation line rings almost nonstop. Just answer their questions normally, and log both the content of their inquiry and a brief summary of your response in the system.”
“Besides phone consultations, there will often be walk-ins too. Just listen patiently, take notes, and if you can answer their question verbally, do so and log it.”
But what if a walk-in’s question couldn’t be resolved verbally at all—what if it was a genuinely complicated case?
As though he’d anticipated exactly what Qi Xi would ask next, Gu Yan had already addressed it further down—
“If the case is complicated, check the legal aid regulations on the desk to determine whether the person qualifies for legal aid. If they do, have them fill out the corresponding form. Once submitted, it enters the legal aid system and waits to be assigned to an attorney.”
…
Even though complicated cases just needed to be logged and left for assignment to a licensed attorney, what if Qi Xi simply couldn’t answer some of the verbal questions on the spot?
She scrolled further down, and sure enough, Gu Yan had a solution for that too—
“If you get a verbal question you don’t know the answer to, just pretend you’re jotting down their information and details while you quietly search it up on the computer. The office computer is connected to the internet, and most questions that can be answered verbally, someone’s already asked online before.”
“Don’t let embarrassment stop you from asking for help just to save face. During your first year as an intern attorney, you won’t know much more about the practical side of law than an ordinary person does. I’ve secretly looked things up online too. Don’t try to bluff your way through a consultation—if you genuinely don’t know something and can’t find the answer, ask me.”
…
Gu Yan’s explanation was extraordinarily detailed—so detailed it made the list of side effects on a medicine’s instruction leaflet look sparse by comparison. It covered nearly everything, and beyond the actual duties of the shift, he’d even meticulously noted things like meal arrangements—
“For lunch, you can go to the cafeteria on the third floor of the Government Services Center. The meal vouchers for the duty attorney are in the second drawer on the lower right of the desk. That said, the cafeteria food is nothing special—heavy on flavor, a bit salty—but it’s convenient. If you don’t want to walk, the cafeteria’s your best bet.”
“If you want something better, you can leave the Legal Aid Center, turn left, and go down the second alley—there’s a small restaurant called ‘Deer’ there that specializes in Japanese set-meal bento boxes. It’s quite good, but you have to get there early, since they only make a limited amount each day and sell out fast.”
The further Qi Xi read, the more she felt just how thoughtful and meticulous Gu Yan was. His writing was plain, almost enough to conjure up his usual buttoned-up, precise demeanor, but reading it, Qi Xi couldn’t deny she was moved.
But being moved only made things harder.
For Gu Yan to go to such lengths clearly meant he still thought of her as a friend, or at least a colleague he was on decent terms with—but the moment she thought about how all this warmth had a shelf life, it only stirred up more restlessness and pain in her, because eventually Gu Yan would gather up all these scattered little kindnesses, along with his heart, and hand them over to the girl he’d loved for so many years.
Qi Xi tried not to dwell on it and kept reading Gu Yan’s notes—
“If you have any issues, you can ask the Judicial Bureau staff for help—someone should be there to hand things off with you. In the rare case that an irrational visitor causes trouble, call the police immediately, seek help, and let me know right away.”
…
For what amounted to just some advice and instructions, Gu Yan had written it with the airtight logical structure of a legal complaint, even applying the formatting standards of legal documents down to the paragraph breaks and numbering, and he seemed to have adjusted the layout with an eye toward how it would read on a phone screen through WeChat.
The more Qi Xi read, the more she felt that Gu Yan truly deserved to be first in their class, ahead of her, fair and square.
This man seemed to be flawless.
There was only one thing wrong with Gu Yan—he wasn’t hers.
Something bittersweet swelled in Qi Xi’s chest, but she managed to keep it in check.
When Qi Xi closed the document and scrolled back up to check the timestamp of when Gu Yan had sent it, she genuinely didn’t know how to describe what she was feeling.
2:35 AM.
Gu Yan had sent her this document at two thirty-five in the morning.
He and the neighbor girl had headed to the hotel at around eleven.
Which meant…
After checking into the hotel, he’d still diligently gotten up and written this entire set of notes and instructions for the Legal Aid Center shift.
Looking on the bright side, though he might have come in first for the hotel checking-in, Qi Xi could at least claim second place after that.
Though, just like with statutory inheritance, being second in line meant nothing as long as the first-in-line heir was still alive.
But Qi Xi didn’t have the energy to dwell on any of that anymore—all she felt was one overwhelming realization crashing over her: she really couldn’t measure up to Gu Yan, in every sense of the word.
She had lost, fair and square, no argument.
What kind of stamina, what kind of vitality did this man have?
So had she really been unfairly stuck in second place all this time?
Not unfair at all.
Did she deserve first place?
No, she didn’t.
After all, her own kidneys were definitely not as good as Gu Yan’s.
**
Qi Xi didn’t have much time to dwell on her complicated feelings, because before long, a staff member from the Judicial Bureau came by to walk her through the office computer’s login password and usage guidelines. It was a brief rundown, but by then Qi Xi had already lost her initial nervousness—Gu Yan’s document had left her well-prepared, and she felt a bit more confident heading into the unknown territory of legal aid work.
She’d assumed she’d be too distracted by Gu Yan and the neighbor girl’s trip to the hotel the night before to focus, but as it turned out, most of the messy emotions people worked themselves up over came from having too much idle time. Once you got busy, none of it mattered anymore.
The work at the Legal Aid Center turned out to be far busier than Qi Xi had expected. The 12348 legal aid hotline rang almost nonstop.
There were workers calling in about labor disputes with their employers—
“Yes, the employer is legally required to sign a written labor contract with you. Otherwise, you can keep evidence like attendance records, cafeteria meal card usage, internal company emails, or delivery sign-in logs at the front desk to prove the existence of an employment relationship, and request that they retroactively sign the contract and provide compensation.”
There were people asking about property ownership before marriage—
“If the other party paid for the home in full before marriage, then even if your name is added to the deed after the wedding, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be entitled to half the property in the event of a divorce. Current law tends to favor protecting the party who financed the purchase. Generally, if the full payment came from your spouse personally, and you’re not the party at fault in a divorce, the court will weigh factors like who paid, who contributed what, and when the contract was signed, and may grant you a smaller share out of consideration for the wife’s interests. But if the full payment came from your spouse’s parents, then…”
Besides the people with legitimate legal questions, there were plenty of bizarre calls too, such as—
“Counselor, I want a divorce, but we never actually registered our marriage—how do I even file for divorce in court? Is the process different from couples who did register?”
“Counselor, you have to help me get justice! My neighbor and I got into a fight over enclosing my balcony, and that damned neighbor stuck pins into a voodoo doll to curse me! A month ago I was in perfectly good health, could do heavy labor and everything, and this month I got diagnosed with terminal lung cancer! My son barged into his house and dug up the whole cursing kit, and the doll even had my name written on it, and the neighbor admitted it was his—now that I have this evidence, how do I get him to pay for my medical bills and losses from being cursed?”
…
Because the legal aid hotline was open to the public with no barrier to entry and no fee, not everyone who called in had even a basic grasp of legal concepts, especially since the people who turned to free legal services when facing hard-to-resolve disputes tended to have less education or fewer financial resources.
After a long stretch of calls, Qi Xi truly came to understand how grueling legal aid work could be. Things that were obvious and easy to explain often took her a good half hour of patient, plain-language explanation to get across.
And callers like that weren’t even the hardest to deal with—what really got to Qi Xi were the people who called in purely to chat. If she hadn’t lived through it herself, the old Qi Xi would never have believed anyone could be lonely and bored enough to call a free service hotline just to pass the time.
As the duty attorney at the Legal Aid Center, Qi Xi couldn’t just hang up on time-wasters the way she would with a spam call in her personal life—she could only remind them not to tie up a public resource and gently urge them to hang up if they had no actual legal issue.
But she soon realized there was always a worse tier below “bad”—
She got a call full of verbal abuse.
“You rotten, heartless lawyer, may your sons be born without assholes—you scum, you shameless bitch, cheating me out of my money, may you die a horrible death!”
The voice on the other end belonged to a man, his language crude, much of the abuse too vile to repeat.
Qi Xi desperately wanted to just hang up, but she couldn’t. She had no choice but to endure the discomfort and calmly try to talk him down.
Ten minutes later, when the man finally stopped on his own and hung up, Qi Xi let out a breath of relief.
But the reprieve didn’t last—this man seemed to have it out for the Legal Aid Center specifically. After Qi Xi took a few more regular calls, she found herself, as if by some cruel stroke of luck, connected to the same man calling back to harass her again—
“You little scumbags, smooth-talking little liars, the men among you are trash and the women are sluts—of course, only garbage would stoop to becoming a lawyer, scamming people out of every last cent, saving up for your own coffins?”
This time Qi Xi didn’t hold back. “Sir, if you don’t stop the verbal abuse, I will treat this as harassment and end this call. If you continue to harass this line, I will contact the police.”
Fortunately, the Legal Aid Center’s landline had caller ID, so once Qi Xi noted down his number, she was able to screen out any further abusive calls from him, finally getting some peace and quiet.
Over the course of the morning, besides the constant stream of phone consultations, Qi Xi also handled a fair number of walk-in visitors, carefully recording each person’s issue and patiently guiding them through how to apply for legal aid services.
It wasn’t until she saw off her last visitor that Qi Xi finally noticed how hungry she was.
By this hour, the cafeteria at the Government Services Center had probably already run out of food. She figured she’d just find someplace nearby for a quick bite. The morning had been hectic, but fulfilling—there was something genuinely satisfying about being able to help people like this.
But just as she was humming to herself, stepping out of the Legal Aid Center’s duty office, before Qi Xi could even react, a middle-aged man suddenly lunged out from behind the door.
His face was twisted with rage, his voice thick with hatred as he gritted out: “You people should all just die!”
Along with the shout came a splash of liquid, hurled out from a water bottle he was holding.
Qi Xi instinctively threw up her hands to block it, but it was useless—she ended up drenched, head to toe, in whatever he’d thrown.
“Hahahahaha, serves you right! Scamming people! You deserve this! Go to hell! Trash! Lawyers should rot in hell!”
Apparently amused by how pathetic Qi Xi looked, the man let out a few twisted, distorted laughs, spat out a few more venomous curses, then dropped the bottle and ran off.
But Qi Xi had no time to worry about the man fleeing the scene—she was overcome with terror and dread. The liquid had been scalding hot, and the instant it touched her skin, she felt a burning, searing pain.
Panic set in. What exactly had he thrown at her?
Was it acid? Or some other kind of chemical agent?
Qi Xi was terrified—but what unsettled her even more was that in the very instant she’d been drenched, the first person who’d flashed through her mind had been Gu Yan.
Gu Yan. Gu Yan.
Qi Xi silently repeated his name in her head.
If only Gu Yan could show up. If only he were here. If only he would come and protect her, the way he had that time back at her old rental—that would be enough.