Shi Ting helped her into the car and fastened her seatbelt. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.” Yan Qing blinked her bright, clear eyes. “It must have been a very difficult case, right?”

“It was indeed rather difficult.” He took the seat beside her. “At the time, the Military Police Division had only just been established, and the officers were all still young — they hadn’t seen much.”

“It sounds like the shop owner’s wife died terribly.”

“Everyone who arrived at the scene, except for me, vomited.” Shi Ting recalled the case, and his mood grew heavy even now. “The victim was completely unclothed, thrown into a large pot used to boil lamb bones — she had been cooked through entirely.”

“Boiled alive?” Yan Qing was deeply shaken. She had been in law enforcement for nearly ten years and had never encountered such a horrific case.

Shi Ting continued: “On that street, there had originally been two hotpot restaurants. The owner Shen’s shop opened later, but because he slaughtered the lamb fresh each day and used genuinely quality ingredients, his business grew better and better with each passing day. Naturally, as his business flourished, the other restaurant suffered. That other shop, barely able to break even at first, began resorting to short-changing customers in order to turn a profit — even substituting dead cats and dead rats for lamb. Gradually, that shop became deserted, with no customers at all.”

“So the other shop owner killed Shen’s wife out of jealousy?”

Shi Ting nodded. “Every night at midnight, the large pot outside the shop began boiling the lamb bone broth, and Shen’s wife would get up every few hours to tend to it. The killer seized this opportunity, knocked the woman unconscious, and threw her into the pot. By the time the body was discovered, she had become indistinguishable from the lamb bones in the pot — completely unrecognizable.”

“No wonder you don’t eat hotpot.”

Shi Ting said, “Owner Shen originally wanted to give it all up, but he still had three children to feed. Forced by circumstances, he had no choice but to keep the restaurant going despite everything. The only change was that he no longer made lamb bone broth — he switched to a clear broth base instead. Can you guess how old Owner Shen is this year?”

“Forty-five or forty-six?”

“Twenty-eight.”

Yan Qing was astonished. “So young, and yet he looks…”

Owner Shen’s hair had gone white, his skin had loosened, and he appeared nearly twenty years older than his actual age. The blow that case had dealt him was beyond what ordinary people could comprehend.

Peace and prosperity for the nation and its people — it had always been everyone’s deepest wish, yet how difficult it truly was to achieve.

The car traveled smoothly along the road, and Shun Cheng’s bustling nightlife descended upon them in a blaze of neon lights.

“Where are we?” Yan Qing looked out the window. This didn’t seem to be the road back to Yan Mansion.

“I’m taking you somewhere.”

Yan Qing was curious, her eyes catching the glow of neon signs along the roadside. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see when we get there.”

When the car stopped in front of a large theater, Yan Qing was surprised. “We’re seeing a show?”

“Not a show — a film. Didn’t you say you liked foreign pictures? There happens to be a foreign film showing today.” Shi Ting helped her into her wheelchair. “I had tickets bought.”

He pulled out two tickets and handed them to Yan Qing. “It starts in twenty minutes.”

The tickets were slim printed paper slips. At the top was printed “Shanghai Grand Theater.” Along the left side ran a small line of text reading “Improperly dressed patrons will not be admitted,” and on the right was a green stamp bearing the theater’s name clearly visible. At the bottom, the price and seat numbers were printed in both Chinese and English.

The Shanghai Grand Theater was the largest theater in Shun Cheng. Though called a theater, it showed both opera performances and films.

The venue had one thousand six hundred seats, along with ten luxury private boxes. Each box was furnished with two leather upholstered chairs, a dining table, and food and beverage service.

Shi Ting pushed Yan Qing through the back entrance, and they made their way through a special corridor to their private box. The box was spacious enough to comfortably accommodate Yan Qing’s wheelchair.

By now, the audience had begun filing in one after another. Most of the filmgoers were young people, while the private boxes were occupied largely by wealthy ladies, young women from well-to-do families, and young gentlemen.

In the box next to Yan Qing sat a man and a woman. The man was dressed in a three-piece suit, his hair slicked back with pomade, his arm draped around a heavily made-up woman. By the look of their dress, she appeared to be a dancer from one of the city’s dance halls.

The moment the two sat down they began embracing and pawing at each other, occasionally breaking into fits of giggles.

“What films have you seen before?” Shi Ting lifted the teapot and poured a cup of tea, placing it in Yan Qing’s hands.

Since arriving in this era, Yan Qing had never once seen a film. She searched through her memories and found that even the original inhabitant of this body seemed not to have seen one either.

“None,” Yan Qing said honestly.

Shi Ting was a little surprised. “This is your first time seeing a film?”

“More or less.”

He set down the teapot. “Do you know what’s playing?”

“Isn’t it a foreign picture?”

Yan Qing laughed — even that phrase, “foreign picture,” could apparently be used in this era.

Shi Ting gave a slight curl of his lips. “That’s right. A foreign picture.”

The theater gradually filled to capacity. Every private box, every seat before and behind them, was occupied. In an age with so few diversions, a good film could empty the streets and draw the whole city out.

After a while, the lights in the theater went out one by one, and the large screen in the center lit up.

It was called a large screen, yet it was considerably smaller than the screens of the modern era — but within all of Shun Cheng, this was still the biggest screen to be found.

The film was a foreign war romance, shot in black and white, with no translation and no subtitles.

Yan Qing had no way of knowing whether the people around her could understand it. For her part, she could follow it only partially.

The moment the film began, the couple in the neighboring box were already tangled up in each other. They hadn’t come to watch the film at all — or perhaps, to be fair, most people hadn’t come purely to watch. After all, not many could truly follow the extensive English dialogue.

“Can’t follow it?” came Shi Ting’s deep, resonant voice near her ear, sounding somewhat distant in the vast expanse of the theater hall.

“Much of it, no.” Yan Qing’s English was only at a mid-level standard, and apart from medical terminology, she had forgotten nearly everything else.

“I’ll translate for you.” Shi Ting’s voice sounded again. With the film’s audio competing for attention, his lips nearly had to graze her ear for her to hear him.

He carried a very pleasant scent, and when he spoke, his breath was steady and soft, his voice clear and compelling with a certain depth to it. He reminded her of voice actors she had particularly admired — those voices that could always draw listeners completely into the scene without a trace of awkwardness.

In the film, the male lead had been captured by enemy forces and sent to work in a chemical plant. There, he met the female lead, and he had been continuously scheming for a way to escape together with her.

In one scene, the two attempted to flee and were caught. Facing the punishment of execution by firing squad, the male lead took the female lead in his arms and confessed his feelings to her.

He said…

The male lead’s voice was overtaken by Shi Ting’s voice. Matching the same rhythm and tone as the actor on screen, he spoke softly against her ear: “I like you.”

Yan Qing knew he was translating the film. Yet his voice was so gentle, his tone so earnest, that she couldn’t help but feel her face flush and her heart quicken — her thoughts beginning to drift in dangerous directions.

“I like you. I like you the way the blazing sun is dazzling, I like you the way a lake is clear and transparent…” His voice flowed like poetry, and as he spoke these words, he was not looking at the screen. He was looking at Yan Qing’s face.

She was watching the screen with focused attention. He was watching her with equal focus.

“I like you. I hope to watch the sunrise with you every single day.” His words came one at a time, deliberate, like the soft beat of a small drum just beside her ear.

Yan Qing turned her head and met his burning gaze. Deep within those dark eyes, something like starlight seemed to flicker and shimmer.

Her heart contracted sharply, and her lips parted softly: “Is that all from the film too?”

Shi Ting gave a very definite nod.

Yan Qing believed him.

Though the male lead had spoken slowly, the vocabulary had been genuinely difficult and obscure. She had only caught one phrase — “I like you” — and as for everything else that was said, she truly had needed the translation.

It was only much later that Yan Qing learned the truth: at that moment, the male lead had said only one line. Everything that followed had been Shi Ting’s own improvisation.

On screen, the male lead was confessing to the female lead. In real life, Shi Ting was confessing to her.

Those few lines from Shi Ting left Yan Qing’s face flushed and her heart racing, so much so that she absorbed very little of what unfolded in the film afterward.

By the final scene, the male lead — having worked for a prolonged period at the military chemical plant — had developed chronic poisoning. Upon learning that his days were numbered, the male lead spared no effort to arrange the female lead’s escape from the plant. As the two parted, perhaps forever, soft sounds of weeping spread through the theater. Whether or not the audience had truly understood the film, the actors’ performances were deeply moving — even without comprehension, the grief came washing over you.

“Shi Ting.” Yan Qing suddenly grabbed the person beside her, her eyes lit with excitement. “I know how Yi Zhimei died. I know who the killer is.”

Shi Ting looked down at his hand in her grasp, and after a moment said: “Tell me back at the division.”

“All right.” Yan Qing’s mind was no longer on the film at all. “Let’s go back now,” she urged.

“Fine.” Shi Ting said the words, but made no move to rise.

Yan Qing was wondering why when she realized that her hand was still gripping his — and gripping it quite firmly.

“Sorry about that.” Yan Qing quickly withdrew her hand, her face burning scarlet.

“It’s all right.” Shi Ting slowly drew his hand back, but set it aside with a kind of careful, almost tender deliberateness. The place where she had touched him still seemed to hold the warmth of her hand — that warmth was slowly spreading, radiating from the back of his hand all the way to the very core of him, warming his entire world.

He fixed his gaze on the back of his hand, and the corner of his lips lifted ever so slightly.

Back in the car, neither of them spoke. Yan Qing was still flustered over having grabbed Shi Ting’s hand, and she kept her face turned to the window, not daring so much as a glance in his direction.

She didn’t know what had come over her. She could examine male corpses without batting an eye, and yet now, simply having grabbed his hand for a moment, she was completely rattled.

Even now, she could still remember the warmth of his skin — and even more, those soft, murmured words in her ear.

Shi Ting turned to look at her. The lights along the roadside swept across her delicate face in passing flashes. She was leaning against the car window, the tips of her ears faintly pink.

He could imagine exactly what she looked like right now — it must be both amusing and endearing.

He rested his head against the back of the seat and quietly closed his eyes.

It was only when the Military Police Division came into view that he slowly opened them again. Yan Qing happened to look over at precisely that moment, and their eyes met. She pressed her lips together. “Were you… smiling just now?”

—