Fang Zhuo crawled along the passage for a while longer and eventually emerged through the back of a cabinet at the far end.

The door to this room was half-open. She traced her way toward Yan Lie’s voice, turned in circles trying to orient herself, and ended up completely losing her sense of direction.

Perhaps sensing her presence, the sounds from Yan Lie’s side went quiet. Fang Zhuo strained to listen, then lost track of him again. Instead, from behind the wall, she caught the screams and the pounding footsteps of Shen Musi and the others.

And this counts as fate?

Fang Zhuo was utterly at a loss. She wandered around like a headless fly, rounded a corner — and came face to face with Yan Lie, who was pressed into an alcove holding his breath.

Both of them froze.

Fang Zhuo immediately took stock of herself. She was wearing a very oversized bloodied costume, but honestly possessed not one shred of professional haunted-house-staff quality.

She should have charged straight at him, bared her teeth in his face, then chased him down wildly all the way to the end of the secret chamber.

Not stood here doing a self-assessment.

Fortunately, Yan Lie had impeccable reactions. Without any effort on her part, he had already scared himself half to death and turned around.

Fang Zhuo waited for him to walk away on his own. But for some reason he stopped again, staring blankly in her direction.

She felt a little sorry for him — this was someone who could be frightened out of his wits by a shadow in the countryside. Who knew how much he’d suffered in this escape room. She decided not to torment him any further.

She was just about to say something when the figure opposite her moved first, rushing toward her at speed.

Fang Zhuo instinctively tried to dodge, but she was no match for Yan Lie’s explosive burst. She had barely stepped back when he wrapped his arms around her.

The momentum nearly sent her toppling backward; his powerful arms steadied her.

Yan Lie pressed his head into the curve of her shoulder and neck, squeezing so hard she could barely breathe. Warm breath spilled against her ear, and the heat radiating from his embrace was scorching.

He must have been terrified beyond reason.

Fang Zhuo was not adept at handling situations like this. Her mind went blank — like a game lagging behind the server, where you think you’ve already crossed the map and then reload to find yourself still standing in the same spot.

She ran a quick assessment of whether Yan Lie had recognized her, then almost immediately concluded it didn’t particularly matter. If Yan Lie chose to play the role of someone seeking her pity, her willingness to indulge him seemed to expand without limit.

That wouldn’t do.

She silently counted. She would push him away when she reached ten.

But when she got to “six,” the numbers began to scramble.

Embraces, in her catalogue of memories, were not something that appeared often.

To be precise, she had come to think of them as one of the earliest things a person outgrows.

If she traced it back far enough, it was when she was very small — her grandmother had offered her that kind of comfort.

But the old woman’s warmth had always been brief. As though she feared that if it lasted any longer, it would make her granddaughter dependent on it.

Lying in her arms, Fang Zhuo had never once counted past “six.” Her weakness had never been permitted to win.

And yet those few paused seconds had left a scratching, gnawing impression she could never quite shake.

Fang Zhuo hadn’t counted the time precisely, but she felt that Yan Lie had stayed long enough for her to count “six” a dozen times over. Perhaps more.

This was an abnormal attachment. From a rational standpoint, it was something to be discarded.

When she raised her hand, Yan Lie seemed to sense it. He let go of her on his own. Without giving her time to speak, he turned and ran.

On the other side of the wall, the rest of the group was fleeing in a panic from the NPC staff.

Wei Xi had tried to grab Zhao Jiayou, figuring he looked like the second-bravest person in the group after Yan Lie. Instead, he and Shen Musi were clinging to each other in terror, their faces in complete disarray. When Wei Xi approached, they linked arms and ran away together.

Wei Xi suddenly found herself no longer afraid at all.

Was there anything in this world more frightening than straight men? She was surrounded by several of them.

She woodenly pulled out the walkie-talkie and spoke into it: “Hey, boss — where are my friends? The two who bolted, forget it. But one was left behind in a room, and one of our group went to find them. Have they come back?”

In his panic, Yan Lie had grabbed Zhao Jiayou and run — then, halfway down the corridor, realized he’d grabbed the wrong person. He’d turned completely pale and doubled back to search. He still hadn’t returned.

The connection clicked through. The owner’s lazy voice came over the line: “I’m keeping an eye on them for you.”

“We don’t need you keeping an eye on them! Give them back to us!” Wei Xi said indignantly. “They’re the only two brave people in our group! Without them we can’t finish this escape room!”

A brief silence on the walkie-talkie, then that same insufferable voice: “Not convenient right now.”

All the girls protested in unison: “What do you mean, not convenient?! Are you running an escape room or a trafficking operation?! Give them back!”

“If you’re going to abduct anyone, can you swap them for those two useless guys from before?!”

The owner replied coolly: “No.”

In the end, the escape room was not completed — the whole thing fell apart completely.

Whether they were simply unlucky or the staff were exceedingly dedicated, NPCs seemed to appear wherever they went.

At first the group still managed to produce some genuine screams on cue, but by the end they had gone almost entirely numb.

Two hours passed quickly. The shop owner, having no customers after them, took pity on them and extended their time by half an hour for free, letting them “get better acquainted” with the NPCs inside.

When it became clear they truly could not find a single clue to clear the room, he sent someone in to walk them through the entire mechanism and lead them out.

The group filed back to the shop’s front desk, looking thoroughly defeated.

Shen Musi hung her head and heaved a long sigh. The birthday girl was even more dejected — she hadn’t received a single scrap of the princess treatment she deserved.

Yan Lie was lounging comfortably at one of the tables playing with his phone. He spotted them coming out and raised a hand in greeting.

Wei Xi stared at him. “Yan Lie, how did you get out here?”

Yan Lie just smiled and said nothing.

Wei Xi asked: “Then where’s Fang Zhuo?”

Fang Zhuo appeared from the back at that very moment, dusting off her clothes and slipping her jacket off her arm to carry it.

Several of her roommates surrounded her. “Where did you go?! We searched the entire floor map and couldn’t find you!”

“Couldn’t beat them,” Fang Zhuo said. “So I decided to join them.”

The owner picked up his phone and gave it a little wave. “Employee — money’s been sent to your account.”

Fang Zhuo nodded.

Wei Xi took two seconds to process this, then the realization dawned. “So you were the NPC chasing me all over the place! How did you infiltrate their side?”

Fang Zhuo asked: “Was it fun?”

Shen Musi said through gritted teeth: “Very fun!”

Wei Xi laughed coldly. “There won’t be a next time.”

By then everyone was fairly worn out. They went to the restaurant Wei Xi had booked and had a proper meal, after which Fang Zhuo and Yan Lie headed back to school.

The two of them sat side by side on the bus — one gazing out the window, one watching the television screen mounted at the front. For about ten minutes, neither said a word.

They hadn’t managed good seats this time. The afternoon sun was catching half of Yan Lie’s face through the window.

They weren’t sitting particularly close together, yet Fang Zhuo felt as though she could almost imagine his heartbeat. Even having left that hidden corridor, the sensation of it still lingered faintly.

This was an abnormal silence.

When the same advertisement played for the third time, Fang Zhuo shifted slightly and reached into her jacket pocket. “The money — I’ll pay you back eventually.”

Yan Lie finally broke out of his statue-like stillness, turned toward her, and first said: “Can’t I spend money on you?”

Then: “I said I’d treat you. After all, I was the one who invited you.”

Then immediately after: “You bought me a meal last time.”

Fang Zhuo wasn’t sure which of those three statements she was meant to respond to.

“I only bought you one bowl of noodles.”

“I haven’t given you a birthday gift yet.” Yan Lie’s mind seemed to be producing reasons and tossing them out one after another, logic be damned. “You had two hundred yuan and you were willing to spend twenty of it on lunch for me. I just paid for a game you half-earned back yourself. I’d say you got the worse end of the deal.”

Fang Zhuo found herself, once again, at a loss for how to respond to him. She raised a hand and scratched absently at the corner of her brow, then redirected her gaze to the television.

In the silence that followed, Yan Lie recognized that he was, as usual, the one who gave ground.

“My birthday is July sixteenth,” he said. “Don’t ask me what I want — I’m not picking my own present.”

Fang Zhuo said: “Okay.”

The bus’s automated voice announced the next stop: A Secondary School.

Fang Zhuo checked she had everything with her and moved to stand.

Yan Lie rested one hand on the seatback in front of him and suddenly remarked with feeling: “When is the college entrance exam, anyway?”

Fang Zhuo turned to look at him. His gaze was drifting, the corners of his lips pressed faintly downward. He said, almost in a murmur, as though complaining to no one in particular: “Strangely enough I don’t want to come back to this place anymore.”

Fang Zhuo did the calculation for him. “One hundred and ninety-seven more days.”