Late at night, Mu Yansheng and the other man returned to the dorm.
By then, Jian Yue was already lying in bed, leisurely playing on his phone.
For some reason, Mu Yansheng and his companion, who had walked in at exactly the same moment, both looked toward the young man lying comfortably on his bed.
“You quit?” Mu Yansheng asked him.
Jian Yue didn’t even lift his head, just gave an “mm.”
But out of the corner of his eye, he noticed it was ten o’clock, and he felt a moment of confusion. After a while, he put down his phone and looked at Li Cheng and Mu Yansheng, who had entered the dorm at the same time, and suddenly remembered what Li Cheng had said to him last night when they’d walked the same route together.
Ah, he’d almost forgotten.
Li Cheng had told him, hadn’t he, that he’d come by to pick him up on the way from now on?
“Sorry.” At that thought, Jian Yue raised his head and looked toward Li Cheng, who was taking off his coat. “I should have told you in advance that I was quitting. Did you also stop by the shop tonight?”
The black trench coat was half off, and the motion paused slightly at the question. When he lowered his head again and casually pulled off his sleeve, the averted gaze seemed to give the man the courage to answer him frankly: “Mm. I didn’t see you.”
And so all of Jian Yue’s attention was drawn to that seemingly calm, unruffled voice.
Amid a faint sense of guilt and curiosity, that face, which never turned toward him, was like a stretch of evocative blank space, so much so that he failed to notice Mu Yansheng looking his way with an expression tinged with unwillingness and self-mockery.
That night, Jian Yue had spent the evening quite comfortably.
On one hand, he sketched out the route map the system dictated in his head, typing it all into his phone so he wouldn’t forget. On the other, he felt light and relieved, his mind full of the sense of liberation that starting tomorrow night, he’d no longer have to work shifts at the bubble tea shop.
The excitement kept the young man up without his realizing it until the small hours of the morning. Only when the system urged him to sleep did Jian Yue begin to feel drowsy and at that moment, he found his phone buzzing repeatedly with new messages.
A photo had arrived via text, appearing above his message notifications.
His finger tapped it open a beat ahead of his thoughts. The rarely used messaging app opened on a white background, bright to the point of being glaring. An image had been compressed into a neat little square, and at first glance, it looked like a white rag lying on a wooden table.
A stranger’s number had sent him a weird picture.
Curiosity drove Jian Yue to open the image, and the enlarged details unfolded before his eyes one by one.
It was a photo taken indoors, in fairly dim lighting. In the center of the frame, on a solid wood table, lay what appeared to be a very small piece of fabric… a pair of light-colored briefs?
Jian Yue’s mood turned strange until he saw the messy, translucent stains all around it.
Jian Yue: “?”
Another new message notification appeared. Exiting the image, he could see the stranger’s next message.
‘These are yours, right? Jian Yue.’
As if suddenly struck by realization, when he tapped back into the photo, the more he looked, the more it resembled the clothes he’d lost that morning.
Faintly, he thought he could also see a mirror in the corner of the image. The person in the mirror had a scar on their left arm, with only half a chin visible, it was impossible to tell whether they were smiling or what.
“Hss…”
It’s the middle of the night, and this is what they pull?
‘This should count as a work injury, right?’ Jian Yue pointed at his phone screen and asked the system.
[Hold on a moment. Let me pull some privileges and see if I can find out who this person is.]
As a member of the Quick Transmigration Bureau, the System naturally had higher-than-standard permissions when it came to worlds like this. For example, it could access surveillance footage and use a portion of the available technology.
But all of that came with a prerequisite.
It would only take effect if an employee had been harmed (which included psychological harm, such as threats or harassment), and only after confirming that the other party was not the mission target.
The good news was that the System had indeed narrowed down the range. The bad news was that it still couldn’t pinpoint this person’s exact location.
‘So what does that mean?’ Jian Yue asked.
[It means this person isn’t the mission target, but they’re connected to the mission target.]
The detective game was less important than sleep. Since there was no way to identify this person right away at most, they could only confirm he was a student at A University rather than picking “one in ten thousand,” it was easier to just ignore the matter entirely.
After all, in a few days, once the favorability chart came in, the System would confirm the fact that the mission was fundamentally impossible to complete, and would relent and allow him to leave this place.
So this time, Jian Yue made sure to have the System extract his consciousness, and the two of them chatted face-to-face in the consciousness space to pass yet another night, greeting the dawn of the third day of the application form countdown.
Thus, early in the morning, Jian Yue crawled out of bed half-dazed, feeling the fatigue washed away by a deep sleep, full of energy.
Only to discover that someone had relentlessly sent him countless text messages throughout the night.
Oh no. He’d forgotten to turn off vibrate.
Li Cheng, who found even the glow of a screen through the gaps in the wooden boards bright enough to disturb his sleep—was, without a doubt, another sensitive type with sleep quality just as terrible as his own. Jian Yue was just about to open his mouth and apologize, but to his surprise, the first person to bring it up wasn’t Li Cheng, but Mu Yansheng, whose bed faced his across the aisle.
“Who were you chatting with all night, until the wee hours?”
The moment those words came out, Jian Yue felt all three of the scarce gazes in the room converge on him.
To tell the truth about this matter would feel somewhat like deflecting his troubles onto someone else. Besides, the way his lost clothes had ultimately appeared on someone else’s desk, in that particular manner… probably wasn’t something suitable for other people to see.
Thinking this, the words turned over in his mouth. Jian Yue didn’t respond to Mu Yansheng’s question directly, only saying: “Sorry. I’ll put it on silent next time.”
The guy was currently hunched over, elbows and knees propped up into a frame, his entire head lazily resting in his palm, his gaze sharp. For just an instant, Jian Yue genuinely felt as if he’d seen those familiar eyes somewhere before.
But the owner of those eyes was rather temperamental. This time, he no longer wore that ambiguous, not-quite-a-smile, maximum-sarcasm grin. Instead, he simply turned his head away, evading eye contact, offering only that sharply chiseled jawline and a mouth whose curve couldn’t be read.
Why did it feel like he was sulking?
Setting aside that terrifying thought, Jian Yue’s gaze involuntarily lingered on the bronzed, well-built chest muscles beneath that light-colored V-neck top.
Hss… tsk.
Was this the aftereffect of coming here these past few days looking for fun, only to be forced into working instead? Why had his eyes become so dishonest too?
Deciding to spare himself and no longer covet food on an empty stomach, the young man nonchalantly looked away. But then he happened to notice the slight bulge beneath the other’s blanket, and his expression turned somewhat solemn as he closed his eyes.
Right being locked up would have been the correct outcome after all.
Lost in such wild thoughts, Jian Yue completely ignored the string of frantic text messages that had been sent to him in the middle of the night.