“That sounds like a man.”
Before Lanting could ask anything further, the person collapsed onto the table, completely drunk and unconscious.
These people were used to acting lawlessly and drank without any reservations, their minds thoroughly muddled one by one. Aside from Lanting and Mu Chun, the only sober person left at the scene besides Gu Guixi was Lanting.
Lanting had deliberately chosen to sit very far away from Gu Guixi, so the latter hadn’t heard what he was asking about earlier.
At that moment, Gu Guixi looked up and locked eyes with Lanting. Though he initially harbored some thoughts of using the alcohol to stir up trouble, the instant he saw Lanting’s eyes, a sudden feeling of lingering fear gripped him.
For some reason, even though Lanting couldn’t see, he always seemed acutely aware of other people’s gazes, as if nothing could escape his scrutiny.
Goosebumps erupted across Gu Guixi’s arms. The moment suspicion arose in his mind, he saw Mu Chun suddenly spread his arms wide to block his line of sight.
The moment he saw that scumbag staring at Lanting, Mu Chun grew extremely irritable, a vicious expression plastered across his baby face.
“Whose daddy are you staring at?” he blurted out, cursing.
Gu Guixi was irritated. Interrupted so abruptly by Mu Chun, when he looked back into Lanting’s eyes, those pitch-black pupils lacked any expression and had long since lost their luster.
He laughed it off as a trick of his own imagination, but by then, Gu Guixi had completely lost any mood for making trouble.
He had originally wanted to go over and chat for a bit, but Lanting had already lowered his head, fiddling with his phone.
The young man was wearing earphones, looking as if he had opened WeChat and was listening to something with the help of a screen reader.
The closer Gu Guixi crept, the more Mu Chun looked like he wanted to bite his head off. With no other choice, Gu Guixi could only sit back down and wait for Lanting to finish.
The message Lanting had just received was sent by a private investigator regarding Xu Xiaoyu.
Xu Xiaoyu’s current state was very abnormal; she seemed lucid, yet her memory was hazy about many things.
She could remember the name of her high school, but had forgotten which university she attended.
It was as if a certain stretch of her memories in the middle had been forcibly erased or tampered with, yet Lanting hadn’t found any traces of magic on her soul.
Lost in thought for a second, Lanting returned his gaze to his phone.
Under the influence of the Partridge Bird’s Spiritual Sight, his right eye could see that unread messages from the investigator had popped up the moment he opened WeChat.
[Sir, there really is a student named Xu Xiaoyu who attends Gu Guixi’s Jingren University, but that person is a male, which doesn’t match the information you provided.]
[Based on your criteria, I checked several other schools and found three Xu Xiaoyu’s. The one closest to your description is a female student from Jinchuan University.]
[However, I discovered that this female student went missing three years ago. There is a police record of it, and she has remained in an unfound status.]
Looking at the information provided by the investigator, Lanting’s gaze paused.
This must be it.
Moving his fingers, he pressed the screen dark and asked, “Where is Jinchuan University?”
Mu Chun pointed at himself: “Asking me?”
He said, “Over by Water Street, not far from here, right across the street from our university. Did you forget even that?”
The original body and Gu Guixi graduated from the same university, and Jinchuan University was separated from Jingren University by only a single street.
Lanting brushed past Mu Chun’s puzzlement without answering. Once he got his answer, he stood up directly and walked outside.
The private room reeked heavily of alcohol, with some people even lying on the floor hugging wine bottles.
Gu Guixi was a slippery character; he hadn’t drunk much, and what he did drink was plain water. Seeing Lanting stand up, he immediately followed.
“Xiaoting, going home? I’ll drive you.”
He walked out to help support Lanting, but was precisely avoided as the other person shifted aside.
He didn’t even manage to brush the fabric of the young man’s cuff, and the white ponytail flashed past.
Lanting: “Not going back.”
“Then where are you going?” Gu Guixi asked persistently.
“Going back to take a look at the school.”
He just named a random reason. In any case, to reach Jingren University, one had to pass right by the gates of Jinchuan University.
Gu Guixi kept following, so Mu Chun hurried over and wedged himself right in the middle, blocking him off.
After the group opened the door and walked away, after a while, amid the drunken crowd in the private room, the light of a mobile phone screen slowly flickered on.
Pip, pip, pip.
That was the sound of typing and sending a message.
“Stop here.”
The scenery outside the car window flashed past. Before getting into the car, Lanting had already reminded Mu Chun to tell him to stop at Jinchuan University.
Gu Guixi, who was driving, instinctively pulled over to the side. It wasn’t until Lanting and Mu Chun had already gotten out of the car that he realized it was Jinchuan University.
“You got the wrong place, Jingren is further ahead,” Gu Guixi said.
Even though he didn’t know why Lanting was getting out here, Mu Chun certainly wasn’t going to tell Gu Guixi.
He spat out a curse and said, “I suddenly wanted to see a friend. None of your damn business.”
Gu Guixi: “…”
His expression turned ugly as he said to Lanting, “There was no need to drag Xiaoting along…”
Mu Chun immediately cut him off, draped his own jacket over Lanting’s shoulders, and rolled his eyes.
Standing in the biting wind, the young man’s white hair fluttered slightly in the breeze, his face pale with only a thin trace of red on his lips.
That head of white hair and striking appearance caused the students coming and going past the school gate to turn their heads and stare repeatedly.
Gu Guixi stood behind them, neither getting back into the car nor leaving directly, locked in a stalemate with Mu Chun.
“If you’re visiting a friend, why did you have to drag Xiaoting along? It’s not like you don’t know his health is bad.”
As he spoke, Gu Guixi carried a faint undercurrent of impatience, his tone quite poor.
Mu Chun didn’t pamper him and didn’t give him an ounce of face, cursing him out directly: “Lanting and I are childhood friends. Your engagement has already been canceled. What qualification do you have to manage him?”
“My foot,” Mu Chun retorted, wearing an adorable baby face while speaking in a deeply disdainful tone.
“You used to treat Lanting with indifference and act all high and mighty. What’s wrong? Now that your family is in trouble and your business partners have all run off, you finally realize you need to suck up to Lanting?”
Others might not know the inside story and continued to shower Gu Guixi with flattery, but Mu Chun’s family background was special, and he knew quite a lot.
The Gu family had recently taken a beating from the Lan family. Their towering mansion was about to collapse, and its fall was only a matter of time.
“If you’re going to suck up to someone, you should at least have the right attitude. A few withered roses, a few sour remarks, and blowing in the cold wind for a bit. Did you really think you could win over the Lan family with something so cheap?”
Having finished, Mu Chun couldn’t help but give him a nickname: “Gu Kebao.”
A toad wanting to eat swan meat.
Mu Chun spoke at a rapid-fire pace, thick-skinned by nature, and his words fired off like machine-gun bullets.
Gu Guixi cared deeply about his face, unable to curse back while holding onto his sense of decorum, so he stood in place with a dark, livid expression, his gaze terrifyingly fierce.
Clearly standing right beside Mu Chun, Lanting didn’t say a single word, acting as if he didn’t even notice Gu Guixi being berated.
This attitude of his made Mu Chun much happier.
Yet before he could even be happy for two seconds, a voice rang out from over by the school gate.
The person sounded somewhat pleasantly surprised yet uncertain as they called out, “A-Xi?”
Gu Guixi, who had endured being cursed at without saying much, stiffened at that moment and hurriedly stepped forward to grab Lanting.
“It’s too windy outside, I’ll send you home.”
However, he was quickly stopped by Mu Chun. Though small in stature, Mu Chun possessed a tremendous amount of strength. With a single elbow jab to Gu Guixi’s waist, the pain caused the man to double over and retreat step by step, crouching down.
With that movement, the figure he had tried so hard to shield was exposed to everyone’s view.
Lanting’s gaze darkened cryptically by two shades, though he still remained unperturbed.
Yet Mu Chun frowned immediately, whispering quietly to Lanting:
“Who is this person? How come they look a bit like you?”