In Lin Xing’s impression, Half Pool did indeed live in this city. But the city was so large, with so many commercial districts and so many elevator lobbies, how could it possibly be this one?
In a very short span of time, Lin Xing’s emotions collapsed and reassembled. As the elevator doors closed and slowly ascended, his thoughts raced wildly under the pressure of panic.
Maybe there was such a possibility, that this was just a passing handsome stranger, not Half Pool at all.
Because he was good-looking, did that automatically make him Half Pool? Ridiculous. That kind of logic simply didn’t hold up. Beautiful people all looked somewhat similar, only ugly people came in all sorts of bizarre variations.
How could something this coincidental possibly happen? Impossible. Absolutely impossible.
Lin Xing’s palms were already damp with sweat.
At that moment, the elevator reached the second floor, and several more passengers were preparing to get on. The people inside, who had originally been standing with loose spacing, had to shift to make room for those entering.
Behind Lin Xing was the family of three who had boarded earlier. At this point, the father lightly patted Lin Xing’s shoulder and said in a low voice, “Excuse me, we’re getting off on the third floor. We’ll stand outside for now.”
“Oh, okay.” Lin Xing reflexively agreed politely.
With people entering from outside and others shifting forward inside, Lin Xing, without even realizing it, was gradually pushed toward the interior of the elevator. In a moment of distraction, the corner of his eye almost brushed against the tall handsome man standing quietly inside.
Not Half Pool, not Half Pool, Lin Xing repeated quickly in his mind.
One hand was casually stuffed into his pocket, but only he knew that the hand inside was gripping so tightly it felt like it might crush his own bones.
His thoughts galloped wildly, and memories of Half Pool’s videos began replaying in his mind.
The face of the handsome man beside him and the face of Half Pool in those videos overlapped again and again.
“Dead memories” suddenly came back to attack him, making it difficult for him to convince himself with any reasonable explanation.
But could there really be such a coincidence in the world? Was he living inside a novel or something??
The half of Lin Xing’s body closest to the handsome man had stiffened slightly. As more people squeezed into the elevator, he was forced to shuffle another half-step inward, now close enough that he could faintly feel the warmth radiating from the person beside him.
Having a handsome man standing next to him would normally be a good thing, but if that handsome man was someone who had witnessed his social death, someone who had received his perverted private messages, and someone whose opinion of him was now completely unknown…
Lin Xing only wished he could pass out on the spot and preserve whatever dignity he had left.
I’ll just look up once. Just once.
He clenched his fist, forcing himself to stay calm. Ironically, after panicking too much, he had become somewhat composed again.
Even if this person really was Half Pool, if this unbelievable coincidence truly crushed him into the ground, so long as he stubbornly refused to admit he was that internet pervert before dying…
What could Half Pool even do to him?
Lin Xing let out a soft breath. At the moment the elevator reached the third floor, with passengers coming in and out, he casually lifted his gaze toward his side, then quickly pulled it back.
He hadn’t seen clearly, but it felt even more like it than before.
Half Pool’s videos never clearly showed how tall he was, only making it obvious that he definitely wasn’t short. But now, standing beside the man next to him, Lin Xing, at 175 cm, was shorter by more than half a head, making the other person feel at least 185 cm tall.
When Lin Xing had once jokingly given himself the title of “scheming pervert little gay,” he had imagined that if he ever met Half Pool in real life, the first thing he would do would be to clear his name and explain his intentions.
But now that that day had actually arrived, he couldn’t even take that first step. The handsome man beside him felt so cold and distant that he looked like he could punch him flat before even bothering to listen to an explanation.
Besides, it was already bizarre enough that he had run into Half Pool in real life, what if Half Pool thought he was the one stalking him??
After all, who would expect anything good from someone who had said, “I am indeed gay, and you’re very handsome”?
Should he be an anonymous pervert that netizens remembered in passing online, or an unfortunate guy in a real-life news story suspected of harassing a man and getting beaten up for it?
Was there even a choice?
All things considered, by the time the elevator reached the fourth floor, Lin Xing had quickly reached a conclusion in his mind: the man beside him was at least 90% likely to be Half Pool, and he himself should become a smart, mute Lin Xing.
But waves of negative emotions, hesitation, awkwardness, unease, frustration, all surged at once and attacked him in a group.
Every second he stood next to this person, Lin Xing felt so embarrassed he could practically short-circuit. He wished he could sprout wings on the spot, headbutt through the elevator ceiling, and fly straight into outer space, never to return to this beautiful blue planet again.
Of course, reality offered no such sci-fi escape. Lin Xing steadied his breathing as best he could, pinched his thigh in his pocket to relieve the tension, and told himself, “Just one more floor. As long as I get through this, I’ll be reborn.”
The elevator numbers slowly changed from 4 to 5. As the doors were about to open, Lin Xing stared wide-eyed at that “door of hope” slowly parting.
He had originally planned to rush out the moment it stopped, but he didn’t expect that the entire fifth floor, filled with leisure and entertainment venues, meant almost everyone in the elevator was getting off here. It would be too abrupt and impolite for him to force his way out.
So he could only suppress his urge to flee, waiting for the people in front to step out one by one before following behind them.
He kept his head down, watching the heels of the person in front of him as he moved forward. But then, from the corner of his eye, he suddenly noticed that the feet of the person beside him, who had not moved at all, as if rooted to the elevator floor, also shifted.
The dawn of salvation was right ahead.
Lin Xing saw Luo Tengfei outside the elevator. Luo Tengfei also saw him and enthusiastically called out, “Xingxing, hurry up!”
His voice wasn’t particularly loud, but in Lin Xing’s ears it felt like it pierced through the entire floor, like a clarion call for an assault charge.
He was going to die.
Lin Xing desperately wished he could seal Luo Tengfei’s mouth shut.
Lin Xing was now almost allergic to the character “星” (“xing,” meaning “star”). Fortunately, he had already reached the elevator exit. He instinctively glanced back in a flash, unable to tell whether the person behind him had noticed the syllable “xing.” Without hesitation, he hunched down and slipped out, disappearing into the flow of people, making himself smaller and smaller within the crowd.
Inside the elevator, with people coming and going, up and down, Chi Tong paid no further attention.
On his phone screen was a message just sent by Chi Yu.
“Are you here yet? We’re waiting for you.”
Chi Tong didn’t reply, but he followed the crowd outside.
What Chi Yu did when he went out to play, and the kinds of people he mixed with every day, Chi Tong didn’t know everything, but he knew enough. What Aunt Liu had called “messing around with the wrong crowd” was already a very polite way of putting it.
In fact, the things Chi Yu did could easily make it onto a legal case study as a warning to others. In the past, Chi Tong had kept a clear boundary between them, but for some reason, he had suddenly agreed to this invitation.
There were two conflicting currents in Chi Tong’s mind, wavering between self-preservation and self-destruction. Now the darker part of himself stood high above, looking down on everything, effortlessly gripping his throat and dragging him endlessly toward an abyss of darkness.
A voice in his mind kept urging him: agree to Chi Yu. Things couldn’t get worse than they already were. Maybe what Chi Yu was showing him was the other path he should have taken long ago.
Chi Tong’s gaze shifted from the empty air ahead to the front. A dense crowd moved through a mall filled with laughter and conversation, yet everything in his ears felt distant and indistinct.
A life that had already unfolded incorrectly was, by nature, difficult to steer toward the right ending.
The suppressed negativity that had always lingered in him reached its peak after he learned of his biological mother’s death.
He could still clearly remember the shock, and faint hint of hope, he felt when he received the call from his maternal grandfather that day. Chi Tong had thought it marked the beginning of a turning point, but instead it became the end, an irreversible collapse.
“She’s dead,” his grandfather’s voice was hoarse and cold, carrying an unshakable hatred. “My daughter is dead. Do you know why?”
Chi Tong, stunned, couldn’t say a single word. All he could do was listen as the other side’s outburst crashed down on him word by word.
“She said she saw you online. She kept saying she wanted to see you. She tried every way to sneak out of the house to come see you, and in the end, while crossing the street, she was startled by traffic and got hit by a car. She died on the spot.”
“Why, after all these years, won’t you leave my daughter alone? The one who should have died is your father and you. Why are you still alive and well?”
Why am I still alive and well?
Sometimes Chi Tong himself wondered the same thing. He was deeply aware of his own pathology, yet he could not pull himself out of it, like self-execution, sinking into it willingly, letting that suffocating sensation surround him at all times.
Until a voice suddenly came from outside the elevator.
“Xingxing, hurry up.”
The two words “Xingxing” entered Chi Tong’s ears. Around these two words, all of Chi Tong’s memories were positive. When he was young, he liked looking at the stars because his teacher told him that every star represented a deceased loved one, and they would turn into stars in the sky, watching over you from afar.
As a child, Chi Tong believed his father had simply become a star. Whenever he saw the brilliant night sky, he would feel joyful, as if he could sense that distant, loving attention.
And the “Xingxing” from not long ago, although it was only a brief case of mistaken identity, had still sincerely conveyed countless gestures of kindness and friendliness, allowing Chi Tong to truly feel the warmth of emotional resonance.
To Chi Tong, “Xingxing” had always been a word that represented infinite light.
Chi Tong looked somewhat dazedly toward the outside of the elevator, but the noisy crowd had long since swallowed up the person who had just spoken.