“Jianbing, are you in position?” Lin Zong asked quickly as he changed his shoes in the entryway, speaking frantically into the phone. “My parents have gone out.”
“I see them,” Li Jianbing said. “I’m already tailing them.”
“Good,” Lin Zong pulled the door open and stepped outside. “Share your location with me, I’m heading over too.”
“What on earth is going on?” Li Jianbing had no idea what he was trying to do, but just played along blindly. “Did you find out your mom and dad are out eating, drinking, and having fun behind your back? Or do they have some hidden identities I don’t know about? Oh crap, it couldn’t be that they found an abandoned child out in the open.”
“Shut up,” Lin Zong lowered his voice. “Just tail them properly and don’t get caught.”
Li Jianbing accepted his role as an agent on a mission in a single second, and solemnly lowered his voice in response, “Received, OVER.”
Lin Zong: “Over my ass. You didn’t drive your dad’s car, did you? My parents would recognize it.”
“Of course not,” Li Jianbing said with a proud tone. “I’m driving my brother’s, a new car, he hasn’t even driven it yet, OVER.”
Lin Zong didn’t reply, ran out of the residential complex, and flagged down a taxi.
Actually, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to explain why he was tailing the car, it was just that he didn’t know himself.
He didn’t know why his parents had been coming home late so frequently lately, why they went out every weekend, and why every time they came back, their clothes always smelled faintly of a hospital.
Lin Zong had suspected whether they were sick.
But a dozen days ago, his parents had just finished a full-body physical exam; it was unlikely they were sick.
After guessing a whole circle of possibilities, Lin Zong arrived at a somewhat plausible conclusion.
His parents wanted to start a new save file.
The hospital smell meant they were seeking medical consultation to ask if they could still have a child at forty-five.
What kind of nonsense was that?
How dangerous!
Taking a step back, what if they really had one? Would he have to come home every weekend in college to babysit?
When the baby cried, should he use positive reinforcement or just beat it directly?
Those inexplicable questions were like ghosts in the night, all surfacing the moment he closed his eyes.
They kept him tossing and turning all night, failing to get any sleep at all.
“Hello,” Lin Zong burst into the car like he had just robbed a bank, shoving his phone at the driver. “Start the meter, follow this navigation.”
The driver was stunned, glanced at him a few times, and hesitantly accepted the fare.
“Are you…” The driver glanced at the avatar displayed on the phone’s navigation, which was a white-haired, big-eyed cartoon moe girl. “Chasing a girlfriend?”
Lin Zong had an earbud in his right ear connected to Li Jianbing on a voice call, and his mind was still filled with random thoughts, so he didn’t hear what the driver asked clearly and just uttered a casual “Yeah.”
The next second, Li Jianbing wailed, “I’m out here charging into battle for you, and you go and ruin my reputation like that?”
Before Lin Zong could even reply, Li Jianbing started singing on his own: “For you, I turned into a werewolf shape, for you…”
Lin Zong: “Oh, give me a break.”
One song ended and thousands more awaited; if not for the fear that the navigation wouldn’t update sometimes, Lin Zong definitely would have hung up.
Right as Li Jianbing was singing “tattoo your name on my arm,” he suddenly switched from singing to shouting: “Holy crap, mom and dad just went into the complex.”
Lin Zong had just gotten a little drowsy and wanted to close his eyes, but at Li Jianbing’s shout, he instantly woke up.
“Zong’er, I’ve been stopped, visitor vehicles have to register,” Li Jianbing shouted again. “Whose name should I put for the visit target?”
Lin Zong’s heart sank. Sure enough, this wasn’t his parents’ first time here; they didn’t even need to register.
He had arrived too. Under the driver’s shocked and curious gaze, he paid the fare and got out of the car.
“The car isn’t going in,” Lin Zong said as he ran toward the small pedestrian gate at the complex entrance. “Find a place to park and wait for me.”
“Got it, turn left, huh,” Li Jianbing rolled down his car window and yelled at the running Lin Zong.
Lin Zong shook his phone from a distance of two or three meters and then hung up the phone.
The good news was that after turning left and not walking very far, he spotted his parents’ black Mercedes.
It was parked under a building whose exterior looked older than he was.
Between adjacent buildings were two rows of sky-blocking trees, and Lin Zong found one he could hide behind and leaned against it.
Summer had been arriving earlier and earlier in recent years; it was only mid-June and it already felt like a steaming sauna.
Lin Zong didn’t know how long he would have to wait, gradually shifting from standing with his back against the tree to squatting, and finally to sitting on the ground.
The sequelae of a sleepless night were truly severe; at some point, his head tilted to the side and he lost consciousness.
When he opened his eyes again, he was being pinched awake.
Above his lips, below his nose, that spot that should be called the philtrum ached so badly it was numb. It might as well be called the numbness-rum.
“Let go,” a somewhat familiar voice came through hazily, sounding still a bit helpless. “He’s awake.”
Man, my arm is so numb, my legs are so numb, my feet are too. Was I reincarnated as a Sichuan peppercorn?
There wasn’t a single comfortable spot on his entire body.
Especially the philtrum.
His vision gradually focused. Standing in front of him was a little boy who looked about ten years old, whose hand had just been pulled away from his face.
He instinctively glanced at the little boy’s hand to see if his fingernails were very long.
Hehe.
The little boy smiled and took two steps back, retreating next to a wheelchair, hiding his hands behind his back.
Lin Zong’s sluggish gaze shifted to the other person.
Hiss.
Familiar.
Way too familiar.
Even against the setting sun’s afterglow, Lin Zong could see that person’s cold, sharp brow bones and those cool-looking eyes, which were actually just used by their owner to roll at people, one of which was heterochromatic.
“Huo You?” Lin Zong looked him up and down.
Why is he limping after just a few days?
Did rolling his eyes finally bring bad karma?
Huo You didn’t speak; he just tilted his head slightly. His left eye flashed in the light for a split second, and it was a very distinct blue.
Then, he seemed to roll his eyes again.
Lin Zong was speechless, laboriously raising an arm to half-cover his face as he stealthily pacified his sunken philtrum.
“Big brother, why did you fall asleep here?” The little boy picked at the wheelchair, poked his head out, and asked, “Did your mom and dad abandon you?”
What kind of ghost child is this?
Lin Zong glanced at him, still sitting on the ground, and checked the time.
Damn, he had actually fallen asleep on the ground for over an hour.
Lin Zong hurriedly poked his head out from behind the tree, taking a glance but failing to see his parents’ car.
Did they leave?
Lin Zong unlocked his phone. The number of missed calls and message alerts that popped up was astonishingly high, almost rivaling his former score of forty on a geography test.
“Do you live here?” Lin Zong asked Huo You while looking at Li Jianbing’s screen-filling messages.
The other person was very cold: “Yes.”
Lin Zong couldn’t care less about his tone or attitude; he struggled to stand up and pointed toward the exit of the unit door: “A car was parked over there, have you seen it?”
Huo You: “Mhm.”
Lin Zong waited a few seconds, and seeing that there was no follow-up, he had to keep asking: “That car… has it been coming here frequently lately?”
Huo You: “Mhm.”
You couldn’t pry a word out of him with a crowbar.
“Then have you seen which apartment they went into?”
Lin Zong just asked that casually, knowing full well ordinary people wouldn’t pay attention, but he still went ahead and shot into the dark anyway.
“Unit 1, 301.” Huo You continued to reply like an NPC.
Lin Zong was in the middle of replying to Li Jianbing when his typing paused at those words: “You even know that?”
“Mhm,” Huo You sat in the wheelchair, tilting his head up slightly, his eyes sparkling with fine, shattered light. “I’m the one living there.”