Chapter 131

“Is there news about Bing-ge?” Zhang Yuanqing asked, a surge of hope in his heart. “Did the Hangzhou branch get any results? Did they find anything?”

He complained inwardly that the colleagues at the Hangzhou branch were too inefficient, taking three days to produce results, clearly not taking Bing-ge’s disappearance seriously.

Bing-ge had been missing for almost half a month. If the Spirit Realm Hunters of the Hangzhou branch had diligently investigated, they should have been able to provide feedback and sufficient information when Li Dongze made his request.

Clearly, they believed that Bing-ge had died in the Spirit Realm and there was no point in investigating.

“We did find something…” Li Dongze said after a moment of consideration. “Lei Yibing’s social circle was relatively simple. He was aloof, a loner who didn’t associate closely with his classmates. He kept a low profile at school and never caused trouble, but after a thorough investigation, colleagues in the Hangzhou branch discovered that in the past three years, two people who had provoked him had died in some plausible way.”

Zhang Yuanqing frowned as he listened, and immediately retorted after Li Dongze finished speaking, “That’s not right. Bing-ge wasn’t exactly sociable, but he was definitely not aloof, and he was far from keeping a low profile. We grew up together, and I know him too well. When his temper flared up, he wouldn't even bother with 'What are you looking at?', he would just throw a punch.”

As for Bing-ge’s suspected acts of murder, he didn’t refute or comment, not knowing the details.

“You’re talking about the Fire Master…” Li Dongze couldn’t help but retort, before clearing his throat and bringing the topic back on track. “So, the Lei Yibing you know is different from the Lei Yibing that the students remember. Who do you think has the problem?”

Zhang Yuanqing was silent for a moment. “Perhaps Bing-ge has the problem.”

Li Dongze hummed in agreement, analyzing, “You and he went to the same high school. If he had any abnormalities, you couldn’t possibly have missed them. In other words, Lei Yibing’s change occurred when he started college.

“Something must have happened to him during the time between graduating high school and starting college, which led to the drastic change in his personality. But there are too many factors involved, and without more clues, it’s impossible to speculate.”

Zhang Yuanqing agreed with Li Dongze’s statement, but there was one thing he couldn’t understand. Given his brotherly relationship with Bing-ge, Bing-ge hadn't even told him after becoming a Spirit Realm Hunter.

The Spirit Realm didn’t have a memory-wiping mechanism. If you wanted, you could even travel the world with a loudspeaker promoting the Spirit Realm.

Although no one would believe you…

“Anything else?”

“Yes, but I don’t know if it counts…” Li Dongze hesitated before saying, “Did Lei Yibing have the habit of keeping a diary?”

“Who keeps a diary these days?”

“Colleagues in Hangzhou found a diary in his dorm room. He didn’t write in it often, but before he disappeared, the night before he sent you the character card, he wrote a diary entry.”

“Where is his diary?”

“The diary is in his university dorm. Colleagues in Hangzhou checked it and didn’t think it was valuable, but at my request, they took photos of it, which I’ll send to you now,” Li Dongze said. “If I remember correctly, tomorrow is the fourteenth day since you came out of the ‘Sheling Tunnel.’”

“Mm!”

Tomorrow was the deadline. Either he would enter the Spirit Realm tonight, or tomorrow.

“There will be a brief buffer period when the Spirit Realm opens. Remember to call me or Guan Ya to report.”

“Got it.”

The two ended the call, and Zhang Yuanqing opened the messaging app, receiving the compressed file sent by Li Dongze.

After unzipping it, he got over thirty pictures.

Zhang Yuanqing sat at his desk, reading the diary. Bing-ge didn’t write in it often, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, and mostly about trivial matters.

Zhang Yuanqing initially read it very carefully, but after confirming that the previous entries were worthless, he flipped directly to the last picture.

“The second half of the year will be internships soon. Time flies so fast. Before I know it, I’ll be saying goodbye to my college life and entering society. Last night, I dreamt of my childhood with Yuanzi in the alley, of secretly reading forbidden books with him, of tricking my dad and his uncle out of pocket money, of playing… games with him.”

The content was short and simple.

Zhang Yuanqing stared deeply at the phone screen, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

Bing-ge had indeed left me a clue!

…

The next day, Zhang Yuanqing woke up at 9:30 in the morning.

“Looks like the time to enter the Spirit Realm is today…”

He had breakfast, put on a mask and a baseball cap, and took a taxi to Lei Yibing’s home.

The alley where he lived as a child was called Yinping Community, built half a century ago. Each residential building was imbued with the mottled traces of time. The buildings were uniformly six stories tall, without elevators. Messy cables were wrapped around the walls in circles.

Zhang Yuanqing got out of the taxi and casually glanced around. After more than ten years, other than the fresh paint on the exterior walls and the addition of a gatehouse at the entrance of the community,

nothing else had changed.

When he was in junior high school, there were rumors that this area would be demolished. Everyone waited and waited, but after almost ten years, there wasn't even a shadow of the demolition team.

Zhang Yuanqing crossed the road and bought a bag of loquats, a pineapple, and three Keitt mangoes at the fruit store across the street.

He walked up the narrow stairwell and stopped in front of the door of apartment 402, ringing the doorbell.

After a moment, footsteps came from inside, and the security door opened. A woman in her forties stood at the door, looking stunned.

“Yuanzi?”

She looked a little unwell, with heavy dark circles under her eyes and a gaunt face.

“Aunt Zhou, I came to see you and Uncle Lei,” Zhang Yuanqing said obediently, sighing silently in his heart.

Aunt Zhou’s eyes fell on the fruit he was holding, and a look of relief appeared on her face. She said softly, “Come in.”

The apartment was a two-bedroom, one-living room layout, about eighty square meters. Zhang Yuanqing sat on the sofa in the living room, holding the warm water poured by Aunt Zhou, listening to her sorrowful account.

“Aunt Zhou, I believe the Public Security Department will find Bing-ge,” Zhang Yuanqing comforted.

“Your grandmother came to see me a few days ago. She said that Lao Chen told her that no news is good news,” Aunt Zhou sighed, and then continued, “Stay for lunch.”

“No, I have class later,” Zhang Yuanqing shook his head.

When he was a child, he and Bing-ge were inseparable, often sleeping together at night, and eating at each other's houses was even more common, but today he could enter the Spirit Realm at any time, so he wanted to minimize the time he spent outside.

“Aunt Zhou, I’ll go stay in Bing-ge’s room for a while.”

Zhang Yuanqing didn’t forget the purpose of his visit.

He pushed open the door to Bing-ge’s bedroom. The small room contained a double bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a television. His eyes quickly swept over the room, and finally he pulled a large cardboard box from under the bed.

The box contained a jumble of things: a Little Tyrant game console, a Tamagotchi, a Pili Ball, a yo-yo, a telescope, Water Margin hero cards, a wooden spinning top, a buzzer, Dragon Ball manga, The Lustful History of Emperor Yang of Sui by Qi Dong Yeren…

Each small toy here had its own story. For example, the telescope. There used to be a red-light district nearby. When night fell, the parlors would light up with hazy lights, and the glamorous aunts would sit seductively on the sofas in the shops, their graceful curves visible through the glass doors.

Once, when he was still in elementary school, Bing-ge secretly found him and said that he saw Zhang Yuanqing’s uncle secretly entering a parlor.

Zhang Yuanqing didn’t believe him, and went straight to his uncle. The uncle was shocked and gave him twenty yuan as hush money.

Afterward, Zhang Yuanqing and Bing-ge licked popsicles and thought that this business was not bad.

So the two little brats squatted on the roadside after school. This time they didn’t squat to the uncle, but they squatted to Bing-ge’s old father.

The old father was also shocked and gave them more than ten yuan in hush money.

Later, the old father and the uncle reformed and were never caught again. Until one day, Zhang Yuanqing stole his aunt’s pocket money to buy a telescope, and secretly observed from afar.

And then he earned hush money again.

So, the box contained Bing-ge’s childhood, and it also contained Zhang Yuanqing’s childhood.

He stared blankly at his childhood toys, feeling that time had passed quickly, and things had changed.

What was he sentimentalizing about? He wasn't old enough to reminisce about the past… He mocked himself and pushed back the memories that flooded his mind.

Then, he picked up The Lustful History of Emperor Yang of Sui and shook the pages.

In the “swish” of the turning pages, a slip of paper fell out. The paper had two strings of densely packed numbers on it.

Seeing this, Zhang Yuanqing slowly exhaled, finally setting aside the big stone in his heart.

The numbers on the paper were a code that only the two brothers could understand.

Influenced by his grandfather, Zhang Yuanqing was obsessed with police and gangster movies, detective cartoons, and novels when he was a child, fantasizing that he was a powerful public security officer.

In middle school, he and Bing-ge watched a famous foreign detective novel together. Inspired by one of the cases, they thought that the great detective Zhang Yuanqing and his assistant A-Bing couldn’t be without a code.

So they spent a lot of effort developing a set of code formats.

For example, the first number corresponded to the line number, the second also corresponded to the line number, the third corresponded to the page number, seven numbers were a group, and the format of the second group of numbers was the reverse of the first group…

And the first time they played this game, the blueprint they used was The Lustful History of Emperor Yang of Sui.

Zhang Yuanqing recalled the code format while comparing it with the book. Time slowly passed, and after an unknown amount of time, he finally pieced together all the content.

First line of numbers: 6203; One lifetime, two brothers.

Second line of numbers: Yuanzi, find it. I left everything there.