"What’s he doing now?"
"He picked up a branch and is swinging it around like a sword."
"Huh?"
"It’s a little childish... but understandable."
Shoulder to shoulder, the two of them carefully watched Chen Yuan swinging a branch around under the apartnt building, yelling "HYAH! HYAH!" as he slashed at the air. The area was completely deserted, so he was really letting loose. The unsmiling, often expressionless Chen Yuan of the past seed to have vanished, replaced by a child who had never grown up.
Chen Yuan slashed wildly for a bit, but the mont the fragile branch whipped toward the holly bushes, it snapped in two. If not for the tough bark barely holding the broken pieces together, the tip would have gone flying.
Abruptly, a phone began to ring, its shrill sound piercing the quiet night.
The two sisters jumped, thinking it was one of their phones, and nearly had a heart attack. They quickly pulled out their phones and switched them to silent. It was a good reminder.
"Hey, Mom. Why are you calling so late?" Chen Yuan tossed the branch aside and started walking toward another building as he talked on the phone.
The two sisters froze.
He was walking directly toward their hiding spot. The sisters exchanged a panicked glance.
"Take cover! Take cover!"
"You’re going the wrong way! Hide over there, you idiot, Yaoyao!"
"Keep your head down!"
Luckily, Chen Yuan’s attention was elsewhere. Who would ever suspect two psychos were stalking him in the middle of the night? He continued walking at a steady pace, talking to his mom on the phone.
"What? My aunt is getting married again? ...Why do I have to go? Isn’t it enough that you guys will be there? I know she’s my aunt, and she was nice to when I was little, but it’s such a hassle to go back. Besides, you know how much I hate these kinds of things. I’d just be going to eat a al, anyway."
As he walked past the garden, a sharp SNAP suddenly echoed—the sound of a branch being stepped on.
Chen Yuan stopped in his tracks and shot a curious glance to his right. On the phone, his mother’s questioning continued.
A few seconds later, he shook it off.
"What vacation? My aunt can’t be getting married on Tomb-Sweeping Day... The weekend? I can’t promise I’ll make it back. What’s there to be upset about? Why are you upset again? Are the hearts of middle-aged won really that fragile? ...No, Mom, I didn’t an you’re old."
The more Chen Yuan tried to explain, the deeper the hole he dug for himself. His head was starting to ache. He ducked into a small elevator lobby behind the apartnt building, his figure illuminated by the soft light before disappearing around a corner.
Outside, another fierce gust of wind blew.
A head covered in leaves poked out from the bushes, followed by another. The two sisters exchanged a look.
"Let’s go."
"Mhm."
They slipped back into the shadows and quickly closed in on either side of the building’s entrance, ears pricked for any sound from the elevator lobby. It felt just like a scene from a spy movie... though it had to be said, the two of them were a bit nuts. An aloof university professor and a virtual idol with nearly a million fans, out stalking soone in the dead of night.
A truly outrageous idea.
"When we hear the elevator ding, we’ll go together. We need to see which floor it stops on, then we’ll go up and take a look. At least that will confirm which floor Chen lives on. I don’t know how many units are on this floor. If it’s two, we can just ask a real estate agent later and basically confirm which apartnt he’s in."
"Sis! You’re so smart! You’ve claid the intellectual high ground."
"Hah," Jiangg Ning scoffed. "Just watch and learn. All it takes is using your brain a little."
Then ca a "DING."
The next mont, the two sisters darted out one after another. They ducked around the corner, and once they confird the elevator doors were fully closed, they scurried over.
The red numbers on the LCD floor display climbed steadily. Bathed in its light, the two sisters stared with intense focus.
"2... 7... 10... 11!"
"Let’s go up, too."
"Mhm."
A mont later, in the 11th-floor elevator lobby, Jiangg Yao peeked her head out, eyes narrowed. She scanned left and right, then pulled back after confirming the coast was clear. The two sisters stepped out of the elevator together and stopped in front of apartnt 1102.
"It looks like only one of these two is occupied. The protective film on the opposite door hasn’t even been peeled off, and there’s no trash can outside."
"Then there’s no need to guess. It’s this one, 1102... What are you doing, Jiangg Yao?"
Jiangg Ning’s eyes widened in astonishnt as she watched Yaoyao press her face to the peephole, trying to peer inside.
"I’m trying to see if the little young master is inside."
"How are you supposed to see anything looking in from the outside? It’s a convex lens. Don’t be silly."
"Oh, really?"
"Okay, let’s get out of here. We have the address, it’s ti to go back. We’re screwed if we get caught. Let’s go, let’s go."
They were just about to crouch down and sneak back the way they ca.
But just then, a flash of pure white light burst through the hallway window, illuminating everything outside. They jumped in fright, and before they could process what was happening, a CRACK-A-BOOM like the sky itself was splitting apart exploded in their ears, leaving them stunned.
The wind outside howled, and dark clouds roiled across the sky. Thick bolts of lightning brewed within them, occasionally exploding in a clap of thunder that lit up the entire cloud mass.
Such storms were common in early spring, the kind of thunder said to awaken hibernating creatures.
Another downpour was about to descend upon Lanjing.
The two sisters were stunned, and it took them a long mont to recover.
"Sis, we’re not going to get struck by lightning on the way back, are we? ...That was so scary."
"Don’t be ridiculous. Let’s just get ho."
"Mhm."
As they stood there discussing the weather outside, they failed to notice the door to 1102 open behind them. Chewing on beef jerky, Chen Yuan walked out carrying two bags of trash. He didn’t see them at first, only glancing in their direction as he went to dispose of the trash. Then, his chewing stopped—CHEW, CHEW, CH—and his expression froze.
"’The little young master in his room probably heard the thunder, huh? I’m dying. I didn’t think he was so childish. It’d be even cuter if he thought he was the one who summoned it. I really regret not getting a video of him. Heh.’"
"When would we have had a chance to film? But he was pretty cute—" Jiangg Ning glanced back, and in a daze, she thought she saw Chen Yuan’s silhouette. She froze, her words catching in her throat.
Her brain short-circuited.
"Sis, you think we should call him when we get ho? It’s thundering out, so I can act all cute and scared, and then we can take turns... tee-hee-hee! What do you think his reaction would be? I’m dying of anticipation just thinking about it."
"Yaoyao..." Jiangg Ning poked her. "Don’t say any more."
"You’re looking forward to it too, right? Maybe I shouldn’t have shared this with you. I could have just called him secretly by myself, but I really want to see his reaction when we *both* act cute."
"Yaoyao!"
"Sis, why are you pulling on ? Let’s go—huh?"
A cold gust of wind blew past. Jiangg Yao didn’t even have ti to wipe the smile off her face before she saw Chen Yuan standing in his doorway. She turned to stone on the spot.
Chen Yuan: "?"
Jiangg Ning: "..."
Jiangg Yao: "What a coincidence~ Little young master, are you also here to... uh... also... hahaha, running into you here, it must be fate!"
...
The rental apartnt wasn’t large. A single sofa bed took up most of the living room, and a large-screen TV hung on the wall. The rest of the furnishings were simple.
As Jiangg Ning and Jiangg Yao looked around Chen Yuan’s new apartnt, they had a single, shared thought: ’At least there’s a thick carpet on the floor.’
’That way, it won’t hurt our knees to kneel.’
’Co to think of it, we should probably exercise our knees more. It’s good for your health. They say the first sign of aging is knee pain—all the little problems from your youth coming back to haunt you at once.’
’We really should focus on knee exercises. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Kneeling a bit more often would be great.’
The two sisters knelt with their heads bowed, not saying a word. This was not, of course, because of their low status in the "family," nor was it because they had knelt so often for their mistakes that they had beco this composed.
But since they were already kneeling, their repentant attitude was, naturally, impeccable.
’See? Chen Yuan was already speechless, utterly disard by them. It just goes to show, you shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes, you should be afraid of having stiff knees.’
Jiangg Ning frantically tried to hypnotize herself. ’I’m just doing yoga,’ she thought. After all, she had never been this humiliated in her entire life. She was eloquent on the lecture stage, a frequent recipient of scholarships, and seen by all as an aloof, intellectual woman who was gentle and graceful in private.
’How could I possibly kneel so easily?’
’This is hardly behavior befitting an aloof goddess.’
Thinking this way, she instantly felt much better about herself.
"Quite the resourceful one, aren’t you, Professor Jiangg Ning? You can’t bla this one on Jiangg Yao, can you? Explain yourself. What exactly was going through your head?"
"..."
Listening to Chen Yuan’s sarcasm, Jiangg Ning squeezed her eyes shut in agony. ’So humiliating... What little image I had left is completely gone.’
User Comments
0 comments from readers