Chapter 149

Chapter 149

Huang Yuanrui used the video to threaten Hu Heng, and before long, she had obtained the address of the hotel Qin Song would soon be checking into.

She made Hu Heng take her to Tianfeng Hotel.

302 had already been cleared out. All her belongings had been moved to a storage room.

She narrowed her eyes and looked up at the corner of the wall. “Get a stool and stand over there.”

Hu Heng scratched his head. “Why?”

Huang Yuanrui tilted her head and looked at him. “To take down a camera.”

Hu Heng froze. “You installed a camera here too?”

Huang Yuanrui smiled. “Don’t ask. The more you know, the more scared you’ll be.”

She had Hu Heng stand on the stool and remove the camera, then went to rummage through the storage room for ages. At last, she found her ID card.

She stuffed it into her pocket and was just about to leave when she glanced back.

Hu Heng, panting, asked, “What else do you want?”

Huang Yuanrui pointed. “Hand me those two ashtrays.”

Hu Heng grew a little nervous. “What do you need them for?”

Huang Yuanrui said, “A keepsake.”

She drove all the way from the north back down south and checked into the hotel where Qin Song was about to stay.

For Huang Yuanrui, driving for long hours with her full attention on the road had already become something that took an enormous toll on her body. By now, her condition was getting worse and worse, and the dizzy spells were coming more and more frequently.

She set an alarm at the hotel and slept for a short while, then rushed out without stopping to buy a pile of things nearby.

Remembering the pajamas she had been wearing the day she and Qin Song had quarreled, she bought a similar set. Then she bought red ink, a small box of bluish-gray eyeshadow, and a woven sack.

She found an empty landscaped area, crumpled the woven sack and rolled it through the dirt a few times, then grabbed a small handful of soil and put it into a separate plastic bag.

As she was hurrying back to the hotel with all those things, Huang Yuanrui suddenly stopped.

It hit her all at once – there was another security camera in the hotel corridor.

That was right. If Qin Song decided to pull the surveillance footage, wouldn’t everything be exposed?

She smacked her forehead, put down the things she had just bought, and searched her phone for a nearby hardware market. She bought a long clothes-drying pole and a sturdy hammer, then put them in the car.

By midnight, there was basically no one in the corridor on that floor of the hotel.

Huang Yuanrui sat in her car, surrounded by an overstuffed pile of snacks. The streetlight cast a dim glow over her face, blurring her features.

She climbed up through the hotel’s stairwell, circled around behind the camera, and adjusted the hammer she had tied to one end of the drying pole a few times. Then, mustering all her strength, she smashed it into the camera.

Immediately after, she crouched down, grabbed a handful of dirt from the bag, and sprinkled it in front of Qin Song’s room. Then she rubbed the woven sack against his door, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape…

The sound drifted faintly into Qin Song’s ears, merging with his dream. One moment it seemed close; the next, far away.

At last, Huang Yuanrui heard footsteps coming from inside the room, moving closer and closer.

She stared fixedly at the peephole, the corners of her mouth curling into a strange smile she could not control.

She knew that Qin Song was about to look through that peephole and meet her eyes.

Sure enough, before long, she heard a sharp scream from inside the room. Then came a thud – Qin Song had fallen.

Huang Yuanrui quickly ran back to her own room and gently closed the door behind her.

She guessed Qin Song might be so frightened that he would change locations that very night, so she hurriedly changed clothes, packed up her things, and prepared to drive after him.

But unexpectedly, at this critical moment, Hu Heng video-called her.

Huang Yuanrui thought he had something important to say. In the end, Hu Heng only pestered her to delete the video right away. A grown man, crying and making a fuss, nagging nonstop like some old auntie.

Just then, a bang of a door closing came from the corridor, and Huang Yuanrui looked sensitively toward the entrance.

A bad feeling instantly rose in her heart. She hung up the video call, packed up at top speed, and chased downstairs.

But by the time she got down there, Qin Song had already vanished without a trace.

Huang Yuanrui cursed aloud, then suddenly saw Qin Song walking out of a convenience store with a newly bought pair of scissors in his hand, heading straight for a taxi.

Huang Yuanrui quickly picked up her pace, ran to her car, yanked open the door, and jumped in.

But just as she was about to start the engine, a wave of dizziness hit her. The road before her eyes began to heave like a stormy sea.

She squeezed her eyes shut, wanting to massage her temples, but the moment she lifted her hand, her body tipped lightly to one side. She plunged headfirst into a heap of bright, colorful bags of chips.

By the time she woke up again, dawn was almost breaking.

This time, she had lost Qin Song completely.

Qin Song could have gone anywhere in the world – the train station, the airport, somewhere in the country, somewhere abroad, up a mountain, by the sea…

Xixi’s call came in again. She had already called countless times, and this time, Huang Yuanrui finally answered.

Weakly, she said, “Hello…”

Xixi asked, enunciating each word, “Where are you?”

Huang Yuanrui let out a long sigh. “I lost him…”

Xixi suddenly exploded into curses. “Are you sick? You’re fucking sick! You’re seriously fucking sick! Don’t tell me you won’t even manage to kill him before you get yourself killed first! I told you to recover properly, and you just wouldn’t listen, would you?”

Huang Yuanrui said softly, “Stop scolding me. Stop…”

Xixi kept going. “I’m scolding you because you deserve it! I already promised you. Once you’re better, I’ll cooperate with whatever you want to do, but you still had to make trouble!”

Huang Yuanrui said, “I’ll go back…”

Xixi snapped impatiently, “Don’t move. Send me your location. I’ll come get you.”

After all that turmoil, Huang Yuanrui finally agreed to stay in the hospital and rest properly for a while.
Her physical condition was even worse than before. More fluids were pumped into her through her swollen hand, and she had to spend even more time lying in bed.

To be honest, Xixi had her own plans. She was the type to look forward, believing that no matter how badly you’d been hurt, it was all in the past. The real loss was staying trapped in it.

She wanted Huang Yuanrui to gradually forget what had happened and move forward with her.

She had Huang Yuanrui move in with her.

Outside of work, she’d accompany Huang Yuanrui for meals, bar hopping, karaoke, and movies. She also introduced her to plenty of guys their age, making sure she had dates every week.

But Huang Yuanrui didn’t grow happier by the day the way Xixi had imagined.

Every day, she would lock herself in the bathroom to smoke, staying in there for over an hour at a time.

Xixi would knock on the door every time. “Hey, did you fall in? Aren’t you worried about hemorrhoids from squatting that long?”

Huang Yuanrui would brush her off through the door. “Almost done!”

Xixi would shout again, “Even if you don’t get hemorrhoids, you’re risking uterine prolapse.”

Huang Yuanrui would brush her off again. “Almost done!”

At night, when they slept, Huang Yuanrui would always jerk violently for a while, then startle awake from a dream.

Once awake, she would turn her back and cry, her shoulders trembling nonstop.

Over time, even her face changed: the corners of her mouth drooped, her eyes were swollen, the collagen in her cheeks disappeared at a visible speed, and her teeth turned yellow from all the smoking.

Xixi saw all of it. She knew she couldn’t let Huang Yuanrui go on like this, but she still clung to the hope that one day Huang Yuanrui would figure it out and come out of it on her own.

Finally, one day, Huang Yuanrui couldn’t endure it anymore. In tears, she asked Xixi, “Have I recovered enough now? Can you help me now?”

Xixi stared at Huang Yuanrui’s face for a full minute before saying, “Okay.”

Huang Yuanrui threw her arms around Xixi in excitement.

After wiping away her tears, she pulled out her phone again. “I still have that video. I can go find Hu-”

Xixi waved her hand. “Don’t threaten Hu Datou again. The reason you lost him last time was that you tipped him off. If you use that method again, Qin Song will just run to the next place.”

Huang Yuanrui put down her phone. “Then how do we find him?”

Xixi said, “It’s simple. Follow Hu Datou for a while, and won’t we find out where he is? Unless Qin Song has already left Earth, I don’t believe the two of them can go their whole lives without seeing each other.”

Huang Yuanrui nodded hard. “Right! If you keep walking by the river, your shoes are bound to get wet!”

Xixi frowned. “I don’t think that’s quite how that saying is used… but crude as it is, the logic’s about the same.”

So not long after Qin Song started working as a hotel security guard, he gained a new coworker named Huahua.

Huahua was Xixi.

She rented a two-bedroom apartment near the hotel and moved in with her two cats and Huang Yuanrui.

The anonymous letter Qin Song received was also planted by Xixi.

The first time Qin Song went to Xixi’s rental apartment for dinner, Huang Yuanrui was hiding in one of the bedrooms.

At the time, she pressed her ear tightly to the bedroom door, listening to Qin Song sneeze, walk around, drink water, eat, and talk in the living room… An indescribable excitement and thrill surged through her. By accident, she raised her hand and knocked over a jar of cotton swabs on the shelf with a clatter.

Huang Yuanrui sucked in a sharp breath.

She heard Qin Song ask from the living room, “Is there someone else in your place?”

Xixi remained very calm. “No.”

Qin Song said, “Didn’t you hear that noise just now?”

Xixi replied, “In a household with cats, it’s normal for noises to come from anywhere. You’re making a fuss over nothing.”

Later, Huang Yuanrui and Xixi teamed up to send Qin Song a series of text messages, using one tiny surname initial, “h,” to lead him around in circles and break down his psychological defenses bit by bit.

The surveillance video Qin Song received had been edited by Huang Yuanrui. She cut out the part where she later sat up, leaving only the segment of Qin Song hitting her with the ashtray.

In truth, Xixi wasn’t a psychology student at all. Her so-called “hypnosis” was nothing more than a little trick for falling asleep that she’d learned online years earlier. Whenever she had insomnia, she used that method, and it worked every time.

Those massage essential oils were also just random products she bought online, with basically no effect.

She did all this only to form a psychological suggestion in Qin Song’s mind, making him regard her home as a utopia where he could avoid the pain and shocks of the real world, thereby gaining his complete trust.

Then, when he was at his most relaxed, she would strike him head-on. Even if he didn’t die, he would go insane.

The old man who always brought two women to stay in 302 was not Huang Yuanrui’s plant. That was only a coincidence.

Once the timing was more or less ripe, the two of them joined forces to put on a grand performance – Xixi sabotaged the wiring for the hotel’s third-floor cameras from the inside, while Huang Yuanrui repeated her old trick and gave the guest in 302 a small fright, luring Qin Song upstairs.

In fact, by this point, Qin Song’s mind had already begun having problems again. He even imagined an entire conversation between the old man and the two women.

The next day, just as Xixi expected, Qin Song indeed arrived at her home early in the morning.

Only the first time had she dragged Qin Song over. Every time after that, Qin Song was the one begging to come.

The reason Qin Song was able to sense a strong rose scent in his dream during his final “hypnosis” session was that after he fell asleep, Huang Yuanrui entered the hypnosis room.

At the time, she stood beside the bed and bent very, very low, so low that the tip of her nose almost touched the tip of Qin Song’s.

She stayed at that distance, too close for the eyes to focus, and silently stared at his face.