Kou Tong said, “What did you say?” 

Huang Jinchen thought about it. He didn’t know why he had suddenly come up with this question, and he thought he had been speaking out of turn a little, so he clutched his hair. But then again, he thought that he had already asked, and it was no good giving up midway. A person ought to finish what he started. So he said, “It’s nothing… Mostly I keep seeing you two making eyes at each other.” 

“Like this?” Kou Tong took off his beast in human clothes glasses and flashed his smiling eyes at Huang Jinchen. “‘I’ve had many male partners. You could put together a full game of ‘Legends of the Three Kingdoms¹’ if you added them up. You want to join?” 

Huang Jinchen immediately looked Kou Tong up and down. Beaming, he said, “No problem, I can do that!” 

“Partner Huang!” said Kou Tong. 

“Partner Kou!” said Huang Jinchen. 

Then Huang Jinchen opened his arms, turned his face, and smiled like a flower in the spring sunshine. “Come on, partner, lay one on me!” 

Kou Tong, leaning on his crutch, swayingly walked out, brushing past him with calm and self-possession, saying with an appearance of propriety, “This style is too bold. It’s no good. Since I am a conservative person, let’s start instead from the step of mutual study and go forward together.” 

Huang Jinchen watched him limp out, insisting on squaring his shoulders and raising his head as though ready to fight for the revolutionary cause, and felt deeply entertained. He burst out in laughter. 

When he was finished laughing, he found that Kou Tong was gone. Only then did Huang Jinchen remember that Kou Tong had avoided the crucial question. He hadn’t gotten any answers!

So the unusually active gossip-loving heart in his chest flamed up with fighting spirit. He felt as though he had suddenly been possessed by a motley group of wives and sister-in-laws at the end of a lane. He felt a deep interest in Dr. Kou’s love affairs. 

Kou Tong returned to his room and replayed all the images caught by the monitoring system, making notes on paper as he watched. His plain glass spectacles hung in front of his chest. The hair in front of his forehead, which needed cutting, hung down, the longest strand already laying on the bridge of his nose. 

The recording was over an hour long. Kou Tong played it seven or eight times from beginning to end, occasionally stopping, pausing it on a certain picture to study it for a long time. When he had just about finished watching, he found that it was very late. It was completely dark outside. As soon as he straightened up, his back gave a crack, sore and painful. 

His fingers holding the pen lightly tapped twice on the table. Then he took out his phone and dialed a number. 

It connected after two rings. A man picked up and said in an indolent tone, “Yeah? Dr. Kou?” 

“That’s right.” Kou Tong narrowed his eyes in a smile, tossing his pen aside. “I didn’t startle you out of someone’s bed, did I?” 

“What do you think?” As if on purpose, the man laughed in a quiet, unusually sexy voice. “What do you need me for?” 

“I want to find out about someone.” Kou Tong took out Yao Shuo’s photograph. The man in the photograph had a very solemn expression. He was facing the camera, his face tense, without a trace of a smile. Probably because he was getting on in years, his cheeks drooped, making his cheekbones stand out a little. The corners of his mouth were turned down and pursed. He seemed somewhat harsh. “A person called Yao Shuo. Have you heard of him?” 

“Yao Shuo?” The man paused. “Yeah…I think I remember something. Wait a minute.” 

The sound of quiet conversation came over the phone. Kou Tong wasn’t in a rush. He held the phone, waiting, his fingertips tapping on a line of small writing: “Voluntarily requested to withdraw from front line service.” He thought about it, then lightly underlined the word “voluntarily.” 

Just then, someone knocked on the door. One-legged Dr. Kou hopped over on his single leg to open it and saw Huang Jinchen standing there holding a plastic bag. Not standing on ceremony, before Kou Tong could speak, he walked in on his own and pushed aside the messy pile of stuff on his table. He opened the bag he had brought. The aroma of food floated out. Kou Tong touched his stomach and really did feel a little hungry. 

The man on the phone didn’t make him wait too long. After a moment, he told him, “Wait until I look into it for you tomorrow, then I’ll give you concrete information.” 

Huang Jinchen watched him say “all right” with a soft expression, then put down the phone. The flames of gossip once again began to burn. “A chick? A partner?” 

Dr. Kou sat down boldly, wiped his hands, and very heroically bit into a chicken leg, winking cheerfully at Huang Jinchen. “What do you think?” 

Huang Jinchen clasped his bosom. “You’re so unfaithful!” 

Without delay, Kou Tong lay bare his true feelings, indistinctly saying, “No, partner. In fact, you’re the one I like best.” 

Huang Jinchen blinked. 

Kou Tong carelessly wiped some grease from his lips. Putting his loyalties where his interests lay, he said, “Because you brought me tasty food.” 

Huang Jinchen was silent, feeling that his friendship with Dr. Kou was in fact built only upon a plump chicken leg. 

He moved over a chair and sat next to Kou Tong, reaching out to go through the messy notes Kou Tong had taken. He saw that amid a series of incomprehensible phrases, Kou Tong had written an expression in black fountain pen and drawn a circle around it as if emphasizing a label: midlife crisis. 

“What does this mean?” Huang Jinchen asked. 

“Oh, the literal meaning.” Kou Tong’s cheeks were stuffed full. He was demolishing food at an astonishing rate. Perhaps he was hungry after missing dinnertime. All ten fingers moved together, eliminating the enemy troops like rolling up a mat. “Some people, when they reach a certain age, have more and more responsibility pressing on them, but physiologically, their abilities fall increasingly short of their wishes. Their careers may plateau or begin to decline. For the sake of saving face, they’ll incline towards shirking others’ judgements, wallowing in past glory. Their ability to accept new things declines, their ability to learn drops… Is there chili pepper in this?” 

Huang Jinchen said, “Eat, don’t be picky.—From what you say, Old Man Yao is being so weird because of piddling crap like that?” 

“When middle age meets adolescence, a person of this age may feel fed up with unchanging family life, or may have strained relationships with their children due to difficulty communicating. So with the double pressures of family and career, owing to their strong self-respect, even if their stress surpasses their ability to cope, they still won’t have a desire to say what’s on their mind or seek help. Instead, they’ll develop an extreme desire to protect themselves.” 

When Huang Jinchen finished listening, he thought about it carefully, feeling that there was some sense in this. So he nodded slowly. “Say, you do have a knack for this. It’s not just tricking people.” 

Kou Tong spat out a chicken bone. He had done his best not to leave a single scrap of meat on it. Even a dog couldn’t have gotten anything from it. Then he took some time out of his busy affairs to glance at Huang Jinchen, thinking, What is he asking about this for? Is this great personage really planning to change professions? 

Huang Jinchen’s position at the ST Base was only nominal. In order to keep him from disturbing the base’s regular work, General Zhong had stuck him with Kou Tong, like a forced marriage. Of course you couldn’t count on him to do any serious work. 

For the past few days, Huang Jinchen had been in a zestful state of observation, aimlessly watching the fun and being entertained. 

Kou Tong knew that he was currently rather at a loss, like a constantly tensed string that had suddenly relaxed and for a time could do nothing but quiver wildly. 

In Huang Jinchen’s life, there were no goals, no convictions. The coolness in his eyes in fact came from indifference—nothing and no one could arouse his interest. He didn’t want to keep living his previous stimulating but precarious life, but he also hadn’t been able to find a new mode of living. 

Kou Tong considered and felt that he was about finished eating, so he bent down and took two bottles of beer out of the little cupboard under the table, like a conjuring trick. Under Huang Jinchen’s derisive gaze, he familiarly rubbed the mouths of the bottles and removed the caps of both. Then he opened a drawer and got a bag of greasy roasted peanuts out from under a stack of deadly serious documents. He tore open the plastic wrapping and dropped it onto the table.

“Come on, let’s have a drink and chat.” 

Huang Jinchen didn’t hesitate to pick up the beer bottle and down a swig. “Shit, that’s awesome! Where did you get it?” 

Kou Tong grinned and quietly said, “My private stash. The base doesn’t allow alcohol, be quiet about it—come on, I’ll tell you what we have so far in Yao Shuo’s case…”

So that night, after eating and drinking his fill and listening for half the night to a lecture on theoretical case analysis with a practical application, Huang Jinchen simply stayed in Kou Tong’s room. 

Kou Tong had a somewhat bad habit—he went to bed later than the dogs and got up earlier than the chickens. 

At the first glimmer of daybreak, he felt himself blearily waking up. Before he had opened his eyes, he already faintly saw a white mist. In front of the white mist, Kou Tong looked for a while and felt exasperated—this scene was truly too cliché, and it was too familiar. He seemed to have become a practiced hand already. Stiff with boredom, he reached out to grab. He grabbed the white mist as though reeling in silk from a cocoon, squeezing it now into the shape of a rabbit, now into the form of a bun. 

Behind the white mist, a mirror slowly appeared, with an identical Kou Tong sitting there squeezing white mist, silently looking back through the mystical reflection. There was no smile on his face. The somewhat long and slender eyes inexplicably looked a little grim. 

The person in the mirror and the person outside the mirror were both located in wide expanses of darkness. Only the UV-protection lenses hanging in front of his chest reflected a bit of faint light. That milky white light seemed to shroud only him. Kou Tong took a deep breath and smiled at the mirror, but the person in the mirror remained apathetic. 

Kou Tong’s smile slowly cooled. He lightly touched the mirror. It was like touching the surface of water. At a light touch, ripples spread out. 

The form of the person inside blurred. But a moment later, the surface of the mirror stilled, and he was still sitting there like a statue, his long and slightly luminous eyes quietly looking at the person outside the mirror, like an outsider looking on objectively. 

Kou Tong sighed. Then he stood up and with incomparable familiarity picked up the stool he was sitting on and smashed it into the mirror. The mirror shattered—he seemed to have repeated these actions hundreds of thousands of times. He tossed the stool down. Not even so much as looking at the human figures reflected in the shards, he strode towards a darker place. 

Fierce light spilled in. Kou Tong at last opened his eyes and saw a feeble whiteness in the faint light. He let out a breath, feeling a little cold. There were no covers over half his body—they had been snatched by Huang Jinchen. 

Kou Tong rubbed his face and sat up, feeling that sleep had left him with a bit of a stiff neck.