The next morning, Su Qing woke up to the sound of the person sharing his bed getting up and dressing. He opened his eyes and saw the hotel’s dismal white ceiling. He stared blankly at it for fully half a minute before he remembered where he was. 

He was sober, and his head hurt. His temples were pounding like a drum. He thought disdainfully of what he had been getting up to while turning his head uneasily—preparing to close his eyes and pass out in case he saw a Laughing Buddha or a gorilla. 

The man was buttoning up his shirt with his back to him. His shoulders were broad, his back was straight, and his skin was a little dark—not the baked color that came from sunbathing; it looked instead like the genuine outcome of being weathered by the elements year round. The man was alerted by Su Qing’s slight turn of the head and looked back at him. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth. Then, unperturbed, he stood up, took the cigarette between the fingers of one hand and picked his pants up off the floor with the other. He said, “Oh, you’re awake.” 

Su Qing pressed down on his forehead. He was feeling embarrassed. 

When the man picked up his pants, a long scar was revealed on the outside of his thigh. Su Qing couldn’t help taking another look. He saw a portion of the man’s waist exposed by his shirttails. The firm muscles there were also covered with scars of all sizes. 

The man buckled his belt in a trice. He was around thirty, with strong features and deep-set eyes. His gaze was faintly cold, with a hint of scrutiny. Seeing that Su Qing was looking him over, the man didn’t react. He grabbed his hair casually, smoothed down the places that were sticking up, and said, “You getting up? If you are, get dressed. I’ll buy you breakfast.”  

Su Qing nodded woodenly, and the man went to wash up without saying a word. He was very swift. Su Qing had only stuck one leg into his pants by the time the man put himself in order and came out. The two of them stared at each other in silence. Su Qing suddenly felt like a kid caught cheating on a test by the teacher. He quickly stuffed himself into his clothes and jumped out of bed. If he hadn’t still been dizzy, he practically would have stood at attention. 

The man looked at him and got out of his way. Su Qing vanished into the bathroom. 

He splashed a double handful of water on his face and zoned out looking at himself in the mirror—the young man in the mirror looked sickly pale and dead-eyed, with a desolate expression. With this venerable countenance, if someone said he hadn’t been dumped, that would have been strange.

Su Qing took a deep breath and buried his whole face in cold water, imagining that he was a fish. The cold water cleared his head somewhat. His rusty brain began to operate. He thought, What happens now? What am I going to do? 

Life was too complicated. Before, there had been people to spoil him and let him squander his youth as he pleased. Now all the people who had spoiled him were gone, so he was lost. 

The fish surnamed Su blew bubbles, feeling that his prospects were dim. But this lost mood was brief. Soon he could no longer hold his breath. He had to raise his head, scrub his face, hastily put himself in order, and go out. 

Then he stood at the bathroom door, not knowing whether he ought to deliver a report or what. He stood there stupidly, waiting for the man to speak. 

The man was sitting on the bed flipping through one of the hotel’s old magazines. The cigarette in his mouth remained unlit. It was as though he didn’t know how to relax. Sitting there casually, his back stuck up like a spear. 

Was he military? 

All of a sudden, Su Qing couldn’t help also standing up straight, as though he felt a sense of inferiority about his own slovenly appearance. 

The man stood up and beckoned to him. “Let’s go.” After thinking about it, he felt it would be awkward if he didn’t say something, so he asked, “How old are you? Are you still a student?” 

Su Qing followed him like a footman. With his head down, he said, “No, I graduated.” 

“Oh. You don’t look it.” 

After issuing his assessment, the man didn’t say anything else. The two of them returned to mutual silence. Su Qing had a lot on his mind. Though he had just slept with a strange man, he wasn’t in the mood to talk to him. The man looked at him and found that this young man had only a sweater on. He didn’t even have a coat. He must have lost it somewhere. So he took off his own coat and handed it to him. 

Su Qing stared blankly, then took it a little sheepishly. “So…how will I give this back to you? Why don’t you write down your address…” 

The man said, “I can’t just give out my address to others.” 

“Oh…” Su Qing falteringly shut his mouth. 

The man walked into the hotel’s dining area. When he put his hand on the door, it paused there. He suddenly said, “My surname is Hu, Hu Bugui. We’ll talk about it if we have a chance to meet again.” 

Su Qing said his own name as though giving a report. Hu Bugui only gave an indifferent nod in response, then picked a table at random and sat down. 

Su Qing had lazy habits. No matter what he did, he loitered. Even if he farted, he had to drag it out twice as long as other people. Hu Bugui asked what he wanted to eat, and he stared at the little menu for fully five minutes. Fortunately this big brother surnamed Hu had excellent patience. He didn’t rush him. With his cigarette in his mouth, he sat across from him in silence, demonstrating correct posture from beginning to end. 

Breakfast was soon served. Hu Bugui ate very heroically, making a clean sweep. After bringing the campaign to a swift resolution, he wiped his mouth and knocked off work. He returned the cigarette to his mouth and waited for Su Qing to count grains of rice while eating his bowl of congee. He had no expression and said nothing. It was as if he wasn’t in a restaurant waiting for someone but instead by the side of the road waiting for a bus. 

At first Su Qing thought this man’s aura was too powerful. He felt a little pressured. As soon as he bent his head to eat, he forgot about him and devoted himself to letting his mind wander. 

It was half an hour before his soul returned to him. He felt a little embarrassed. He poked at the remaining half bowl of congee with his chopsticks, then picked it up and drank, puffing out his cheeks. 

Hu Bugui saw that his bowl was empty and said, “Are you finished? If you’re finished, let’s go. In the future…” 

At this point, he came to a stop. He had meant to say, “In the future, be careful. Don’t just go with anyone who takes you. Young people should learn better.” Then he thought that saying this would sound like bragging. It would be indecent. So he swallowed the words and only came up with a stiff sentence: “In the future, don’t drink so much. It causes trouble.” 

Su Qing had eaten and drunk his fill, and he was clear-headed. This time he was in spirits. He agreed, then began to make conversation. “Where do you work? You must exercise often, right?” 

Hu Bugui stood up and walked forward, completely upright. “You could say I work for a government department.” 

Su Qing sniffled, feeling that he had caught a bit of a cold. He thought, If he works for the government, he definitely has to repress himself and mind his image; he wouldn’t dare to be out. Then he asked, “Do you go to that bar often? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.” 

Hu Bugui extended a hand to hail a taxi. “Occasionally. I don’t have time.—Where are you going? If it’s on my way, I’ll take you there.” 

At his question, Su Qing went blank. He didn’t know where he was going. He rather wanted to go back to the bar to continue his dissipation. He felt around in his pocket. He didn’t seem to have enough money left, so he let it go and gave the address of his current residence: “South of the city…” 

When he had just said this, Su Qing went quiet—he had been standing not half a meter behind Hu Bugui. A second ago, he had just watched the man extend a hand to open the car door while turning back to speak to him. The next second, he was gone. 

He had really vanished in front of his eyes! 

Su Qing stood there dumbfounded, looking blankly at the half-open car door. He felt dizzy. Then someone pressed down on the back of his neck and shoved him into the taxi’s passenger seat. Hu Bugui, who had moved to his other side at some point, lowered his voice and grimly said, “Leave at once and keep quiet.” 

Then he shut the car door with a bang. 

These great changes to the universe happened too rapidly, so rapidly that the taxi driver hadn’t noticed anything amiss. He happily asked him, “Where are you going, young fellow?” 

Su Qing carelessly gave his own address while he turned his head to look around. In the blink of an eye, there was no sign of Hu Bugui at the hotel door. 

What the hell…

Just then, the taxi driver inadvertently looked at him and gave a yelp. “What’s wrong with your neck, young fellow? That’s blood, isn’t it? Should I take you to the hospital first?” 

Su Qing only then felt that the back of his neck was chilly and sticky where Hu Bugui had held it down. He reached out to touch it and came away with his hand covered in blood. 

Whose blood? That man’s? His hand had been just fine while they were eating that morning… Su Qing shuddered. He thought, he had been fine just now, then he had suddenly shoved him into the car. Could they have run into a surprise terrorist attack? Was there a gun with a silencer? 

Or was this Hu Bugui who said he worked for the government a terrorist himself? Worked for the government… Which government? Not the Taliban, surely? 

Able to move in an instant, couldn’t even reveal his address…and he had so many scars…

Tying all these suspicious signs together, Su Qing, who liked to trawl the internet reading stallion novels, let all kinds of absurd possibilities soar through his brain—in the end, only one thing was clear. His sad and decadent tale of a lovelorn youth getting drunk and having a one-night stand seemed to have turned into a horrifying incident of a sniper attack in the middle of the street. 

He didn’t speak. The taxi driver glanced at this decent-looking youth and thought, Ah, young people these days. They really wouldn’t learn. A perfectly nice child, and here he wouldn’t do any work; he had to be an idle little punk and get into fights with people. The driver didn’t want to make trouble. He shut his mouth and took Su Qing home as fast as lightning. 

Su Qing dizzily went inside. As he searched for his keys, he inadvertently put his hand on the apartment’s doorknob. At a light push, the door unexpectedly opened. 

The hair stood up on the back of his neck. He thought, What’s going on? He’d just gone to bed with a man he suspected of being a terrorist, and now he came home to a burglary? 

Su Qing reached for his phone, planning to call the police, but he found that he had left his phone along with his trench coat back with Guo Julin. He really was unlucky; he could get food stuck between his teeth when drinking cold water. 

So he quietly backed up. As a weak little shut-in who couldn’t lift or carry anything, he didn’t have the skills to go up against bad guys for several rounds of battle. Though his life was a mess and his future a blur, for the moment he didn’t mean to end his problems in death and be reborn. 

Suddenly, a dark figure blocked his path. Su Qing stopped in his tracks and nearly bumped into the person. He looked in terror at the guy in front of him, who was wearing black clothes and black sunglasses—at a visual estimate, he was a meter ninety, and had the look of a fiend. One of his arms was thicker than an ordinary person’s waist. The worst part was, he had an unidentified object in his hand—Su Qing swallowed with difficulty. While he had never seen such a high-level toy, he thought that this wasn’t an unidentified object; ten to one, it was a gun. 

This buddy, whose every cell asserted that he was a “thug,” bared his teeth in a grin. In a hoarse voice, he said, “We’ve been waiting for you for ages.” 

Su Qing took a deep breath, gathered it in his diaphragm, then stretched out his neck and yelled: “Help! Fire!”

Teachers tell us that in this day and age, you can’t yell “thief” if you meet a thief. No one but your dad will look after you. You have to say that there’s a fire. That especially went for an apartment building like this, where there were many families upstairs and downstairs. 

As he yelled, he squeezed through an opening as the thug reached for him and ran towards the corridor. Just then, a pair of hands reached out from behind. One hand covered his mouth, and the other clutched his neck. Su Qing quivered. He felt something ice-cold pressed to the artery in his neck. He wilted at once, not daring to breathe. His eyes rolled this way and that. The inside of his head turned into a pot of porridge. 

But his brain didn’t have long to cook its porridge. The next instant, Su Qing’s vision went dark. He knew nothing more.

The man who had knocked him out was tall. He wore glasses and had a gentle and scholarly look. He seemed neither like a Spider-Man nor a Superman, but he could lift Su Qing as easily as lifting a dog. His cold eyes scanned his face. Then he handed him over to the buddy in black and briefly said, “The people on this floor will wake up in thirty seconds. Take him. We’re leaving.”