The night was like a vast sea. In an urban village deep in the heart of the area far from Jingcheng, this place felt like some neglected, unimportant nerve ending discarded by prosperity.
In a corner of the village, Heyue led a woman through the dim stairwell, where a tungsten-filament lightbulb, long since burned out at the top, could be heard creaking and swaying in the wind.
Looking at the mottled wall beside her, Heyue suddenly felt a sense of awkwardness.
This was the first time anyone had ever come to her home; she could be considered a guest, after all...
Thinking this, Heyue self-consciously bit her lip, and before pulling open the door, she said softly, "My place is quite small. Please don't mind."
To her surprise, the woman answered with a very calm "Oh," and stood there waiting for Heyue to unlock the door.
Even in the dead of night, she did not take off her sunglasses.
Heyue turned and twisted the key. The ten-square-meter room could be taken in with a single glance; it barely managed to accommodate a bedroom, a kitchen, and a shower—sparrow may be small, all its organs are there, as the saying goes.
It should have felt cramped, but Heyue kept the place meticulously clean, organizing everything so well that it actually freed up a fair amount of space.
In truth, Jiang Shaoming had more than once expressed his disgust for this urban village, saying that just breathing the air here turned his stomach. Yet Heyue simply refused to take his money or his apartment: "What's between us is purely a transaction; I don't want to get involved in anything else."
But this statement earned her a large, dark-purple bruise ruthlessly left by Jiang Shaoming on her slender, fair arm, followed by a sarcastic parting shot: "Pay for your own medical bills, otherwise I'm afraid you won't be at ease."
Jiang Shaoming didn't understand Heyue. To her, this tiny ten-square-meter space was the only place where she could hide herself away, a realm entirely her own where she could vent all her petty emotions with a clear conscience.
As she pressed the switch, the warm yellow light of the room poured out, accompanied by a faint, refreshing, and pleasant magnolia scent. The woman showed no sign of disdain for the cramped and crude surroundings; instead, she made herself entirely at home, kneeling down before the small, homemade coffee table in the room. "I want an orange soda."
Heyue was momentarily stunned. How did she know there was soda in the house, and that it happened to be orange-flavored?
Though puzzled, Heyue agreed nonetheless. "Alright, I'll get you one."
Two bottles of soda were placed on the small coffee table. As they warmed up, tiny beads of condensation formed on the glass, chilling her hands, yet driving away the uneasy, restless heat in Heyue's heart. She pulled the tab and took a large gulp of the soda, the bubbles tingling through her senses and making her shiver involuntarily.
Yet the woman in front of her did not reach for her soda right away. Instead, she tilted her head and gazed at a photograph placed on the bedside table—the only group photo in Heyue's room.
Noticing her gaze, Heyue shifted half her shoulder to block the photo and went straight to the point. "Who is the killer?"
"You certainly are direct." The woman picked up the soda, pulled the ring with a sharp snap, and asked with a laugh, "Who do you think it is?"
Heyue instinctively pressed her lips together, and the woman teased, "What would you do if I told you it was one of the two girls in the photo?"
Heyue's breath hitched. Following the woman's gaze, she turned her head toward the bedside table, where three girls in school uniforms were huddled together looking at the camera, their faces wreathed in wild, radiant smiles. Free of cosmetics, they captured youth at its absolute finest, making it impossible to look away.
How long... how long had it been since they last saw each other?
Ever since the murder ten years ago, the three of them had maintained a tacit agreement to cut off all contact.
"Will you... kill me?"
Suddenly, a wave of heat puffed against the back of her neck, raising goosebumps all over Heyue's skin. She whipped her head around, only to see the woman sitting composedly back in her seat.
"Who on earth are you?" Heyue demanded harshly.
The two stared at each other, the atmosphere growing delicate. With her nerves taut, Heyue secretly reached out to feel for a small knife hidden beneath the straw cushion.
"Take the knife out."
The woman spoke softly, causing Heyue to freeze mid-motion. "Y-you... how did you know?"
From the moment she appeared, she had carried an air of absolute control over everything.
The woman lowered her head with a faint chuckle, slowly raised her hand, and took off her sunglasses. Under Heyue's burning gaze, she revealed a face identical to Heyue's own!
No, not entirely identical. The "Heyue" opposite her had visibly lost a great deal of collagen, with numerous crow's feet crowding the corners of her eyes, while her clear, deep pupils had grown indifferent and weather-beaten.
How could this be...
Terrified, Heyue recoiled, shrinking back as she continuously retreated, demanding at the top of her lungs, "Who the hell are you?"
"Can't you tell yet?" The woman walked over, squatted down in front of her, and nonchalantly stated an almost impossible truth: "I am you."
"This is absurd." Heyue instinctively denied it, waving her hand to make the woman go away, but instead, the woman grabbed her slender wrist, stripping off her watch to reveal a series of shocking, gruesome scars.
The scar she could never bring herself to speak of was exposed just like that, and Heyue let out a piercing scream. "What on earth are you trying to do?!"
The woman rolled up her own sleeve in response, displaying her wrist completely before Heyue. Staring at the identical, horrifying scars, Heyue was struck dumb—because these scars matched hers in every single detail of placement, depth, and number!
For such an absurd thing to happen to her!
Amidst her numbness and shock, she heard the woman say, "Heyue, I am you from ten years in the future."
The woman told Heyue to call her Dahe, chattering on and on about many things, but looking at that identical face, Heyue couldn't take in a single word.
She sat cross-legged in front of the small coffee table, weighing the veracity of Dahe's words, while Dahe didn't sit idle either, retrieving the first-aid kit with practiced familiarity to apply medicine to the wounds left by Jiang Shaoming.
After all, this was her body too.
"Hiss."
Heyue couldn't help shrinking back slightly, the pain snapping her back to attention and fixing her gaze on Dahe.
"Who is the killer?" She persisted with the question.
Dahe went on applying the medicine herself and packed up the medical kit. "Don't you already have the answer in your heart?"
Heyue lowered her gaze. "Because I saw..."
A rainy night, a corpse, a hurried retreating figure, a pretty hairpin.
"What did you see?" Dahe demanded at a blistering pace. "Did you see who followed Chen Song? Did you see who picked up the brick? Did you see who killed Chen Song with their own hands? There was nothing there at all... yet because Jiang Shaoming said it was Lin Xialing's back, you chose to believe him."
Faced with Dahe's interrogation, Heyue chose silence.
"Weren't you best friends?" At this mention, tears welled up in Dahe's eyes. "Heyue, you kept saying you were best friends for life, yet you didn't trust them at all. You genuinely thought they wanted to kill him."
Word by word, sentence by sentence, wasn't Dahe interrogating herself as well?
Heyue's lips, parched from tension, were soaked by tears once more, and Dahe simply looked at her in silence.
As she wept, Heyue suddenly began to laugh, laughing almost to the point of gasping for breath. "You know, don't you?"
With her fair, obedient face, her smile carried a hint of sickness. Her dark pupils fixed straight on Dahe, and she spoke in the gentlest tone imaginable:
"When I appeared there back then, wasn't it also to kill Chen Song?"