It was normal for an adult not to remember things that had happened before he was ten years old. For example, Luo Wenzhou persisted in believing that silly things like him seizing a coal heap while wielding a toy gun when he was little were fabricated by Comrade Mu Xiaoqing to slander him. But the unusual thing was that Fei Du remembered everything that had happened before and after clearly, including Fei Chengyu's tone of voice. Why would he only have forgotten this segment?
But Fei Du's condition was obviously unsuited for further questioning. Luo Wenzhou could only temporarily lay down his arms, checking his temperature, suspecting it was him going too far fooling around earlier that had made Fei Du catch a chill. Though the current temperature display showed that the temperature in the room was nearly 27°; you wouldn't feel cool wearing short sleeves. Luo Wenzhou couldn't come up with an answer after thinking it over and in the end had to sum it up in one cause—Fei Du, perhaps belonging to the category of tropical fish, was weak.
But when his body was tired after excessive activity, Fei Du's mind was never willing to behave and rest inside his motionless outer form. It wandered around at random while he slept.
First he dreamed that he'd taken out a can of cat food but had forgotten to open it for Luo Yiguo. Then he dreamed that Luo Wenzhou was displeased for some reason, not paying attention to him no matter how he coaxed. Finally, he seemed to return to the day Tao Ran had been brought to the hospital—the strange thing was that in the real world, when Fei Du and Luo Wenzhou had arrived, Tao Ran had already been in the emergency room, and they'd only gotten a quick look at him when his condition had stabilized and he'd been taken to an ordinary hospital room.
But in his disordered dream, Fei Du thought he saw Tao Ran covered all over in blood, bones with torn flesh on them bursting from his body. Tao Ran's face was flushed purple, and his eyes were protruding. It was a horrifying appearance of death.
Fei Du instantly opened his eyes, waking with a start.
His eyelids felt heavy, but in the instant it took for him to open his eyes, his wild thoughts were instantly forced back into place through thorough training. Frowning, Fei Du remembered the dream he'd just had, feeling it was a little wrong, because Tao Ran had been injured in a car crash. So why had his dream given him the appearance of being suffocated?
It didn't seem very logical.
But probably even Stephen Hawking couldn't have asked for all his dreams to be logical. The doubt flashed through Fei Du's mind, and then he felt somewhat unwell, something like the ache of being in the same position for too long. Fei Du gently pulled away Luo Wenzhou's arms, which were clinging a little tightly. He turned over, but the usually soft and comfortable mattress seemed to have turned into a cement floor. However he turned over, he felt that it was pressing against his bones. Covered only in a light-weight quilt, he felt it was pressing down on him so he couldn't quite catch his breath. No matter what, he couldn't find a comfortable position.
When Fei Du was very carefully turning over for the third time, Luo Wenzhou, who normally couldn't be shaken even by thunder, suddenly turned on the bedside lamp. "What's wrong?"
Fei Du didn't feel like talking. He buried most of his face against the pillow, avoiding the lamplight, shaking his head.
Luo Wenzhou reached out a hand to feel, then sat up with a start. "You're burning up like a radiator, and you're still shaking your head!"
Fei Du half opened his eyes somewhat vaguely, seeing Luo Wenzhou rush out to find fever-reducing medicine.
When Luo Wenzhou had lived alone, he'd mostly used things like safflower oil and Yunnan white medicinal powder6. He had a hoard of band-aids and iodine, but the rest was basically all expired medication. He rifled boxes and turned over drawers, working up a sweat. Next to him, Luo Yiguo was unwilling to be tranquil, dragging over an unopened can from somewhere, clawing and biting at it on the floor, the can making banging noises as it fell.
Luo Wenzhou shushed it, quietly reprimanding, "If you keep making a fuss, I'll lock you out on the balcony!"
Luo Yiguo pushed the can with its feet, raising its head and glaring indomitably at him, evidently meaning to fight him to the end.
Luo Wenzhou wasn't in the mood to pay attention to it. He finally found a box of fever-reducing medicine, scanned the directions and manufacturing date, discovered that it actually hadn't expired, and quickly took it to Fei Du.
As he gave Fei Du the medicine from his hand, he couldn't resist wanting to sigh. "President Fei, let's talk it over. Can we exercise a little starting tomorrow, set up a routine?"
Fei Du didn't have the energy to joke with him. He only vaguely said, "Tomorrow's fine."
He forced himself to drink half a glass of water, unsteadily pushed the glass away, and patted the back of Luo Wenzhou's hand twice in thanks, then curled up and didn't move. Fei Du was usually adept at making trouble, but after belatedly realizing that he was sick, he behaved himself, seeming to take orderly stock of his limited forces and intelligently lower all his life functions as much as possible, allocating all his strength to his immune system.
Luo Wenzhou watched him very uneasily for a while and found that this patient could entirely take care of himself; he didn't have the bad habit of throwing off covers and tossing around. Suddenly he rather tenderly touched his hair. "Who took care of you before when you got sick?"
Fei Du wanted to say, "Minor illnesses were nothing to worry about, for big ones I went to the hospital," but in reality his lips moved and he said nothing. The soporific effect of the fever-reducing medication bore down. The sound of Luo Wenzhou walking around seemed to come through a layer of something, further and further. Soon it had turned into a haze. Fei Du, holding on to the unsaid answer, was forced into sleep by the medicine. The unsettled question escaped his consciousness and seeped into his dreams.
In his dream, he saw his bedroom when he was little—the whole villa was decorated according to Fei Chengyu's preferences, including the woman and the child's rooms. The richly-colored pieces of furniture had their own atmosphere, pressing down on the youthful inhabitant's personality until not a sliver remained. Everything was cold…only fortunately the window faced south, and the light was good.
Fei Du vaguely remembered one time he'd leaned at the head of the bed, the sun falling on his body, restricted to bed because of a sudden cold and fever.
While Fei Chengyu wasn't home, he'd secretly taken out a strip of paper from his pencil case.
There were three strings of digits on the strip. Secretly entering a forbidden place was the sort of thing you had to do a second time. Fei Du had spent nearly half a year quietly watching Fei Chengyu's every move, secretly collecting all the other codes Fei Chengyu used in his daily life, making a simple summary and count of the encoding rules, producing a few principles from this analysis, trying to determine the code to the basement.
He had no chance to make a wrong attempt, because entering the wrong code would raise the alarm. No matter where Fei Chengyu was, he would receive a notification at once. Fei Du had finally fixed on three possible combinations Fei Chengyu may have used, but he really couldn't determine which one of the three it was.
Just then, someone knocked on the door. Fei Du had just stuck the "treasonous and heretical" slip of paper back into the pencil case in a flurry when his mom came in carrying cold medicine mixed with water.
She gently changed the soaked and scalding towel on his forehead, then used a towel soaked in cool water to wipe him down. Throughout the process, she was like a robot, doing everything attentively and methodically, but unwilling to make any eye contact with him, as though any extraneous contact would bring calamity down upon them.
Fei Du wanted to call out "mom," but when the word came to his throat, it stuck. He only opened his mouth.
When the woman had finished cleaning him, she seemed less gloomy than before. There was even a bit of briskness in her step. Little Fei Du wanted to say something to her, but he didn't know where to start. Seeing she was about to leave, he hastily reached out an arm to catch her. The unzipped pencil case on his knee fell, and the strip of paper with the codes written on it slipped out.
The air seemed to solidify.
After a good while, the woman bent down and picked up the pencil case and the little slip of paper. Fei Du subconsciously held his breath. The woman at last looked up and met his eyes. Her gaze was so complicated and hard to read that the boy couldn't tell what she meant. He nervously clutched the quilt.
Would she tell Fei Chengyu? Would she suddenly go mad?
As his apprehension increased, the woman, as if she hadn't understood, put the slip of paper back into the pencil case and gently put it back in his lap, kissed the top of his head, then turned and left.
After he'd heard the door, Fei Du hesitantly pulled out the strip of paper he'd written the codes on. He saw that there was a fingernail mark under one of the codes.
Three days later, when he learned that Fei Chengyu had gone out of town, he used that code to open the basement's thick door. The basement was like a forbidden area. The stairs were narrow and winding; you couldn't see the end from the top. Dim lights flickered in the gloomy wall lamps, lighting up the malevolent dragons on the wallpaper. There seemed to be a monster hidden inside, darkly opening its mouth wide.
In the dream, Fei Du thought that as he walked down step by step, his mom was watching from the second floor. When he opened the door, there seemed to be a faint black mist screening the desk and the cupboards on all four sides. He hesitantly approached the desk and saw a stack of printed treatises.
Then the dream turned into chaos. The characters printed on the paper suddenly grew, spreading on the paper like bloodstains. The space around him heaved as though it was about to crumble. The floor and ceiling shattered. There were the mixed sounds of shattering glass, the terrible footsteps, and a woman's screams. The feeling of suffocation suddenly attacked, making him unable to catch a breath. At the same time, he seemed to hear a man saying by his ear, "My Picture Album Project can also launch…"
Fei Du was covered in cold sweat. He suddenly sat up. Then, feeling the world spinning around him, he fell back and was embraced by Luo Wenzhou.
"Don't throw off the covers yet." Luo Wenzhou pulled him back and wiped the sweat at the corners of his forehead. He was very gratified to feel that his temperature had fallen and softly kissed his temple. "Did you have a nightmare? It's easy to have nightmares when you've taken fever-reducing medicine. I've been waiting here all night for you to throw yourself into my arms. Come here and let me comfort you."
The fierce ringing in Fei Du's ears subsided. He hesitated, then said, "It wasn't really a nightmare. It was only a very fantastic plot."
"…A fantastic plot?" Luo Wenzhou said. "Like riding a train into the sky?"
Clowning around with a sick person first thing in the morning really was low. Speechless, Fei Du poked him with his elbow.
"Like how when I worked out Fei Chengyu's code on my first try, it was actually because my mom gave me a hint," Fei Du said. "Also…I think Fei Chengyu said something to me about 'my Picture Album Project…'"
Luo Wenzhou paused. "You don't remember how you opened that door?"
"I do, I remember I worked out a few possibilities, then went to try, and very luckily the first code I tried worked…" Fei Du's words suddenly paused. He'd noticed something off. Looking at his childhood mental state from an outsider's point of view, he thought that no matter what he wouldn't have run the risk of making Fei Chengyu angry by hastily going to try out some codes he was entirely unsure of.
So had his mom really given him a hint?
Why didn't he remember anything about it?
Luo Wenzhou covered his eyes. "Go back to sleep. We can talk about sad things when you're better."
When he'd gotten Fei Du settled down, Luo Wenzhou quietly got up, heated up breakfast, and put it in a heat-preserving container. Then he left a note and went alone to the records room. Asking for a transfer of files required going through formal procedures, especially sealed records, but this was a very particular time; if he'd gone through the formalities, he still wouldn't have found anyone who could sign for him. The person in charge of the records room had smoked countless packs of his cigarettes, so he turned a blind eye and let him in.
Luo Wenzhou searched around; as expected, he couldn't find anything of value. There was only a thin book on the Picture Album Project with some very surface-level introductory words in it. There were also a few superficial treatises that all looked like they'd been copied and pasted from all over. The head of the Picture Album Project had been Yan Security Uni's professor Fan Siyuan, but among the papers included in the end, his signature didn't appear on any of them as either author or academic advisor.
The contents of Fan Siyuan's personal file were also pitifully scant. Only his work experience and publication history were collected; they came to an abrupt halt thirteen years ago, but his recorded death, very strangely, was ten years ago.—Lao Yang had vaguely mentioned him, saying that he'd died. He'd always thought that it was something like killing himself to avoid punishment after the Picture Album Project had been exposed or a mishap while being apprehended. He hadn't expected to find it was nothing like that.
It was first thing in the morning. The person in charge called to Luo Wenzhou and went to the bathroom. Luo Wenzhou took the opportunity to quickly copy all the collected files that had been used in the first Picture Album Project, proficiently taking a turn as a thief.
Before leaving, his gaze fell momentarily on Fan Siyuan's work record, and a divine light suddenly flashed through his mind—
Yes, Director Lu had said that after starting work, Gu Zhao had gone to Yan Security Uni to do a postgraduate program!
Meanwhile, Xiao Haiyang had gone to the rehab center first thing in the morning. A rehab center wasn't like a public park where you could just show up. He sat waiting uneasily for an age before finally seeing Ma Xiaowei. Xiao Haiyang secretly sighed in relief—so many things had gone wrong lately, he'd been afraid that when he'd just found a bit of a lead he would be informed that Ma Xiaowei had also been silenced.
Ma Xiaowei had gained some weight and no longer had the look of a drug addict, but his mental state was rather listless. The listlessness vanished as soon as he saw Xiao Haiyang. He tensed all over.
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Author's note:
(6) Both used for treating minor injuries and aches.