Brother Bing's Clue

At the mention of Brother Bing, Zhang Yuanqing felt a surge of hope and asked, "Did the Hang City branch get results? Did they find anything?" The colleagues at the Hang City branch were terribly inefficient. Taking three whole days just to produce results clearly showed they didn't take Brother Bing's disappearance seriously, he grumbled inwardly. Brother Bing had been missing for nearly half a month. If the Spirit Realm walkers at the Hang City branch had conducted a thorough, responsible investigation, they should have been able to provide feedback and ample information right when Li Dongze made the request. Evidently, they assumed Brother Bing had died in the Spirit Realm and saw no point in investigating. "They did uncover a few things..." Li Dongze hesitated for a moment to choose his words before continuing. "Lei Yibing's social circle was relatively simple. He was solitary, kept to himself, and wasn't close with his classmates. He maintained a very low profile at school and never caused trouble. But after a deeper investigation, the colleagues from the Hang City branch discovered that over the past three years, two people who had provoked him both died in plausible, seemingly accidental ways." Zhang Yuanqing frowned deeply as he listened. The moment Li Dongze finished, he immediately retorted, "That can't be right. Brother Bing may not have been a smooth talker, but he was never solitary, and keeping a low profile wasn't his style at all. We grew up together; I know him too well. When his temper flared, he wouldn't even bother asking 'What are you looking at?'—he'd just throw a punch." As for the suspicion that Brother Bing had killed someone, Zhang Yuanqing didn't refute or comment on it without knowing the details. "Are you sure you're not describing a Fire Master..." Li Dongze couldn't help but quip. Clearing his throat, he steered the conversation back on track. "So the Lei Yibing you know doesn't match the Lei Yibing the other students remember. Who do you think changed?" Zhang Yuanqing fell silent for a moment. "Maybe... something went wrong with Brother Bing." Li Dongze hummed in agreement and analyzed, "You attended the same high school as him. If there had been anything unusual, it's impossible you wouldn't have noticed. That means Lei Yibing's transformation began when he started college. "Between graduating from high school and starting university, something must have happened to cause such a drastic change in his personality. But there are too many variables. Without more clues, there's no way to deduce what it was." Zhang Yuanqing agreed with Li Dongze's assessment, but one thing still puzzled him: given how close they were—practically brothers—why hadn't Brother Bing told him anything after becoming a Spirit Realm walker? The Spirit Realm had no gag rule or obliteration mechanism. If you wanted, you could grab a megaphone and travel the world proclaiming the existence of the Spirit Realm. Though no one would believe you... "Is there anything else?" "Yes, but I'm not sure if it counts." Li Dongze paused thoughtfully before asking, "Did Lei Yibing have a habit of keeping a diary?" "What decent person keeps a diary these days?" "The colleagues in Hang City found a diary in his dorm room. He didn't write in it very often, but right before he went missing—the night before he mailed you the character card—he wrote an entry." "Where is the diary now?" "The physical diary is still in his dorm. The colleagues at the Hang City branch looked it over and thought it held no value, but at my request, they took photos of it. I'll send them to you now," Li Dongze said. "If I remember correctly, tomorrow marks the fourteenth day since you emerged from Sheling Tunnel." "Yeah!" Tomorrow was the deadline. He would be pulled into the Spirit Realm either tonight or tomorrow. "There will be a brief buffer period when the Spirit Realm opens. Remember to call and report to me, or call Guan Ya." "Understood." They ended the call, and Zhang Yuanqing opened his messaging app to find the compressed file Li Dongze had sent over. After unzipping it, he had more than thirty image files. Zhang Yuanqing sat down at his desk and began reading through the diary. Brother Bing really hadn't written in it very frequently—sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly—and the entries were mostly trivial daily matters. At first, Zhang Yuanqing read very carefully, but once he confirmed the earlier entries held no real value, he skipped straight to the final photo. "Internships start in the second half of the year. Time flies so fast. Before I knew it, my college life was drawing to a close, and I was about to step into society. Last night in a dream, I remembered our childhood in the alleys with Yuanzi. I remembered sneaking around reading forbidden books with him, scamming my dad and his uncle for pocket money, and the... game we used to play together." The content was very brief, just a few sentences. Zhang Yuanqing stared intently at his phone screen. Suddenly, he leaned back against his chair and closed his eyes. Brother Bing really did leave me a clue! *** The next morning, Zhang Yuanqing woke up to find it was nine-thirty. "Looks like the Spirit Realm will open today..." After finishing breakfast, he put on a face mask and a baseball cap, then hailed a taxi to Lei Yibing's house. The residential alley where they had grown up was called Yinping Community. Built half a century ago, every apartment building bore the mottled marks of time. The buildings were uniformly six stories high, lacked elevators, and were wrapped in tangled loops of electrical cables clinging to the exterior walls. Zhang Yuanqing stepped out of the cab and cast a casual glance around. Over a decade had passed, and apart from fresh paint on the outer walls and a newly installed guard booth at the entrance, nothing had changed. Back when he was in middle school, rumors were already circulating that the area was slated for demolition and redevelopment. Everyone waited and waited, nearly ten years passed, and still not a shadow of a demolition crew had appeared. Zhang Yuanqing crossed the street and bought a bag of loquats, a pineapple, and three Keitt mangoes at the fruit shop opposite the complex. Making his way up the narrow stairwell, he stopped in front of Unit 402 and rang the doorbell. A moment later, footsteps approached from inside, and the security door swung open. A woman in her forties stood at the threshold, looking startled. "Yuanzi?" Her complexion looked poor, heavy dark circles hung beneath her eyes, and her face was gaunt. "Aunt Zhou, I came by to see you and Uncle Lei," Zhang Yuanqing said in a well-behaved tone, sighing inwardly. Aunt Zhou's gaze fell upon the fruit in his hands, and a comforting smile surfaced on her face. "Come on in," she said softly. The apartment was a two-bedroom, one-living-room layout of around eighty square meters. Zhang Yuanqing sat on the living room sofa, holding a cup of warm water Aunt Zhou had poured for him, listening as she spoke with deep sorrow. "Aunt Zhou, I believe the Public Security Bureau will find Brother Bing," Zhang Yuanqing comforted her. "Your maternal grandmother came to see me a few days ago. She said Old Chen told her that no news might just be good news," Aunt Zhou sighed, then added, "Stay for lunch today." "No need, I have class in a bit." Zhang Yuanqing shook his head. As children, he and Brother Bing had been inseparable, often sleeping over at each other's houses and freeloading meals, but today he could be drawn into the Spirit Realm at any moment, so he needed to keep his time outside to a minimum. "Aunt Zhou, I'll go sit in Brother Bing's room for a while." Zhang Yuanqing hadn't forgotten the real purpose of his visit. He pushed open the door to Brother Bing's bedroom. The modest room contained a double bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a television. His gaze swept quickly over the space before he finally pulled a large cardboard box out from under the bed. The box was packed with a hodgepodge of knickknacks: a Subor gaming console, a Digivice, clackers, yo-yos, a pair of binoculars, Water Margin hero cards, a wooden spinning top, a pull-string whistle, Dragon Ball manga volumes, and *The Sensuous History of Emperor Yang of Sui* by Qidong Yeren... Every little toy here had a story behind it. Take the binoculars, for instance. Back then, there had been a red-light district nearby. Once night fell, hazy, alluring lights would glow from the hair salons, and glamorous, provocative older women would lounge voluptuously on the sofas inside; you could make out their shapely curves even through the glass doors. Once, while still in elementary school, Brother Bing had pulled him aside in secret, claiming he had seen Zhang Yuanqing's uncle sneak into one of those hair salons. Zhang Yuanqing hadn't believed it and marched straight over to confront his uncle. The uncle, pale with fright, handed him twenty yuan as hush money. Afterward, while licking ice pops together, Zhang Yuanqing and Brother Bing realized this was a lucrative business. So the two little rascals began staking out the roadside after school. This time, they didn't catch the uncle—they caught Brother Bing's old man. The father, equally petrified, also paid them over a dozen yuan in hush money. Later, both the father and uncle turned over a new leaf and were never caught again. That was until Zhang Yuanqing pinched some pocket money from his aunt to buy binoculars, observing them secretly from a distance. And just like that, they made hush money once more. In this way, the box held Brother Bing's childhood, and it held Zhang Yuanqing's as well. He stared blankly at the toys of his youth, overwhelmed by how swiftly time had passed and how people and circumstances had changed. *What am I getting sentimental for? I'm not old enough to be reminiscing about the past,* he mocked himself, pushing back the flood of memories surging into his mind. Next, he picked up *The Sensuous History of Emperor Yang of Sui* and shook its pages. With a rustle of flipping paper, a small slip dropped out. Densely written across it were two strings of numbers. At the sight of this, Zhang Yuanqing slowly exhaled, feeling a heavy weight lift from his chest. The numbers on the paper were a cipher that only the two brothers could understand. Influenced by his grandfather, Zhang Yuanqing had been obsessed as a kid with cop movies, detective cartoons, and mystery novels, fantasizing that he was a brilliant officer of the law. During middle school, while reading a well-known foreign detective novel with Brother Bing, he had drawn inspiration from one of the cases. He figured that the Great Detective Zhang Yuanqing and his assistant Ah Bing couldn't possibly manage without a secret code. And so he had poured his energy into devising a cipher system. For example, the first number corresponded to the line, the second also to the line, the third to the page number, grouped into sets of seven characters, with the format of the second set being the reverse of the first... And the very first time they played that game, the base text they used had been *The Sensuous History of Emperor Yang of Sui*. Recalling the cipher format while cross-referencing the book, Zhang Yuanqing watched time tick away. After an unknown amount of time, he finally pieced together the full message. The first line of numbers: 6203; Brothers for a lifetime. The second line of numbers: Yuanzi, find it. I left everything there.