第 010 Ch.| Yongqing Road

October 27, 06:42.

Ren Yi woke. The seventh time.

She'd slept maybe four hours. Lay down at 02:30, didn't fall asleep until four, awake again at 06:42. She wasn't sure how much longer her body could take it, but she also knew that lying back down wouldn't help her sleep.

She got out of bed, made coffee, sat on the living-room sofa. She didn't check the muji first.

She needed one thing she could decide not to look at — she needed to confirm she still had the capacity not to be carried along by the other party's rhythm. She sat for about fifteen minutes, finished a cup of coffee, and only then went to her desk.

Under the twelfth entry, "The ring in the background of the 2060 group photo — who left it there?" — still blank. The other party still wouldn't answer this question.

She didn't write a new entry. She needed to switch tactics.

---

From that night of 10/14 until now, she'd been "waiting" — for the Academy, for the other party, or for the next message she didn't even know the shape of. Everything she could verify was something someone else had left behind: the fountain pen, the letter, the low wall at Wankou, the lines the other party drew in the muji.

She hadn't gone looking for a single lead that was entirely her own.

The easiest one to find was Chen Yufang.

Chen Yufang was the only option on her whole list of leads that she could go and look at in person, on foot. The fountain pen, the Moleskine, the locked office drawer where it all began — none of those came with coordinates she could walk to. Chen Yufang was different: she had a name, an address. Ren Yi could stand below her building, see her window.

The night before last, when she wrote the fourth entry in the muji, she'd decided not to message Chen Yufang. But "observing in person, offline" was different — she could stand near Chen Yufang's place without ever making contact, take one look at the window, and go home.

An alley off Yongqing Road, third floor. She remembered the door number, not exactly, but she remembered the direction.

She decided to go.

---

09:00, she left.

This time she brought the wrist terminal. In her backpack: the Moleskine notebook, the muji booklet (she'd decided to take it out with her, not give the other party a chance to touch the muji while she was gone), the fountain pen, a thermos.

She placed the muji deliberately in a side compartment of the backpack, lying flat, where it wouldn't get crushed. She'd never have thought she could be this anxious about a little booklet, but now, every time she closed the muji, she pressed the cover lightly with a finger to confirm it had really shut.

Mailbox 305 downstairs, empty. She went down and walked to the subway station.

---

09:30, she took Line 1, transferred to Line 3, and reached Wenheng Station. She walked along Yongqing Road, heading toward Dongcheng Forest Park.

She remembered Chen Yufang's place was down some alley off a certain stretch of Yongqing Road. There was a bicycle repair shop at the mouth of the alley, an old banyan tree at the far end. She remembered the fact of "having been there before" — several times, more than once. But she couldn't recall any single visit, didn't remember which year, who'd arranged it, what she'd done that day, what homework she'd written.

She remembered the bicycle repair shop at the mouth of the alley, remembered that some unit on the third floor had a mixed-breed dog that would bark on the balcony. Everything else was empty.

---

10:00, she reached the intersection at that stretch of Yongqing Road.

She walked along the road, checking every alley. After about ten minutes, past three alley mouths, she saw the bicycle repair shop — the owner was a man in his sixties, six half-repaired bicycles standing at the door, looking exactly the way she remembered.

She turned into the alley. There was an old banyan tree at the far end. The position matched her memory.

---

10:15, she found the three-story old apartment building.

She stood across the alley, about 8 meters away, looking up at the third-floor windows. One was open halfway. On the balcony was a potted plant — jasmine, looking like someone was tending it.

From a corner of the balcony, she heard a dog bark once, short, as if it had seen someone passing outside.

Bubu. Or another dog. Or maybe Chen Yufang's family didn't keep a dog anymore and it belonged to a neighbor above or below. She couldn't tell.

She stood across the alley for about twenty minutes. No one came down, no one went up.

---

10:35, she decided to move closer to read the nameplate.

She crossed the street, walked to the door of the three-story building. She walked at a pace no different from any other pedestrian, not fast, not slow, like someone who just happened to be passing on the way to a nearby shop.

The ground-floor entrance was an ordinary iron gate, with three doorbells, each one with a small plaque below it bearing a surname — the three were Lin, Huang, Chen. The top one was Chen.

Chen. It matched her memory.

She didn't press the bell. She stepped back, looked at the ground by the door — there was a paper bag from a sportswear brand, like someone had just bought something and hadn't carried it up yet. The label on it was new, like it had been bought this morning or yesterday.

The stretch of time when Chen Yufang had complained to her about work on LINE was back in 2063. She remembered the other woman was a planning editor at a publishing house then, the pay not high, unlikely to buy a sportswear brand. But two years had passed; she might have changed jobs by now, gotten a raise, or found a boyfriend who'd buy that brand.

Ren Yi couldn't judge a person she hadn't actually seen in two years from a single bag.

---

11:00, a mail carrier rode a scooter through the alley, stopped at the door of the three-story building, and rang the third-floor bell.

Ren Yi withdrew to the other side of the alley, somewhere inconspicuous.

After about a minute, someone came down from the third floor to open the door. A woman in her fifties. Short hair, a dark knit sweater, glasses. She said a few words to the mail carrier, signed for a package, then closed the door and went back up.

Ren Yi had never seen Chen Yufang's mother. She wasn't sure whether that was Chen Yufang's mother.

It might be. But at this distance and this angle, on top of having slept only four hours the night before — she couldn't confirm it.

---

11:30, Ren Yi decided to leave.

She hadn't pressed the bell, hadn't taken any photos. The whole time she'd stood across the alley, watching the third-floor windows.

She walked back to the Yongqing Road intersection, went into a noodle shop, bought a bowl of plain noodles, 52 yuan. She sat down to eat.

Halfway through, she took out the muji booklet, turned to below the twelfth entry. Below the twelfth entry — still blank. The other party still hadn't answered the question about the 2060 ring today.

She turned to the page after the twelfth entry and wrote the thirteenth:

13: Chen Yufang's home does exist (an alley off a stretch of Yongqing Road, third floor, surname Chen, a dog barking, bicycle repair shop at the alley mouth, old banyan tree at the far end — matches my memory). But I didn't see Chen Yufang herself. A woman in her fifties downstairs (could be her mother, could not be), a sportswear-brand paper bag at the door.
Status: candidate downgraded — confirmed her home is real, person unverified.

She finished writing, closed the muji, put it back in the backpack, and went on eating her noodles.

---

13:00, she got back to the foot of her building. Mailbox 305, empty.

Upstairs. The hair in the gap of the entry door — she'd placed it this morning before leaving, at a point 30 centimeters off the ground. She took out a flashlight, bent down to look. The hair was at 30 centimeters. It hadn't moved.

She went in, closed the door, set the backpack on the desk, took out the muji booklet, opened it.

She turned to the twelfth entry, the one she hadn't written under this morning — still blank.

She kept turning, to the ninth entry, the passage about "the other party drew a second line."

Below the record of the ninth entry — below the line that read "Status: the other party is responding actively, high frequency, by design" — there was a new, faint gray pencil stroke.

---

Ren Yi sat down.

That line had appeared between 09:00 and 13:00 today — and during those four hours the muji had been in her backpack the entire time — out of the apartment, on the subway, on Yongqing Road, at the noodle shop, and back home, with her the whole way. In between, when she'd opened the muji at the noodle shop to write the thirteenth entry, the space below the ninth entry had still been blank (she remembered — turning to the thirteenth entry, she'd checked whether there was room on the previous page and her eyes had passed over the ninth).

Meaning: the other party had not physically entered the apartment today (the muji wasn't home); or, what the other party entered today wasn't the apartment, but the muji itself.

The two possibilities she'd written under the ninth entry yesterday — the other party has a spare key vs. the other party doesn't need physical entry — were now pushed toward the second. She could no longer treat "home" as the muji's safe space.

The other party had left nothing below the twelfth entry (no answer to the 2060 question), but at the ninth — the entry where Ren Yi had written the other party drew a second line — had drawn another line.

The other party was responding to what she wrote.

Or rather — the other party was responding to what she was doing — she'd gone out, the other party knew; she'd written down the observation that "the other party is responding actively," and the other party had drawn a line beneath that very observation, as if to say, "yes, I am responding actively."

---

She realized — the other party wasn't only talking with her; the other party was participating in her record-keeping system.

She wrote an entry, the other party drew a line. She went to Chen Yufang's place, and today the other party didn't ask "what did you go and do" — the other party simply added a line below a record she'd already written.

The other party was saying: I see you chasing. I'm chasing what you're chasing.

She'd just gone to Yongqing Road — did the other party know? She turned to the thirteenth entry, "Chen Yufang's home does exist" — no line drawn on it. She'd written that one just now, at 11:30 in the noodle shop; she'd only left to head home at 12:00, reached home at 13:00. By the time the other party came to draw the line, the thirteenth entry hadn't been written yet.

But the next time she went out, the other party might read the thirteenth entry. She didn't know whether the other party would draw a line on the thirteenth entry next time, or not.

---

She took out a ballpoint pen — keeping the discipline of the muji control group, not letting that pen that turned on its own touch the muji — and below the thirteenth entry, wrote the fourteenth:

14: The other party drew another line below the ninth entry (today between 09:00 and 13:00, while I was over on Yongqing Road, the muji in my backpack the whole time).
The other party isn't entering "home" — it's entering the muji itself.
Confirms the second of the two possibilities under the ninth entry: the other party doesn't need physical entry.
The other party is tracking my record-keeping system itself, not just the specific questions I write.

Done writing, she closed the muji and set it back in its original spot on the desk.

---

She sat in the chair and thought: the other party was talking with her, but the other party was also letting her know the other party was talking with her.

These were two different things. The second was more precise than the first.

She looked at the line that had just been drawn, faint and gray. The other party was somewhere — maybe on this very street, maybe across from the apartment, maybe farther off — and was deliberately letting her know: she wasn't chasing alone.

She didn't know whether this counted as a threat or an invitation.

Maybe both.

【Ch. 010 End · Ren Yi's apartment + Yongqing Road, Dongcheng】