Owl (鸮)¹, read as xiāo, has only one description in the dictionary. Strigiformes, the name of an order of birds whose characteristics include a large head and a short, crooked beak. There are several birds in the species, of which owls are only one example.
The dictionary’s explanation confirmed the hoot hoot-ing Xu Wang had heard at midnight. It was the call of an owl, an incantation spawning the beginning of the whole diabolism.
Gradually, dawn broke over the horizon, putting an end to the night, which also meant that real life had to resume.
Sun Jiang was a driving school instructor and had a student to meet with, so he was the first to leave; Kuang Jinxin was in his last year of university. He studied tea sciences. His hometown was in Xinan, his university in Jiangnan, but he somehow ended up choosing a tea house in Beijing for his internship. According to him, the proprietor of the tea house treated him well and wouldn’t mind if he took another day off, but in truth, there was nothing more any of them could do except wait for night to arrive, and so under the urging of Wu Sheng and Xu Wang, little Kuang obediently returned to his internship.
As soon as those two left, Xu Wang naturally shifted his gaze onto Wu Sheng, trying to hint at him it was time for him to leave. While he naturally wanted to spend more time with him, pragmatically speaking, he was well aware that nothing good would come of such prolonged interaction, and so there was no point.
Wu Sheng read the silent implication in Xu Wang’s eyes, but ignored him and stood up instead, fully intending on bringing this reunion to the next level. “Aren’t you going to show me around?”
Now that they were alone, Xu Wang dropped his formal pretense and shot back, “This isn’t a museum, the hell is there to show?” Not to mention there was only a living room and a bedroom. The tiny living room could be seen in entirety at a glance, which left only the bedroom. And really, anyone who asked to see someone’s bedroom without any intention of sleeping with them was definitely a pervert.
“Why are you so dramatic? Unless,” Wu Sheng raised a brow mischievously, “there are things in there that can’t see the light of day?” The more off-limits the bedroom was, the more he wanted to see it.
Words failed Xu Wang for a beat as he glared at Wu Sheng and ground his teeth. In the end, he spat out, “It’s been a decade, why are you still so obnoxious?”
Wu Sheng shot him a look, that same look of disdain from their youth, and said, “As if you’ve improved so much yourself.”
The two of them were like Mr. Wang and Mr. Yu, two peas in a pod, so similar in temperament and so knowledgeable about the other’s personal history that neither could hope to gain the upper hand in their bickering. One little mistake and they would each suffer a hit upon themselves in the process of attacking the other. Once they came to terms with this fact, a temporary truce was declared, and a momentary interlude of camaraderie took place.
Before the conversation progressed much, however, Wu Sheng expressed perplexity after learning his old classmate’s profession. “A real estate consultant?”
“You got a problem with that?” Xu Wang’s neck stiffened indignantly.
Wu Sheng leaned back into the couch and propped one leg over the other, water glass in hand and a graceful smile on his face. “You sell property then.”
Xu Wang squinted at him. “Then pray tell, what kind of career prompted this gentleman before me to come back to China and start a business?”
“Software development,” Wu Sheng answered. He took a languid sip of his water.
Xu Wang nodded. “A code farmer then.”
Wu Sheng choked on his water.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Xu Wang also sat with one legged propped over the other, shaking his foot in amusement.
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As the sun rose further in the sky, Xu Wang checked his phone. If he didn’t catch the metro soon, he’d really have to skip work. At that thought, he decided to stop cutting around the corner and get straight to the point. He slapped his thigh and stood up, gesturing towards his guest to leave. “Alright now, you get back to wherever you came from, I’ve got to go to work.”
Wu Sheng stared at him with a puzzled look, completely not comprehending. “Sun Jiang went to work because he has a wife and kid to raise, Xiao Kuang went to work because it’s an internship and he’s going to be assessed. You a) don’t have a family to support and b) don’t need to graduate, yet instead of sitting down and properly strategising how we’re going to deal with this situation of ours — a pretty major situation, might I add — you’re going to go to work?”
His judgmental tone made Xu Wang want to beat him up with the bottom of his shoe. “Yeah I don’t have a family to support, but do bachelors live off air? I won’t die if I bounce back into the real world from Owl, but if I don’t go to work today, I really will die.”
When he’d asked for time off yesterday, his boss was already displeased. If he asked for another day off, he reckoned he’d just be asked to take his things and leave.
“Never mind, explaining to someone who’s rich is pointless,” Xu Wang said, ending the conversation with a wave of his hand. If he kept going, it was going to sound like self-pity.
Wu Sheng creased his brows. The innocent expression on his face made him look wronged. “How am I rich…?”
Xu Wang rolled his eyes, then went to his bedroom to get changed, not wanting to further entertain the man’s bullshit.
He’d heard, from an old classmate that had just returned from the States at a class reunion two years ago, that Wu Sheng was doing extraordinarily well in Silicon Valley and had earned a bucket load of money not long after they’d graduated. With a career trajectory like that, he was basically another Zuckerberg.
Naturally, the old classmate’s description was likely partially hyperbolic, but the envy in his eyes was genuine. If he’d been envious, it meant that Wu Sheng had been doing far better than him, and this particular classmate of theirs was one of the more successful ones in their class who’d managed to achieve a guaranteed annual salary before the age of thirty.
Xu Wang exited his bedroom dressed in business attire and found Wu Sheng still on the couch, with no apparent intention of moving. Even his legs were still crossed. “What is it you want? Are you seriously not planning on leaving?” Xu Wang asked in exasperation.
Wu Sheng looked up and then froze, eyes staring at the well-dressed man in front of him. An indiscernible look gleamed in his eyes.
The staring made Xu Wang uncomfortable, so he deepened his voice deliberately and shouted, “Hey!”
Wu Sheng blinked, coming back to his senses. With one swift motion, he bent to grab his glass of water again. “Ah, about that, I already spoke with my startup partners and told them that I’m not going in to work today.”
Xu Wang’s already furrowed brows had been out of curiousity, because he didn’t see the purpose in Wu Sheng picking up his already-empty glass of water, but now his frown deepened because of Wu Sheng’s words. “So you’re telling me you’re planning on staying here the entire day?!”
Wu Sheng raised the glass to his lips and went through the motions of drinking from it for several minutes before realising that the glass was, in fact, empty, and then he set it back down as smoothly as he could before looking back up. “Your lives are clearly important, so I guess I can only sacrifice myself. There has to be someone to think up a plan.” There was a holier-than-thou look all over his face.
“You can think somewhere else.”
“I don’t have a home in Beijing.”
“You’re full of shit!”
“I literally don’t even have shit.²”
“…..”
In all three years of high school, Xu Wang had had about a 50 percent chance of winning his battles against Wu Sheng. Now as an adult, he found sadly that ten years of living in different environments had caused his winning probability to fall quite a bit.
“Don’t go through my things,” he warned from the doorway to Wu Sheng, who was still sitting inside, “if I find out….” He narrowed his eyes, “our friendship is over.”
Wu Sheng nodded with unprecedented sincerity and solemnity.
Yes, there were definitely secrets in the bedroom.
The storm door shut with a resounding slam.
Outside, Xu Wang awaited the lift with his head down, hating himself for being so weak.
Inside, Wu Sheng was scrutinising the bedroom door, hand rubbing his chin thoughtfully, letting his imagination run wild with all the scandalous secrets that could possibly be hidden inside.
A thousand thoughts milled on either side of a single door.
By the time Xu Wang managed to squeeze into the metro car, Wu Sheng, who’d paced back and forth in front of the bedroom door for at least half an hour at that point, received a call from one of his partners. The program they were developing had encountered a small hiccup and their engineers couldn’t resolve it, so they had no choice but to call on their Research & Development Director who was also practically half CEO.
Wu Sheng sighed into the phone, his previously good mood spoiled. “You’re a boss too, can’t you resolve this tiny problem by yourself?”
The voice in the phone became high-pitched. “Tiny problem? If I could fix these ‘tiny’ problems, you think that I’d accept taking three shares of stocks as opposed to your seven, even though we invested the same amount of money?”
There was nothing Wu Sheng could say to that. How did the saying go again? The bigger the shareholder, the larger the responsibility.
“Tell Xiao Mian to bring my laptop over, I’ll send you the address.”
“Can’t you just come to the office? What is so urgent that you can’t step away for a few seconds?”
“I have no keys.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t have keys, so I can’t leave, otherwise I can’t get back in.”
There was nothing but silence on the other end.
After a long while, Wu Sheng heard his partner ask, “You’re not doing anything illegal, are you…?”
The laptop was delivered in due time, but the so-called “tiny problem” was not so tiny at all. It was already 2 PM by the time the problem was dealt with. Wu Sheng sent the data back to the company, the issue of the bedroom’s secrets long forgotten. He took a look at the time, and swiftly decided to start searching the Internet…
***
Xu Wang spent the entire day ill at ease, terrified that his bedroom would spill his secrets, although he comforted himself with the fact that Wu Sheng would not so easily go through his things under his threat of cutting off ties with him.
He didn’t know whether it was because he’d thought about it too much or because he slept too deeply during the nap he decided to take during his break at noon, but he ended up with a bizarre dream. In his dream, Wu Sheng stood at the centre of his bedroom, a box filled with war trophies raised in his hand, looking like a Marvel villain holding up the Tesseract.
In the afternoon, a client he’d been slowly buttering up came to sign their contract out of the blue. It was likely that luck was finally rebounding in his life after the repeated misfortune he’d experienced over the past couple days. Xu Wang hadn’t even been the person who was supposed to be taking care of this client today, but when they’d arrived, they had specifically requested the service of the man who had painstakingly introduced all the different floor levels and interiors of the buildings, in addition to giving them insight on the future development of its surroundings. In the end, they signed their name on the largest structures on the property.
The commission for this deal would be over 20,000 yuan alone, and it would contribute to his year-end performance review and bonus. The wind of this success swept away his exhaustion and fatigue, and Xu Wang rode it all the way home.
He couldn’t explain the strange feeling that overcame him as he approached his door — just that even as he put his key into the lock, he did so carefully, as if this were not his own home and he was a robber. When at last he opened the door and entered his foyer, he found the entire room silent and still. If not for the faint glow passing through the window from the flashing neon lights outside, he would have missed Wu Sheng on the sofa.
The man sat there with his head tilted to the side, in deep slumber. A laptop Xu Wang had never seen before was resting on the coffee table, its screen illuminated with white light. It was unclear whether Wu Sheng had just fallen asleep or that he’d set his laptop to never shut down, but even though it wasn’t being used, it was still lit up.
Xu Wang treaded quietly, stopping before the sofa. He bent down and inspected the fellow closely for the first time since they’d reunited.
Eyes, nose, mouth… truly, none of these features had changed much. His smile was as attractive as it had been in the past. A “womanizing face,” was the description Xu Wang had used to describe Wu Sheng in high school, even though the latter had never dated anyone during that time.
Xu Wang’s breath followed the path of his stolen gaze, falling gently upon Wu Sheng’s lashes. They seemed to twitch — whether it was his imagination or not, he jumped with a start and straightened up instantly, pretending to look elsewhere.
His eyes landed on the screen of Wu Sheng’s laptop. It was covered in English words. He inspected the page up and down, finally concluding the two phrases that appeared the most: Multiverse, Parallel Universes.
The only word Xu Wang actually knew the meaning of was “universe”–he grabbed his phone and looked up the definitions of the rest. He wasn’t particularly well-versed in such complicated physics, but he’d watched a lot of science fiction films and, combined with the events of the last two days, could pretty much guess what Wu Sheng had been looking into.
Evidently, he had really been doing research, not just casually suggesting that he would. Facing problems head-on, the phrase “circumvent the problem” absolutely not in his dictionary — Wu Sheng had been like this ten years ago too.
Xu Wang tiptoed quietly into his bedroom, and after shutting his door, the first thing he did was not to turn on the lights and change, but to turn on the lights and peer into his wardrobe. When he confirmed that a certain box hidden in the deepest corner of his closet showed no signs of having been touched, he settled down, patting his chest and letting out a sigh of relief.
“What are you digging around there looking for?” came a voice from the doorway in a vaguely upturned tone.
With a start, Xu Wang slammed his wardrobe door shut and shot a look towards Wu Sheng’s probing stare. He willed himself into a righteous and saintly facade from head to toe, then shot back, “I’m changing, what’s it to you?! Also, this is my house, can’t you knock before you enter?”
Wu Sheng stared at him lazily from where he leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed before his chest. “I knocked, but you probably didn’t hear me because you were too busy acting shady.”
Thank you for the chapter!!!
kfffffdfp they’re basically their greatest enemy and friend at the same time
Ok, ok, have mercy now! kiss kiss become boyfriends the sexual tension is gonna kill me
Thanks for the chapter <3
thanks for the chapter! ♡
Thanks for your hard work!
😂 these two guys…
hahaha I like these 2 together.
I wonder what the wardrobe holds? his secret 10+ year old crush?
thanks for the chapter <3
Thanks for the chapter<3
Thank you for the chapter ♡ (⁄ ⁄>⁄ ▽ ⁄<⁄ ⁄)
What’s in the box, ahh I wanna know haha
Probably memorabilia from their high school days that’s incriminating of his crush. But he acts like they’re bedroom toys :3