PSE - 21

The next day, a sandstorm swept through Sui City. Dust filled the sky, blotting out the sun, and visibility outdoors was reduced to less than five meters.

In such harsh weather, since the early hours of the morning, pebbles had been hitting the windows intermittently, causing a series of clattering noises. However, Xue Jing slept soundly, like a hibernating bear, not moving an inch in his bed.

He woke up only because his phone kept ringing incessantly like an alarm.

The first thing he did after regaining consciousness was to mutter a curse. Frowning, he groped around with both hands; one hand fumbled for the phone on the pillow to answer the call, while the other hand searched blindly on the bed but found only empty air.

Realizing that he was the only one in the bed, Xue Jing immediately sat up. It wasn’t a dream—because all the clothes that had been thrown on the floor yesterday were now neatly folded and packed back into the suitcase.

After the person on the other end of the line said “Hello” several times, Xue Jing finally took a deep breath and pulled his hand out from under the covers again.

The caller was Zhou Shuang, Xue Jing’s half-classmate and roommate.

The reason he was called a “half-classmate” was because Zhou Shuang and Xue Jing had never attended the same school or rented the same apartment.

In mid-2019, Xue Jing received an offer to study at Yale while attending Jid University. Around the same time, Zhou Shuang, who was studying at Stanford, began an online romance with a French girl studying string music at Yale.

Six months later, when the pandemic erupted locally, their online romance hadn’t yet transitioned to real life. The French girl hastily boarded a repatriation flight arranged by her family, while Zhou Shuang, like Xue Jing, was stranded abroad due to miscalculating the severity of the pandemic.

By mid-2020, with countries imposing strict border closures, return flights were nearly impossible to book, schools had suspended in-person classes, and most programs had moved online. While living in California, Zhou Shuang suddenly received a call from his girlfriend, asking him to check on her belongings at her rental apartment in New Haven.

According to her, the male roommate she shared the apartment with was also a Chinese student at Yale.

Initially, after she left, they had brief communication, but over the past month, he had stopped responding to her private messages on Facebook and Instagram. She had tried calling several times, but no one answered.

As a new student at Yale, she didn’t have many close friends. Moreover, since her name wasn’t on the lease, the grumpy American landlord refused to disturb the tenant under special circumstances.

So, she pleaded with Zhou Shuang to go to New Haven and personally check if the roommate had taken advantage of the chaos to loot all her belongings. If so, she asked him to report it to the police and handle the aftermath.

4,843 kilometers—Stanford to Yale, from the far west to the far east of the United States, with a three-hour time difference.

Without hesitation, Zhou Shuang boarded a six-hour economy flight the next day, wearing double masks and disposable protective clothing.

After getting off the plane, he squeezed onto a train for more than two hours, risking infection to cross the United States alone. This wasn’t just because Zhou Shuang still dreamed of a future where he could ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange during the day and watch his artist wife perform at Carnegie Hall at night. More importantly, he was a proud Chinese man.

He wanted to prove to his four-years-younger French girlfriend that Chinese people weren’t opportunistic thieves as portrayed in Western films from the first half of the 20th century—a stereotype that had done much harm.

Her Chinese roommate must have had some unspoken difficulties, perhaps even been shot dead on the street.

In reality, Zhou Shuang’s prediction was mostly wrong. When he finally managed to break into his girlfriend’s apartment using improper means, he found that not a single luxury item was missing from her small bedroom. However, in the large bedroom, wrapped in all the clothes, lay Xue Jing, suffering from a high fever. Though he hadn’t been persecuted by any extremists, he was indeed close to death.

Later, neither of them liked to recall those days.

That period was bitter, like sucking on a licorice root. Both young men had lost hope that the sun would rise again tomorrow.

Out of the false politeness typical of people from Jicheng, Zhou Shuang offered to stay and take care of Xue Jing for a week. Eventually, he didn’t leave—he got infected too, and then it was Xue Jing’s turn to heat up instant chicken soup in the microwave to take care of him.

Amidst the turbulent times, class conflicts were severe, and protests filled the streets. Radical elements were everywhere. The two young men stayed holed up in that rented apartment for four months.

During that time, they minimized unnecessary outings, completing group assignments through online video calls. Even so, they were repeatedly infected two or three times until social order gradually returned to normal. Zhou Shuang received an email from his school and returned to Stanford to collect his diploma.

As for Zhou Shuang’s French girlfriend? Even after several countries successively declared the pandemic over, for various reasons, she never returned to Yale to resume her studies.

Meeting someone is itself a kind of miracle, especially in difficult years.

The last news Zhou Shuang heard about her came through Xue Jing, who was about to return to China. By then, she was already a mother of two children, her figure resembling a croissant dipped in melted cheese. Wearing a beret, holding a cigarette in one hand and a coffee spiked with strong liquor in the other, she directed her driver with her mouth to pack all her Chanel items into Louis Vuitton hard cases.

Zhou Shuang had always been unlucky in love. Meeting the wrong people was a common occurrence in life. Xue Jing’s French roommate, during her online romance with Zhou Shuang, often brought different men back to her room for overnight entertainment—she was far from being the shy newcomer she claimed to be.

Still, there was no room for judgment between them. Zhou Shuang, though a magnet for problematic women, had an exceptional nose for making money, something Xue Jing had to admit.

After returning to China, Zhou Shuang made his first fortune during the domestic black swan event, heavily investing in internet star companies and netting his clients a 20-fold profit within a year, earning himself a hefty commission.

After the bull market peaked and the yuan depreciated, he promptly shifted his focus to monetizing online traffic. Now, after less than two years in the knowledge payment industry, he was thriving in his circle.

In the past year, with the real economy in decline and people staying indoors, they turned to the internet for entertainment. A new class of internet-fueled nouveau riche emerged in droves.

There was no shortage of KOLs lining up to collaborate with him, but Zhou Shuang had his standards. In recent months, his main focus had been on artists, and at this stage, he was considered Xue Jing’s half-business partner.

“Xue’r, are you heading straight home after your flight tonight? Do you need me to send someone to pick you up? How have things been these past few days? Are you tired?”

“Or should I arrange for a massage therapist from the hospital to come over and give you a spinal massage? Want acupuncture? I know a blind old Chinese medicine doctor.”

Zhou Shuang grew up in a courtyard house in Jicheng. His grandfather, parents—all were veteran actors at the Central Drama Academy.

Logically speaking, growing up in such an artistic environment, he should have inherited some artistic flair, but Zhou Shuang didn’t follow in his family’s footsteps. From a young age, he loved playing around with money. In middle school, to impress a girl he liked, he sold all of his father’s stamp collections online.

Within three sentences, he inevitably circled back to his bread and butter: making money.

“There’s a one-on-one live session in the group chat on Monday morning. The course we released last month was a huge hit. This live stream will be four hours long, with paid Q&A sessions at three minutes each, priced at 588 yuan as the threshold. After one session, it’ll bring in several hundred more.”

“Isn’t this better than writing books? I say stop hanging out with those old-timers; nothing good will come of it. Writing or not writing—it’s all the same. The main purpose of life is to earn enough money to enjoy it.”

“You already have a name for yourself, so just focus on making money! How simple is that?”

“If you can’t write right now, just wait. Don’t push yourself too hard. If you keep pressuring yourself like this, you’ll end up breaking down.”

The two were close, very familiar with the embarrassing jokes in each other’s lives, and spoke casually.

Xue Jing immediately retorted: “Stop buttering me up.”

“I know you too well. Pretending to care about me is just a front; your real goal is to suck my blood. I’m busy with real work—how do I have time for live streams? My schedule has changed. If you really see me as a person, tell your assistant to pack more of my stuff and send it to me.”

“I’ll send you the address.”

“I’m not coming back tomorrow.”

Hearing this, Zhou Shuang became displeased on the other end of the line. This was millions of real money! Could some dispensable report really be more important than this?

His eyes darted around, and he tapped the earpiece, wondering if Xue Jing had finally found inspiration for his next book?

By the calendar, aside from the reports Xue Jing produced, since the day he graduated with his master’s degree, he hadn’t seriously written anything of his own.

The few novels still being published were old stock.

In previous years, after Xue Jing broke up with Ha Yue, his creativity flowed like a fountain. But recently, his inspiration had dried up completely.

No matter how hard he tried to find his rhythm, traveling everywhere for inspiration, even trying drinking himself into a stupor, nothing worked. All he did was hug the toilet and vomit—no new material, no new stories came out.

He no longer hated Ha Yue, but the works born out of that hatred had also left him.

Even when he forced himself to write, he kept repeating the same old tunes.

Thirty is a critical age for writers.

Yu Hua wrote To Live at thirty-three, Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis at thirty, Fitzgerald created The Great Gatsby at twenty-nine. The list of male authors could go on endlessly, let alone female writers—Xiao Hong saw through Life and Death Field at twenty-four.

Everyone knows that Jiang Lang had no great lines in his later years, but “best-selling author” Xue Jing wasn’t even thirty yet, and he was already on a downward slope in his once proud career. It wasn’t a gradual decline either—last night, Ha Yue’s words echoed in his mind, saying his talent was like an appliance unplugged.

The publishing house he collaborated with didn’t know this, nor did the readers who praised him online. The planners and editors packaging his new books didn’t know either. Literary critics merely thought his books were becoming increasingly rigid, overly catering to the market, and speculated that he had probably given up writing what he truly wanted to write.

Only Zhou Shuang knew that commercialization was Xue Jing’s last resort. If he could write with divine inspiration, what self-respecting literary man would willingly teach others how to write for money? The art celebrities he promoted recently weren’t genuinely creating anymore. After showcasing their interesting souls to the public, the inevitable path was to make money by selling products.

Writing literary reports was Xue Jing’s final lifeline—a self-inflicted hardship, fearing idleness would lead to ruin. Over time, he really couldn’t produce a single word.

With his right hand, he dialed an internal line to his assistant outside the office and told her to go to Teacher Xue’s house. Meanwhile, Zhou Shuang asked him mockingly: “Isn’t it just over ten thousand words? Why so difficult? Didn’t you write those previous pieces pretty quickly? Just fake it. Search online, cobble something together.”

“If you’re really struggling with this report, I’ll find someone to help you write it.”

“If you’re not coming back this week, are you coming back next week? Let’s have a meeting and discuss the course content. We need to strike while the iron is hot and launch an advanced seminar.”

“We also need to arrange a studio shoot for some hardcover photos. The new course needs a fresh package.”

“What do you think these kids aspiring to be online writers can afford? Would over a thousand be too much? Should we dare to push the price to the limit?”

“Hiss… Speaking of which, I just remembered something.”

“These kids buying your courses should all be adults, right? There shouldn’t be any issue of them using their parents’ money for pre-consumption of courses. Oh, I must note this down and discuss it with the legal team later. We’re earning money legitimately; we don’t want any lawsuits.”

“It doesn’t matter if I get a bad reputation—I can always change my shell and keep going. But I’m mainly worried about how it might affect you.”

Xue Jing now relied on his looks to make a living. He couldn’t exactly get plastic surgery and change his face.

Zhou Shuang was purely talking to himself on the phone, jumping from one idea to another faster than someone with ADHD.

Xue Jing listened, annoyed, his eyes falling on the charging cable of his phone.

The cable was probably plugged in by Ha Yue before she left. Thinking about last night made him anxious—not only about what to do with Ha Yue but also about how he should handle himself.

When Xue Jing was young, his Chinese teacher was a middle-aged unmarried woman who had a basic understanding of psychology.

At that time, he greatly admired her lectures and treated her words as gospel.

Whenever she talked about family education during class meetings, she would tell the students: “A dragon begets a dragon, a phoenix begets a phoenix, and the son of a rat will burrow.” This was meant as a warning: a parent’s behavior is crucial in shaping their child.

So from that point on, Xue Jing was particularly afraid of hearing the phrase: “A son grows up to be like his father.”

He was determined not to become someone like Xue Lianwu, so ever since he gained the ability to discern right from wrong, everything he did went against his father.

If his father was rotten to the core, he would show him what it meant to be good.

If his father mocked rules and boundaries, he would adhere strictly to his own limits.

But last night, he stumbled and committed an irreversible mistake—he did something highly immoral.

He ended up lying in bed with his ex-girlfriend, unclear and undefined.

The problem is, during the process, he experienced both pain and pleasure to the extreme.

If only people could truly deceive themselves, pretending to be pure, pretending to be indifferent, pretending to be extraordinarily successful, pretending to be full of themselves, pretending to be a talented great artist. If life were purely about acting, about falsifying, then nothing in this lifetime would be so difficult.

Just like his parents, who acted their whole lives and lived quite glamorously in front of others.

The key is that he can’t; he’s just contradictory.

He is neither as fake as Xue Lianwu and Feng Yun, nor as genuine as Zhou Shuang. The pursuit of money ultimately cannot be the sole goal of his life. His life is still so long, seemingly endless, and he still wants some earth-shattering passion.

And within this passion, after going around in circles, it still includes Ha Yue.

A person who is not so good, but not entirely bad either, like the two sides of a coin.

Summoning the courage to toss the coin into the air, brushing away the past, when it lands again, sincerity still prevails.

So Xue Jing responded, his tone light but steady, “Yes, ten thousand words are definitely not enough. The material of Sui City’s mountains and countryside is so rich; if we dig deep, there’s a lot to explore. I think we need at least a few hundred thousand words. Plus, the wind power industry has great potential. For the sake of research, I need to get a high-altitude work certificate tomorrow.”

As for the certification, it will take at least two or three months to obtain.