When Jiang Nuan walked out of the Accident Investigation Office, Su Yang’s sister’s sobs were still ringing in her ears.
“You’re covering for that driver! How could he possibly remember nothing?! He did it on purpose! Make him pay with his life—!”
“My brother was only twenty…”
Jiang Nuan’s fingers curled slightly.
Yes, the driver responsible for the accident claimed he had lost all memory of what happened.
Before the investigators arrived to take control of the scene, Jiang Nuan had taken advantage of the chaos to question him.
She clearly remembered the look in his eyes.
The man had been slumped on the ground, his face blank with confusion.
She had asked him why he had hit the victim. He said he didn’t know. She had asked what he had been thinking just before it happened. He said he couldn’t remember…
He had no answer to anything.
Jiang Nuan couldn’t quite explain what she was feeling.
If she hadn’t gone out for hotpot with Su Yang, if she had pulled him along and made him cross the street faster, if she hadn’t brought up the first time they met at the barbecue restaurant and delayed them…
Would he still be alive?
At the very least, he could have continued living carefree in this restricted zone for a few more years.
Everything about this incident was bizarre.
Su Yang’s sudden, suggestive tone before his death. The driver’s inexplicably vanished memories. The fact that the vehicle had lost control at neither an earlier nor a later moment, but precisely when Su Yang stepped directly in front of it…
Put together, none of it added up. A chill crept over Jiang Nuan’s back.
This was absolutely not an ordinary accident.
Someone—or rather, something—had been manipulating everything from the shadows.
*
Outside the main entrance, Shen Wu stood leaning against the car in a black suit, watching her.
But Zhou Mengmeng was the first to rush over.
“Jiang Nuan!”
Zhou Mengmeng nearly tripped as she ran toward her. Once she had regained her balance, she grabbed Jiang Nuan by the wrist.
“You scared me to death… Agent Shen told me there had been an accident here. Thank goodness you’re all right.”
Zhou Mengmeng’s palm was warm and slightly sweaty.
“Don’t overthink it, and don’t blame yourself.” Zhou Mengmeng squeezed her fingers sympathetically. “This really has nothing to do with you. That driver went crazy. You were standing so far away—you couldn’t have done anything.”
She shook Jiang Nuan’s hand and repeated, “It’s not your fault at all, understand?”
Looking into Zhou Mengmeng’s worried eyes, Jiang Nuan felt a sudden sting in her nose.
She clasped Zhou Mengmeng’s hand in return. “Thank you. I feel much better.”
“Let’s go.” Shen Wu, who had remained silent until then, finally spoke. “Standing here won’t turn back time.”
Under normal circumstances, Jiang Nuan would probably have rolled her eyes inwardly and complained that this man really had no warmth in him at all.
The three of them walked side by side toward the parking lot.
Zhou Mengmeng stayed beside Jiang Nuan, speaking softly the entire way and trying to comfort her with a stream of reassuring words.
Jiang Nuan responded with distracted hums and murmurs. Her mind was already elsewhere.
Once they had finished dealing with Zhou Mengmeng’s actual business, she had to speak with Shen Wu privately. He might know what had caused the driver’s strange condition.
Just as she was thinking this, a sudden chill touched her wrist.
Something cold and almost insubstantial wound silently around the wrist of her other hand.
Jiang Nuan turned her head slightly.
Shen Wu was walking on her left, his gaze fixed ahead. He was even making the occasional reply to Zhou Mengmeng.
But his psychic tendril had curled around the area above her wrist bone, silently soothing her.
*
Back inside Shen Wu’s spacious van, the group sat in the rear seats.
Zhou Mengmeng glanced at Jiang Nuan.
Then, as if presenting a precious treasure, she took a slightly timeworn velvet box from her canvas bag.
“Qi’s sister-in-law!” Zhou Mengmeng said excitedly. “This is the drafting pen my grandmother used—the one I told you about.”
She glanced at Shen Wu and added, “I’ve never shown it to Agent Shen. Since you’re Qinian’s girlfriend, and this pen was the reason I was able to draw the work that caught Qinian’s attention, I thought you should be the first to see it!”
…Qi’s sister-in-law.
Jiang Nuan’s expression went blank inside.
She was nearly used to the title by now. That in itself was a skill.
Jiang Nuan smiled and accepted the box.
The moment she took it, that same unpleasant sensation from the previous day returned—only this time, it was several times stronger than when she had seen Qinian’s painting.
Lying quietly inside the box was an exquisitely crafted wooden drafting pen.
Shen Wu leaned closer as well, his brows drawing together slightly.
Jiang Nuan brought the pen nearer and examined it from every angle.
It appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary handmade drafting pen, albeit a finely crafted one. Apart from the unsettling energy fluctuations that made her heart tremble, there seemed to be no hidden mechanism.
Then her finger brushed across the end of the barrel, where she felt a series of tiny bumps and indentations.
Jiang Nuan rotated the pen. At last, under the light inside the vehicle, she could make out a line of minuscule characters engraved into the wood.
She brought the pen even closer.
“To my beloved.
—Zhou Hao”
Zhou Hao.
She abruptly raised her head. Her gaze met Shen Wu’s in midair.
Even in his eyes—eyes capable of seeing through all false appearances—there was an unusual flicker of emotion.
“Mengmeng,” Jiang Nuan said, quickly composing herself and putting on an expression of eager curiosity, “the pen says, ‘To my beloved, Zhou Hao’… Is this Zhou Hao your grandfather’s name?”
Zhou Mengmeng’s smile froze for an instant.
She blinked, then lowered her head to look at the pen. Only after a moment did she answer softly, “…Maybe.”
With something like this, the answer was either yes or no.
How could someone describe their own grandfather’s name as “maybe”?
The smile at the corners of Jiang Nuan’s lips nearly faltered. She fought to maintain an inquisitive, slightly gossipy tone.
“Why ‘maybe’?”
“My grandmother… never mentioned my grandfather to anyone.” Zhou Mengmeng pressed her lips together. “All I know is that his surname was Zhou. There are no photographs of him in the family, and no belongings, either.”
“I only found this pen when I was sorting through my grandmother’s old things recently.” She ran a finger along the edge of the box. “When I saw the name engraved on it, I guessed that was probably who it was.”
“But it could also be someone else, because my grandmother never spoke of him her entire life.”
Jiang Nuan’s thoughts raced.
The file displayed on the holographic projection before they entered the restricted zone.
The investigation team member named Zhou Hao, who had been only twenty-three years old, yet had become as old as an elderly man after being trapped inside the restricted zone for several hours.
The man who, according to the file, had never married and had no children, but had suffered a mental breakdown before his death and repeatedly babbled about the everyday lives of his wife and child.
Shen Wu had said that they had spent more than a year inside the restricted zone, investigating countless people named Zhou Hao whose identities were suspicious, yet had found very little.
Because they had always been searching for an outsider.
But Zhou Hao was not an outsider. He had already become part of this world. He had a wife, a child, and a granddaughter.
His traces were not recorded in reports of anomalous incidents. They had been left behind on a drafting pen he had given to his wife.
The thought sent a chill through Jiang Nuan’s entire body.
This was no longer a simple anomalous zone.
It could even be understood as… another parallel world, one with its own independent history of life.
Her fingers tightened unconsciously.
The blood on the ground when Su Yang died had been warm.
Jiang Nuan closed her eyes for a moment, forcing down the turbulent emotions surging inside her. When she opened them again, her face had returned to its usual carefree expression.
“Mengmeng, I really love this liner pen.” She ran her fingers over the barrel, her voice full of envy. “I want to find a craftsperson to make an identical one based on this pen. Could I… borrow it for two days?”
She clasped her hands together in a pleading gesture. “Don’t worry, I promise I’ll take good care of it. I’ll bring it back to you in two days.”
Zhou Mengmeng agreed without the slightest hesitation, nodding readily. “Of course! If Qi’s sister-in-law likes it, just take it!”
Everything went unbelievably smoothly.
Shen Wu pulled several bills from his pocket. “I won’t see you home. Take a taxi back.”
Zhou Mengmeng’s eyes widened. “That’s way too much—”
“Your place is pretty far away. Think of it as a travel allowance.” Shen Wu’s tone was indifferent.
Zhou Mengmeng wavered for a few seconds between “This isn’t appropriate” and “That’s really a lot of money,” but in the end she accepted it, thanked him, and got out.
*
The car door closed again.
Shen Wu took something from the storage compartment beneath the passenger seat.
A piece of silver fabric, folded into a neat square.
An anomalous-energy isolation cloth.
Jiang Nuan had seen this kind of material at the base. It could temporarily block the leakage and detection of anomalous energy.
With practiced efficiency, he wrapped the box containing the drawing pen in several layers of the cloth, completely cutting off that unsettling anomalous energy.
The two of them stared at the wrapped box in silence for several seconds.
The amount of information they had just received was overwhelming.
“…Let’s head back first.” She looked at Shen Wu and noticed the faint bluish shadows beneath his eyes.
After last night’s battle at the black market, he had immediately conducted a large-scale mental-force search. From the explosion at the cold-storage facility until now, he had not slept a wink.
And today, he had driven back and forth to take Zhou Mengmeng home.
“You didn’t sleep at all last night, and you’ve been driving back and forth today,” she said. “Go back and get some rest first. We can discuss all of this together after everyone meets up.”
Shen Wu placed the cloth-wrapped box in the storage compartment, then turned sideways.
“You’ve finished worrying about everyone else?” Shen Wu looked at her quietly. “Can you worry about yourself now?”
“What do I have to worry about?” Jiang Nuan instinctively avoided his gaze, twisting her fingers together. “We have the clues. We should get back and reunite with the others as soon as possible…”
Before she could finish, a cool hand suddenly reached over and gently covered her clenched hands.
Shen Wu’s fingers forcefully slipped between hers one by one, making her release her tightly intertwined hands.
“Su Yang’s death makes you feel responsible, doesn’t it?” he exposed her without mercy. “You think that if you hadn’t agreed to go out to eat with him, that car wouldn’t have hit him.”
Jiang Nuan’s lashes trembled.
“Your guilt grew worse after you realized that Zhou Hao might be Zhou Mengmeng’s grandfather,” Shen Wu continued. “Because you understood that this world is more complete than you imagined. Every person in it is this real.”
“So Su Yang’s death feels even heavier.”
“Stop…” Jiang Nuan lowered her lashes, her voice a little hoarse. “There’s so much going on with our team right now, and everyone is fighting with everything they have… I don’t want to complain at a time like this and make myself look overly sensitive, or like I can’t understand the situation.”
Silence fell over the car once again.
Shen Wu looked at the girl in front of him. Her shoulders were trembling, yet she was still desperately using reason to suppress her emotions.
His heart suddenly softened.
“If you keep using all this so-called important team business to pressure yourself, until you can’t even have the most basic emotions…”
Shen Wu’s voice grew very gentle, so soft that it sounded unlike anything she had ever heard from him.
“That’s too unfair to you.”
Jiang Nuan’s eyes immediately stung.
She turned her face away, wanting to look out the window.
But before she could turn fully, a hand clasped the back of her head and pulled her into an embrace that was cold to the touch.
“You’re not a machine, Jiang Nuan.”
One of Shen Wu’s hands gently stroked her hair. His movements were awkward, but extraordinarily careful.
“Someone you’d known for only two days—a friend who still stood up for you out of a sense of justice—was gone right in front of you.”
Jiang Nuan buried her face against his chest, breathing in the cool, steadying scent of him.
“If it were me, I’d be upset too,” Shen Wu said. “That isn’t being oversensitive.”
“You’re allowed to grieve.”
His hand slid to the back of her neck, his palm resting there without quite pressing down.
“Suppressing your emotions is exhausting.”
The words were like flipping a switch.
Jiang Nuan wanted to say, “I’m fine.”
But when she parted her lips, the sound that emerged from her throat broke into a breathy whisper.
The tears she had held back for hours finally fell. Several landed on his coat, soaking into a small dark patch.
Her fingers gripped the fabric over his chest tightly.
Shen Wu said nothing more.
He simply closed his eyes, feeling the body trembling faintly in his arms, feeling her tears seep through his clothes and burn against his skin.
His mental force spread soundlessly, like a tide, completely enveloping the cramped car interior.
Blocking every prying eye from the outside.
No one would see this scene.
No one was allowed to.
Only him.
