It was a rainy summer night, mercifully free of thunder. The rain fell in dense, whispering sheets across streets that were dark, damp, and cheerless.
The rain wasn’t heavy, but the wind was.
Lin Xun had her hoodie pulled up over her head. One hand carried two bags of instant noodles, the other a pack of sodas, and she moved at a brisk clip toward the building entrance at the corner.
In her earphones, the soft background music of an audiobook dropped away, replaced by a notification chime that had no business being so chipper. Her hands were full, so she tapped the side of the earphone with the back of her hand.
A small, delicate nightingale was tattooed on the pale skin between her thumb and forefinger. Its body was slight, its neck slender, and its long tail feathers trailed along a faint blue vein all the way to her wrist. The moment the nightingale grazed the earphone casing, a voice burst through at a speed that outpaced the wind itself.
“Xun — Xun! Tonight’s reunion was incredible!”
“You won’t believe it — Zhou Shan got married last year, and she’s eight months pregnant! And Liu Xueyang, remember how good-looking he was back then? His belly is bigger than Zhou Shan’s now! Chen Tongnian is already a department manager under Teng Fei, and Liu Lili got dumped by her sugar daddy…”
Lin Xun’s head filled up with all this information she had no use for. She didn’t stop the message, though. Even from the volume alone, she could tell Cheng Meng was absolutely bursting to share.
Apparently the voice message limit wasn’t enough to contain the enthusiasm, because before Lin Xun could reply, Cheng Meng immediately called.
Lin Xun shouldered open the rust-spotted iron door and picked up.
“Heh heh.” On the other end, Cheng Meng let out a sly little laugh. A pause, then her voice dropped. “Ning Lang showed up today. And he was asking about you.”
“Oh.” No particular feeling crossed Lin Xun’s face. “How filial of that bastard.”
As she said it, she glanced at the door of unit 101. Sure enough, a takeout bag was hanging from the old brass door handle, its coating worn to a mottled yellow-green. It was like that every time — lunch, dinner, any mealtime she passed by unit 101, there was always a lone takeout bag dangling from that handle.
This was an old residential complex from the eighties. Most of the residents were locals in their forties and fifties and up, people with families, people who cooked. The smell of home cooking drifted out of most kitchens far more often than any delivery driver came by.
Whoever lived in 101, it seemed, was like her — mostly working from home, mostly too lazy to cook. No, maybe lazier than her. Lazy enough to leave the takeout hanging there without picking it up. She wondered if anyone ever stole it.
Here she was, worrying about a stranger’s delivery bag, while Cheng Meng was anything but calm. “He actually had the nerve to ask me to apologize to you on his behalf,” Cheng Meng said, voice sharp with irritation. “Can you believe that? It’s been so many years. What good does an apology do?”
“He must be bored.” Lin Xun started up the stairs at an unhurried pace. “It was a clean transaction. Nothing owed.”
She reached the third floor and stopped in front of her own door, set down everything crowding her hands, and dug her keys out of her hoodie pocket. Leaning against the doorframe, she reached in and switched on the dim entryway light.
“As I recall, there were people at school who used to say that if they were me, they’d have snuck into the woods with Ning Lang and gotten expelled a hundred times over, and it still would’ve been worth it. And besides, Young Master Ning paid handsomely for the pleasure. It’s not like he got anything for free.”
“Oh, spare me.” Cheng Meng was thoroughly disgusted. She ran through several generations of Ning Lang’s family tree before she finally let it go and changed the subject. “It happened to be the homeroom teacher’s birthday today, so the turnout was great — even Lin Qiaoqiao flew back from abroad. Zheng Feng brought his wife. Pretty much everyone we were close to showed up. Sigh, everyone except…”
Cheng Meng had been about to say it — that the only one missing was Lin Xun — but a flash of clarity stopped her cold. She bit down on her tongue. Lin Xun had been expelled in the second semester of her senior year. She’d never gotten an invitation to begin with.
Cheng Meng felt a stab of irritation at herself. She’d had a few too many drinks and, in her excitement, had called to tell Lin Xun all about a reunion Lin Xun hadn’t been invited to.
How much had she had?
Lin Xun had already carried the instant noodles into the kitchen. She tore open the packaging, dropped the brick of noodles into a bowl, and asked absently, following the thread of conversation: “Everyone except who?”
Cheng Meng made a noise. Her mind scrambled through the list of people who hadn’t come, and she grabbed the first name she could find. “Shen Yu! Right, right — Shen Yu didn’t make it.”
A blind fumble, logic be damned. Shen Yu had never been part of their crowd to begin with.
Lin Xun didn’t notice the inconsistency.
It was a name she hadn’t heard in eight or nine years, and it arrived through that long tunnel of time sounding faintly unfamiliar.
Cheng Meng pressed on. “Such a shame, really. From what the class president and the others were saying, it sounds like things have been rough for Shen Yu. He didn’t sit the gaokao back then, and apparently he ended up going to a special education school afterward.”
“He didn’t take the gaokao either?”
The question slipped out before she thought about it, and then felt unnecessary. By the time she’d been expelled, Shen Yu’s vision had been nearly gone. Of course he couldn’t have sat a standard exam.
“Right,” Cheng Meng said, with a sigh. “The following year, after the government introduced the braille exam, he did get into a decent university. But from what I heard, he hasn’t been able to find work since graduation, because of the visual impairment.”
Lin Xun came back to herself and emptied the seasoning packet over the noodles, then poured in the boiling water and pressed the lid down. She said nothing.
Cheng Meng seemed to have found a thread worth pulling. “You probably know this already, but that ‘Shen’ in Shen Yu’s name — it’s that Shen Group, the one everyone in Zhaoshan knows. Loaded. His father, Shen Changyi, is the one running the whole thing now. Back when Shen Yu sat the middle school entrance exam, his family’s driver sent him to the test site in a Rolls-Royce Phantom. It even made the local news.”
“And then, the car accident in the second semester of first year — the one that destroyed his eyes. His mother was in the car with him. From what people say, she threw herself over him to protect him, and the broken glass went straight through her. She died on the spot.”
Lin Xun had heard all of this before, but she let Cheng Meng talk.
“Not long after that, his father remarried. The stepmother eventually had a son of her own, and when Shen Yu came back to repeat the year, they threw him out. So yeah — by all accounts, life hasn’t been kind to him.”
Cheng Meng wrapped it up with the kind of sigh people save for other people’s misfortunes. “Makes you think, doesn’t it. You really have to cherish what you have. Who knows what comes first — tomorrow or the unexpected.”
Then her tone shifted, and her nose for things sharpened. “Cherish what you have — Lin Xun, don’t tell me you’re eating instant noodles again.”
Lin Xun’s eye twitched. She looked at the cartoon lobster clawing its way across the packaging. “What are you talking about. I’m having Boston lobster. Absolutely delicious. Now I’m hanging up, don’t ruin my appetite.”
She ended the call and carried the noodles over to the work desk by the window, then folded herself cross-legged into the oversized leather swivel chair.
Outside, the storm was getting worse. Rain hammered the glass.
Down in the old neighborhood, the rain had scoured the grime off a row of billboards. Along the covered walkways beneath the eaves, people in thin clothes hurried past, their faces blurred and indistinct.
Inside, by contrast, it was very quiet.
Lin Xun had bought the place the year before and was still paying off the mortgage. The building was over forty years old, the renovations minimal, and the price had been the lowest on the block. She’d had double-pane soundproofing installed afterward, on the windows and the walls, and not a single sound from outside made it through.
She cracked open a soda with a sharp hiss, propped her chin in her hand, and waited for the noodles to soften. Her thoughts drifted.
Back in the day, Class 12 of their senior year had fifty-two students.
By the look of things now, she and Shen Yu were the only two who hadn’t graduated with the rest. The only two who’d never gotten that parting send-off — all the best for your future — that classmates exchanged at the end.
As it happened, they’d sat one row apart.
She’d been in the very last row, the natural habitat of troublemakers and champion sleepers. He’d been in the second-to-last, the kind of seat that kept people away, that no one voluntarily came near.
Neither of them had fit in, in their own ways.
Eight or nine years had passed, and Cheng Meng said he was doing badly.
She wasn’t doing great either.
“Looks like the feng shui in the southeast corner of the Class 12 classroom was cursed,” Lin Xun concluded, after a long silence with her chin in her hand. “What rotten luck.”
─ ⊹ ⊱ ⊰ ⊹ ─
“The youth was sixteen or seventeen, dressed in a robe the color of ink-dark feathers, a flawless piece of Hetian jade hanging at his waist. His brows were like distant mountains, his frame lean and straight, and all around him was an air of cold, noble detachment utterly at odds with the noisy bustle of the marketplace.”
Oh, here we go. The male lead makes his entrance.
Lin Xun slurped her instant noodles with great interest, listening along.
Two seconds later, a rich, deliberately weighted baritone rolled out of the speaker with the force of something trying very hard: “That jade pendant. I’ll take it.”
“Cough — cough, cough—”
The noodle broth went straight down the wrong pipe. The artificial lobster soup, aggressively spicy and fragrant, shot up into her sinuses.
She rewound and listened again, unable to believe her ears.
Sixteen or seventeen, noble and cold?
Was he sure this wasn’t a forty-six or forty-seven year-old man with an inflated sense of himself?
She had nearly choked to death in the voice actor’s laboriously lowered, drawn-out, bubble-filtered delivery.
By the time Lin Xun had sorted out her ear, nose, and throat situation and managed to wipe the streaming, cough-wrung tears off her face, her phone on the desk erupted into a ringtone.
She picked it up and squinted through watery eyes.
A WeChat voice call. Zhou Zhou, the planner from the studio.
Lin Xun pressed accept and managed a congested, indistinct “Hello. What is it?”
A brief pause on the other end, then a careful, slightly baffled question: “Boss, are you… crying?”
“Mhm. Had some Boston lobster. Cried because it was so good.” Lin Xun wiped her eyes without any change in expression. “What is it. Talk.”
“…” Zhou Zhou took a long moment to recover, then got to the point. “Boss, I genuinely cannot find anyone. We went through a budget’s worth of auditions, maybe thirty or forty voice actors. There are good voices in there, but none of them have what you’re looking for — that transcendent, otherworldly, ascended-beyond-the-mortal-realm, stands-apart-from-all-creation—”
He recited four chengyu in a row, all sourced directly from Lin Xun’s own mouth, then muttered under his breath: “Could you maybe try a slightly more normal set of requirements?”
He was talking about casting for the audio drama, Mortal Dust.
After being expelled from No. 1 Middle School, Lin Xun had spent a year waiting tables in Zhaoshan, then enrolled elsewhere to repeat her final year, and eventually tested into the directing program at Nanli Film Academy.
After graduation, with no connections into the film and television industry, she’d done the practical thing and followed her own taste instead, using years of savings to open a commercial audio drama production studio. She called it Nightingale.
Recently, the studio had acquired the rights to a small xianxia IP, finished the script, and was now in the middle of casting. The other roles had been settled without much trouble. Only the male lead, Yuqingzi, remained undecided.
The reason was simple: of the dozen or so audio drama studios in Zhaoshan, none had ears as particular as Lin Xun’s, and none had a harder palate to please.
In her own words: ears were on your head for a reason, and that reason was not to have terrible sounds drilled through them.
Yuqingzi was a character she personally adored — a cultivation ascetic who wanted nothing to do with women, ice-cold and peerless, the unattainable peak of restrained desire. The moment he opened his mouth, it needed to sound like clarity itself, like a voice that had left the mortal world entirely behind.
No ordinary voice could ever be right for a role like that.
Lin Xun reined in her patience. “Fine, more practical then. Close your eyes. Picture yourself walking alone through a pitch-dark graveyard in the dead of night. A few ghosts come drifting toward you — uh…”
She’d made the mistake of actually visualizing it. A shudder ran through her before she could stop it.
On the other end of the line, Zhou Zhou sneezed.
Lin Xun absently picked at the nightingale tattoo on the back of her hand and added, as if this were perfectly reasonable: “…then open the audio files. See if any of the voice actors sound like the moment they speak, golden light pours off them and every evil spirit within a mile radius turns and flees.”
Zhou Zhou listened with growing bewilderment, understanding less by the second.
But Lin Xun had gone still.
That description. Why did it feel, somehow, a little familiar.
