She felt like she had heard that voice before, and even formed an opinion of it somewhere in the back of her mind.
Lin Xun tried to recall, but before she could remember which heavenly, golden-born deity of a CV she had once auditioned, Zhou Zhou asked, thoroughly bewildered: “…I still don’t get it. How did we go from casting a CV to talking about ghosts?”
He covered the receiver and mouthed silently: “You’re the one who looks like a ghost.”
Lin Xun didn’t catch his grumbling. After a moment she said, “Forget it. Go follow up on the other candidates. I’ll track down Yuqingzi myself. The project hasn’t even started yet, there’s no rush.”
Zhou Zhou received this like a pardon from the emperor. “Yes ma’am! Your humble servant is off to work. Enjoy yourself, boss.”
Lin Xun paused. “Enjoy what?”
“The Boston lobster,” Zhou Zhou said, genuinely puzzled. “Weren’t you crying over it earlier?”
“…”
Lin Xun looked at the cup noodles sitting on her desk and felt, all at once, thoroughly deflated.
After finishing her noodles, Lin Xun found she was no longer sleepy at all. She put on her headphones and started going through every male CV she had ever auditioned, trying to locate that voice from across the heavens that she couldn’t quite place.
Because Lin Xun typically matched voices to characters based on fit, her studio “Nightingale” didn’t keep any CV on permanent contract. Once a script was finished, she would bring in commercial dubbing studios or individual commercial voice actors on a per-project basis.
Over the past few years, she had accumulated well over a thousand audio clips on her computer.
Her ear for timbre was sharp. A few seconds was usually enough for her to identify a voice, and she moved through audio files at a remarkable pace.
Even so, by the time dawn broke and the morning light flooded in, she still hadn’t found the voice she was looking for.
Boss Lin sat there with two impressive dark circles under her eyes, frowning to herself. “Could I really be misremembering?”
─ ⊹ ⊱ ⊰ ⊹ ─
For the following week, Lin Xun spent every day at the recording studio, staying until evening.
The studio’s other ongoing project, a contemporary campus audio drama called Little Rosebud, was currently serializing on the platform. It wasn’t a breakout hit, but listener reception had been warm and steady.
Commercial audio dramas were typically recorded on-site at a professional studio.
The first season was nearly wrapped, and as director, Lin Xun was personally present for every recording session.
Beyond quality control, she wanted to be there to run pre-session briefings and run lines with the cast, helping the voice actors find their footing in the roles quickly and cut down on retakes, since everyone’s time was worth something.
Once the day’s dry recordings were done, Lin Xun ordered food for the voice actors and headed home to get some sleep. The night before, she had let a thousand ordinary voices pass through one ear and out the other, and her head felt like someone had left a tumble dryer running inside it.
When she reached the entrance of her apartment building, she glanced out of habit at the door of unit 101. The handle was bare today, not a single takeout bag in sight, which felt oddly off.
Had 101 actually gone out? Or had they finally shaken that chronic laziness?
Lin Xun didn’t give it much thought. She turned left and climbed the stairs to the third floor.
But when she reached her own door, she stopped. There was a takeout bag hanging from her handle.
She reached over and peeled the receipt from the seal, then raised an eyebrow. In an instant, she had a single reasonable explanation for two strange things that had happened within the same minute: the delivery rider had gone to the wrong address.
The receipt clearly read: Shengling Yuan, Building 21, Entrance 3, Unit 101. For Mr. Shen.
She was in Entrance 3, Unit 301.
“…”
Lin Xun forced her heavy eyelids open, let out a deeply exhausted yawn, and carried the takeout bag back downstairs.
The hallway outside unit 101 was cluttered with a rusted bicycle, both wheels detached and propped to the side, the whole thing buried under a stack of flattened cardboard boxes.
She stepped around the pile, initially planning to just hang the bag on the door handle, but hesitated and knocked instead.
There was a security camera inside the building entrance. If something turned out to be wrong with the order, she didn’t want the resident suspecting her of some prank. Better to explain it in person.
While she waited, Lin Xun leaned against the wall and closed her eyes to rest. The hallway felt stuffy, so she reached over and pushed the latticed window beside her open a crack.
Fresh air rushed in at once, and the sealed soundproofing of the building’s interior collapsed through that palm-width gap.
All the sounds of the outside world came flooding in.
Sparrows chattering on a utility pole. A dense, hot wind moving through the camphor trees.
A car horn rising from somewhere down the road, and the scattered, hurried voices of people at the nearby street corner.
A humid, bustling summer evening in the hills, carrying what felt like every layer of background noise that human life could produce.
And then all of it fell away.
In the space between sounds, it was stripped clean from her drowsy mind, and a man’s voice, languid and not quite awake, came through the door with sudden clarity, warm and close against her ear.
“Delivery? Just hang it on the door handle, thanks.”
It was a short sentence, carrying the slight hoarseness of someone half-asleep, yet the voice itself was composed and clean, with an easy, natural cadence that cut straight through the thick summer heat. It landed on her like an exact match, locking perfectly into the voice she had spent all of yesterday searching for without success: that transcendent, otherworldly, utterly singular sound, like something that had drifted down from a higher plane.
A familiar voice. One that stirred something. The kind that had been buried in the cracks of time.
Lin Xun’s ear went warm. Before she could even begin to place the memory, something slammed hard into her right shoulder.
She hissed in pain, clapped a hand over it, and turned on instinct.
Beside her was a man in his fifties or sixties, heavyset in body, and not obviously generous in spirit. He had a large ring of keys in one hand, a cotton tank top hanging loose over his pale, rounded belly, and an expression of pure menace as he shoved past her through the narrow hallway and hammered on the door of unit 101.
“Bam bam bam!”
Lin Xun’s gaze drifted from the man’s tank top and shorts down to the navy flip-flops on his feet, then back to the heavy ring of keys. A rough count put it at twenty or thirty keys, at least. She felt a quiet, involuntary respect.
When she had bought her apartment last year, she had heard about him. Shengling Yuan had a landlord known to everyone as Old Li, who reportedly owned several dozen units in the complex. The story went that when the development was built, they had seized several mu of his vegetable fields to make way for it.
Old Li knocked and bellowed, gruff and oddly cheerful: “Open up, open up, open up! It’s already a week into August and July’s rent still isn’t in. Keep it up and I’ll throw you out on your ear. You’re not the only one who wants this place, there’s hundreds behind you.”
Lin Xun raised an eyebrow. She had never seen rent collected quite like this before.
Silence from inside for about two minutes. Then the iron door was pushed open from within.
Lin Xun looked in past it and went still.
It was dusk. The last light of the evening, blazing like the end of the world, spilled in through the window at the side of the hallway and fell across the face beyond the dark iron door, illuminating it clearly: peach-blossom eyes with well-defined folds, a straight nose, a neat, delicate tip, thin and pale lips.
The jawline was narrow, the complexion fair, the features slight, like a creature from deep in some forest, half-hidden in heavy mist, young and unbothered and harmless.
The picture was genuinely striking. The only flaw was that pair of beautiful eyes, which were staring straight ahead at nothing, glassy and unfocused.
He appeared to be blind.
Lin Xun blinked, and a memory that had nearly slipped away for good came swimming back.
It was her high school deskmate, Shen Yu, the one Cheng Meng had only just mentioned yesterday.
So he was the one that voice had belonged to.
It was probably because of those years after she was expelled from No. 1 High School, years spent deliberately avoiding the chaotic, messy memories of high school. Eight or nine years had passed now, and her impressions of so many people and things from that time had gradually blurred and faded. So much so that she had almost forgotten: of all the boys she had ever known, Shen Yu had the best voice.
Even now, working in audio production and spending every day surrounded by voices of all kinds, that conclusion hadn’t changed.
“…The rent? I haven’t paid it?”
Shen Yu frowned, turning his face toward the sound of Old Li’s voice. His eyes still couldn’t find their mark.
Old Li, apparently oblivious to anything unusual, squinted at him with impatient irritation. “What a strange young man. You don’t know whether you’ve paid your own rent? Don’t play dumb with me.”
While the two of them went back and forth, Lin Xun found herself looking past Shen Yu into the apartment behind him.
The entryway light was off. The pink plastic lampshade had collected years of dust.
The living room décor was aggressively dated, a patterned sofa covered in white plastic sheeting, stacks of old newspapers piled against the wall. The black-and-white floor tiles had cracked along their edges in dense, spidery lines, and where the plaster had peeled from the walls it had gone a deep, stale yellow, like nothing had been touched in years.
Same building. Same floor plan. Her apartment and his might as well have been from different centuries.
She looked at Shen Yu himself. He wasn’t in much better shape than the apartment.
He was taller than he had been at seventeen or eighteen, slim and long-limbed, shoulders slightly bent to accommodate the low door frame. His hair, still damp, was piled in loose tangles on his forehead, dripping at the ends. His face was pale and colorless, and his lips, a faint chapped pink, looked raw and dry. He was wearing a black cotton t-shirt and matching black trousers. The fabric was soft and formless, pilling at the shoulders, elbows, and seams, the kind of thing you might turn up in a flea market bin by the kilo. Even so, on him it managed to look clean and effortlessly put-together in a way that made no sense.
And yet Lin Xun found him genuinely hard to recognize.
Without that unforgettable face and that voice, she doubted she would have placed him at all.
She had heard something of what had become of him from Cheng Meng last night, but nothing had prepared her for actually seeing it.
The Shen Yu she remembered was not someone who had ever existed in her world.
At an age when Lin Xun was running forty minutes to school every day just to save herself two kuai1kuai — colloquial term for the Chinese yuan (¥), the basic unit of Chinese currency. Roughly equivalent to calling dollars “bucks.” on the bus fare, telling herself it was exercise, he arrived in a Rolls-Royce. His shoes were limited editions, always different ones, and beneath the blue-and-white school uniform he always had something clean and sharp underneath, minimal streetwear in solid colors.
After a full game on the court, when every other boy was dripping with sweat and covered in dust, he would go through three fresh jerseys.
Lin Xun thought back to the first time she had ever seen Shen Yu.
It was the opening ceremony for first-year students. She and her grandmother had taken advantage of the crowd that day, planning to set up a bowl jelly stall outside the school gates.
The slope leading up to No. 1 High School was long, with stretches of uncultivated land and hillside on either side, wild with sunflowers growing in every direction.
Her grandmother pedaled the tricycle with effort while Lin Xun stood at the bottom and pushed from behind, her white athletic set already soaked through with sweat.
The tricycle had just pulled up at the school gates when two or three long, gleaming black sedans swept past her, kicking up a curl of dust, turned a corner, and stopped at the street corner just ahead.
On the hood of the lead car stood a small golden figure, its wings spread wide against the blazing sun.
Five or six teenagers climbed out one after another, all in brand-new No. 1 High School uniforms, the same style as everyone else’s, though the fabric looked considerably finer. At the center of the group was the boy who had stepped out of the first car.
Striking looking, very tall, a bag slung loosely over one shoulder, he walked toward the school gates with long, unhurried strides and half-lidded eyes.
One of the girls kept close behind him, half a step back, and suddenly pointed toward the tricycle, tilting her head with a sweet smile. “Shen Yu, they have ice jelly over there. Do you want some? I’ll go buy it.”
The boy kept walking without so much as a glance in that direction, completely indifferent.
The girl’s eyes flickered with the hurt of being ignored. She bit her lip and said softly, her voice gentle and coaxing, “That old grandmother is out here working at her age. It must be so hard for her. Shouldn’t we help her out?”
As she spoke, Lin Xun looked over, and found herself suddenly locking eyes with the boy, who had turned his gaze in her direction.
His look was cool and sharp. It rested for a long moment on her grandmother’s busy, bustling figure, and then he turned and walked over with those long legs.
Lin Xun was pulling a foam box of toppings out of the tricycle when a shadow fell over her, heavy and close. She looked up and met a pair of cold, indifferent eyes looking straight down at her.
The bone structure beneath them was refined and handsome, but the flat set of his mouth and the distance in his expression gave him an edge, something faintly hard and proud.
Lin Xun had no particular feeling about people like that. She looked back down without interest and started pouring brown sugar syrup into small plastic containers.
She always handled the physical work. Dealing with customers was her grandmother’s job.
But before she could continue, the boy reached out and pressed his hand over one of the container lids.
Then, cutting through the fine dust in the air, a voice came, cool and clear as deep water, spreading to her ears like an electric current.
“Don’t bother dividing it up. I’ll take all of it.”
Lin Xun went still for a moment. When she looked up again, she took a proper look at him for the first time, or more precisely, at his throat as he spoke, the bob of his Adam’s apple.
In her assessment: naturally gifted, and very good vocal cords.
So in Lin Xun’s memory, Young Master Shen had always occupied the center of that circle of wealthy kids at school. Born lucky, in every sense. Money, brains, height, looks, easy confidence, with no shortage of goodwill and admirers around him at all times.
Even after the accident that later changed him, his life had remained expensive and well-appointed. “Pitiable” was not a word that had ever applied to him. Nobody had the nerve to feel sorry for him.
While Lin Xun had been lost in memory, the landlord had delivered his ultimatum: “Either the rent hits my account by midnight tonight, or you pack up and get out.”
Footnotes
1
kuai — colloquial term for the Chinese yuan (¥), the basic unit of Chinese currency. Roughly equivalent to calling dollars “bucks.”
