Two weeks later, the campus drama Little Rosebud finished its final episode, and Boss Lin — who had been working herself into the ground day and night — finally got to sleep at a decent hour.

Too bad she was jolted awake in the middle of the night by a crack of thunder so loud it rattled her bones.

Her bed sat against the window, and she usually slept with it open for the air. The rain drummed against the sill and sent a fine spray across her face, beading on her lashes. What was left of the cold crept in through her half-shut eyelids.

Lin Xun reached up and wiped the water from her face, then threw off the covers and found herself drenched in sweat.

Zhoushan summers were brutal. The weather swung without warning — a thunderstorm could roll in from nowhere, and the forecast never stood a chance of keeping up.

Worse, even after the rain, the thick, swampy heat refused to break. Still hot. Still muggy. Rain changed nothing.

Zhoushan was a lively city, sure, but the weather alone made it no match for Qingyuan. The two places were north and south in every sense, and the differences ran deeper than climate.

Even after spending her high school and university years in the south, then grinding through three or four more years in the working world, Lin Xun was still a northwestern girl at heart.

Her Mandarin would never carry that soft, melodic lilt the Zhoushan locals had. Every now and then she’d find herself missing the cool, clear days back home, with loess dust drifting over the mountains.

She had been fifteen when she came to Zhoushan. Back then, the Qingyuan government had marked off a stretch of land in the mountains to build some kind of observatory, and her family’s home was in the way.

They received a decent resettlement payout. Her grandmother went three nights without sleeping, and then, money in hand, made up her mind to take Lin Xun south to Zhoushan to look for family.

Lin Xun’s father had gone south to Zhoushan for work years earlier. After a while, he simply vanished. The monthly remittances stopped, and not a single word followed. The Qingyuan police had nothing to offer either — just a missing persons report filed and forgotten.

Year after year, nothing. Her grandmother said: even the dead leave ashes behind. We can’t just sit here waiting without knowing anything. So she brought Lin Xun all the way south, a journey of a thousand li.

In the end, it was her father’s ashes and then her grandmother’s that were carried back to Qingyuan one after the other, laid to rest in the earth back home. Only Lin Xun remained, grinding it out alone in this warm and bustling southern city until she had finally put down roots.

She reached over and shut the window. Her skin felt clammy.

She picked up her phone from the bedside. Just past three in the morning.

Her scalp ached, tight and prickling like needles. She pressed her fingers to her temples, then felt around for the water glass on the nightstand and drank several long gulps.

She’d been so exhausted when she got home the night before that she’d fallen straight into bed without even changing clothes. She hauled herself up, grabbed her pajamas, and headed for the shower.

The bathroom in the old apartment had originally been tiny, with no separation between wet and dry areas.

Lin Xun had put some thought into it. She knocked through the wall between the bathroom and the hallway, borrowed part of the living room, and built a proper walk-in shower. The guest room became a studio and walk-in wardrobe.

For someone living alone, a living room and a guest room were the most expensive waste of space imaginable. Better to put those square meters to work for herself.

She shook her hair loose. The oversized showerhead had strong pressure, and the cool water hit her scalp and brought her fully back to herself — whatever scattered pieces of her had drifted off in the night came home. By the time she finished, all trace of sleepiness had left her.

She walked into the studio, settled into her swivel chair, and got back to reviewing voice auditions.

Little Rosebud was done. The next project was Mortal Dust, and the role of Yuqingzi still hadn’t been cast.

Now that she knew the voice she’d been chasing — the one she’d thought was heaven-sent — belonged to Shen Yu, she’d have to start the search over.

The bar for professional voice actors was genuinely high. Breath placement, line delivery, the ability to shift vocal quality across different characters, performance range, mimicry — a good CV took years of dedicated training to become.

It had never occurred to her to go with an amateur.

No matter how much raw talent or natural vocal quality someone had, there was a real gap between an amateur and a professional CV. And that was setting aside whether Shen Yu even had the time or the interest. Training someone from scratch was expensive in ways that had nothing to do with money. She was just a small-time boss running an audio drama studio. She couldn’t afford it.

The night was perfectly still.

Lin Xun had just finished reviewing two audio tracks when her phone buzzed on the desk.

She pulled off her headphones, glanced at the screen, and swiped to answer. Before Cheng Meng could say anything, she pressed a hand to her forehead. “You know what time it is, right?”

Cheng Meng answered with complete sincerity: “Three forty-two. What about it — you’re not asleep either, are you?”

“…”

Lin Xun turned and looked around every corner of the studio, suddenly convinced her apartment had been bugged.

Cheng Meng ignored her silent protest, sniffled, and got straight to it. “Do you know why I’m not sleeping?”

Her voice sounded like she’d been crying.

Lin Xun paused. Without thinking, she lowered her voice. “…Did someone cheat on you? Where’s Chen Nuozhi? I’ll go find him tomorrow.”

“…Yingying ying,” Cheng Meng finally couldn’t hold it together anymore and broke into full, messy sobbing. “I almost wish that were it — those kids are just too pitiful, they’re really too pitiful, wuwuwu, I just donated my whole month’s salary.”

“…?”

Lin Xun had known Cheng Meng for eleven years and still hadn’t gotten used to her completely untethered way of telling a story.

It took half a packet of tissues before Cheng Meng pulled herself together enough to explain from the beginning.

“Qianxun-dada¹Dada: It’s an honorific suffix used in Chinese online fandom culture, attached to someone’s username or name to express admiration and affection. Roughly equivalent to calling someone “master” or “senpai” in English fandom spaces, but with a warmer, less formal tone. has been completely off the grid for the past few months, not a peep from anyone. I was doing my usual scroll through Xunyu Studio’s Weibo right before bed, and I found out the official account had uploaded a whole series of audio content. Turns out Qianxun-dada took his team to a village in the Qingyuan mountain region to do a charity project. The whole program is about teaching kids in the mountains to speak proper Mandarin, to open up more options for them down the road — for school, for work…”

“God, the kids out there in those mountains, they’re really so pitiful. Most of them are left-behind children. Girls especially — nine times out of ten they don’t even get the chance to go to school, but they’re so sharp, so well-behaved, so eager to learn.”

Then her tone shifted. “Xun-xun, didn’t you grow up in the Qingyuan mountains? And you’ve been sponsoring a few kids there over the years, haven’t you… So, is it really that bad out there?”

Cheng Meng was Zhoushan-born and Zhoushan-bred, generations of her family rooted in this prosperous southern city with its ancient wealth. She had never in her life had any real sense of what life looked like on poor, dry land.

Lin Xun was quiet for a moment — rare for her. Then she nodded. “Yeah. More or less.”

Her hometown was the poorest county in Qingyuan.

That she’d had any chance at school at all came down to two things: the monthly remittances her father had sent before he disappeared, and her grandmother’s daily, tireless tending of their fields and livestock.

Her grandmother had never learned to read. She didn’t really understand what education was for. But she held to one fixed belief: Lin Xun’s father had made it through middle school, and that was what had given him the nerve to go south and make something of himself. She didn’t want her granddaughter to end up like her — married off young, buried in the mountains for the better part of a life.

“…Xun-xun, I suddenly feel like… you’ve had it so hard, wuwuwu…”

The breathless crying made Lin Xun laugh. She reached through the phone line and gave Cheng Meng a figurative pat. “Alright, who exactly are you feeling sorry for? I’ve got more money than you now, haven’t I?”

“Right, right, right,” Cheng Meng conceded without a fight, a small thread of cheerfulness working its way through the sniffling. “Our ‘Nightingale’ is going to grow up to be just as big as Xunyu Studio one day.”

Lin Xun clicked her tongue. “Don’t put me that high up just yet. What if the God of Wealth hears and thinks I’ve gotten full of myself?”

Xunyu Studio, the one Cheng Meng kept mentioning, was currently the top commercial voice acting studio in the country. Headquartered in Zhoushan, its roster of voice actors stretched across the nation, with work spanning animation, games, and film and television.

Its founder was Qianxun — a name that carried serious weight in the entertainment industry, one of the most acclaimed voice actors working today.

Part of what had brought Lin Xun and Cheng Meng together, all those years ago, was that they were both voice chasers.

Lin Xun’s interests ran mostly toward audio dramas and audiobooks, while Cheng Meng had a particular obsession with hunting down outstanding voice work in film and television. Qianxun was her person above all others.

Qianxun-dada was famously elusive. Never photographed in public, no known background, no traceable history. What people did know was that he had no formal training. Seven or eight years ago, his exceptional talent and raw vocal ability had caught the eye of director Yang Kan — still nobody at the time — who cast him as the male lead in a web drama that went on to become a runaway hit. He’d been famous ever since, the kind of person the heavens seemed determined to bless whether he asked for it or not.

His vocal range was extraordinary, his ability to inhabit a character uncanny. No one knew what his real voice sounded like. No one knew his age.

In the most recent xianxia drama, for instance, the male lead had been played by three different actors across his youth, middle age, and old age — but there had only ever been one voice throughout. Seamless from the first line to the last. In voice acting circles, he was considered something close to a mythical creature.

Cheng Meng finally laughed through her tears, wiped her face, and said, “Anyway, if you get a chance, go watch the program. The latest episode is an audio drama the kids wrote and performed themselves — Qianxun-dada even made a cameo in a few roles. At the beginning their Mandarin was all over the place, but after working with the professional team, they sound genuinely good. I cried my eyes out listening to it. It’s already trending near the top — trust me on this one.”

After they hung up, Lin Xun set down what she’d been working on, opened her browser, and typed in a search for Xunyu Studio’s audio program.

A show came up. It had already hit number one on the platform.

It was called Forest Fables.

Below a long column of production companies and investors in the details section, there was a single line in small text.

Recording location: Qingyuan mountain region, Qi’nan County, Xialin Village.

Lin Xun’s eyes landed on those words, and for a moment she forgot to breathe.

Qingyuan, Qi’nan County. She had spent fifteen years of her life there. The only difference was that she was from Shanglin Village — barely an hour’s walk from Xialin.

Thanks to an observatory that had never actually been built, most of Shanglin Village’s land had been requisitioned.

Xialin Village was still out there, buried in those barren mountains, enduring. Rising with the sun, resting when it set. Season following season, year following year.

Lin Xun sat still for a moment, then clicked into the first episode.

The hosts were two of Xunyu Studio’s most recognized voice actors — Mengdie-dada and Zhuangzhou-dada, who were, by all accounts, married to each other in real life.

The episode opened with the two hosts describing Xialin Village’s remote and rugged geography, then handed the microphone to the children and asked them to say hello to the listeners.

In the imageless audio, the children’s breathing blurred together, uneven, growing quicker and quicker. For a long time, no one dared to speak.

Lin Xun’s mind filled with faces — young, tense, frightened. Cheeks flushed with the high-altitude red that never quite fades. Ill-fitting clothes in stiff synthetic fabric. Rubber-soled shoes that cost two kuai a pair.

Eyes wide and flickering, full of terror at this strange black thing that could swallow their voices and send them somewhere unknown.

So familiar.

Old memories closed around her.

Lin Xun, at that age, had been the boldest girl in her village. But even she, after an entire night on the train, had taken one look at Zhoushan’s gleaming, unbroken rows of floor tiles and quietly stepped back, her mud-caked cloth shoes suddenly impossible to lift.

Outside the audio, Boss Lin — long since grown out of that girl’s face — found her own breathing had gone just as shallow as the children’s.

Then, after a long silence, cutting through the faint hiss of static, a voice appeared. Unhurried, a little roguish, with no particular patience, but carrying the ease of someone smiling without effort.

“That nervous? It doesn’t bite. Come on — whoever speaks first gets strawberry cake.”

Sweet as a line from a love song.

Footnotes

• 1
  Dada: It’s an honorific suffix used in Chinese online fandom culture, attached to someone’s username or name to express admiration and affection. Roughly equivalent to calling someone “master” or “senpai” in English fandom spaces, but with a warmer, less formal tone.