The man’s voice faded out, and the children’s noisy scramble over the strawberry cake came surging in wave after wave, shattering the calm. Lin Xun’s breath caught. She hit pause.
That cool, clear male voice was so pleasing to the ear, and so familiar.
She had heard it downstairs just two weeks ago.
Lin Xun almost suspected she had listened to this particular voice so many times that she was starting to hallucinate it. She put on her monitor headphones, dragged the progress bar back, cranked up the volume, and played the clip over and over until she finally trusted her own ears.
The timbre, the cadence, the lazy, unhurried enunciation. She could not possibly be mistaken.
How could it be Shen Yu? Did he work at Xunyu Studio? Was he a voice actor?
Lin Xun scrolled to the comments. Most listeners had their attention fixed on the program itself and the children, but a small handful had been just as struck as she was, and they were all buzzing about the male voice at the opening.
“Oh my god, it’s the middle of the night and I’m already melting. That voice is insane. Does anyone know which voice actor this is?”
“So young. Is he a new signing at Xunyu Studio? I’ve looped it a hundred times and my ears are numb. Anyone else?”
“I clipped the audio. Sharing on the cloud drive in the comments. You’re welcome. [smug face.jpg]”
“Bless you, I already grabbed the clean audio. Thank you!”
Lin Xun kept scrolling and found an official reply from the production team under one of the comments.
“He’s a volunteer from a charity organization, not one of ours at Xunyu!”
Everyone in the comments walked away disappointed. Lin Xun just found it baffling. He was nearly blind, and from what she had heard, he had struggled to find steady work since graduation. And yet he was out in the mountains doing volunteer work?
Who exactly was taking care of whom?
She blinked and sat with that thought for a moment, then decided that this kind of improbable thing happening with Shen Yu actually made perfect sense. He never gave anyone the chance to pity him or offer him charity.
When they first started high school, they had not sat anywhere near each other. Seating in the class was arranged not by height or eyesight, but by grades.
Lin Xun’s scores had been among the best in her middle school back in Qi’nan County, good enough to scrape through No. 1 High’s entrance exam. But the gap in academic rigor between Qingyuan and Zhoushan was enormous. And besides, she had never had the luxury of studying without distraction.
The relocation payout from the Qingyuan government was decent enough back in Qi’nan, but in Zhoushan it barely stretched. After paying the school transfer fee for No. 1 High, half of it was already gone.
To keep the two of them afloat, her grandmother set up a barbecue stall near the school a month into the first semester. Lin Xun went to help every evening, and on weekends she walked the whole city with thick stacks of flyers, posting missing person notices everywhere.
The absences piled up. The teachers started treating her as a troublemaker, and her seat kept getting moved further and further back.
Young Master Shen, on the other hand, had nothing much going on and a sharp enough head that he landed near the top of every ranking without trying.
His seat, naturally, was in the front row.
Then, during the second semester of their first year, Shen Yu went on a trip with his mother. There was an accident. He took a leave of absence for several months.
When second year began, he came back and voluntarily moved seats, placing himself in front of Lin Xun.
At the time he had medical gauze over his eyes. The homeroom teacher explained that both eyes had been injured and were still healing.
Nobody expected that he would never recover.
Probably not even him.
Since No. 1 High’s cafeteria was privately contracted out, prices were not cheap. Lin Xun usually stayed alone in the classroom at lunch and ate whatever she had brought from home.
Starting that day, Young Master Shen joined her.
Her aluminum lunchbox held the unsold chicken hearts, chicken feet, and chicken bones left over from her grandmother’s barbecue stall. His elegant bowl and plate held Michelin three-star takeout.
For the first few days, the moment lunch came around, Shen Yu would be surrounded by people. His family’s driver, their housekeeper, his young and attractive stepmother, girls who admired him, even a dedicated life-skills teacher assigned to him by the school.
Everyone fell over themselves showering him with goodwill, setting down his chopsticks and cutlery, cutting his steak, practically ready to feed him bite by bite.
Shen Yu accepted none of it. He sat there with his eyes covered and his face cold, letting them fuss over the elaborate dishes without touching a single bite. When pushed past his limit, he simply flipped the table.
In short, since coming back from his leave, he seemed to have not only lost his sight but also stopped speaking entirely.
Lin Xun did not know him well, so she had no interest in getting mixed up in any of it. She kept her earphones in, listened to her audiobook, ate her food, and tuned out all the noise and fuss around the desk in front of her.
Then one day, Shen Yu’s father came to the school, his stepmother trailing behind him with red-rimmed eyes, worn out from worrying over his refusal to eat.
When Shen Yu’s father’s hand came down hard on the half of his face below the gauze, Lin Xun nearly choked on a chicken bone.
When Shen Yu’s tray landed squarely on his father’s forehead and drenched his face in bright red borscht, the chicken bone she had just coughed up nearly went back down again.
After that day, the classroom was quiet.
Lin Xun went back to gnawing on her chicken bones and duck necks. Young Master Shen sat blindfolded across from her, cutting through some kind of meat with hollow, mechanical persistence.
The heavy silver cutlery dragged across the expensive porcelain with a grating, tuneless scrape, like a midnight chainsaw killer in California.
No chainsaw in sight, but projectiles were another matter. A chunk of meat with visible sinew let out a violent crunch, sailed over Shen Yu’s shoulder, and smacked Lin Xun square in the forehead.
“……”
The first thing Lin Xun said to her famously well-known former front-row neighbor in all three years of high school was: “Hey. Your meat just hit me in the face. Watch it.”
After a long pause, Young Master Shen turned around with the knife in one hand and the fork in the other, his gaze fixed on her from behind the gauze.
The hard, mask-like blankness of his face seemed to crack, just slightly, in a way that made no obvious sense.
Lin Xun’s eyes steadied on him. She noticed the faint spatters of brown soup dotting his face and the snow-white collar of his shirt.
She tilted her head toward the plate on his desk. It held a few pieces of pan-seared short rib and some broccoli, half-cooked at best. Difficult to cut for anyone with working eyes, let alone someone without. Medium rare, probably, in its original ambition.
Whatever careful plating there had once been was completely unrecognizable now.
A total wreck.
“Tsk.” Lin Xun frowned and reached up to peel the chunk of meat off her forehead. “What is your family even sending you? It looks awful.”
She heard the double meaning the moment the words left her mouth and moved to correct it. “I mean, it might taste fine, it’s just very hard, to eat… uh.”
Lin Xun was genuinely terrible at Chinese.
“……”
After a short silence, Shen Yu spoke. “…So is yours good, to eat?”
He had apparently understood her and was angling for a trade.
Lin Xun looked at the duck neck in her hand, barely a scrap of meat on it, a struggle to get through even with full use of her eyes, and shook her head honestly. “Mine’s hard to eat too.”
She did feel a small pang of regret. If she could actually swap with him, she would definitely come out ahead.
“……”
Young Master Shen said nothing more and turned back around. He set down the knife and fork, then, after a stiff pause, rolled up his sleeves. His long, clean fingers spread open and came to rest on the plate with an air of resignation, moving across the surface of the meat in slow, mechanical increments, like a forensic examiner feeling over a body.
Both hands stained reddish-brown with broth, he worked out the position of each piece and its texture relative to the plate beneath it. Then he picked up the knife and fork and started cutting again. When it went wrong, he felt around again. Then cut again.
That skin-crawling scrape of metal on porcelain. The cross-sections of pale, red-fresh meat coming apart ragged and uneven, the whole scene raw and grim, like something from a crime scene.
That afternoon, Lin Xun sat happily gnawing on chicken bones and watched him work his way through the entire plate: rough cuts, uneven sizes, not a single piece fit to eat.
And so the days went by, and then the months.
The gauze eventually came off Shen Yu’s eyes, but his vision never came back. If anything, it kept getting worse.
Lin Xun never understood why he still came to school. Third year review and exam prep had nothing to do with him anymore.
By the time Lin Xun left No. 1 High, Young Master Shen could make it through a full meal with quiet ease, handling both cutlery and chopsticks like he had never known any other way.
It was not just meals. He could sit through a study period reading a thick braille edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, play mobile games by ear with text-to-speech running at several times the normal speed, work through twenty-four point puzzles with a braille deck of cards, and do it faster than the math rep who scored full marks.
Aside from her, probably no one had ever seen him struggle.
─ ⊹ ⊱ ⊰ ⊹ ─
The latest episode was a short radio drama the children had written and performed themselves, a fairy tale set in a primeval forest. The production notes stated clearly that the script was entirely the children’s own work, with nothing changed by the team.
The premise was wildly imaginative. The logic did not quite hold together, but the freewheeling creativity was genuinely charming.
The children’s Mandarin had improved considerably since the first episode, especially the girl playing the old grandmother. You could tell she had worked hard to absorb what the voice coaches had taught about placement and vocal imitation. The performance was surprisingly convincing.
Lin Xun did not skip a second of it, listening through at normal speed from start to finish. It was only when she got to the comments that she learned Qianxun had voiced the king’s youngest child, a babbling infant. She had been genuinely stunned. She had assumed the production team brought in actual recordings of a real baby.
It was a reminder, if one was needed, that Qianxun had earned that reputation as the undisputed best in the business.
A thousand voices, one performer. No exaggeration.
By the time Lin Xun finished working through the episodes, the sky had quietly gone light.
The rain had stopped outside. A fierce morning sun was already shouldering through the clouds and getting to work. Lin Xun put her head down on the desk and let out a long breath.
One kick from Cheng Meng, and a whole sleepless night wasted.
She still had not found anyone who could voice Yuqingzi.
She gave up trying to be strategic about it, pulled on a hoodie, and headed to the studio.
Zhou Zhou had arrived early and was at the studio computer playing a game, deep in the thick of battle and too busy to look up. When he caught sight of her walking in, his eyes went glassy with relief. “Boss is here. Take me next round. The other side is full of little kids who trash talk me every single day. The nerve.”
Lin Xun glanced at his ranking. Still Bronze IV.
She made a small sound of acknowledgment and said, with full seriousness: “It’s definitely not the same kids cursing you out every day. You’ve been at this for over two years. You’ve sent off batch after batch of elementary schoolers. By the time those kids finish first grade, they’ll probably be ranked too high to ever get matched with you again. Which means…”
Lin Xun tilted her head, finding this entirely reasonable. “…you’re basically a professional kindergarten-to-first-grade training partner.”
