Chapter Eighty-Nine: Fang Xi

Old Zhang led Guai Guai home in a daze.

His wife, Wang Jia, had left two low-wattage energy-saving lamps on for him in the entryway and on the balcony, while she herself lay in bed in the bedroom, scrolling on her phone. Hearing the front door open, she did not get up or call out. Only after finishing a long, sprawling retrospective about some celebrity scandal from years ago did she realize how strangely quiet it was outside.

Wang Jia sat up and peered toward the balcony. "Old Zhang, what are you doing?"

Guai Guai's kennel was on the balcony. In the past, whenever Old Zhang came home from walking the dog at night, he would wipe Guai Guai's paws clean, watch him curl up in his bed, even tuck a little blanket over him, and only then go brush his teeth, wash his face, and return to the bedroom. During all this there would naturally be rustling, shuffling, clattering sounds, not to mention Old Zhang's habit of talking to Guai Guai. The way he chattered away sometimes even made Wang Jia cringe.

No answer came to her shout, and unease began to stir in her. She threw off the quilt and got out of bed.

Her gaze went straight to the balcony. At first glance, she saw neither man nor dog. She instinctively turned to look at the entryway, but there was no leash hanging on the hook, and no sign of Old Zhang's worn-out sneakers either. Only a pair of plastic slippers sat there.

She thought the sound of the door opening had been an illusion. Her eyes swept over the clock on the living room wall, and something still felt wrong.

At this hour, why wasn't Old Zhang back yet?

Wang Jia turned to fetch her phone and call him, but then froze midstep as gooseflesh broke out across her skin.

She whirled toward the sofa.

The balcony lamp illuminated one corner of the living room, falling across half of Old Zhang's body and casting the side of his face nearest the bedroom into darkness. He sat motionless, like a statue, or like a wandering spirit in the dead stillness of the night.

Wang Jia nearly lost her breath.

Clutching her chest, she gulped in air and snapped, "What kind of ghost are you trying to be in the middle of the night?"

At that, Old Zhang startled and lifted his head.

A dog's head also poked up between the sofa and the coffee table.

Wang Jia grew even more furious. "What are you two doing? You're scaring people to death! Trying to frighten me on purpose, is that it? At your age, and still pulling this kind of stunt... You... Old Zhang?"

As she scolded him, her tone gradually softened. She studied him cautiously.

Because of the lighting, she could only make out a blurred human shape and a dog shape, both unmoving. The longer she looked, the more apprehensive she became.

Wang Jia hurried to the entryway and switched on the living room light.

Click.

The room flooded with brightness.

Old Zhang squinted and looked toward Wang Jia.

After a careful glance, Wang Jia saw that both man and dog were perfectly fine. The man seated on the sofa had left a dent in the cushion; the dog on the floor cast a dark shape there as well. There were even the prints of sneakers and paw pads trailing across the floor. Only then did she let out a breath.

She went to Old Zhang's side. "You scared me half to death. For a moment I thought you two were... Sigh. What on earth were you brooding over so late at night?" Gently, she took the leash from his hand and removed Guai Guai's collar loop.

Only then did Old Zhang come back to himself a little. He regained some energy and even had the heart to tease Wang Jia. "You've watched too many horror films. Your imagination is running wild."

"I'm imagining things? What were you doing sitting here in the dark, not even changing your shoes?" Wang Jia did not deny it. In that instant, she really had thought of plenty of classic horror scenes, like Old Zhang encountering some accident while walking the dog at night, and only his soul, knowing nothing, coming home.

Old Zhang considered it for a moment before saying, "Do you think there are people in this world who look exactly the same?"

"Twins?" Wang Jia asked. "Or father and son, mother and daughter? There are plenty of people with similar faces. When we were young, wasn't there even a kind of online activity where people looked for their doubles?" Then she asked, "Who did you see? That nephew of Xiao Cheng's?"

Wang Jia had heard Old Zhang say that Cheng Yao's nephew looked remarkably like Cheng Yao. That time when Old Zhang had come back with Guai Guai, he'd mentioned it in a rather interested tone, though only in passing. After saying that, Wang Jia had asked how Xiao Cheng was doing lately, and Old Zhang had replied that he was traveling. She had then said that sounded nice, and Old Zhang had answered, yes, and that was the end of it.

Wang Jia had a good memory and remembered most of the conversation. When she finished recalling it, she looked at Old Zhang in confusion again.

She had said so much, yet he had not said a word.

Old Zhang was silent for a long while before shaking his head. "Forget it. It's nothing important. It's so late already. Let's sleep."

Wang Jia glanced at his face, which still looked a little pale and bluish. "You look like a dead man. Just like when I drag you to horror movies."

Old Zhang's expression darkened. "Must you talk about horror movies this late at night?"

"Let me tell you, next month the fiftieth-anniversary special edition of The Bell of Death Curse is coming out. I'm going to see it."

"Go by yourself."

"I'm an old lady. Doesn't it look odd to go alone?"

"And dragging this old man along doesn't look odd?"

"You went with me for the fortieth anniversary. Now that it's the fiftieth, you won't watch it?"

The old couple bickered back and forth. After settling Guai Guai and wiping the floor, they waited until Old Zhang had finished washing up before lying down side by side in their familiar bed.

Old Zhang switched off the light and brought an end to the bedtime conversation, trivial and full of ordinary domestic life.

Beside him, Wang Jia's breathing was steady and even. Everything was calm, as always.

Old Zhang lay with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling for a while. His eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, and he could make out the shape of the ceiling lamp. His gaze seemed to pass through the lampshade and see the remaining warmth inside, the red glow of the filament.

That red filament was like the end of a cigarette burning in the night.

Again Old Zhang thought of the young man's face, and those cold, fierce eyes reflecting red light.

He did not consider himself a timid man, yet he could not stop the chill seeping up from the deepest part of his heart. His limbs felt as though filled with lead. The heavy weight seemed to flow through his veins into his trunk, making his body oppressive and unbearably dense.

Old Zhang turned over.

He shut his eyes tightly, but his mind would not stop wandering. It drifted to that night, then to decades ago.

After a very long time, so long that his body had become stiff and numb and the thoughts in his head had grown chaotic and disordered, he finally sank into deep sleep.

...

When Old Zhang was still young Zhang, his grades were never very good. He could not focus on studying, and his parents were frantic with worry. They spent a great deal of money sending him to cram schools, and at home there was no shortage of stick-wielding discipline: small beatings every three days, big ones every five, all in hopes of straightening him out. In the end, after much effort and sweat, they managed to get him into a junior college.

After graduating, Old Zhang became a worker at a small factory. Whether it was the tempering of the world or the fact that the parents who could once beat him until he screamed were no longer able to lift oil or carry rice, he grew considerably more mature in mindset. Year by year, he scraped and saved, eventually passing the adult university entrance exams and then earning a number of professional certificates. Though these things were of little use in the first few years, later on, when the small factory was swallowed up by a larger one, he used them to enter one of the country's leading factories and managed to stay. The work he did became more advanced, and his pay and benefits rose sharply as well.

Before long, he married Wang Jia, whom he had met in adult university. With the help of both families and the savings the young couple had accumulated over the years, they put down a down payment and bought a small house. They also had a child...

Life flashed by like a revolving lantern, passing one by one through Old Zhang's dream, interwoven with those horror-movie fragments Wang Jia had excitedly dragged him to see, and occasionally flipping back to the past. Memory was in shards, tumbling and reversing, time thrown out of joint.

Then, all at once, Old Zhang saw someone in the dream.

From afar, looking up at the mountaintop through the crowd, he saw the young man with both hands in his pockets. His long overcoat, ill-suited to climbing a mountain, was whipped up by the wind. His slightly long hair streamed back like the hem of his coat, revealing a handsome face. The young man squinted at the rolling sea of clouds before him, completely unmoved by the noisy tourists around him, and unconcerned by the many gazes fixed upon him. Standing alone, he looked especially solitary at this busy scenic summit. After a while, he took out a cigarette and lit it, inhaled once, then slowly exhaled. Smoke obscured his brows and eyes.

It was only when Wang Jia, beside him, tapped him that Old Zhang suddenly came back to himself.

He jolted awake, his heart pounding with alarm. For that instant, through the smoke, it seemed he had seen two cold, menacing eyes glowing red.

He wiped his forehead and turned to look, finding Wang Jia turned away from him, sleeping soundly.

The sensation of being tapped had only been part of the dream.

Back then, Wang Jia had also patted the distracted him and reminded him not to stand there blocking the path for the tourists climbing behind them. When he looked up again, the young man was already gone. His heartbeat had quickened instinctively, and he thought the man might have leapt from the cliff. But soon he realized that if someone really did jump off in front of that sea of tourists, the summit of Dragon Rising Mountain would have erupted into chaos. Wang Jia asked him what he was looking for. He said he had seen someone he used to know, and then, rather remarkably, told Wang Jia that the man had not aged at all in decades, and looked exactly as he had back then.

Right. When he had seen Cheng Yao's nephew, he had also said something similar to that young man and to Boss Le...

Old Zhang let out a breath and drowsily closed his eyes again.

...

The workshop director gathered everyone in their team and introduced the young man standing beside him.

The man had sharp brows and bright eyes, a straight, elegant figure, and a faint smile on his lips. He gave everyone a slight nod of greeting, looking aristocratic and refined, and though his manner was polite enough, he seemed to look down on a bunch of blue-collar workers like them.

Old Zhang had only just been merged over from a small factory and spent his days working anxiously, afraid of being laid off. At the sight of this new young man, what rose in his heart was not curiosity, admiration, or envy, but a fear unlike anything he had known before.

He listened as the director introduced him: "This is Fang Xi, a PhD who returned after studying abroad. He will be rotating through our team this month, and everyone should learn from him." At the end, the director even looked at Fang Xi with deep feeling. In both tone and expression, it was the look one gave to someone else's child.

The director's manner left everyone at a loss for how to respond. The coworkers exchanged glances. Old Zhang, fully self-aware, stood calmly at the end of the line and had no thoughts at all.

No, that was not true. He did have thoughts now. A sense of unease kept welling up in him, and in his mind kept surfacing Fang Xi's other two faces: the lonely, distant figure on the mountaintop, and the dark, terrifying one beneath the streetlamp at night.

Fang Xi remained composed. In a calm voice, he said something modest: "I should be the one learning from all of you."

Soon enough, Old Zhang in his dream had reviewed Fang Xi's abilities in full.

Fang Xi could do everything. It seemed he did not even need to learn before knowing exactly what to do, and whatever he did was better than what the most experienced frontline workers on their side could manage. In just one week, Fang Xi had optimized and improved their workflow, even taken over work from the engineering department, replaced the machines they used with new programs, and somehow brought in new equipment from who knew where. He swiftly passed the factory's complex and rigid approval process, transforming the workshop in no time at all.

At first Old Zhang thought this was simply how a large factory operated, but after hearing his coworkers discuss it, he learned that even his fellow employees at the big factory all thought Fang Xi was a monster, a being from a different world than ordinary people like them.

Here in this dream, Old Zhang looked at Fang Xi with the same terror one might feel toward a monster. He watched Fang Xi's cool, detached smile; watched him methodically transform their workshop beyond recognition; watched him then stand beside the director with a lofty expression, just as he had arrived, to announce his promotion.

After Fang Xi's promotion, every workshop in the factory underwent a major overhaul modeled after theirs. In the first two years, Old Zhang still heard bits and pieces about Fang Xi: promoted, promoted again, risen to the highest level, carried out technical innovations, clinched a major contract, brought in new investment, led the construction of a branch factory elsewhere, expanding overseas and conquering new territory...

The Beginning After the End

It was as if Fang Xi had accomplished in a single year what others needed ten or twenty years to complete, and as a result their factory soared to an even higher level and expanded at astonishing speed.

Not long after, Old Zhang heard that Fang Xi had changed jobs. More accurately, people said he had ascended so far that even "promotion" was too small a word for his new position.

Old Zhang could be said to have benefited from Fang Xi's rise as well. Not only did he pay off his mortgage early, he also moved into a new home that was larger and better.

He had thought that a monster like Fang Xi would become merely a passing figure in his life, perhaps even the sort of topic people brought up in idle conversation. He never imagined that twenty or thirty years later, during a trip, he would chance upon Fang Xi again.

Even if only for a single glance.

Old Zhang felt sure he could not have mistaken that person. Though they were far apart, and though there had been no greeting, and though the man no longer seemed to possess the restrained brilliance Fang Xi once had, still... still... it should have been Fang Xi, shouldn't it? After all, if one were to tell this story, saying that it was Fang Xi would make it far more dramatic, would it not?

When his father became paralyzed, Old Zhang had once awkwardly thought: someone like Fang Xi could only climb mountains alone, looking forlorn and defeated. For an ordinary person like himself, encountering such a thing would probably be nothing unusual. He had also thought of the Bai family, of the son-in-law in the Bai family who might remarry at any time, and reckoned that no matter what, his own family was still together, that he had parents, wife, and children, and was not alone...

...

In a daze, Old Zhang fell asleep, dreamed through the entire night, and in that same haze woke again.

The bed beside him was already empty. He could hear sounds coming from the kitchen outside, along with all the noises of the neighborhood beyond the window.

Old Zhang sat up, quickly washed up, then called for Guai Guai and grabbed the leash.

"What are you doing the moment you open your eyes?" Wang Jia came out of the kitchen carrying a pot of freshly cooked porridge.

"Taking Guai Guai out to pee."

"So early?" Wang Jia had only just set the pot on the table when she heard the door close. Seething, she let out a "hah" and muttered a couple of complaints to herself about the old man's rotten brain, then did not bother with Old Zhang any further and sat down to eat breakfast on her own.