Spirit Realm Wanderer

Chapter 45: Brother Bing’s Clue

The matter concerning Brother Bing... Zhang Yuanqing’s heart leapt with joy, and he said “Has the Hangzhou branch come up with any results? Did they find anything?” The colleagues at the Hangzhou branch were way too inefficient—it took them three days to come up with results. They clearly weren’t taking Brother Bing’s disappearance seriously... he grumbled to himself. Brother Bing had been missing for nearly half a month. If the Spirit Realm practitioners at the Hangzhou branch had investigated diligently, they should have been able to provide feedback and sufficient information when Li Dongze first commissioned them. Clearly, they believed Bingge had died in the Spirit Realm and saw no point in investigating further. “We did uncover some information...” Li Dongze paused for a moment before saying “Lei Yibing’s social circle was fairly simple. He was reclusive, kept to himself, and didn’t get close to his classmates. He kept a low profile at school and never caused trouble, but after colleagues from the Hangzhou branch conducted an in-depth investigation, they discovered that over the past three years, two people who had provoked him had both died under circumstances that appeared to be natural.” Zhang Yuanqing listened with a furrowed brow. As soon as Li Dongze finished speaking, he immediately objected “That’s not true. Bingge may not be the smoothest operator, but he’s definitely not a loner, and his actions are anything but low-key. I’ve known him since we were kids—I know him inside and out. When he loses his temper, he doesn’t even bother to say, ‘What are you looking at?’ —he just goes straight for it.” As for Bingge’s alleged murder, since he didn’t know the details, he neither refuted nor commented on it. “You’re talking about Fire Master, aren’t you...” Li Dongze couldn’t help but interject. He cleared his throat and steered the conversation back on track: “So, the Lei Yibing you’re describing is different from the Lei Yibing the students remember. Who do you think is the problem here?” Zhang Yuanqing paused for a moment: “Maybe… it’s Brother Bing who’s the problem.” Li Dongze gave a soft “Hmm” in agreement and analyzed “You went to the same high school and university as him. If there were anything unusual about him, you’d have noticed it. That means Lei Yibing’s change began when he started college. “During the time between high school graduation and the start of college, he must have gone through something that caused such a drastic change in his personality. But there are too many possible factors; without more clues, it’s impossible to speculate.” Zhang Yuanqing agreed with Li Dongze’s assessment, but there was one thing he couldn’t wrap his head around: given how close he and Bingge had been—like brothers—Bingge hadn’t even told him after becoming a Spirit Realm Walker. The Spirit Realm has no mechanism to erase one’s existence; if you’re willing, you could even travel the world with a megaphone, promoting the Spirit Realm. Although no one would believe it… “Anything else?” “Yes, but I’m not sure if this counts…” Li Dongze paused for a moment before saying, “Did Lei Yibing have a habit of keeping a diary?” “Who in their right mind keeps a diary these days?” “A colleague in Hangzhou found a diary in his dorm. He didn’t write in it very often, but right before he went missing—the night before he mailed you the character card—he wrote an entry.” “Where’s his diary?” “The diary is in his college dorm. Colleagues at the Hangzhou branch checked it and thought it was of no value, but at my request, they took photos of it, which I’m sending you now,” Li Dongze said. “If I’m not mistaken, tomorrow will be the fourteenth day since you emerged from the ‘Sheling Tunnel.’ ” “Mm-hmm!” Tomorrow is the deadline—either enter the Spirit Realm tonight or tomorrow. “There will be a brief buffer period when the Spirit Realm opens. Remember to call me to report, or call Guan Ya.” “Got it.” After ending the call, Zhang Yuan opened his messaging app and received a compressed file from Li Dongze. After unzipping it, he found over thirty images. Sitting at his desk, Zhang Yuanqing read through the diary. Bing Ge didn’t write very often—sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly—and his entries were mostly about trivial matters. At first, Zhang Yuanqing read them carefully, but once he confirmed that the earlier entries held little value, he skipped straight to the last image. “My internship starts in the second half of the year. Time really flies. Before I know it, I’ll be saying goodbye to my college days and stepping into the working world. Last night, I had a dream that took me back to my childhood with Yuanzi in the alleyway. I remembered sneaking a peek at banned books with him, pulling pranks on my dad and his uncle to get their pocket money, and the games we used to play together...” The post was very brief—just a few sentences. Zhang Yuanqing stared intently at his phone screen, then suddenly leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Brother Bing really did leave me a clue! The next day, Zhang Yuanqing woke up at 9:30 a. m. “It looks like today is the day to enter the Spirit Realm....” After breakfast, he put on a mask and a baseball cap, then took a taxi to Lei Yibing’s home. The alley where he’d lived as a child was called Yinping Residential Complex. Built half a century ago, every apartment building bore the mottled marks of time. The buildings were all six stories tall, with no elevators, and tangled cables wound round and round the walls. Zhang Yuanqing got out of the taxi and glanced around casually. It had been more than a decade, and aside from the fresh coat of paint on the exterior walls and the new security guard booth at the entrance Nothing else had changed at all. Back when he was in middle school, rumors of demolition had already been circulating in the neighborhood. Everyone waited and waited—for nearly a decade—but not a single sign of the demolition crew ever appeared. Zhang Yuanqing crossed the street and bought a bag of loquats, a pineapple, and three Kate mangoes at the fruit shop across the street. Walking up the cramped stairwell, he stopped in front of apartment 402 and rang the doorbell. A moment later, footsteps sounded from inside, the security door swung open, and a woman in her forties stood in the doorway, looking taken aback as she asked “Yuanzi?” She looked somewhat haggard, with heavy dark circles under her eyes and a gaunt face. “Aunt Zhou, I came by to check on you and Uncle Lei,” Zhang Yuanqing said in a polite tone, silently sighing to himself. Aunt Zhou’s gaze fell on the fruit he was holding, and she broke into a relieved smile, saying softly “Come in.” The apartment was a two-bedroom, one-living-room layout, measuring over 80 square meters. Zhang Yuanqing sat on the living room sofa, holding the warm water Aunt Zhou had poured for him, as he listened to her deeply sorrowful account. “Aunt Zhou, I’m sure the Public Security Bureau will find Bing,” Zhang Yuanqing said comfortingly. “Your grandmother came to see me a few days ago,” Aunt Zhou sighed. “She said Old Chen told her that no news isn’t necessarily bad news.” She continued “Stay for lunch.” “No, thanks. I have class later,” Zhang Yuanqing shook his head. When he was a child, he and Brother Bing were inseparable; they often slept together at night, and it was perfectly normal for them to eat at each other’s places. But today, since he might enter the Spirit Realm at any moment, he was trying to keep his time outside as short as possible. “Aunt Zhou, I’m going to Bingge’s room for a little while.” Zhang Yuanqing hadn’t forgotten why he was here. He pushed open the door to Bingge’s bedroom. The modest room contained a double bed, a wardrobe, a desk, a TV… His gaze swept quickly across the room, and finally, he pulled a large cardboard box from under the bed. The box contained a hodgepodge of items: a Little King game console, a Tyrannosaurus Rex toy, a Thunderball, a yo-yo, binoculars, *Water Margin* hero trading cards, a wooden spinning top, a whistle, *Dragon Ball* comic books, and *The Scandalous History of Emperor Yang of Sui* by Qi Dongyeren... Every little toy here had its own story. Take the binoculars, for example: back in the day, there was a red-light district nearby. When night fell, the hair salons would glow with a hazy light, and the alluring ladies would sit on the shop sofas with irresistible charm—you could clearly see their graceful curves even through the glass doors. Once, Bingge—who was still in elementary school at the time—sneaked up to him and said he’d seen Zhang Yuanqing’s uncle sneak into one of the salons. Zhang Yuanqing didn’t believe him, so he went straight to find his uncle. When his uncle heard this, he turned pale with shock and gave him twenty yuan to keep his mouth shut. Afterward, as Zhang Yuanqing and Bingge licked their popsicles, they thought to themselves that this was a pretty good business. So after school, the two little rascals took up a stakeout by the roadside. This time, they didn’t catch his uncle—they caught Bingge’s old man instead. The old man was horrified and also gave them a hush money of over ten yuan. Later on, the old man and the uncle turned over a new leaf and were never caught again—until one day, when Zhang Yuanqing stole some pocket money from his aunt to buy a pair of binoculars and secretly observed them from a distance. And so they earned another hush money payment. So, the box holds not only Bingge’s childhood but also Zhang Yuanqing’s. He stared blankly at his childhood toys, feeling only that time had flown by and that while the objects remained the same, the people had changed. “What am I getting so sentimental about? I’m not old enough to be reminiscing yet...” He gave a self-deprecating chuckle and pushed the flood of memories back into his mind. Then he picked up *The Scandalous Love Affairs of Emperor Yang of Sui* and flipped through the pages. Amid the rustling sound of the pages turning, a slip of paper fell out, covered with two dense columns of numbers. Seeing this, Zhang Yuanqing exhaled slowly, feeling as if a huge weight had been lifted from his heart. The numbers on the slip were a code that only the two brothers could decipher. Influenced by his maternal grandfather, Zhang Yuanqing had been obsessed with cop shows, detective-themed cartoons, and novels since childhood, fantasizing about becoming a formidable law enforcement officer. In middle school, he and Bingge once read a famous foreign detective novel together. Inspired by one of the cases in it, he thought to himself: How could the great detective Zhang Yuanqing and his assistant Bingge not have a secret code between them? So he devoted a great deal of effort to devising a cipher system. For example, the first number corresponds to the line number, the second also corresponds to the line number, the third corresponds to the page number, with seven characters forming a group, and the format of the second set of numbers is the reverse of the first set... The first time they played this game, they used *The Scandalous History of Emperor Yang of Sui* as their source material. As Zhang Yuanqing recalled the cipher format and cross-referenced it with the book, time slowly passed. After an unknown period, he finally pieced together the entire text. First line of numbers: 6203; two brothers in one lifetime Second row of numbers: Yuanzi, find it—I left everything there.