Chapter 6: Ghost Festival, Dark Alley

After several days of light rain, late August finally produced a clear sky. The sun bore down without apology, turning the asphalt roads into something that seemed on the verge of igniting. Small insects darted through the air. Cicadas maintained their relentless, hoarse commentary. Yun Li felt she was being slowly dissolved by the heat.

She met Deng Chuqi and they didn't bother searching for a specific restaurant — they walked directly into the neighboring Haitian Mall and found a wonton place without much discussion.

"This weather is trying to cook us from the outside," Deng Chuqi said, visibly reviving the moment the air conditioning found her. "I genuinely can't take it. The West Fortress was never this bad."

"You've just been away long enough to forget. It's the same."

"Is it? Fine." Deng Chuqi conceded this without argument. "I'd take South Wu raining all summer. The temperature this past week was actually bearable."

"Then South Wu would flood."

"Then the sun should just never come out."

"What do you have against sunlight?"

Deng Chuqi looked at her with deep feeling and reached across to pinch her cheek. "Yun Li. Why must you always do this. I should have brought a needle today to sew your mouth shut."

Yun Li pulled back, laughing, and apologized until Deng Chuqi withdrew.

After the minor commotion settled, Deng Chuqi studied her face for a moment and said, "You know, my first impression of you was that you were pretty but completely unapproachable. I assumed you were performing some kind of superiority."

Yun Li glanced at her. "Watch it."

"But then I got to know you and realized the quietness was probably just self-protection."

"Oh?"

"So you wouldn't accidentally offend someone and get yourself eliminated."

The waiter arrived at that precise moment with two bowls of wontons.

Deng Chuqi spooned in chili oil and then, as if something had surfaced, pointed upward. "Was the VR place actually fun? I was going to go during the trial run and then completely forgot."

"I liked it," Yun Li said, and meant it. "I regretted agreeing at first, but afterward I felt it was worth it. I got paid and got to try everything."

Deng Chuqi asked who else had been there. Yun Li listed the few names she could recall. Deng Chuqi recognized one of them and immediately pivoted into a lengthy piece of secondhand information about that person's recent life. Yun Li listened with interest.

"Sounds made up," she said.

After a while Deng Chuqi asked if there was anyone else.

Yun Li thought. The three characters she had typed into the search bar the night before floated up without warning.

She hesitated. "Do you remember a video that went around on E-station when we were in high school?"

Deng Chuqi looked blank. "What?"

"The one that was — you know, it was called something like—" Yun Li found she couldn't say the name directly and worked around it. "The Moon of the Human World."

"Moon?"

"West Fortress University of Science and Technology—"

"Oh!" Something clicked. "The genius from West Fortress. I remember. The first time I came to your house in high school you had his photo on your wall, practically an altar—"

Yun Li had genuinely forgotten about the photo.

She felt her face warm and interrupted before it could go further. "Okay. Let's eat."

Deng Chuqi was visibly entertained. "Why are you bringing this up now? I can barely picture what he looked like anymore."

Yun Li paused for a moment. "I think I might have seen him."

"What?"

"I'm not sure it was the same person."

The feeling was not entirely unlike running into someone she had only encountered through a screen — she had experienced that a few times since starting work at EAW, meeting people whose online presence she'd been aware of for years. But compared to those meetings, this one sat differently. Heavier, somehow. Less comfortable.

He had been someone she'd looked up to at a particular age, for particular reasons. That kind of thing left a mark that ordinary familiarity didn't.

She was also not entirely sure what was making her uneasy.

Was it not having recognized him immediately?

Or was it simply the strangeness of encountering, in ordinary daily life, someone who had only ever existed in a video — someone she had privately assumed she would never actually meet?

Seven years had passed.

The boy she remembered had grown into a man with sharper features and the particular quality that time leaves in a face whether it's invited to or not. His looks hadn't changed dramatically, but the way he occupied space had — and that was where the real difference was.

It was not what she'd expected.

In her imagination, constructed over years from a single video and fragments of subsequent searches, a person like him would have grown into someone who drew a room toward him naturally. Someone with ease and precision in how he moved through the world — quietly magnetic, capable of managing everything without appearing to try. Passionate about the right things, unshakeable about everything else.

What she had actually encountered, across those few brief meetings, was someone turned inward. Withdrawn. Unreachable not from distance but from some kind of absence.

His brightness seemed to have dimmed. As though it had been put somewhere he couldn't currently find.

Her mind produced, without her asking for it, the image of him asleep on the couch. The way he had been slightly curled, his frame thin, the outline of his shoulder blades visible through the fabric of his shirt.

Something about it had looked like fragility dressed in composure.

"Maybe it's not even him," Deng Chuqi said, already moving on. "Someone who just looks similar. It's been years — he wouldn't necessarily look the same as in the video."

Yun Li came back to herself and laughed, because Deng Chuqi was right. "You're probably right."

She had been reading too much into it. Even if it was the same person, there were straightforward explanations. He had said himself he wasn't well. A few days of feeling unwell would account for most of what she'd observed.

---

The area had several residential developments, ranging from older buildings to newer construction. Yun Li, who was not particularly pressed for money, chose Seven Mile Fragrant Town — the best security in the neighborhood, a good surrounding environment, directly across from Haitian Mall, and a ten-minute walk from South University of Technology at most.

After lunch she messaged the agent. Once the time was confirmed she brought Deng Chuqi along.

The apartment was a one-bedroom, fully furnished, and the previous tenants had left it in reasonable condition. The landlord required a minimum one-year commitment and a three-month deposit upfront.

Deng Chuqi, who had recently navigated her own rental agreement, took point on the conversation with the agent.

The terms suited Yun Li. They agreed to return the following day for the lease paperwork.

After Deng Chuqi left, Yun Li found a deep-cleaning service and booked them. Then, over the following days, she ordered what she needed — basic supplies, filming equipment, a few things that made a space feel inhabited rather than merely occupied — and had it all delivered.

She officially moved in the day before her hotel reservation ran out.

By the time everything was arranged and the space had taken on some shape of her own, it was dark outside. She realized she was hungry, and the thought arrived with it: the fried rice noodle shop. She had found it by accident on a previous visit to South Wu, walking back from the second round of interviews, near the food street close to the university. One of those things you buy without much thought and then find yourself returning to mentally afterward. She had tried several versions of the same dish back in West Fortress and found all of them lacking.

She opened a few delivery apps. The shop didn't appear.

Probably no delivery service.

Yun Li looked at the clock. Just past ten.

She looked out the window. Haitian Mall was still fully lit.

She changed her shoes, picked up her wallet, and went out.

Working from memory, she crossed the street, walked past the mall, and followed the direction she thought she remembered. She noticed, several times, people crouched at the roadside burning paper money.

She stopped and checked the date on her phone.

The Ghost Festival.

Her scalp prickled. She immediately regretted leaving the apartment.

But she had already walked most of the distance. Turning around now would mean coming home hungry and annoyed at herself. She continued.

The food street, when she reached it, was bright and populated enough that the knot in her chest loosened slightly. She remembered the fried rice noodle shop had been tucked away from the main stretch — she'd discovered it by veering off the obvious path. She couldn't recall the exact location, only that it had required some looking.

She opened her navigation app.

The route it produced wound in on itself after a hundred meters or so, the kind of thing that happens when map data and the physical world have quietly disagreed. It directed her through an alley.

The alley was narrow, the ground still damp from the recent rain. A corner roughly ten meters in, then a turn right and left, emerging onto another street. The distance was short.

Yun Li walked in.

Around the corner, she heard it before she saw it — laughter, low voices, the loose quality of men who have been drinking. Then the smell of alcohol reached her, and the two figures came into view.

One had light blue hair and English lettering tattooed across his collarbone, indistinct in the dim light. The other wore a tank top, his arms thick with muscle.

The alley was narrow and dark and very quiet behind her.

Yun Li kept her eyes forward and tried to pass with the composure of someone who has somewhere specific to be.

She had taken three steps when the blue-haired one stepped into her path. "Well. Hello there, little sister."

She stepped back carefully.

The muscular one laughed at his companion. "Da Feng, what are you doing, harassing someone?"

"How is that harassing?" the blue-haired man said, sounding aggrieved and slurred at once. "I'm just saying hello."

The alley had no space to maneuver around them. Yun Li calculated her options and decided that calm was more likely to produce a way out than anything that looked like panic. She kept her voice even. "Could you let me through, please? I need to get to the other side."

"I can do that," the blue-haired man said agreeably. "If you come get a late-night snack with me after."

Silence.

"How about it, little sister?"

She couldn't afford to make him angry and she couldn't see a way through. "Alright," she said, quietly. "Let me through first. I need to buy something."

He shifted aside by a fraction.

The shops along this stretch of the alley were closed, their shutters down, one side of the narrow space entirely dark and still. On the other side, a few meters ahead, a street lamp threw thin light onto the pavement. Under it, a man stood with his head down, smoking.

Backlit, the light had bleached his face to something pale and cold. He looked like a figure that had walked out of a different kind of night entirely.

Yun Li recognized him in the same moment that her heart registered the recognition.

Fu Shize.

She had thought the coincidence of the first meeting was enough for one chapter of her life. She had not been planning for a second.

He seemed to catch the disturbance in the alley and looked up.

She didn't call out — she didn't know what the two men behind her would do if she drew more attention to the situation. She pressed her lips together and looked at him directly. She was not sure what her face was doing but she knew what she needed it to say.

Their eyes met for a second.

Fu Shize looked away.

He exhaled a slow stream of smoke.

Yun Li stood still.

The meaning of what had just happened took a moment to reach her fully.

He had no intention of helping.

Behind her, the blue-haired man's patience was thinning. "I let you pass, so let's go, sister. What are you stopping for? Going back on your word—"

Her voice came out before she made the decision to use it. "Fu — Fu Shize."

The alley went quiet in a way that didn't feel like ordinary quiet.

Even the blue-haired man seemed to lose the thread of what he had been saying.

The silence stretched for what was probably only two or three seconds.

Then Fu Shize turned his head. His gesture was lazy, unhurried — a light wave of the hand. Yun Li felt something come back to life in her chest and took half a step toward him.

The blue-haired man walked past her.

"Brother," he said, with the slightly injured air of someone who doesn't understand why his evening has become complicated. "You know her?"

The ground of Yun Li's understanding shifted.

Something from a few days ago that had been softened by time into blurriness snapped back into sharp focus. A boy at an airport, laughing with deliberate cruelty, leaning close to say something she hadn't wanted to hear. Fooled you, didn't we. Bet you didn't expect he's the one running the whole thing.

Fu Shize replied without particular emphasis. "What are you doing."

"Just asked her to keep me company for a late snack," the blue-haired man said. "Didn't do anything else."

"Keep you company for a snack." Fu Shize repeated it the way you repeat something when you're deciding what to do with it, and then looked at Yun Li. "Do you want to go?"

The night sky was high above. The stars were too far away to offer anything. The wind moved through the alley warm and dry, offering no relief.

Yun Li did not think about where the courage came from. She shook her head.

Fu Shize made a quiet sound of acknowledgment and relayed her answer. "She doesn't want to."

The blue-haired man, still in the grip of whatever he'd been drinking, started to form an objection. Fu Shize put a hand on his shoulder and pushed — not hard, but with enough precision that the man staggered two unsteady steps and had to work to stay upright. He turned around looking confused.

"You frightened her," Fu Shize said, in the same unhurried tone. "Go apologize."