Spirit Realm Walker

Zhang Yuanqing felt a surge of excitement. News about Bro Bing?

”The Hangcheng branch delivered results? Did they find anything?” he asked his superior on the other end of the line.

It had taken them three days, a long time just to produce results. Their colleagues at the Hangcheng branch were painfully slow, and clearly did not treat Bro Bing’s disappearance as a priority. 

He grumbled silently to himself. His friend had already been missing for nearly half a month. If the Spirit Realm Walkers at the Hangcheng branch had conducted an investigation with any real diligence, they should have been able to offer more than enough information the moment Li Dongze submitted his request.

Obviously, they had written Bro Bing off as dead in the Spirit Realm, and deemed his demise not worth the trouble of a proper investigation.

—Well, we did turn up a few things.

Li Dongze chose his words carefully before continuing.

—Lei Yibing’s social circle was quite small. He was reclusive by nature, a loner who kept to himself and did not get close to any of his classmates. He maintained a low profile at school and never stirred up trouble. But when colleagues at the Hangcheng branch dug deeper, they discovered that over the past three years, two people who’d crossed him both died under seemingly suspicious circumstances.

Zhang Yuanqing’s brow furrowed the more he listened, and the moment the squad leader finished, he fired back, ”That’s not right. Bro Bing might not be the most socially graceful guy around, but reclusive? Not a chance. 

”And low profile doesn’t describe him at all. I grew up with him. I know him better than anyone. When his temper flares, he doesn’t even bother yelling, ’what are you looking at?’ He just swings.”

As for the suspected killings, he didn’t know the details, so he offered neither rebuttal nor comment on that front.

—Sounds like you’re describing a Fire Sage.

Li Dongze chuckled, unable to resist the jab. He cleared his throat, then steered the conversation back on track. 

—So the Lei Yibing you know and the one his classmates describe are two completely different people. Who do you think changed?

Zhang Yuanqing fell silent for a moment, then said, ”Maybe it was Bro Bing.”

The Squad Leader grunted in agreement, then laid out his analysis.

—You two went to the same high school. If something had been off about him back then, there’s no way you wouldn’t have noticed. In other words, Lei Yibing’s transformation began in college.

—Something must have happened to him between graduating high school and the start of university, something drastic enough to reshape his entire personality. But with so many possible factors and no further leads, there’s simply no way to speculate.

Zhang Yuanqing agreed with Li Dongze’s reasoning, but one thing still gnawed at him. Given how close he and Bro Bing were—they had been practically blood brothers—why hadn’t his friend told him anything after he became a Spirit Realm Walker? The Spirit Realm had no silencing mechanism. If you wanted, you could grab a megaphone and tour the world advertising its existence.

Not that anyone would believe you, he supposed.

”Is there anything else?”

—There is, though I’m not sure how relevant it is… 

The Squad Leader paused to consider before speaking again.

—Did Lei Yibing have a habit of keeping a diary?

”What kind of normal person keeps a diary these days?”

—Colleagues in Hangcheng found a journal in his dormitory. He didn’t write in it often, but on the night before he disappeared, the night before he mailed you the Character Card, he wrote an entry.

”Where’s the journal now?”

—Still in his university dorm. The Hangcheng branch looked it over and decided it had no value, but at my request, they photographed every page. I’m sending them to you now. 

Li Dongze paused, then changed the topic.

—If I’m not mistaken, tomorrow marks the fourteenth day since you came out of Sheling Tunnel.

”That’s right.”

The next day was the deadline. He would enter the Spirit Realm either that night, or the next day.

—There’s a brief buffer window between the notification and when the Spirit Realm opens. Remember to call me to report, or call Guan Ya.

”Got it.”

The call ended. Zhang Yuanqing opened his messaging app and found a compressed file from the squad leader. Extracting it yielded over thirty photographs.

He sat at his desk and began reading through the diary. Bro Bing’s entries were indeed sporadic, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, and mostly about trivial everyday matters. Zhang Yuanqing read carefully at first, but once he confirmed the earlier entries held nothing of value, he skipped straight to the final photograph.

The entry was brief, just a handful of sentences.

”Internship starts in the second half of the year. Time flies. Before I know it, I’ll be saying goodbye to college and stepping into the real world. Last night I dreamed of the past, of my childhood with Yuanzi in the alley, of sneaking peeks at forbidden books together, of scamming my dad and his uncle out of pocket money, of playing… games together.”

Zhang Yuanqing stared at the phone screen for a long time, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

Bro Bing really did leave me a clue!

***

The next morning, Zhang Yuanqing woke to find it was half past nine.

Looks like today’s the day I enter the Spirit Realm, he mused.

He ate breakfast, put on a face mask and a baseball cap, then hailed a cab to Lei Yibing’s home.

The alley where he had spent his childhood was called Yinping Community. Built half a century ago, every residential building there bore the mottled patina of age. The structures were uniformly six stories tall with no elevators, and tangled cables wound themselves in loop after loop around the exterior walls.

Zhang Yuanqing stepped out of the taxi and swept his gaze across the neighborhood. Over a decade had passed, yet aside from a fresh coat of paint on the outer walls and a new security booth at the entrance, nothing had changed. Not one thing.

Back when he had been in middle school, rumors of demolition and redevelopment had already been circulating through the area. Everyone waited and waited, year after year, for nearly a decade, without so much as a glimpse of a demolition crew.

He crossed the street and ducked into the fruit shop opposite, picking up a bag of loquats, a pineapple, and three mangoes.

He climbed the cramped stairwell and stopped in front of unit 402. Reaching out, he pressed the doorbell.

A moment later, footsteps sounded from inside. The security door swung open to reveal a woman in her forties standing in the doorway. She looked unwell. Dark circles hung heavy beneath her eyes, and her face had grown gaunt.

The woman’s eyes went wide with surprise. ”Yuanzi?”

Zhang Yuanqing kept his tone gentle and well-mannered, though he sighed quietly to himself. ”Aunt Zhou, I came by to see you and Uncle Lei.” 

Her gaze fell to the fruit in his hands, and a warm, grateful smile crossed her face. 

”Come in,” she said softly.

The apartment was a modest two bedroom layout, with a floor area a little over eighty square meters. Zhang Yuanqing sat on the living room sofa, cradling the cup of warm water Aunt Zhou had poured for him, listening to her speak in tones heavy with grief and sorrow.

”Aunt Zhou, I’m sure the Public Security Bureau will find Bro Bing,” he said, offering what comfort he could.

”Your grandmother came to visit me a few days ago. She said Old Chen told her that no news isn’t necessarily bad news,” Aunt Zhou replied. 

She sighed, then added, ”Stay for lunch.”

Zhang Yuanqing shook his head. ”I can’t. I’ve got class later.” 

As children, he and Bro Bing had been inseparable. They often slept over at each other’s homes, and mooching meals off one another’s families was a matter of course. But he knew the Spirit Realm could pull him in at any moment that day, so he needed to keep his time outside as short as possible.

Still, he hadn’t forgotten why he had come.

”Aunt Zhou, I’d like to spend a little while in Bro Bing’s room,” he said.

He pushed open the bedroom door. The small room held a double bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and a television. His eyes swept the space quickly before settling on a large cardboard box, which he dragged out from under the bed.

The box was a jumble of childhood relics: a Subor game console, a Digimon virtual pet, a thunderbolt ball, a yo-yo, a telescope, Water Margin hero cards, a wooden spinning top, a pull whistle, Dragon Ball manga volumes, and The Romantic History of Emperor Yang of Sui by Qi Dongyeren.

Every single toy in that box had a story behind it. Take the telescope, for instance. Back in those days, there had been a red light district nearby. When night fell, the hair salons would glow with hazy, suggestive lighting, and the women inside, dolled up in all their provocative finery, would lounge on the sofas with effortless allure, their curves visible even through the glass doors.

One day, Bro Bing, still in elementary school at the time, crept up to him with a conspiratorial whisper. He said he had spotted Zhang Yuanqing’s uncle sneaking into one of those salons.

Zhang Yuanqing didn’t believe it. He marched straight to his uncle and confronted him. The man’s face drained of color on the spot, and he hastily forked over twenty yuan in hush money.

Afterward, while licking on their ice popsicles, Zhang Yuanqing and Bro Bing agreed that this was a pretty solid racket.

So the two little rascals started staking out the street after school. This time they didn’t catch Yuanqing’s uncle. They caught Bro Bing’s old man instead.

When confronted, his father nearly had a heart attack and promptly paid them off with a dozen or so yuan of his own.

Eventually, the old man and the uncle both mended their ways and were never caught again, until the day Zhang Yuanqing pilfered some of his little aunt’s pocket money to buy a telescope and began conducting surveillance from a distance.

And just like that, the hush money started flowing again.

Bro Bing’s childhood was sealed away inside that box, and so was Zhang Yuanqing’s too.

He gazed at the toys of his youth in a daze, overwhelmed by the sense that time had raced past and how nothing was the same anymore.

What am I getting sentimental for? I’m not nearly old enough to be reminiscing like this, he scoffed at himself as he shoved the flood of memories back down.

Then he picked up The Romantic History of Emperor Yang of Sui and riffled through its pages.

With a soft rustle, a slip of paper fluttered out. Two dense strings of numbers were scrawled across its surface.

At the sight of it, Zhang Yuanqing let out a long, slow breath, as though a boulder had finally been lifted from his chest.

The numbers on that slip were a cipher only the two of them could read.

Influenced by his grandfather, Zhang Yuanqing had been obsessed as a child with cop dramas, detective cartoons, and mystery novels, fantasizing about becoming a brilliant investigator himself someday. 

In middle school, he and Bro Bing had been reading a famous foreign detective novel together when one of its cases sparked an idea. The great detective Zhang Yuanqing and his trusty assistant Ah Bing simply had to develop a secret code known only to them.

So they poured their energy into devising an entire cipher system. The first number corresponded to a line, the second also to a line, the third to a page, with every group consisting of seven characters. The format of the second group was the reverse of the first, and so on.

And the very first time they played this game, the book they used as their key was The Romantic History of Emperor Yang of Sui.

Zhang Yuanqing recalled the cipher’s format step by step, cross referencing each number against the book. Time slipped away. After what felt like an eternity, he finally pieced together the complete message.

”6203; brothers for life.”

”Yuanzi, find it. I’ve left everything there.”