Yu Xian’s pupils constricted slightly.
He suddenly remembered that rainy night last Saturday. While he and Wen Xiao were walking back to the North Campus, she had indeed asked the exact same question.
"That girl... what is she like?"
At the time, he had been too preoccupied with fighting the fear of his fading memories, desperately searching his mind for details about Xia Li. It seemed he had completely overlooked the faint caution and subtle disappointment in the girl’s tone when she asked that question.
"I told her I didn’t know her either," Shi Zuozhou said with a shrug. "She didn’t ask again, but her demeanor... how should I put it? It was like she clearly wanted to ask more, but was too embarrassed to bring it up."
He glanced at Yu Xian. "What do you think, Old Yu?"
Yu Xian took a deep breath. Prompted by Shi Zuozhou’s words, little details he hadn’t paid attention to before began to surface uncontrollably in his mind.
At first, there was the misunderstanding where she mistook him for Wen Yu’s blind date. Yu Xian still clearly remembered her awkwardness and how she wanted the ground to swallow her whole. Back then, he had even labeled her as a bit scatterbrained.
Later, his impression of her shifted to a socially anxious, kind-hearted girl with a bun hairstyle—an Uncertainty Robot who was always blushing. She spoke softly and slowly, and while she occasionally showed a bit of temper, she was undeniably a reliable partner.
After that, his attention had been completely monopolized by the endless string of crises and mysteries. He only vaguely felt that Wen Xiao had become much more well-behaved and compliant, but he hadn’t thought deeply about it.
Now, with Shi Zuozhou threading all these details together, the affection behind them was glaringly obvious.
He wondered when it had started. Was it at the coffee shop, when she agreed to help him sneak a peek at her sister’s medical records? Was it on that rainy night, when they crouched in front of the computer together to analyze the audio structure? Or was it later, when they built the Rabbit Hole together, went to the escape room, or searched for Professor Ning, and she charged into the rain without hesitation to act as bait? Or perhaps it was under the starry sky during their joint test in the Dream Net...
Dreams?
Yu Xian’s train of thought abruptly halted. He suddenly thought of an extremely crucial point in time. His brow furrowed deeper. In that instant, he felt like he had grasped something terribly wrong.
The very first shift in Wen Xiao’s attitude, the exact moment he truly noticed something was off... was it right after she had privately altered the audio structure and listened to the Midnight Bus audio with the MCH suppression removed?
Yu Xian’s heart began to race. The mere thought filled him with a suffocating sense of panic.
He recalled his meeting with Wen Xiao after that incident. Wen Xiao had said she forgot most of the dream’s details. She only remembered being on a bus, sitting next to a "faceless stranger." At the time, her head had been stubbornly lowered, her ears flushed a deep, blood-red. Seeing her unnatural guilt and embarrassment, he had simply assumed she had dreamt of something too inappropriate to mention, so he hadn’t pressed further.
But what if that "faceless stranger" wasn’t a stranger at all?
The bus vendor had explicitly stated that the Midnight Bus would construct scenarios based on the dreamer’s subconscious and recent memories.
"Haven’t you ever heard the saying, ’what you think about by day, you dream of by night’? The scenes and people inside this bus will be connected to whoever you were thinking about or whatever scenes you saw during the day."
During that period, classes had been suspended due to the heavy rain, and Wen Xiao was holed up in her dorm, unable to leave. She had just finished analyzing the audio structure with him that night. If she immediately used the audio and boarded that bus right after... then, the person she was most likely to see in that dream, the emotional experience most likely to be amplified...
Following this logic, he also remembered when they were building the Rabbit Hole resource library. When they had "cleansed" and replaced the MCH source files into those audios, the materials Wen Xiao had been tweaking...
Yu Xian’s hands and feet went numb. He wondered if this was the root cause of all of Wen Xiao’s strange reactions.
"Source memory confusion"?
Senior Sister Yang Yiyi’s warning exploded in his ears once more.
If Wen Xiao had experienced some intensely real and profound emotional projection in the dream, could the forcefully written "weights" in those memories have already begun to influence her cognition and behavior in reality? Was it possible she could no longer distinguish whether her feelings were an obsession forcefully amplified by a dream, or genuine affection in reality?
If Wen Xiao’s affection for him wasn’t born of her own desire or free will, but was instead a seed planted in her mind by an audio clip—a side effect of forced distortion and contamination—how was he supposed to face her now?
Should he help her investigate the audio’s side effects? Or should he just accept everything as it was?
But how could he investigate? Would he have to brutally expose the most secret, tender feelings that a young girl had been so carefully hiding away? Wouldn’t that be too cruel to her?
Yet, if he didn’t investigate and just accepted her feelings, it would hardly be easy either. On one side was an affection built upon false memories, and on the other was a care mixed with guilt and unease. Was this truly fair to Wen Xiao? Could it even be called respect? Would it just be compounding one mistake with another?
Whether he advanced or retreated, there seemed to be no right answer.
"Old Yu?" Shi Zuozhou’s voice pulled him back to reality. "Sigh, you Xiao Chunans who have never dated and are totally inexperienced in love are all like this. Take your time."
Shi Zuozhou merely clicked his tongue, saying nothing more.
Yu Xian leaned against the washing machine, mindlessly tapping his phone screen on and off. On and off. Off and on.
He didn’t tell Shi Zuozhou what he was thinking about. He was thinking about the words Shao Yiyi had spoken in the North District Apartments.
"A jinx to your family, destined to be separated from your flesh and blood. The Celestial Killer Lone Star has entered your fate; you are doomed to be entirely alone.
"Solitary stars and desolate constellations, the White Tiger at your door. Those who draw near will be endangered; those who love you will be hurt."
The "Great Flood" trigram that Shao Yiyi had calculated was being verified, piece by piece, by the information they had learned since.
What about this part of the prophecy?
His parents’ accident. Xia Li’s disappearance. He wondered if those who were closest and most important to him were genuinely more likely to encounter unforeseeable danger and misfortune.
If so, someone like him, branded by fate as a Celestial Killer Lone Star... what right did he have to respond to another girl’s affection?
Yu Xian closed his eyes. The BUZZ of the washing machine droned on, like an endless elegy.