Chapter 95: Dimension 02

Amid a backdrop of an ocean of trembling exclamation marks, the young man at the Film and TV Base and the middle-aged man in the police station office stared wide-eyed at the empty air beside them. They remained speechless with shock for a long while.

In the end, Uncle Police was the first to speak.

“Little Bai, why can I see you floating in the air? What is this?”

Yu Bai himself wasn’t entirely sure about the technique in anime where phone calls let viewers see the other side of the conversation. Did it even have a specific name?

In any case, it was something like a split-screen, right?

The young man, his head now swirling with a chaotic tangle of lines, was just about to respond when a familiar magnetic voice rang out beside him.

“This is…” Xie Wufang stared at Li Nanxiao in the air, asking uncertainly, “a video call?”

At those words, the bird’s nest of lines atop Yu Bai’s head spun even faster, flinging out bursts of erratic, disordered stars.

A video call? That’s not what it means!!

…But in a certain sense, it kind of was.

Amid his daze, Yu Bai couldn’t help but find it amusing. Tian Ge would absolutely love this world in animated mode.

Now the whole world was basically on a video call.

Haha.

So hilarious 🙂

Keeping a straight face, he answered the man on the line. “Uh, you could call it a kind of video call. Actually, it’s more like the split-screen style from comics and anime…”

Li Nanxiao heard Xie Wufang’s voice coming through and shifted his gaze, as if searching for the corresponding figure.

“Is that neighbor of yours right there with you?”

“Ah, yeah, he is.” Yu Bai paused for a second before quickly turning to the man beside him. “Little Xie, come a bit closer.”

The view he could see of Li Nanxiao’s side wasn’t very wide—limited to everything from the chest up, plus a small patch of the background. It looked like a filing cabinet behind an office desk.

Li Nanxiao was probably seeing the same limited perspective.

After all, that was the typical framing for phone scenes in anime.

Xie Wufang leaned in as instructed, and Li Nanxiao caught sight of part of him. For some reason, he let out a quiet sigh of relief.

“As long as you’re not there alone, that’s good.”

Hearing that, Yu Bai froze for a moment as an inexplicable emotion welled up in his chest. “I’m fine, Uncle Li. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Li Nanxiao echoed his form of address for Xie Wufang. “Mm. Knowing Little Xie’s there with you, I’m suddenly not as worried anymore.”

He had no idea why he felt this subtle shift in his emotions.

“So, the versions of us from that wrong timeline earlier—did we all go back to the past?”

Even with countless questions swirling in his mind, the Criminal Investigation Captain quickly regained his composure. He carefully recalled every detail from before the time jump and began piecing together the current situation.

“Yeah, all four of us went back to the past.” Yu Bai gritted his teeth and took the initiative. “Uncle Li, actually… this isn’t entirely the past…”

He went ahead and gave Li Nanxiao a concise rundown of everything that had happened before.

From restoring the exploded kitchen of his weird neighbor, to the bizarre adventures of the time loop, and then inexplicably looping back again…

As he spoke, he watched Li Nanxiao on the other end with some trepidation, short black lines trembling faintly around his body.

The first time he’d realized Xie Wufang wasn’t human, he’d called Uncle Police over.

But a man who had lived more than forty years in a materialistic society naturally hadn’t believed those wild ramblings that no normal person would buy. And thanks to the elevator accident Yu Bai had just gone through, Uncle Police had logically chalked it up to trauma-induced hallucinations.

Now, Yu Bai was laying it all out.

About how the world had started going haywire bit by bit from some point onward, and the mastermind behind all that chaos.

That’s right—the global anomaly where the sky turned into a lake, the craze in the northern hemisphere for buying winter clothes in summer, the inexplicable longing Skystar City residents felt for snowflakes. All those strange events were connected to the two of them.

As an upright people’s police officer, would Uncle Police report Xie Wufang’s existence to his superiors?

Yu Bai felt a twinge of unease, inwardly grumbling as he nervously gauged Li Nanxiao’s reaction.

Fortunately, this was a super intuitive video call, complete with the animated mode that laid emotions bare.

No room for saying one thing while meaning another.

If Uncle Police really planned to do that, Yu Bai would just have to—

Have to try really, really hard to talk him out of it.

…

Not like he could assault an officer, right?

Besides, he couldn’t beat Uncle Li, who took first place every year in the department’s combat drills.

Not even Yan Jing could!

But to Yu Bai’s surprise, he didn’t see any intense reaction on Li Nanxiao’s face upon learning the truth.

Even the ocean of trembling exclamation marks behind him gradually faded away.

In their place appeared a patter of rain.

The rain fell silently, carrying a drenched sense of sorrow.

“I remember… you told me about this before.” Li Nanxiao let out a deep sigh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t believe you back then.”

“If only, when we met downstairs that time, I’d asked Little Xie one more question. Like whether he’d gotten half of that massive watermelon.”

Li Nanxiao murmured, “You told me a yoga-ball-sized watermelon had grown on the rooftop and that you’d given half to your neighbor. But without a photo as proof, I figured you’d grown an ordinary one yourself and were just imagining it was huge. If I’d asked Little Xie then, I would’ve realized something was off. Two people couldn’t both be hallucinating at the same time…”

Hearing his low voice thick with guilt, Yu Bai hurriedly said, “It’s fine, Uncle Li. I gave up trying to prove it to you later on. Not believing this stuff is what’s normal.”

Li Nanxiao fell silent for a moment before asking, “Was life in the loop really tough?”

“You were trapped there all alone. It must’ve been awful.” He said, “If I’d believed you sooner, maybe you wouldn’t have had to face it by yourself.”

His voice wasn’t loud, but it left Yu Bai lost in thought for a long time.

Xie Wufang had been listening quietly to their conversation, but suddenly, he lowered his gaze to Yu Bai’s shoulder and neck.

The thin summer fabric left the skin at his collarbone exposed to the bright sunlight.

Strands of light brown hair brushed against nearly translucent pale skin. At the elegant, slender nape of his neck, a crudely drawn little white figure flickered faintly, silently shedding tears.

What emotion was this?

Neither Yu Bai, who was focused on the airborne video, nor Li Nanxiao, lost in his own swirling thoughts, noticed it.

The young man holding the phone smiled softly.

“It wasn’t tough at all, Uncle Li. Don’t overthink it.” He laughed as he said, “Life in the loop was actually a lot of fun. I almost didn’t want to come back… Really, look at me—haven’t I gotten way more outgoing lately?”

“Mm, I noticed. This is good.”

Li Nanxiao’s expression was as warm and indulgent as a father’s. He paused, then added, “You were good before too. All of it’s good.”

The little white figure, reflected only in those gray-blue eyes, cried even harder. Tears pattered down, as if soaking the pale, fragile skin at his neck—though in reality, they dissolved invisibly into the air.

As their call continued, the little figure gradually faded away.

Li Nanxiao asked, “You said earlier that when a timespace gets dispersed after someone re-enters it, ordinary people in the real world retain impressions from that timespace, right?”

Yu Bai nodded. “So that’s why, three days ago in the morning, everyone in our city suddenly felt cold and missed the snow for no reason.”

“Mm, I felt it too that day.” Li Nanxiao said thoughtfully. “No wonder when I saw you today, I vaguely felt like I’d met this version of you before.”

That explained why he wasn’t surprised by Yu Bai’s personality change.

Evidently, in that snow-covered Skystar City timespace, he’d already interacted with this Yu Bai.

“No wonder I instinctively felt like your neighbor here was trustworthy… even though he’s not human at all.”

Those sudden words sent an ocean of exclamation marks rippling out behind Yu Bai again.

“Ah?!” Yu Bai’s face was full of shock. “What did you say?”

He blurted out, “No way! In that timespace, you had no idea about Little Xie’s identity, Uncle Li!”

In the Go Timeline, the three of them had only met once at the start, at the police station. He’d covered for Xie Wufang’s identity perfectly back then. How could Li Nanxiao possibly have realized he was a non-human, let alone trust him?!

With a head full of literal question marks, Yu Bai heard the man beside him speak in a calm tone.

Xie Wufang said, “He knows.”

His voice was steady, but the rows upon rows of exclamation marks behind the brown-haired young man trembled violently.

“!! How did Uncle Li know?!”

Against the backdrop of an earthquake in his ocean of exclamation marks, Yu Bai whipped his head around to look at Xie Wufang.

“How did you know Uncle Li knew about it?” Yu Bai fired off his questions like a rapid barrage. “No, hold on—why don’t I know any of this? When the hell did it even happen?!”

He had spent virtually the entire nine days in that alternate timespace glued to Xie Wufang’s side. How could there possibly be anything he didn’t know about!

Wait… Could it be…

Seeing Yu Bai’s shocked and bewildered reaction, Li Nanxiao—who had been a bit puzzled on the other end of the line—suddenly had a lightbulb moment at this tongue-twisting string of questions.

He turned directly to Xie Wufang in the floating video feed, his tone certain. “Did Little Bai get drunk in that timespace?”

Xie Wufang met his gaze. “Yes. After he got drunk, he called you and asked about He Xi getting abused at home.”

“Ah, so that’s what happened… No wonder it felt familiar, like I’d talked to Little Bai about this before.”

With all his lingering doubts cleared away, Li Nanxiao swiftly pieced together what must have come next.

“Little Bai’s drunk ramblings are pretty distinctive. I wouldn’t have felt right leaving him alone, so I must have asked him to pass the phone to whoever was nearby—you—to request that you keep an eye on him, right?”

“Yes,” Xie Wufang replied evenly. “You’re very sharp.”

Conversations between clever minds were always brisk and efficient—the pace was so quick that Yu Bai could barely keep up.

“You two talked on the phone… after I got drunk?!”

Yu Bai was a whirlwind of shock, confusion, and a dozen burning questions right then.

Even the cartoonish effects swirling around him seemed frantic.

An ocean of exclamation points, tangled bird’s-nest yarn balls, and a head overflowing with question marks.

“What did you guys even talk about?” Yu Bai stared off in a daze, the sting of impending social death closing in. “No, seriously—why don’t I remember a single thing—”

In that call, Uncle Li had somehow seen right through Xie Wufang’s true nature and even come to trust Him.

…What on earth had these two discussed?!

“Because you were drunk,” Xie Wufang said, glancing sideways at him. “You mentioned you’d black out after waking up and forget everything from your drunken stupor.”

And that was exactly what had happened.

Yu Bai froze for a second, blurting out on instinct, “But the next day, I asked if I’d caused any trouble, and you said no—that I was fine even drunk, no bother at all…”

The gray-blue lake so close by lay serene as ever, a nearly tender smile rippling across its surface amid the onslaught of resurfacing memories.

“You didn’t cause any trouble,” Xie Wufang said, his expression utterly earnest. “You really were fine. I wasn’t lying.”

That magnetic voice, so pleasing to the ear, jammed Yu Bai’s litany of complaints right in his throat.

Like hell he was! Yu Bai didn’t buy this “fine” business from Xie Wufang for a second anymore!!

God only knew what had actually gone down that night!!!

…He was totally in the dark—and more than a little afraid to dig deeper.

At a loss for words, the young man flicked his eyes away and shot an irritated glare at the man beside him. The ocean of exclamation points, the bird’s-nest tangles, and the swarm of question marks all faded away.

Puffs of white hot steam suddenly erupted from the soft crown of his head.

Just like a teakettle coming to a boil—chubby white lines rising in vivid, lively curls.

“…”

Xie Wufang eyed the fresh special effect, along with Yu Bai’s cheeks abruptly flushing red, and asked softly, “Are you embarrassed?”

The words had barely left his mouth when the mortified, seething young man froze—then reached up on reflex to touch his own face.

Yep. Burning hot to the touch.

The next instant, the little brown teakettle on his head boiled even more furiously.

Chugging and bubbling with white hot steam.