Chapter 50: The Sticker Photo Booth Part 1

It was supposed to be a date centered around “nice weather,” but the skies had opened up with relentless rain—how had both of them shown up anyway?

That was what Cui Qijin was thinking.

Then Chi Buyu suddenly lifted a hand and, without any warning, tugged off her glasses before gently brushing her eyelids with her palm.

After a couple of touches, probably noticing the dampness, she leaned in even closer.

Both hands cupped Cui Qijin’s face now, her palms warm and slightly moist as she gazed at her with deep worry.

“Did you cry just now?”

Even if Cui Qijin had been crying, the gesture would have made her laugh.

Not to mention that she hadn’t been.

“No,” Cui Qijin replied. She kept her damp eyelashes lowered, her whole face cradled firmly in Chi Buyu’s grasp, and spoke in a tone of helpless exasperation. “It’s because your hands are wet.”

“Ah?”

Chi Buyu blinked in bewilderment. “Really?”

But she didn’t let go.

Instead, she kept Cui Qijin’s face lifted in her palms, tilting it just a fraction higher as though determined to inspect it more thoroughly.

Fine threads of rain wove into steady sheets just beyond the umbrella. Cui Qijin held the umbrella aloft while clutching the colorful leaf taro plant, her glasses slipping down to perch on the bridge of her nose. She had to look utterly ridiculous in that moment.

Yet she put up with the absurdity of having her face nestled in someone else’s hands. She let Chi Buyu stare at her, perfectly content.

She made no move to pull away.

From that intimate distance, she said, “And Chi Buyu, I have to emphasize this to you one more time.”

Chi Buyu blinked her lashes, heavy with clinging water droplets. “What?”

Cui Qijin swallowed. “I’m really not the type who cries easily.”

Chi Buyu nodded with exaggerated seriousness. “Understood.”

Cui Qijin gave a little shake of her head in Chi Buyu’s hands. “Mm.”

Chi Buyu fell quiet, seemingly lost in thought.

The colorful leaf taro in Cui Qijin’s arms began to slip, forcing her to speak up. “You can let go of me now.”

Chi Buyu snapped back to reality a beat too late.

“Oh, right,” she said, finally releasing her. But then she noticed her hands dangling empty and glanced around before reaching out to take the plant from Cui Qijin.

Cui Qijin dodged aside.

“It’s kind of heavy,” she explained.

Chi Buyu huffed, unconvinced. “You, the sickly little patient who’s always falling ill, can carry it—so why can’t I?”

Cui Qijin replied airily, “It’ll get your clothes dirty.”

“Ah!”

Chi Buyu promptly snatched the umbrella instead. “Then I’ll hold the umbrella for you!”

Cui Qijin smiled.

With her makeup already streaked and smudged, Chi Buyu demanded in a fierce tone, “What are you smiling at!”

Cui Qijin laughed so hard she nearly dropped the flowers.

She waved a hand. “I’m not laughing at you.”

Chi Buyu huffed. “As if.”

Seeming genuinely peeved, she stomped hard on their shadows beneath the streetlamp.

Cui Qijin glanced down at the two silhouettes—standing shoulder to shoulder before the boarded-up old mall, one holding an umbrella, the other cradling a bouquet. Even the shadows looked a bit lost.

“It’s shut down,” Chi Buyu said, her voice tinged with regret.

“I only found out today,” Cui Qijin replied. “Though it must have happened a few years back.”

“You haven’t come back here since?”

“Only that one time.”

“Oh.”

“And you?”

“Hmph. Of course not.”

Cui Qijin nodded, noting the regretful cast to Chi Buyu’s expression. “Want to go inside and check it out?”

Chi Buyu’s eyes went wide. “Isn’t it off-limits?”

Cui Qijin considered it. “I actually know a little side path. Not sure if it’s still passable, though.”

“Grandmaster Cui, you’re incredible,” Chi Buyu said.

Cui Qijin’s face took on a peculiar look. “What?”

Eager and fidgeting under the umbrella, Chi Buyu replied, “I’ve never even considered scouting out a secret path!”

Cui Qijin steered away from the comment. “It starts at the movie theater entrance. Not sure if it’s still open now.”

Anyone with sense wouldn’t wander into an abandoned mall like this—unless they were idle kids treating it like some grand adventure.

Cui Qijin had assumed the path would be blocked off too. But after leading Chi Buyu on a series of twists and turns drawn from hazy memory, they actually emerged onto the fourth floor, right by the theater.

A few ancient lights glowed with a bluish tint inside. The black-and-white checkered tile floor stretched out, and many of the shops were shrouded under vast, dingy woven tarps. The whole place wouldn’t last much longer before demolition. It felt like a forgotten, crumbling planet adrift in the void.

Truth be told, Cui Qijin had never done anything this reckless. The entrance blared “No Trespassing” in bold letters—only someone extraordinarily bored would ignore that and poke around.

Yet Chi Buyu wondered aloud,

“What if security chases us through here like we’re in some action flick?”

Chi Buyu had the oddest ideas.

Cui Qijin spotted a camera dangling from the ceiling, uncertain if it even worked anymore.

“Could happen,” she said.

Chi Buyu hurried over to join her, staring intently at it for a moment before calling out to it cheerfully,

“We’re not thieves, okay!”

Cui Qijin thought, sure you aren’t. With both of them huddled under the camera, peering right at it, heads pressed close together—how could anyone mistake them for anything else?

But she glanced at Chi Buyu and played along. “What if it doesn’t have audio?”

“No worries.” Chi Buyu folded the umbrella, tugged at the hem of her skirt, then lifted her chin proudly. “They can read our lips on the footage. Besides, what kind of thief shows up looking this pretty in a brand-new skirt?”

That settled the camera.

Then Chi Buyu bit her lip, as if recalling something. “Oh, right—what happened with Chen Xing?”

“Nothing serious,” Cui Qijin said as they walked. “She wasn’t feeling well earlier, so she went to the hospital. By the time I arrived, she’d already headed back to her dorm. It wasn’t a big deal…”

“Okay…” Chi Buyu clutched the soggy umbrella, hesitating as if on the verge of saying more.

“I didn’t tell you ahead of time…”

Cui Qijin felt compelled to explain. “I figured I could handle it myself and saw no need to get you worried early. I only mentioned it to Chen Wenran because she asked right then.”

“Oh, got it.” Chi Buyu’s lips pressed into a thin line.

“No, you don’t.” Cui Qijin shook her head.

“What?” Chi Buyu looked up, dazed. “What don’t I get?”

“But once I’d sorted everything with Yu Chenxing, I thought I’d still make it in time. So I rushed home for the flowers, grabbed an umbrella preemptively, and hurried to our spot. I even forgot to check my phone’s battery. I was so sure I wouldn’t flake, that just waiting here for you would be enough. It wasn’t until I arrived that I realized my phone had died on me without warning. And there I stood, wondering if Chi Buyu had tried reaching me, if that idiot Chi Buyu might be spiraling into wild worries, if this stupid mix-up meant missing our date and leaving Chi Buyu feeling sad all over again…”

Cui Qijin glanced down at their shadows, elongated by the dim gray-blue light, and let out a defeated sigh.

“Then I realized I’d been wrong the whole time.”

Chi Buyu said nothing. Even her shadow seemed frozen in place.

Cui Qijin pressed on.

“I guess I’m in the habit of locking down every detail on my end first—making sure of all the upfront plans—before looping anyone else in. I hate giving people hope only to let them down. Or announcing something I can manage myself ahead of time, leading them to doubt me and feel disappointed… I’m always terrified of disappointing people.”

They wandered aimlessly through the derelict mall, a relic from a decade past. They passed the escalator Cui Qijin had once fled down, eventually reaching the sticker photo booth—where Chi Buyu had lingered so long before, arms full of flowers and gifts, dressed in her prettiest skirt.

The booth looked ancient now. No one used these in modern times; heaven knew what it was waiting for. But it had hung on until fairly recently—the QR code for scan-to-pay was still there.

Could scanning that code whisk her back to 2014?

Cui Qijin stared at the vertigo-inducing barcode, murmuring in a dazed fog,

“Maybe sometimes you don’t need things to be one hundred percent certain before you can voice them. Right?”

“Cui Qijin.”

Chi Buyu called her full name.

“Hm?”

Their shadows fell across the booth, looking faded with age.

Chi Buyu prodded them with the umbrella’s tip. “You said my name three times in that little speech.”

“Did I? Wasn’t keeping count.”

Chi Buyu sniffed back what might have been tears—or maybe just emotion. “That’s why I’m so happy.”

“Happy why?”

“Because… Chi Buyu really did message you. Chi Buyu really did spiral into crazy thoughts. And if we’d missed this one too, Chi Buyu really, really, really would have been heartbroken.”

Referring to herself in the third person made it sound all the more straightforward and honest.

“But good thing you spoke up.”

Chi Buyu giggled, her voice light with relief. “So you caught me again, huh?”

Cui Qijin laughed right along with her.

There they stood, the two of them, giggling at a sticker photo booth that had probably been broken for years.

So ridiculous.

Neither of them had a lick of sense. Cui Qijin sighed to herself. How had she turned into such a fool?

They were halfway through their laughter when Chi Buyu poked at the shadows again with the umbrella tip. Smug as could be, she declared,

“So now you get it, right?”

“Get what?”

Chi Buyu switched the umbrella to her other hand, setting their shadows swaying lazily. In a tone both sage and heartfelt, she lectured,

“A lot of things don’t need a hundred percent guarantee before you mention them. You can’t predict what’ll matter most to someone else.”

Cui Qijin glanced at her and nodded.

It did seem that way.

She could never quite read Chi Buyu.

She certainly never saw it coming when Chi Buyu’s eyes lit up the very next instant. She whipped around, beaming with sudden excitement. “Hey, think this thing can still take pictures?”

Where did that leap of logic even come from?

“You want to try?” Cui Qijin asked.

“Of course!”

Chi Buyu seemed to have flipped some kind of switch. She hurriedly pulled out her phone to scan the code, only to find it completely dead.

Chi Buyu pouted.

Cui Qijin took out her own phone as well. It was at zero percent too.

“That probably won’t work then—”

“Then we’ll just pretend to take some!”

They spoke in unison.

Hearing the idea of “pretending to take photos,” Cui Qijin’s eyes twitched at the corners. She thought to herself that Chi Buyu’s ideas were truly unpredictable, always leaping beyond conventional logic.

“It’s not exactly—”

Cui Qijin hadn’t even finished her sentence.

Before she knew it, Chi Buyu was pushing her along, one step, two steps, until the two of them squeezed into the narrow confines of the photo booth.

It must have just been plugged in, as warm white light flickered inside. But whether due to years of neglect, it blinked on and off erratically. The camera equipment took up most of the space, leaving them to cram onto a single narrow bench.

Cui Qijin set down the flowers she had been carrying the whole way.

She glanced down at the rain and mud splattered on her clothes, frowning in distaste. When she looked up, she saw Chi Buyu fiddling intently with the machine. With great patience, she asked,

“How exactly do we pretend to take them?”

“Just like this!”

Chi Buyu tinkered for a moment before rushing back to sit beside her. A faint damp mist clung to her body, carrying a light, yeasty scent that pressed in on Cui Qijin’s breath.

“What?”