Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 5

Chapter 5: She’s the Humid Season

The table read didn’t end until two in the morning.

The friend request on WeChat still hadn’t been accepted.

Qin Luo was in no mood to go to a bar with the assistant director to explore some “collision of souls.” She drove home alone.

By the time she had showered and tidied up, it was nearly four a.m.

She stood before the bathroom sink, put on her fogged-up glasses, and wiped two clear circles on the lenses with her fingers.

Qin Luo stared into the mirror.

Did she really look that different from sixteen years ago? Had her features changed? So much so that Shen Yiyi hadn’t recognized her immediately, even after they’d made eye contact.

The moment her gaze landed, her own face appeared abruptly in the glass.

With it came a sharp, itching pang in her chest.

Mirrors are always too honest.

She had originally imagined herself to be a tawny brown, like a hard, scorching heat. She thought she could burn down grasslands, flash a bold, toothy grin at people, then raise a sharp weapon and deftly pierce through them.

But the mirror assassinated those narcissistic fantasies. The dead avatar was stuck in her throat, its mystery sparking a peculiar unease—it’s a death instinct, the way a person can suddenly feel disgust for themselves in a certain moment, not tied to any specific thing or object.

So Qin Luo smiled at herself.

Her smile was lively enough. Her face was mostly clear, but it carried the heavy weariness of the workplace. The bridge of her nose, supporting her glasses, wasn’t as high as it looked in magazines. She looked so calm, the kind of calm that melts into a crowd.

She was braless under her camisole.

The form-fitting fabric was meant to outline her figure; the people who sold the clothes thought so too, wanting her to display her curves.

But the painful, protruding points still needed to be covered by clothes described with words like “cover” or “shield,” lest she reveal her primitive nature and tempt those beasts who claim to control reason to let their eyes pop out.

At seventeen, she had hated this part of her body.

The swelling, firm mounds jiggled in the eyes of those around her, and there was always someone peeking in secret. So she would shrink her shoulders in shame. If her arm accidentally brushed against them while doing homework, a sour stench would rise in her heart, a twisted, nauseating feeling.

Back then, she would also wonder why no one stared at boys’ crotches. Was it just because it was on their lower body, not as prominent as the mounds on her upper body?

But if it wasn’t prominent, then why was she told to keep her legs together? At that time, she didn’t yet have the courage to question this logical flaw.

This led to her despising her own distorted secondary sex characteristics even more after she fell for Shen Yiyi. It was as if her body were deformed, as if someone had snipped away her anger, doused the raging fire of her adolescence, and decreed that she could only be shy.

Qin Luo turned and walked barefoot toward the bedroom.

She was always barefoot at home. Sometimes, when she was still awake at four in the morning, she liked to walk around the living room reading, wearing only a camisole without any pants.

She didn’t have a particular exhibitionist kink, nor was it about gender-free fashion or the freedom to dress. She was simply erasing the traces of that conditioning, trying to validate all her efforts over the past sixteen years.

But Qin Luo spent thirty minutes and only managed to get through ten pages of her book.

Her mind was now completely filled with Shen Yiyi. Even though the new literary star she was reading wrote about rural ghosts, she could still think of Shen Yiyi at the sight of a ghost-fire-lit grave.

She thought of her with a mixture of hate and love.

This tyrannical thought made her toss the book onto the sofa. She pulled the script Shen Yiyi had scribbled on from her pocket. Her notes were on it, the only trace she had left behind today.

“Doesn’t conform to investigative logic.”
“Doesn’t conform to arrest procedures.”
“A single fatal stab? Ridiculous!”

Furious, Qin Luo threw the script onto the sofa and stomped on it viciously twice.

She then jumped from the sofa to the floor, rushed into the bedroom, and flopped onto the bed. Tossing and turning, unable to sleep, she opened Weibo and logged into the private account that only her most loyal readers knew about.

She posted a single line.

“She is the bitter, humid season, and so I resonate with the dampness.”

***

When she woke up in the morning, her WeChat had exploded.

First, there were five missed calls from her business partner, Liu Jia. Then, after opening WeChat, a flood of private messages from friends. Most importantly, a red bubble had appeared on her contacts list.

She paused, reaching for her glasses, and called Liu Jia back first.

“The hell, who is the ‘she’ you were talking about on your private account?” The sound of an airline boarding announcement crackled in the background of Liu Jia’s call.

Hearing the heavy nasal sound in her friend’s voice, Qin Luo sat up and asked with concern, “How did you catch a cold?”

“Right now, I’m dying to know who the ‘humid season’ is!”

“Shen Yiyi. I ran into her on set.”

“The hell?”

Liu Jia and Qin Luo had been classmates since middle school, and their grandmothers had been colleagues. They’d grown up together. When it came to the crap between Qin Luo and Shen Yiyi, she knew everything. She even knew about the time Qin Luo had used “going to the bookstore with Liu Jia” as an excuse to her grandmother, when she was actually meeting Shen Yiyi for a trip to the zoo.

Liu Jia first held her breath in shock, then took a deep, sharp inhale. She couldn’t hold back the curse in her throat. “What… the actual hell?! When… when did she get into the film industry? Didn’t she—to get into the police academy—”

Qin Luo cut her friend off. “She’s a forensic pathologist now.”

She put the phone on speaker and walked to the window to pull open the curtains. “A cadre, no less. Dispatched by the city leadership to be a consultant for the crew. I just saw her yesterday.”

Liu Jia probed, “You just saw her?”

Qin Luo sat on the edge of the bed and opened WeChat.

She tapped the little red bubble on her contacts list. Next to a profile picture that could be categorized as a boring landscape photo was a single character: Yi.1

She tapped “Accept.”

The message sent with the friend request immediately appeared in the chat window.

“Qin Luo, it’s Shen Yiyi.”

“Hurry up and tell me how it went when you met! Our great Screenwriter Qin, now a charismatic elite, made a dazzling entrance. Wasn’t she blown away?”

Qin Luo blinked. “I saw her. She forgot who I was at first, then remembered me five hours later. She apologized, then ghosted me all night. We just added each other on WeChat.”

The process had been rocky, but recounting it felt surprisingly light.

Liu Jia detected the melancholy beneath her friend’s feigned witty tone and jokingly changed the subject. “This is even more dramatic than our office’s Little Wang, who just wanted a one-night stand and ended up settling down with the guy in Singapore. Art really does imitate life.”

But just as quickly as she’d veered off, she veered back. “So how is Shen Yiyi now? How has she changed from when we were kids?”

“She’s fine, I guess. Normal changes.”

Qin Luo knew that once Liu Jia started gossiping, she wouldn’t stop. She gave a perfunctory answer, tapping on the landscape profile picture to open Shen Yiyi’s Moments feed.

Qin Luo scrolled through Shen Yiyi’s feed.

June 15: Shared a long article from the Identification Center’s official account.
May 20: Shared a 520 scam alert from the Anti-Fraud Center.
April 5: Shared a police station’s notice promoting respectful tomb-sweeping.
January 10: Shared a post celebrating National People’s Police Day.

“What do you mean ‘fine’? I’m dying here! Does she still have OCD? Is her hair still short? Did becoming a cop make her even more cold-faced? Is her tone still as harsh as it used to be? I’m dying of curiosity!” Liu Jia sounded like she wanted to fly a fighter jet back immediately.

“Her OCD seems a bit better, but her hair is longer.”

Qin Luo got up and walked toward her closet. To enter the civilized world of daytime, she still had to find a pair of pants. She placed her phone on the watch cabinet and, remembering her only task for the day was a meeting at the studio, grabbed a random pair of sweatpants.

“Then what’s with that Weibo post?! From your tone, it doesn’t sound like a rekindled flame. More like you’re burning all by yourself again?”

“Yup. I’m over here playing with dripping hot wax on my heart,” Qin Luo said, tying the drawstring of her pants.

“So… is she married?”

“I don’t know, but probably not.” Qin Luo could spot a married woman at a glance, and she hadn’t seen that kind of fatigue on Shen Yiyi’s face.

She added, “From what I understand, it’s pretty difficult for a female forensic pathologist to reach the position of deputy director. I looked through her political achievements from the last couple of years. She probably wouldn’t even have time to hold a wedding, let alone manage a family.”

“So she’s officially settled in Shanghai now?”

Qin Luo walked from the closet to the bathroom. “Probably. It looks like she joined the Institute of Criminal Science and is involved in some research.”

“You’ve already done a full background check? Are you really planning to give it another go with her?”

Qin Luo cupped her hands under the faucet, splashed water on her face, and used the feigned action of washing her face to avoid answering the question.

“Back then, she cut off all contact with you when things were getting super ambiguous. Don’t let the scar heal and forget the pain.”

Qin Luo lifted her foam-covered face. “Shut up, you.”

“If you ask me, she’s a classic egoist. It’s good for you to get burned a little. Disenchant yourself from her sooner rather than later, save yourself from seeing her through so many filters.”

“Do I have that many filters?”

Liu Jia said, exasperated, “The hell, it’s not just ‘many,’ okay? The girl was giving you the silent treatment, and you were over here telling me she was just working hard for her ambitions.”

Qin Luo knew she saw Shen Yiyi through thick filters, but she hadn’t realized they were that thick.

Qin Luo wiped her face clean, put on her glasses, and heard a notification chime from her phone.

She opened it while saying, “Alright, you still haven’t gotten to the point. Did you secure the project sponsorship for the aid society’s next season or not?”

“It’s ninety percent there. The legal team will connect next month. You have no idea how difficult those media people are. My god, I drank so much yesterday my head is still spinning…”

It was Shen Yiyi.

Qin Luo’s ears instantly went deaf. All her focus was on the line of text on the screen.

[Qin Luo, I’m sorry. I didn’t see the producer’s message until late last night. I was afraid of disturbing your rest, so I only added you this morning.]

Liu Jia was still complaining on the other end when she suddenly heard Qin Luo let out a soft laugh.

“What are you laughing at?”

[I’d like to apologize again for my offensive behavior when we met.]
[The producer’s message said the next meeting is at the end of the month. Will you be staying in Shanghai for work until then?]

“Huh?” Qin Luo stared at the screen, trying hard to control the corners of her mouth. “What laugh? Did I laugh?”

She typed back a cool reply on WeChat: [Yes, I will be.]

[If it’s convenient for you, could I treat you to a meal?]

The more Liu Jia listened, the stranger it sounded. The breathy laugh that escaped Qin Luo sounded like she was possessed. She asked urgently, “The hell, what are you laughing at? Your laugh is harder to suppress than AK-47 recoil…”

Qin Luo pressed her lips together. “I’m hanging up. We’ll talk when you get back tonight.”

After ending the call with her friend, she tossed her phone onto the carpet, jumped barefoot onto the sofa, and started bouncing high, high up in the living room.

It was an indescribable excitement.

Like a bag of puffed snacks being smashed open with a single clap.

BANG—

The flavor and the emotion became overwhelming, fermenting, and a triumphant giddiness began to spin. She kicked the script, sending it flying into a messy, chaotic pile of books scattered across the living room floor.

“The hell!!”