Chapter 14:

◎She Was Like a Visitor from Outer Space Again◎

Ji Qingyou was only five years old when she first arrived at the Qin family home.

But she seemed very quiet, didn’t like to talk, and spent every day sitting by the small window, staring at who knows what.

Yu Qinjiu asked her what she was doing.

She didn’t want to say a word back then.

So Yu Qinjiu asked her over and over again, like a broken recorder, chattering nonstop in her ear. Even though Ji Qingyou was only five at the time, she still thought Yu Qinjiu was truly amazing, just babbling away relentlessly without getting tired.

But she still said it anyway.

She said she was looking at the houses.

Yu Qinjiu blinked her big eyes at the time, and asked in her childish voice, “What’s so interesting about houses?”

The five-year-old Ji Qingyou wasn’t yet good at controlling her emotions. Big round tears streamed down her face, but she still felt the need to put on a brave front. She wiped away her tears, turned her head away, and wrote a few words made up of pinyin on a piece of paper.

“Because my house burned down.”

“Huh?” Yu Qinjiu looked puzzled. In her understanding, she didn’t know what it meant for a house to burn down. She just widened her eyes. “Who burned it!”

Ji Qingyou held back her tears, didn’t speak, just shook her head with red eyes.

Seeing her cry, Yu Qinjiu became flustered. She fumbled around for a bit, finally using her own hands, which were sticky from eating a strawberry cake, to clumsily wipe Ji Qingyou’s tears, smearing her face in the process.

That night, Ji Qingyou washed her face with a little bunny towel.

She noticed some pink stains on the white towel. She brought it up to her nose and smelled it. It smelled like strawberries.

She then smelled her own hands and was puzzled to find they also smelled like strawberries.

So, on a certain day when she was five, she became a limited edition Strawberry-Flavored Ji Qingyou.

As a child, Yu Qinjiu was energetic and couldn’t sit still. At first, her parents would take her to the Qin’s house to play. She sat with Ji Qingyou for a few days, but then stopped coming.

Ji Qingyou didn’t find it strange, just a little used to it.

But a few days later, Yu Qinjiu came back, frantically dragging her outside. Actually, her memories of that day were a bit blurry. Ji Qingyou had no idea where Yu Qinjiu was taking her. She just felt they ran for a very, very long time, as far as the journey in Huluwa Saving Grandpa, weaving through rooms of all sizes.

That distance wasn’t really far. It was just because Ji Qingyou was so small at the time that it felt very long. The road was also very hot. It made her palms sticky. But in reality, that journey was only from the study of her house, down the hall, to the study of Yu Qinjiu’s house across the way. It took less than five minutes.

That day.

Ji Qingyou saw an extremely special “building.” On the mahjong table in Yu Qinjiu’s house, a house had been built out of mahjong tiles. Yu Qinjiu introduced each part to her.

“This is the living room, this is the guest bedroom, this is the master bedroom. There’s a table for eating here, so it’s the dining room…”

It was Ji Qingyou’s first time at Yu Qinjiu’s house, and also the first time she had seen this kind of house. She didn’t agree with her statement and struggled to say, “How is this a house?”

“How is it not?” Yu Qinjiu looked a little wronged, but she took the toy bear off her schoolbag and placed it on the bed of the mahjong bedroom. She said in her soft, childish voice,

“It’s so beautiful. Why is it beautiful? Because I built it.”

And she answered her own question.

Later, Yu Muzhou explained to Qin Shuangchi, who had brought Ji Qingyou over. His tone was a little aggrieved. “Little Jiu spent a lot of time on this. She’s been studying this for the past few days. She used three sets of mahjong. She hasn’t even been eating. And she won’t let anyone touch her ‘house’.”

Qin Shuangchi patted Yu Qinjiu’s head and asked, “Little Jiu, why did you spend so much time building this house for Little You?”

Yu Qinjiu was focused on straightening the little bear lying on the mahjong.

“Because it didn’t snow.”

“Huh?” Qin Shuangchi looked at Ji Qingyou. “What does not snowing have to do with it?”

Yu Qinjiu wrinkled her face. “If it doesn’t snow, I can’t build a snowman. If I can’t build a snowman, then I have to build a house that won’t burn down.”

“This kind of house won’t burn down.”

At five years old, Yu Qinjiu could only say strange combinations like “building a house.” In her heart, she felt that “mahjong,” this unchewable thing, certainly wouldn’t burn no matter what.

As she got older, whenever Yu Qinjiu saw a model house she thought was beautiful and unique, she would save up her allowance to buy it for Ji Qingyou. Or if it was a real building she couldn’t afford, she would send pictures to Ji Qingyou, telling her to save them all in an album.

Starting from some unknown day, Ji Qingyou developed a very strange collecting habit.

Initially, it was just about the concept of “houses.” She liked refined and complete houses. When she assembled these complete, undamaged architectural models, she would imagine the fish tank surrounding her, also seemed like these buildings—safe, complete, yet unique.

Buildings are immutable and stable, like an indestructible protective shield.

But their design was romantic and vivid, unique like a matchless graffiti.

–

When falling into memories, Ji Qingyou would always unconsciously repeat certain actions. Like right now, she flipped through that set of building photos again and again, causing Ji Xiruan to also look along with her, her head nearly shoved into the photos.

“Yu… Qinjiu?” Ji Xiruan read the name on the note aloud, like a curious cat, her eyes wide. “How come it sounds so much like Little Jiu’s name?”

Ji Qingyou locked the screen and pushed her office chair away. “Coincidence.”

Ji Xiruan spun uncontrollably on the chair, but she immediately wiggled and rolled back, squinting her eyes at her. “Is this the same ‘Little Jiu’ you and Dr. Qin mentioned a few days ago? The one who could draw all over your face and you wouldn’t even get mad?”

Ji Qingyou looked very calm, staring intently at the computer screen. But Ji Xiruan looked closer and realized her computer screen was completely blank. No documents were open. The clean desktop wallpaper was that snowy mountain.

“You must have made plans with her, right? Go to the Alps together?”

Whenever something was being kept secret, Ji Xiruan’s questions became especially numerous, as if not digging it out would be an injustice to her own saliva.

Ji Qingyou pushed her away without looking up. “I’ll go check on the ward.”

With that, she ignored Ji Xiruan’s reaction, took her phone, and walked out of the office. The corridor during the lunch break was no longer as noisy as it was in the early morning.

She leaned against the wall next to the office and opened her phone, saving the set of photos Yu Qinjiu had sent her one by one into her album.

Finally, she stared blankly at Yu Qinjiu’s profile picture.

It was a pure white building at the foot of the Alps. The view from inside the room captured the vast Alps mountain range. Using a unique perspective, a small window could hold the entire Alps in its frame.

This was very fitting for Yu Qinjiu’s profession: architect.

Ji Qingyou wasn’t clear about the connection between “architect” and “building houses,” just as she couldn’t understand back then the necessary link between “building a snowman” and “building a house,” and why Yu Qinjiu, who was better at the humanities, had put so much effort into studying science, which she wasn’t good at.

A minute later.

Someone passed by and called out to her, “Dr. Ji.”

Ji Qingyou forced herself to snap out of her thoughts. Straightening her back, she walked into the ward she was responsible for. When she came out, she received a WeChat notification.

It was from the agent:

【Dr. Ji, your neighbor across the hall has already moved in today. Oh, by the way, I mentioned to her that you are a doctor. After she heard that, she wanted to get to know you, so you can look out for each other.】

【Can I share your contact info with her?】

Ji Qingyou glanced quickly at her phone. Usually, she was tired of any kind of forced connection, but her identity as a doctor had indeed strengthened her connection with this world.

She didn’t refuse. She just replied with an “Okay.”

She didn’t get a chance to check her phone again until she got off work. The agent’s reply of “Received” was still at the top.

Five or six hours had passed.

She hadn’t received any new contact requests either.

After confirming that her WeChat account wasn’t having any problems, Ji Qingyou stopped worrying about it. As she stepped out of the hospital, Nanwu was experiencing a light evening drizzle.

The snow on the road had completely melted. The whole city was painted with a gray filter by this fine rain. The blue of the night mixed with the gray of the drizzle, like a deep, damp old movie.

Ji Qingyou didn’t have an umbrella. She was soaked by the fine drizzle all the way home.

When she got out of the elevator, her body felt like it had absorbed the moisture. She took the watch that was hidden under two layers of sleeves to look at it carefully. The watch was waterproof, her clothes were not.

But she still subconsciously used her non-waterproof clothes to shield the waterproof watch from the rain.

As she turned the corner, she caught an unintentional glimpse of a figure sitting on the floor opposite her door. A misty milky blue coat was dragging on the floor. A blue-brown plaid scarf was wrapped around her neck. The strands of hair peeking out from under the scarf were a bit wet, with a few familiar strands of ash-brown highlights among them.

She was slightly lowering her head, her face buried in her knees. Her cold fingers were a stiff, numb white. Under the dim hallway lights, she looked like an exquisite statue in a shop window, as if she would shatter at a touch.

It was Yu Qinjiu.

The moment she realized this fact, the motion-sensor light went out. In the darkness, Yu Qinjiu lifted her head and saw her standing in the pitch-black hallway.

Her usually light-colored pupils looked a bit darker under the night, yet clean like a pool of swaying lake water. After the initial surprise faded, a slow, languid smile appeared in her eyes.

“Ji Qingyou.”

She only called her name.

But she was like a visitor from outer space again, stamping her bright mark upon her.