Chapter 289: Opening and Closing

“Wei Xun?”

A hesitant, familiar male voice rose from the darkness. The man switched on his phone’s flashlight, dimming it to a low setting that lit only the small patch of ground around them.

When he made out Wei Xun’s face, he rushed over immediately, reaching for his arm out of habit, voice tight with worry.

“How are you feeling? Are you all right? Thank goodness you’re finally out. This late at night, what are you doing here?”

“You Ziming?”

Wei Xun didn’t pull away from the steadying grip. He narrowed his eyes and studied the man.

He hadn’t sensed You Ziming’s presence at first. He only became aware of him when the other man drew close and made no effort to conceal himself at all. That confirmed it: You Ziming was an ordinary person. All of a Guide’s titles and heightened perception were useless against someone like him.

Wei Xun’s mind had raced through several possibilities in the space of an instant, but You Ziming hadn’t been among them. You Ziming was in uniform. Today was October first, National Day, it should have been a normal holiday. But in their line of work, what holidays existed? One phone call and you went straight back.

Eight in the evening, the Xishan Cemetery, running directly into him here was far too much of a coincidence. Without answering You Ziming’s question, Wei Xun asked flatly, “Why are you here?”

“Don’t you remember? I do my regular patrol in this area.”

You Ziming’s answer caught Wei Xun off guard. He spoke as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Don’t I always patrol here during national holidays?”

Someone had planted suggestions in You Ziming’s mind.

Wei Xun recognized it immediately.

You Ziming had accompanied Wei Xun to sweep tombs before, back when Wei Xun’s health was at its worst. But there had never been any talk of patrols. Not once.

“Who assigned you to patrol this area?”

You Ziming was an ordinary person, and ordinarily, the various methods available to Tourists and Guides could not take effect on ordinary people. But his profession was particular. And Wei Xun happened to know a certain powerful figure whose real-world profession matched You Ziming’s exactly.

“My superior assigned me. It’s not a secret. You already knew, didn’t you?”

You Ziming gave him a strange look, then his expression shifted toward concern. He was worried Wei Xun’s illness had progressed, that his memory was slipping, otherwise why would he ask something like this again? He reached out and touched Wei Xun’s hand, and his expression changed at once.

“You’re freezing. We’re going to the hospital right now.”

“It’s October, it’s cold out at night, and you’re dressed like this. Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

You Ziming fussed as he pulled off his own jacket to drape it over Wei Xun’s shoulders. But in the very next instant, a heavy, warm trench coat, still carrying someone else’s body heat, was draped over Wei Xun’s shoulders first.

Wei Xun had actually tried to step aside, but his body was too weak, his movements too slow; the coat settled over him before he could avoid it. He didn’t look back. His gaze stayed on You Ziming’s face, and he watched clearly as You Ziming’s expression shifted: first a startled jolt, then a flash of recognition and pleasure, the unmistakable look of someone spotting a familiar face.

The next second, You Ziming confirmed it.

“Captain An! What are you doing here?”

Those two words, Captain An, split clean through the boundary between the real world and the Agency, collapsing two utterly different yet fundamentally identical worlds into one.

“Officer You, your evening patrol is finished.”

The low voice came from behind Wei Xun. He felt An Xuefeng’s hand settle on his shoulder, the touch light, and yet Wei Xun’s body still swayed slightly.

With You Ziming present, none of Wei Xun’s alienation, titles, or tools were of any practical use. What remained was only the bare reality of his physical condition.

An Xuefeng, stripped of his titles, still had peak physical condition. Wei Xun was simply that frail. An Xuefeng’s hand stilled the moment he felt it; he registered Wei Xun’s weakness, and had no more patience for You Ziming’s pleasantries. A brief, clean order, and You Ziming was leaving the cemetery.

It wasn’t natural behavior. You Ziming wasn’t someone who would simply abandon Wei Xun like that. But under psychological suggestion, things were different.

The last thread of sunlight had long since vanished. Only scattered lights remained in the cemetery. This section of the grounds was remote; the places the lights couldn’t reach were colder and darker for it. But An Xuefeng’s trench coat blocked out all the wind.

“Last time I checked, You Ziming was close to entering the Agency.”

An Xuefeng broke the silence first. He wanted to light a cigarette, but he glanced down at Wei Xun and kept his hands where they were.

“As you know, ordinary people who share a connection with us tend to attract all kinds of misfortune.”

Being chosen by the Agency was itself the greatest misfortune of all. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] And by the Agency’s standards for selection, a person either harbored an overwhelmingly powerful wish, or they were beyond saving medically.

How does someone come to carry a wish that strong without first having something go very wrong? Like the way everyone at Mao Xiao Le’s mountain temple had died. Like the way Bai Xiaosheng had gone missing, and Lu Shucheng’s desire to find him had become the most desperate thing inside her.

Whether that was a chain reaction those people had caused themselves, or whether the Agency had played some catalyzing role, was difficult to say. But after entering the Agency, the fewer ties left to the real world, the better.

Just as Wei Xun had almost stopped coming back to reality altogether, partly because he was genuinely too busy, but also partly because he didn’t want to draw You Ziming into any of it.

But hearing An Xuefeng speak now, it seemed You Ziming had long since reached the threshold.

“He didn’t enter because of you?”

Wei Xun said it evenly.

“The psychological suggestion was yours as well?”

An Xuefeng’s hand paused. He hadn’t expected that here, standing at the Puppeteer’s grave, with Wei Xun clearly already aware that he had been investigating the Puppeteer’s real identity, Wei Xun would still speak to him with such composure.

“Yes.”

An Xuefeng answered.

“His health is good; he has no terminal illness. He won’t become a Guide. And his powerful wish was simple enough. As long as that wish was fulfilled ahead of time, his sense of expectation satisfied, the Agency would lose its hold on him.”

An Xuefeng had been on the verge of saying what You Ziming’s wish actually was, but he didn’t.

You Ziming had a happy family and a good life. What he wished for was simple: that his good friend Wei Xun might find a cure, recover, and go on living well.

You Ziming knew nothing of Wei Xun’s journeys; the Agency’s interference kept it that way. But the direction of that interference made all the difference. Even a subtle shift in how it was applied could produce completely different outcomes.

“Even with all your preparations and contingencies in place, under the Agency’s influence, You Ziming might very well have discovered that you’d disappeared.”

At that point, his desire to find Wei Xun, to save Wei Xun, would have peaked and driven him straight into the Agency. And Wei Xun, as a Guide, revealing nothing of his identity or name, You Ziming would never have found him. He would only have kept pushing, kept climbing.

It was why the Agency always seemed to produce pairs so tightly bound to each other: brothers, sisters, closest friends, even husbands and wives, parents and children. Because an ordinary person’s wish rarely rose high enough to be chosen by the Agency. But if a family member vanished, if a closest friend vanished, that wish could spike to its peak in almost no time at all, and the Agency would come.

“You Ziming has real talent.”

An Xuefeng said.

Enough talent that Wei Xun had only been in the Agency a few months before You Ziming was already near the threshold. It was precisely because he existed at that borderline that An Xuefeng had been able to plant the suggestion in him at all.

Someone like Yu He’an for instance, after Yu Hehui disappeared, he had thrown himself into searching desperately, and still hadn’t entered the Agency for years. That spoke to ordinary talent. Whereas An Xuefeng and his team had only been investigating Yu Hehui’s disappearance and had been drawn in almost immediately.

You Ziming’s rate of approach was comparable to theirs.

An Xuefeng noted.

He had investigated Wei Xun and Wei Xuechen’s real-world lives, and naturally he had come across You Ziming as well. Being in the same system, An Xuefeng had paid him more attention.

“If he’d entered the Agency normally, he might have been the most outstanding Tourist of the next decade.”

An Xuefeng couldn’t help remarking on it. It should have been simple appreciation for a junior. But there was, underneath it, something faintly sour.

If everything had gone as it naturally should, without ***’s sudden intervention and its contract, without the bond that had formed between An Xuefeng and Wei Xun, then perhaps the next decade would have belonged to Wei Xun and You Ziming.

You Ziming was one of the rare people Wei Xun was genuinely close to, someone he could trust. You Ziming would have found Wei Xun, and Wei Xun might not have hidden his identity from him. They could have become a linked Guide and Tourist, the way Dreamchaser and Zhang Xingcang were.

“Thank you.”

Wei Xun said it softly, drawing An Xuefeng out of his thoughts. An Xuefeng felt Wei Xun lean directly into his arms; then came a second, sincere thank you, and a quiet exhale.

“It’s such a relief he didn’t enter the Agency. I owe that to you.”

“Someone like You Ziming, if he’d entered the Agency, the early days would have been brutal for him.”

Wei Xun’s closeness had put An Xuefeng in a somewhat better mood, but that last remark pulled at something uncomfortable.

He really did care quite a lot about You Ziming.

“Oh? Is that so?”

An Xuefeng said, his tone flat, and moved his hand from Wei Xun’s shoulder.

“He’s not as decisive as you. Not as ruthless either.”

Wei Xun smiled and tilted his head back in An Xuefeng’s arms to look up at his face.

“You make people suffer, don’t you? Zhou Xiyang told me you killed your first Guide the very first time you entered a journey?”

The hand An Xuefeng had removed from Wei Xun’s shoulder came to rest at his waist instead. Wei Xun’s waist was narrow; when An Xuefeng’s arm settled around it, he always felt like he was holding something that might drift away, thin as paper.

An Xuefeng gave a low sound, somewhere between a scoff and something almost pleased. He had meant to keep a straight face. But he glanced at the Puppeteer’s headstone, and the corner of his mouth curved, deliberately dropping his voice.

“That’s right. I’ve killed quite a few Guides.”

“Scared?”

“They deserved to die.”

Wei Xun said it without any particular thought.

“If you and I had met when you first entered, we probably would have understood each other perfectly. Don’t you think?”

The remark made An Xuefeng picture it, almost against his will.

Ten years ago, Wei Xun would have been in his teens. Probably bolder than he was now, more vivid. A Wei Xun on his first tour as a Guide would have been nothing like a new Guide at all. Faced with a group of Tourists all clearly older than him, he would probably have played up the rookie act just to hook the newcomers.

And An Xuefeng would have spent the entire time probing at exactly how far a Guide’s authority extended, and where exactly the disparity between Guide and Tourist in the Agency actually came from, running one test after another.

That boldness, that quality of something hidden beneath the surface, the love of risk, the absolute control a Guide held over their Tourists, it would have reminded him of facing the most cunning criminals he’d ever encountered. His attention would have been caught from the very start.

They would have clashed, and they would have worked together with seamless precision. Wei Xun wouldn’t have let his teammates die carelessly; he would have gone alone to the most dangerous places. But when he did, An Xuefeng would have been able to follow.

Perhaps they would have escaped from death together, and then done it again, and again. When the Eagle Corps was established, An Xuefeng would have invited him immediately as their resident Guide.

Opening the Pyramid, opening the West Continent, those too, would have been adventures they took together.

“The Puppeteer has been blocking you from entering the Agency.”

The thought in An Xuefeng’s mind had been vivid and good, but the words that came out sounded severe and cold. He had laid it almost entirely bare: I’ve been investigating your brother.

He was genuinely a little puzzled. There was no question Wei Xun cared deeply about the Puppeteer. On discovering that An Xuefeng had been investigating the Puppeteer’s grave, had even arranged for patrols — patrols staffed by one of Wei Xun’s few real-world confidants, Wei Xun, with how suspicious he was by nature, should have raised his guard immediately and put some distance between them.

When An Xuefeng had noticed Wei Xun going to sweep the grave, he’d smoked through two packs and then stood under a cold shower long enough to wash away the smell before coming here. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] He had fully prepared himself for a confrontation, even a temporary rupture. So why was Wei Xun this calm?

The answer, of course, was that Wei Xun had known all along. His brother had started investigating An Xuefeng long before he ever disappeared.

To be precise about it, his brother had begun investigating An Xuefeng a full ten years earlier.

Only Wei Xun had pieced that together, naturally. And it hadn’t struck him as particularly strange, he’d simply noticed that every time he and An Xuefeng were close, An Xuefeng had just happened to bathe recently. Wei Xun liked that quality: clean, fresh, uncomplicated.

“If I’d entered the Agency ten years earlier, the top Guide slot might be mine by now.”

Wei Xun said it without a trace of modesty, then smiled.

“Speaking of which, after all that investigating, did you find out whether my brother had a terminal illness?”

“I always had a feeling he wasn’t the type to get one. Tell me, can a normal Y-class Tourist convert into becoming a Guide?”

A Tourist converting into a Guide?

“The Puppeteer’s rise was fast, but before it, he was exceptionally low-profile.” An Xuefeng said.

“Someone following the normal Guide path couldn’t rise that quickly.”

Before reaching the Gold rank, Agency rules restricted Guides to one tour per month. And in the early stages, the journeys were mostly Safe and Difficult difficulty, nothing high-level.

Guides were also perpetually cash-strapped. Unless someone started out like Dreamchaser, with Zhang Xingcang funding him from the beginning and points and tools flowing freely, growth that rapid wasn’t possible.

“I think so too.”

An Xuefeng had phrased it carefully, but if he was saying it at all, it was essentially fact. Wei Xun looked at his brother’s headstone. If his brother had started as a Tourist, what had made him become a Guide? Was it connected to Wei Xun himself? Or had his brother been searching for their missing parents? Were there secrets only a Guide could reach, could uncover?

“If my brother had been a Tourist, he’d have become the top Tourist, wouldn’t he?”

Wei Xun said wistfully.

“He wouldn’t have settled for anything less, even if sitting at the top was dangerous. The two of you would probably have been trying to fight each other every single day.”

The Puppeteer as a Tourist. Fighting every single day.

An Xuefeng kept a straight face and declined to pursue that line of thinking.

“Ready to go back?”

The current temperature didn’t particularly bother An Xuefeng, but the person in his arms was trembling faintly. Cemeteries seemed to carry a chill of their own; the temperature here ran lower than anywhere else, and the cold settled into you differently.

“Did you find anything inside this grave?”

Wei Xun wasn’t ready to leave yet. He still had the golden nanmu wood urn in hand.

“I didn’t dig it up.”

An Xuefeng said first.

“But I did use certain methods to examine it.”

“This is a normal empty grave. The Puppeteer didn’t leave much behind here. The only unusual thing is the headstone itself.”

The Puppeteer’s headstone was black granite, the same material as their parents’ stones. Wei Xun had noticed that when his brother ordered the headstones for their parents, there had been material left over; the Puppeteer’s stone had been made from what remained.

“The headstone carries an unusually strong yang energy.”

An Xuefeng frowned slightly. A gravestone with overpowering yang energy in its stone was, in many local customs, considered inauspicious.

“Using stone with too strong a yang charge for a gravestone is said to subject whoever rests there to endless torment, as though they’re being scorched by a blazing sun day and night.”

“Is there anything wrong with my parents’ stones?”

Wei Xun’s eyes lit up faintly when he heard that. Blazing sun. Scorched. When An Xuefeng shook his head to say no, Wei Xun fell quiet, something turning over in his mind. Then he said, softly, “An Xuefeng.”

“Mm?”

When An Xuefeng looked down at him, Wei Xun’s lips met his in the very next instant, cool and soft.

‘Good thing I brushed my teeth tonight.’

That was genuinely An Xuefeng’s first thought. Then his brow furrowed and he pulled back; kissing in a cemetery was thoroughly improper. Even if this secluded corner had been purchased entirely by the Wei family, with only Wei Xun’s parents’ and brother’s headstones here, An Xuefeng still felt it wasn’t right.

But the moment he stepped back, Wei Xun followed. He pressed close like he intended to stay attached, and even made a point of it, the kiss producing a soft, deliberate sound. When An Xuefeng straightened up, Wei Xun rose onto his toes and stretched toward his lips, trying to coax them open, one arm hooked around An Xuefeng’s neck, pulling him down.

An Xuefeng’s strength was on a different scale entirely from Wei Xun’s; it was only because An Xuefeng felt Wei Xun’s arm was too thin and didn’t want to strain it that he gave in and lowered his head at all. Even when An Xuefeng bit him deliberately, hard enough to draw tears, Wei Xun just pressed closer and refused to let go.

He liked kissing An Xuefeng. An Xuefeng ran warm; the heat of his mouth was almost scalding against Wei Xun’s chill. That burning, forceful quality was something Wei Xun found himself drawn into completely. He’d once thought that anything too intimate, exchanging this kind of closeness, would feel unclean, but with An Xuefeng he didn’t think about any of that.

When Wei Xun made a choked sound, An Xuefeng’s whole body went taut. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Wei Xun noticed, and made more of those sounds deliberately, his blue eyes bright with tears, shining like sapphires.

An Xuefeng couldn’t stand Wei Xun crying. And when Wei Xun did cry, An Xuefeng’s first instinct was never to comfort him, it was to make things worse, which was frankly unhinged. He exhaled quietly and finally kissed Wei Xun back properly. The sounds Wei Xun was making were far too loud; An Xuefeng took the initiative, and silenced them.

The two of them pressed close together and shared a kiss that tasted faintly of mint. Even pressed this close, they eventually parted; An Xuefeng finally put his arm around Wei Xun properly. If they were any closer, they might have looked like one person.

He was thinking exactly that when he noticed Wei Xun’s other hand, extended out behind him at an odd angle.

An Xuefeng: ?

What was he doing?

An Xuefeng bit Wei Xun, not hard but not gentle either; when Wei Xun flinched back from the sting, An Xuefeng took the opportunity to glance over.

And he found that the hand Wei Xun had been holding out behind him was holding an unfolded poster. A poster of a young An Xuefeng.

An Xuefeng: ?

The poster was facing the headstone. The kiss had been facing the headstone.

While An Xuefeng was still processing this, something happened that made his pupils contract sharply.

The headstone, which had been completely still until now, had quietly, without a sound, developed a crack.

Wei Xun didn’t even register the pain anymore. When the Agency notification sounded in his ear, he was overjoyed.

【Tombs Currently Under Guardianship: 2】

This grave had finally been counted. Wei Xun looked at the newly added Tomb No. 2 with undisguised delight.

【Tomb No. 2 Classification: Small Private Grave】

【Current Residents: 1 (Remnant Soul, Consciousness State)】

【Bond Established: 1 Person】

Whether positive or negative, a response was a response. He had established a connection with his brother.

He was so pleased that he kissed An Xuefeng again, right then. This time An Xuefeng didn’t pull away. His expression was somewhat difficult to read, and when he spoke, the usual clean decisiveness in his voice was gone; the words came out haltingly.

“Is this… some kind of family tradition?”

He had spent every spare moment lately investigating the Puppeteer’s grave. His one finding had been the anomaly with the headstone. It had never occurred to him that watching them kiss a few times, and then the poster, would be enough to crack it.

What had caused that?

An Xuefeng found himself thinking, involuntarily, of colleagues he’d known over the years whose parents had died in the line of duty long ago, people who, after finding a partner, would go to their parents’ graves specifically to pay their respects and report the news.

Was that it?

So that was why Wei Xun had kissed him in front of the Puppeteer’s headstone?

To make things official, by the logic of reporting to a grave?

An Xuefeng took Wei Xun’s face in his hands and looked at him carefully, with full attention. Wei Xun smiled back at him, bright and lovely enough to make An Xuefeng’s chest tighten; he pressed a kiss to the tip of Wei Xun’s nose without quite meaning to.

An Xuefeng could see that Wei Xun liked him, that he was something particular to Wei Xun; Wei Xun had only ever kissed him, only been close with him. But somewhere in An Xuefeng’s nature, something possessive and proud wanted more than that. Wanted all of it. He felt that Wei Xun’s feelings for him were still missing something.

So, An Xuefeng stepped back and said plainly, “I don’t think what you feel for me has reached that point yet.”

That sounds terrible.

An Xuefeng thought. They’d already kissed; he could hardly not be Wei Xun’s boyfriend after this.

But he wanted more between them. More than just arriving at the last step directly.

“I’m sorry. But what we have right now doesn’t quite qualify as a boyfriend relationship.”

Hm?

Wei Xun looked at him, confused. And then, in the very next second, something happened that confused him even more.

The crack in the Puppeteer’s headstone, which had split open just moments ago, quietly sealed itself shut.