The raincoated man made to move; An Jie paused and said without turning back, “If I were you… I wouldn’t move. You still owe me a bomb.”
He slowly approached the man in the wheelchair. All the muscles in his body seem relaxed, like a carnivore leisurely walking through a herd of herbivores, evaluating every beast, looking for that sure hit angle. Sometimes, the fox was more than just cunning.
The person in the wheelchair sat there calmly and silently. An Jie raised his gun slightly and pointed at them from around twenty centimetres away, refusing to proceed any further. He felt the person’s gaze pierce through the hood over his face, staring unblinkingly at An Jie.
Cold, like a reptile.
They were at a stalemate. Suddenly, the suspected R·Li laughed. It was the same voice as that machine-like, sharp, unnatural voice from the cassette tape. He lightly, almost gently, called out, “Yin Hu.”
An Jie’s eyes curved into a smile, his features softening the chilly air he brought with him, like he was facing an old friend. “Li. I didn’t think it would really be you.”
R·Li slowly reached out his hands from under his cloak. An Jie noticed his hands; they were extremely thin and as he raised them, they were strangely rigid. Li pulled back the hood of his cloak and An Jie saw that face.
He finally understood why such an extraordinary old man would start talking like that.
Li had no hair; An Jie thought that he might not even have a cranium. The entire top half of his head was made of some sort of metal. His right eye was obviously fake and glowed with a cold metallic shine. He had no lips; where there was meant to be his mouth, there was only a small slit left. There was a long knife scar on his chin that continued until his throat, the flesh puckered around it. A small device was inlaid at his chin that helped him speak. The little remaining human flesh on his cheeks was sunken in, dull with wrinkles and age spots as if he hadn’t removed the makeup for a horror film yet.
An Jie frowned but Li smiled. His unsmiling face could already send even flowers into cardiac arrest, but now that he had split his face wide open, it was truly terrifyingly disgusting – the slit he had for a mouth split off to both sides and opened up slightly, revealing the grey gums inside… and a row of metallic dentures. His laugh sounded from his throat along with a strange, whistling airflow. “How is it? Frightening?”
An Jie cocked his head as if to observe this person. After a short pause, he said calmly, “Good thing I had the foresight to not point the gun at your head. Is that metal skull of yours bulletproof?”
Li slowly took back his smile as he stared at this handsome young man. It was hard to describe what emotion was on R·Li’s face. To be precise, on a face like that, no matter how he twisted his expressions, it would be difficult for a normal person to understand him. An Jie felt his eyes – the only natural things on him – look at him and for a moment, they seemed to hold such complicated emotions. Then where the mouth was meant to be once again curled upwards. An Jie judged that he was smiling, but he didn’t know what was so funny.
Li shook his head. He could only make small movements. “I heard that you got sent to the hospital by a little girl. And I thought that the An Yin Hu was gone, I didn’t expect…”
An Jie side-eyed the silent, cloaked man. “No matter how gone I am, it’s difficult to stay holed up after being sent a bomb as a present, don’t you agree?”
The cloaked man suddenly spoke, still in that dry, vocoded voice. An Jie wanted to rip through his wrappings to see just what exactly was under that hood that wanted to hide so badly. “I knew that bomb couldn’t kill you, but I didn’t think that instead of leaving that place, you would follow me… and find here.”
An Jie sighed as if at a loss for what to say, his expression a little exasperated. He looked at Li as if admiring some object, then said quietly, “If you did, then he wouldn’t be piled up here like something half-dead. Li, Don’t you think so?”
Li narrowed his eyes, staring coldly at An Jie.
“Don’t you think so?” As if not fearing death, An Jie persisted, the smile on his face vanishing. The man’s expression was as cruel and heartless as ten years ago.
After a long pause, R·Li actually nodded, albeit extremely slowly. “You’re correct,” he said, the shaking muscles on his body relaxing as he leant back into the wheelchair, seemingly confident about something. “You’re correct. But Yin Hu, are you here to kill me?”
At that moment, Sixteen recovered his breath and climbed up slowly, but he didn’t dare to make any move to the door. An Jie glanced sideways at him, then looked back at the gun in his hand. He glanced at R·Li and lowered the gun just slightly. “You’re confident I won’t.”
Li chuckled. “Not won’t, can’t. Yin Hu, I thought for a long time before I understood. Your biggest weakness is how careful you are. You always think just a few steps more than others. If you’re not confident, you never move a make. I was too trusting ten years ago; I gave you access to too much information that you should have never found out and you saw through me… But now, I’m the one who holds what you don’t know. Don’t you think that’s very dangerous?”
An Jie nodded, lowering his eyes. The next moment, he suddenly shifted his gun and pulled the trigger. No one saw it coming. Sixteen’s eyes widened and he stared down at the sudden burst of blood in front of his chest in disbelief, then slumped down onto the ground. The cloaked man quickly twitched but was rooted to the ground by a cold, “I warned you, don’t move,” from An Jie.
Smooth and quick, without the blink of an eye.
Li forced out from the back of his throat, “Nice.”
An Jie ignored him. He turned around and stared straight at the cloaked man sitting on the bed, the black muzzle pointed at him. In another’s hands, this would merely be a threat… but in the hands of An Yin Hu, who knew when this bastard would flip and actually shoot something.
“Let me ask you – you or Li, both of you can answer, and as for whether I shoot you or not, that’s up to me. You better answer quickly, my patience isn’t good in a place this soundproofed,” An Jie said. “Who is Mo Yannan?”
The cloaked man turned to look at R·Li. That better-off-dead thing cared nothing for An Jie’s threat and sat there calmly as usual. Without another word, An Jie pulled the trigger and the bullet scraped by the cloaked man’s shoulder, a bare inch from his head. “I said, my patience isn’t good.”
“I just didn’t think that your first question would be on Mo Yannan,” Li started, his eyes filled with interest. “Yin Hu, Mu Lian did say you were actually a good person deep down. I saw it as a joke back then… but no wonder why you were so entranced by her; that girl was so smart she was almost wise. What a shame.”
He sighed and watched leisurely as An Jie gritted his teeth, the veins popping on the hand holding his gun.
Li said, “Mo Yannan was my work partner. I needed historical sources, so I needed someone like him who was well-versed with history…”
“Mo Yannan?” An Jie sneered. “Are you daydreaming? I’m not that blind, how could someone like him be connected to you in any way?”
As if deliberately trying to provoke him, Li shook his head and brought up Cui Mulian again. “Yin Hu, I just said that you’re not as good as your Mu Lian, you never trust. What sort of person is Mo’s wife? Even though they ended up divorced, can you imagine the chances of them getting together in the first place? And what sort of person is Mo’s son? Compared to you… all he lacks is age and experience. And his youngest daughter… Tsk, even I’m jealous of a child like that.”
An Jie didn’t reply, he quietly waited for him to continue. To be fair, out of the three children of Mo Yannan, he didn’t think that any of them were his except for Mo Jin. If that old nerd had half the wit as his children, there was no way his life would be such a mess.
“Mo was young once,” Li said slow and deliberately, as if reading out a book review. “He was a bit like his son when he was young. Of course, he wasn’t as extreme, but he was ambitious. He wanted to prove himself to everyone. He made something back then and published an essay, but no one appreciated it…” Li paused, then turned to An Jie and explained patiently, “As for what that essay is, I didn’t let you know back then and I can’t let you know what it is now.”
“So?”
“So then, we hit it off.” Li made a movement at this point, pulling his hood back up, his withered hands shrinking back into his exaggerated clothes, his voice so soft that it seemed to dissipate at the first puff of air. “It’s a shame… after Mo Cong was born, he suddenly didn’t want to work with me any more. I can’t understand why that is. Yin Hu, say, why do you think that happened?”
“Stop wasting time, do you want me to kill him?”
“Tsk, you’re such a child. It was fine that he didn’t want to work with me anymore, I couldn’t exactly force him. But who knew that Mo would end up burning all of his hard work.” Li seemed deeply sorry. “That was fine too since the person was still there and it could all be remade, but then he accidently drank this potion a friend of mine made.”
An Jie’s throat was dry. That old Mo who fought to save a stranger…
Li was silent for a long while before continuing, “When we found out, we sent him to the hospital. But we were a bit late; even though we rescued him, he was never the same Mo Yannan. He turned into a coward, his nerves got damaged by the chemicals and became hypersensitive, a gust of wind rustling the grass would frighten him… It became hard for him to focus and his memory deteriorated. What a good person, destroyed…”
“You can shut up now,” An Jie said lowly. Something pressed up against his heart, wanting to break free.
There was a father who had, in the vigor of youth, walked a thin line for his career, for those earthly things but… An Jie didn’t know if it was because he had looked after old Mo’s three children for so long that he too felt like a father, but he suddenly understood what Mo Yannan had felt when he firmly and without hesitation decided to sacrifice himself for his wife and children.
For more than ten years, he didn’t speak of this to anyone. Even when facing his wife’s betrayal and his children’s distance, he had never mentioned a word of his ideals and the life that he had given up for them.
His children all grew up one by one, eager to escape his protection, but they would never understand just how deep their father’s love was buried.
“You can… shut up now.” An Jie clenched a hand and it shook in his sleeve a little. He took a deep breath. “Let me ask you another question. Why did I meet Mo Yannan in the desert?”
R·Li was silent.
“Answer. Me.”
“Yin Hu, I’m sorry. Even though you did exceedingly well tonight, for a reward… I can only answer one question,” he said. The giant clock in the room suddenly rang and alarms chimed one after the other. An Jie startled.
The floor suddenly collapsed into great pieces. An Jie only had time to hurriedly flip onto the bed behind him and use the momentum to grab onto the chandelier above. From below him came the joyous voice of R·Li. “I knew that would be your first reaction… I forgot to mention, Yin Hu, this is my territory…”
Immediately, the floor returned to normal. An Jie frowned and jumped down, putting the gun in his belt. That undying demon! Seemed like he had already missed out on tonight’s opportunity.
Suddenly, he seemed to sense something and he jerked around. From behind the door, a figure slowly walked out, his expression terribly pale. An Jie’s throat tightened as he quietly called out, “Mo Cong…”
Author’s Notes: After writing about Old Mo, I suddenly have nothing to say.
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