Running Away

The deputy director’s sharp cry seemed to pull Yu Mao back to a sliver of awareness. Her eyes shifted; dull and motionless, like a pair of mirrored lenses reflecting nothing, she remained trapped in her own emotions.

“She won’t be happy. She’ll be sad. I’m hurting her…"

She murmured to herself, her voice soft, quick, and light. She looked like a string stretched taut to the point of snapping.

“I’m hurting her. Always, always… Why record this? Why let her see it…"

“No, it’s my fault. I regret it. I shouldn’t have come here. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have come here…"

Her words came faster and more broken, and though she sat there so still, she looked frantic and unhinged. The deputy director was so rattled that cold sweat broke out across her back; for a moment, she was too frightened to speak.

She finally forced down the panic in her chest and tried to say something to comfort her, but she never even got the chance to open her mouth before Yu Mao suddenly sprang to her feet and blurted out one sentence: “I’m withdrawing from the competition.”

Even as the words left her mouth, she had already darted out the door.

“…"

“No, wait…” The deputy director raised a hand and pointed toward the doorway, but the person was already gone. The words stuck in her throat.

…

“She should know by now.” The director picked up her phone and glanced at the time. “I had someone go tell her. Things blew up too much; she had to be informed.”

And since they were at it, they might as well ride the wave for more traffic. Money well earned.

Her only concern was that this might bring the higher-ups down on them. After all, the vaguely worded things in that recording would definitely hurt them. Especially since… there might really be some hidden secret buried behind it.

But she also thought the chances were low. The whole thing had spread too fast; saying everyone in the country knew about it now would not be an exaggeration. If they suppressed it too aggressively right away, it would only make the rumors seem true.

At her words, Nan Changgeng nodded and lowered her eyes into silence, making it impossible to tell what she was thinking.

The atmosphere sank into awkward heaviness. The director shifted in her seat and tried to steer the conversation.

“Ah, Yu Mao really is pitiful. You had no impression of her at all before this? I thought you must have met her before.”

There were many things she wanted to ask, but most of them went too deep and were not fit to discuss with a stranger, especially with cameras still rolling, so she tactfully held back.

“No. I don’t remember.” Nan Changgeng rested her forehead on one hand on the table; her voice was low and weak. “According to the recording, if she came looking for me again after that, she definitely wouldn’t have let me see her.”

The director frowned, and the question slipped out before she could stop herself. “Then why did she come back now?”

As soon as she said it, both of them seemed to realize something. Shocked, they looked at each other.

Nan Changgeng suddenly dropped her hand and sat up straight. It felt as if a wave had crashed down from the top of her head and surged through her body, cold and wet, the roaring in her veins tangled with the pounding of her heart. In that instant of shock, even her vocal cords trembled.

“She… could it be…"

Her throat suddenly tightened, and she could not finish the cruel guess. So she changed course, forcing down her emotions and asking urgently, “Where is Yu Mao now?!"

“She’s right across the way…” The director turned and pointed toward the door.

Before she could finish, the door was shoved open hard, revealing the deputy director’s furious face.

“Director! Yu Mao ran off!!”

“What!?”

“What!!”

The two of them shot to their feet at the same time; even the director’s drowsiness was startled away.

“What happened? Tell me everything!”

“She said she was withdrawing from the competition, then she took off. She didn’t even take her luggage; I didn’t have time to stop her.” The deputy director planted her hands on her hips and caught her breath. Once she realized what was happening, she had immediately gone upstairs to the dorms to look. But everything was still there; Yu Mao hadn’t come back for her luggage at all. She had just run.

She pointed at the tablet on the table. “Just check the internet and you’ll know. The netizens must have already uploaded screen recordings.”

Nan Changgeng immediately opened a blog search and, sure enough, found the topic; its popularity was still climbing rapidly.

#Yu Mao Withdraws From the Competition#

#Yu Mao I’m Hurting Her#

The livestream recording captured the audio directly. The viewers had heard it even more clearly than the deputy director had on site, and in just this short time, the marketing accounts that had uploaded it were even considerate enough to add subtitles.

After watching it, Nan Changgeng kept one hand braced on the table and for a moment couldn’t manage to stand up.

When the director finished watching the video on her phone and looked up to see her like that, she couldn’t help frowning with concern. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.”

Her head lowered, her hair fell forward under its own weight, hiding the confusion and pain on her face. It shut her off from the outside world, letting her emotions spill freely within this small space. She shook her head and repeated, “I don’t know.”

She was in complete turmoil, so much so that she could barely breathe.

Hatred, anger, bewilderment, grief; all kinds of emotions were surging wildly through her. And yet she also felt terrifyingly clear-headed, as if she were calmly watching the tangled mess in her own mind.

Among them, anger was the most vivid. She was angry at Yu Mao’s escape, angry at her self-righteousness; angry that she had presumed she could come close and then pull away at will; and angrier still at how distorted and extreme Yu Mao’s feelings toward her had become, to the point that she had been caught off guard and forced into the role of a “savior”… leaving her unable to bear it, and if she tried to step closer to fulfill that supposed “duty,” she might easily fall straight into an endless white fog, unable to tell the entrance from the exit.

Yu Mao was not some hard-to-understand person at all; she was simply too empty, too pure, and that made it impossible not to be hurt by her.

But Nan Changgeng also understood that this was not really anger or hatred; it was emotion that had built up to such an extreme that it had started to burn out of control.

She did not let herself stay lost in the chaos for long. Her fingers threaded through her hair and swept it back; she took a deep breath, turned her head, and straightened up. Looking at the two of them, she said softly, “I’m going to find her.”

Her tone was calm, but unmistakably firm. “I’ll bring her back.”

She would not accept her leaving… and even less would she accept her dying!

Both directors nodded. The words they wanted to say never came out; only sighs remained.

After getting her phone back from the staff, Nan Changgeng walked out while trying to contact the blog account under Yu Mao’s teacher’s name that had exposed everything.

Xiaofeixia remained in place; inside the livestream room, the bullet comments were scrolling so fast they blurred together, all of them saying the same thing:

[Please save her!! Only you can save her!]

…

During the time they had delayed, Yu Mao had already taken a driverless car away. She hadn’t gotten her phone back, but her ID card was on her; the embedded electronic storage chip could be used directly to pay by swiping and entering the password.

She wanted to go back as quickly as possible, back to a safe place where she could catch her breath.

As her car drove farther away, Nan Changgeng also got in touch with Lin Yan.

Lin Yan had watched the livestream and knew Nan Changgeng would probably come to her first; apart from her, no one could provide Yu Mao’s home address in detail.

After a brief exchange through blog DMs, the two of them traded numbers. While Nan Changgeng called a car, she spoke to Lin Yan on the phone.

“Hello, do you know where Yu Mao lives? Or where you think she’s most likely to go now?” She got straight to the point and wasted no words.

The other party gave her an address. “There’s a ninety percent chance she’ll come back. You don’t need to worry too much. She… won’t let herself be in danger for the time being.”

“…What do you mean?”

“It’s too early. Before she’s sure you’ve basically forgotten her, she’ll definitely do everything she can to protect herself… That’s why she ran away immediately, to avoid facing you directly.”

Nan Changgeng froze. Her fingers silently tightened around the phone. She drew in a long, quiet breath that caught at the root of her tongue and clenched her jaw.

The driverless car slowed and pulled up by the roadside, announcing in a mechanical voice:

“Passenger ending in 8212, please board.”

The robotic voice seemed to throw a handful of sand into her thoughts, making them even more chaotic, yet it also stirred the frozen air in her chest.

She moved, opened the door, and got in; then she shut it behind her. In an instant, the surroundings fell quiet, locking her inside the cramped space.

The call was still ongoing. At last, she spoke again.

“You know her very well.”

The scenery outside the window began to recede. On the other end of the phone came a bitter laugh. “Yeah. I understand her more and more now, far better than I did during the time I was recording her on the blog.”

Nan Changgeng closed her eyes and pressed the back of her head hard against the seat. “If that’s the case, should I even go find her?”

The other woman’s voice suddenly turned urgent, with a hint of pleading. “No. Come. You can hide for a while, but not for a lifetime. She needs you; no one except you can truly help her.”

Holding her breath, Nan Changgeng offered no rebuttal. She only said, “I want to know the truth. Why do she and you… both seem to think her death is imminent?”

Lin Yan seemed to have long prepared for this question; her tone held no surprise. “When you get here, I’ll tell you.”

“Fine. We’ll talk in person then.”

The call ended. Nan Changgeng steadied her breathing, her face taut, and gazed at the passing scenery outside the car while letting her mind go blank.

More than two hours of driving; long, yet strangely short. It was barely enough for her to sort through her thoughts and decide what kind of attitude she should take when facing Yu Mao.

The restlessness in her heart settled, but it revealed a trace of hesitation born of loneliness and unease.

A savior… enshrined as one in human form; with such a grand title, how could she possibly bear it?

When she arrived at the address Lin Yan had given her, she got out of the car and immediately saw a middle-aged woman in a light coffee-colored trench coat waiting by the community gate.

The moment she saw her from afar, she guessed who she was without needing to ask.

Those eyes carried the steadiness of someone who had lived through many more years; there was no trace of anxiety or worry. Just a brief meeting of eyes, and that steady presence seemed to lift her heart out of the acid it had sunk into, so that the quickened beat from earlier gradually settled again.

When she drew near, the woman spoke first and extended her hand. “Hello, I’m Lin Yan.”

Nan Changgeng nodded and shook it.

Lin Yan studied her for a couple of seconds and even found the mood to smile and praise her. “You’re calmer than I expected.”

But Nan Changgeng no longer had the energy to guess whether there was anything beneath those words. She only asked indirectly, “Aren’t you worried about her?”

“Let’s go. We’ll go upstairs first.” Lin Yan led the way ahead. Then she answered, “It’s not that I’m not worried; I’m just used to worrying. If you’d gone through this kind of thing as many times as I have, you wouldn’t be able to stay on guard every single time either.”

Nan Changgeng pressed her lips together and said nothing.

“As her teacher, you’ve really been very good to her. You were the one who truly saved her.”

But things had still come to this. A child she had gone to such lengths to save—how could she not feel sad?

Lin Yan only gave a bitter smile. “She’s my student. If I ran into it, how could I not take care of it?”

Looking the other way also required talent, and she didn’t have that talent. Some people, when faced with a choice, have no choice but to do evil; others, when faced with a choice, can only do good.

She could not endure the pain of wearing down her conscience, so she had to accept that once she took on that child’s fate, she would also have to bear whatever ending might come of it.