The Note

At eleven o'clock deep in the night, the street outside the old apartment was shrouded in a thin layer of fog. In the distance, the wail of an ambulance siren came and went intermittently, as if slicing several gashes into the沉闷 city night.

Lin Wanqiao sat on the edge of the bed, her back stiff and rigid. The light in her bedroom was off; only a warm yellow desk lamp on the table burned tirelessly, its circle of light just barely covering the notebook spread open on her lap. Her gaze kept sweeping across the wall covered in floral wallpaper.

The orientation training at Starry Group during the day still hadn't faded from her mind. Meng Wei's eyes, sharp as blades, and Lu Shiyue — that CEO who sat at the head of the conference room, lowering the entire room's气压 with just a single look. The way he rubbed the crown of his watch, his words "Don't waste my time on anything beyond logic" — all of it made Lin Wanqiao feel tense.

But right now, what made her even more tense was this wall.

"...What gives you the right?"

That voice sounded again.

Still that same clear, youthful timbre, yet roughened by immense suppression. Lin Wanqiao held her breath and quietly edged closer to the wall. She could hear the faint rustling of paper on the other side, accompanied by the creaking sound of an old fan spinning.

That was a sound that would never appear in the dead of night in 2024. Modern apartments were all equipped with silent inverter air conditioners; who would still use one of those old iron-blade desk fans?

"I said I'm not going... That's your wish, not mine." The boy's voice rose a pitch, followed by a dull thud, like a fist slamming hard against a wooden desk.

Lin Wanqiao's heart inexplicably skipped a beat. She instinctively reached out to touch the slightly curled wallpaper at the seam of the wall. Her fingertips met a cold, chalky feel, but as the voice rose and fell, she had an illusion — that this wall was slightly warm, as if it weren't just a pile of bricks and mortar, but a thin, pulsating layer of skin.

"Wanqiao? You're still not asleep?"

Suddenly, Zhao Li's voice came from outside the door, accompanied by the slap-slap of slippers on wooden floorboards.

Lin Wanqiao startled, her whole body trembling. She instantly pulled her hand back and practically threw herself back under the covers. She switched off the desk lamp, and the room plunged into dead silence.

"Wanqiao?" Zhao Li pushed the door open a crack and poked half her head in. She was wearing that slightly goofy soft sleep cap, holding a slipper in one hand, staring suspiciously at Lin Wanqiao in the dark. "I thought I heard a man's voice in your room just now? Don't scare me in the middle of the night."

"No... no." Lin Wanqiao buried her face in her pillow, her voice muffled. "It must have been a passerby on the street. You know how thin the soundproofing is in this place."

"True." Zhao Li pursed her lips, muttered, and backed out. "This crappy house... I'm going to buy some earplugs tomorrow. I kept feeling like there was movement in the walls just now, like a ghost story. Scared me to death."

As the door clicked shut, Lin Wanqiao let out a long sigh. She sat up again. Instead of turning on the light, she used the faint glow of the streetlamp filtering through the window to pull out a stack of pink sticky notes from her drawer.

These were office supplies Meng Wei had given to every new hire when she joined Starry. Bright pink paper, edges with a faint tacky feel, exquisitely refined and smooth under the modern industrial production line.

She held the pen, her fingertips trembling.

If this wall really connected to ten years ago, if that boy really was Lu Shiyue...

She quickly wrote a sentence on the sticky note: "Who are you? Where are you?"

After writing it, she felt the words were too much like a background check, or even some kind of prank. She stared at the line of text for a long moment. In the end, she didn't tear it off. Instead, holding her breath, she knelt on the mattress and reached her hand toward the seam in the wall.

The opening of the seam was extremely small, hidden in the crease of the floral wallpaper. Lin Wanqiao used her fingernail to gently push aside the lime dust, and felt a faint suction there. She folded the pink sticky note in half and carefully, cautiously, pushed it into the gap.

The process of the paper disappearing between her fingers was very strange. It didn't fall into an empty hole; it was like being swallowed by some viscous, shapeless stream of water. When the last corner of the sticky note disappeared into the seam, Lin Wanqiao even felt a slight ringing in her ears.

She stared fixedly at that spot, her heartbeat thundering violently in her chest, drowning out the distant traffic.

One minute. Two minutes.

The other side of the wall was terrifyingly silent.

Just as Lin Wanqiao thought it was all a absurd hallucination and was about to lie down and sleep, a violent tearing sound suddenly came from the wall seam.

"Rip—Rip—"

It was the sound of paper being frantically crumpled and torn.

"Get lost! All of you, get lost!" The boy's low roar carried a kind of despairing hostility. "No one listens to me anyway, you've already decided everything... So why even ask me!"

Then, Lin Wanqiao saw the gap suddenly spit out a crumpled ball.

It was a piece of white paper, wildly crumpled, like a discarded bullet, landing precisely on her pillow.

Lin Wanqiao's breath instantly froze. With trembling hands, she picked up the crumpled paper and smoothed it out bit by bit.

Due to age or storage conditions, the paper showed an unnatural yellowish-brown color, the edges rough with torn marks, the texture far rougher than modern copy paper. The paper was densely printed with blue grids — the kind of math scratch paper most commonly used by high school students ten years ago.

Lin Wanqiao turned on the desk lamp.

By the light, she made out the content on the paper.

It was a draft that had been defaced beyond recognition. At the top were several complex trigonometry problems, the handwriting sharp and lean, each stroke ending with an almost obsessively heavy downward pressure — startlingly similar to the way Lu Shiyue signed documents now.

But beneath those math problems was a brutal "battlefield."

The word "Architecture" had been viciously crossed out with a red ballpoint pen, the force so great it had torn through the paper. Next to it, roughly scrawled, were two words: Finance.

Around those two words were several lines of messy dialogue, like angry notes jotted down during a quarrel:

— "The Lu family doesn't need an architect, only someone who can manage the accounts."

— "You got such high scores just to go carry bricks at a construction site?"

— "This is for your own good."

The last line had been blacked out into a massive ink blob by the boy with a black pen. Lin Wanqiao leaned in close and could only make out a few blurry words at the edges of the ink:

"...I want to disappear."

Lin Wanqiao's fingers tightened suddenly, the paper letting out a crisp crackling sound between her fingertips.

An indescribable bitterness welled up from the bottom of her heart. She thought of Lu Shiyue during the day — that man standing at the pinnacle of power and wealth, cold, rational, unassailable. He was like a precisely running instrument, never revealing any emotion, even his reprimands to subordinates carrying a kind of mechanical precision.

But who could have imagined that, in the dead of night ten years ago, he had once despairingly written "I want to disappear" on a piece of scratch paper?

On the other side of the wall, the boy's suppressed breathing, on the verge of sobbing but forcibly choked back, pierced Lin Wanqiao's eardrums like needles. She looked down at her own pink sticky note from 2024 that had disappeared, confirming it had stayed in the past. This强烈的时空撕裂感 made her dizzy.

In Lu Shiyue's eyes on that side, what would he see? A weird pink note emerging from the wall?

Would he think it was some kind of prank? Or a glimmer of illusion he had caught in his despair?

Lin Wanqiao took a deep breath, calming her mind. She knew she was touching a secret that could change destiny. If she stayed silent now, then the Lu Shiyue of ten years ago would still obey his family's arrangements, give up the architecture he loved, study that cold, dry finance that made him冰冷, and eventually become that emotionless CEO at the top of Starry Tower.

But if...

The image of Lu Shiyue rubbing the crown of his watch in the meeting room appeared in her mind. That gesture was actually incongruous. In someone so extremely self-disciplined, it looked more like a lingering consequence of years of anxiety.

He wasn't happy. Even though he owned Starry, even though he had the status that everyone looked up to.

Lin Wanqiao picked up her pen again. This time, she didn't use those polite inquiries.

She tore off another pink sticky note. This color must have been very eye-catching in 2014, right? Like an alien intruding into a gray world.

She put pen to paper, writing each character extremely slowly, extremely carefully:

"Lu Shiyue."

She wrote his name first. This was the first time she had addressed him by name in an informal setting — no longer the reverent "Mr. Lu," but like an old friend, or a witness.

"Become the person you want to be. The me ten years from now will prove that you made it."

After writing this sentence, she stared at it for a long time. Was this, to some extent, a spoiler? Would it cause a collapse in time and space?

But when she thought of the crossed-out "Architecture" on the note, of the boy's "I want to disappear," all her顾虑 dissipated.

She knelt by the bed again, her fingertips gently touching the seam in the wall.

"Thump. Thump."

She gently tapped the wall, as if confirming whether the other person was still there.

On the other side of the wall, the boy's breathing seemed to pause for a moment.

Lin Wanqiao didn't hesitate. She pushed the pink sticky note, carrying the courage from ten years later, bit by bit into the dark gap.

This time, the note disappeared quickly.

She pressed her ear to the wall and heard a faint, puzzled sniff from the other side. Then, the soft rustle of paper being unfolded.

The wind of 2024 slipped in through the crack in the window, stirring the stray hairs at Lin Wanqiao's temples. She closed her eyes, as if she could see, in that room ten years ago, a boy with a tear-streaked, angry face, staring in astonishment at the bright pink note that had materialized out of thin air.

Shaken by this connection spanning ten years, Lin Wanqiao scrambled into her bed.

She tightly gripped the yellow scratch paper that had been "spit out" from 2014, feeling its rough texture. This was no longer an illusion; this was real physical evidence.

In the real workplace, she was that insignificant newcomer doubted by Meng Wei and scrutinized by Lu Shiyue; but in front of this wall, she seemed to be the only one who could save that desperate boy. She didn't know what kind of waves this small note would stir up — whether it would instantly change reality, or sink like a stone into the sea.

But at least at this moment, she heard from the other side of the wall that the always tense, heavy breathing seemed to finally let out a long exhale.

It was a sound of relief.

Lin Wanqiao closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep in the darkness. She didn't notice that the scratch paper pressed under her pillow, in the residual warmth after the desk lamp was turned off, had the ink blob at the bottom seem to have faded slightly, revealing an extremely fine scratch mark, like a reply.

And at this moment, at the other end of the city, in the CEO's office on the top floor of Starry Tower.

Lu Shiyue stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at the sleeping city. He was still wearing the suit from the day, his tie pulled loose and disheveled.

He took a wallet out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket.

The wallet was very old, the edges worn to white fibers, looking completely out of place with his expensive, custom-tailored suit.

His slender fingers slowly opened the wallet, and from the innermost compartment, he carefully took out a neatly folded piece of paper.

It was bright pink.

Although ten years had passed, although the color had somewhat faded, under the cold white fluorescent light of the office, that pink was still startlingly conspicuous.

He stared at the line of handwriting he had long since memorized, his fingertips unconsciously rubbing it.

"Who exactly are you?"

He murmured quietly, his voice carrying a paranoia suppressed for ten years.

He turned around, his gaze falling on a list of new employees on his desk. The wind blew, flipping the list, and it happened to stop at a personal information page. His eyes, sweeping over it, abruptly halted, and finally came to rest on the three characters "Lin Wanqiao" and the photo next to it showing a stiff, awkward smile.

He frowned slightly, as if catching some fleeting sense of familiarity.

That feeling was like, on that rainy night ten years ago, in the midst of his despair, the faint scent of paper with a modern industrial smell that he had caught.