By the time Qingmu returned to Liuying Lane, Ruhua Bar was already full of customers.
Xiao Qi spotted Qingmu and came over to greet him. "Why are you back so late today?"
"Oh, I had something to take care of. Where's Mo Yu?" Qingmu saw that the young men in the bar's regular band had returned and were singing on the little stage.
Xiao Qi jutted his chin toward the counter. "Over there, learning to mix drinks from the boss lady."
"She seems to be recovering pretty well." Qingmu saw Mo Yu standing behind the counter, chatting and laughing with Bi Shenghua.
"Yeah. The boss lady said she slept pretty soundly last night. She just can't remember anything from the past few days, as if she has amnesia."
"You didn't stay with her last night?" Qingmu asked.
Xiao Qi blushed and gave a sheepish laugh. "How could I stay with her? She's a girl, you know!"
Qingmu smiled. "She still doesn't know about her sleepwalking, does she?"
"With the boss lady's temperament, how could she keep it a secret?" Xiao Qi said. "She told her last night."
Qingmu was a little surprised. "That girl's pretty resilient."
"Isn't she just!" Xiao Qi said. "If something like that happened to me, I'd be scared out of my mind." Then he asked, "Hey, those unorthodox tricks of yours are so powerful. Why not help her recover her memories?"
Qingmu shook his head. "Some things are better forgotten than remembered."
Xiao Qi paused, vaguely guessing something, and said no more about it. He pointed toward the counter. "Go on, report for duty."
Qingmu ambled over to the counter, his slippers slapping, sat on a barstool, and said, "A cold beer."
Bi Shenghua had seen him long before. She took out a bottle of beer and slammed it onto the counter with a bang. "So you finally deigned to come back!"
Mo Yu came over with a smile to open his bottle, then brought him a glass and whispered, "Boss Coal's already been fed. The boss lady cooked braised pork hock herself."
Qingmu grinned at Bi Shenghua.
Bi Shenghua complained to Mo Yu, "He's not even as good at talking as that bird of his. He can't even say thank you. It's as if I owed him in a past life. Whatever you do for him, he takes it for granted."
Mo Yu covered her mouth and giggled.
Just then, more customers came in, sat down, and ordered. Xiao Qi was busy with another table and was struggling to keep up. Qingmu was about to get up and serve them when Mo Yu stopped him. "You just got back. Take a break. I'll go."
"You're a singer, a future star," Qingmu said. "Leave this sort of work to me."
But Mo Yu said, "You saved me. I should thank you properly. From now on, when I'm not busy, let me serve the customers."
"From now on?" Qingmu watched her walk away with the drinks menu, then said to Bi Shenghua, "She said 'from now on'! Is she not leaving?"
"She said she doesn't want to go home for summer vacation," Bi Shenghua said. "She's decided to stay here until school starts."
"Congratulations on getting another free waiter!" Qingmu said.
Bi Shenghua put on a stern face. "What do you mean, 'another'? You think you work for free? Does your rent not count as money? And what about food and drink for you and Boss Coal? Look at her. She can sing and wait tables. Either way, she's better than you!"
Qingmu smacked his beer-foamed lips. "Watch out, or you'll bring trouble down on yourself."
Bi Shenghua rolled her eyes at him. "Like hell I'm scared!"
He watched Mo Yu weave through the bar, taking customers' orders one moment and mixing drinks behind the counter the next. Occasionally, she took a turn onstage in place of the band members and sang a couple of songs, earning a round of applause.
Qingmu kept feeling that Mo Yu had recovered a little too quickly. A young girl who had seen her own dead face in a mirror and then sleepwalked for seven days had woken up and started waiting tables in a bar as though nothing had happened. No matter how he looked at it, it wasn't normal.
Still, with Mo Yu there, Qingmu suddenly had plenty of free time. For several nights in a row, he had nothing to do.
He often glanced toward the darkest corner. For some reason, the spot that had once been neglected because it offered no view of the stage had become particularly popular over the past couple of days. Customers would sit there for ages, unwilling to leave. Some even stayed planted there until the bar closed.
Mo Yu said the spot had atmosphere. Bi Shenghua said atmosphere, her ass-a vixen had sat there and left her musky scent behind.
Qingmu foolishly walked over to the spot, sniffed hard, and said in all seriousness, "Musky? I don't smell anything!"
Then came two loud crashes as two empty beer bottles traced angry arcs through the air and smashed against the floor and wall beside Qingmu.
Holding a broom and dustpan, Xiao Qi swept up the broken glass, unable to stop cackling.
"What exactly happened?" Mo Yu asked.
Xiao Qi laughed and said quietly, "Musky. Really musky!"
Mo Yu seemed to realize something and covered her mouth, laughing too.
Boss Coal appeared from somewhere, flapping his wings, and cried in the peculiar quavering voice of a bird, "Oh-ho-what did I miss? Ruhua? Ru-hua-"
Another series of glass-shattering crashes followed, accompanied by the beating of the crow's wings and startled caws.
Hu Xing sent a message saying they hadn't found any information about Situ. There was no one named Situ among the Chinese students at MIT in the United States. Recent entry and exit records did include a few people with the surname Situ, but they were either women or elderly people, while the local police station had yet to turn up anything useful.
Qingmu was beginning to wonder whether he was being oversensitive. Could that "Situ" have been someone Mo Yu had imagined? Had she been in a state of self-hypnosis from the very beginning?
Mo Yu was enjoying herself at Ruhua Bar, and Qingmu had no intention of probing her inner world or the secrets hidden in her subconscious.
Since everything was normal, he decided to set the matter aside for now and pay Professor Mei Yiqiu a visit.
Professor Mei had sent him a message-he had found some leads on the symbol consisting of two connected inverted triangles.
Mei Yiqiu was famous in academic circles. Besides psychology, he was a leading authority in neuroscience and genetics. What few people knew was that he also had considerable achievements in polymer chemistry and quantum mechanics.
He had great influence and high standing, as could be seen from the fact that he personally owned a large, independent laboratory of more than five hundred square meters in Wuzhong City.
Professor Mei was very thin and liked wearing Zhongshan suits and smoking a pipe. His graying hair was stiff and curly, often giving the impression that it was standing on end in fury. Had it not been for his typically East Asian face, one might have thought he was Einstein reincarnated.
In Wuzhong City, Professor Mei could ignore anyone he pleased. He had earned that right. Even the mayor had to call his assistant to make an appointment before seeing him.
Few people visited Mei Yiqiu without a reason, because everyone knew about his foul temper. If he took a dislike to you, or if you did even the slightest thing to displease him, he could tear you to shreds right to your face.
When he wanted to berate someone, he didn't care whether their bank balance had nine digits or ten. In his eyes, it was merely a string of numbers. Compared with the speed of light, quantum jumps, and the dimensions of the universe, those numbers were insignificant however long they were, and did nothing for humanity's future.
Few people measured up in Professor Mei Yiqiu's eyes, especially in Wuzhong City, where they were rarer still. Yet, whether it was because they shared common ground in their eccentric dress and behavior or for some other reason, Professor Mei was very fond of the young Qingmu.
And in all of Wuzhong, apart from the professor's assistant, Qingmu alone could enter and leave Mei Yiqiu's laboratory freely without an appointment.