AP CH3
Chapter 3 – What Kind of Decent Person Still Keeps a Diary?
“Name.”
“Huai Shi.”
“Age?”
“Seventeen…”
Sitting in the police station giving his statement, Huai Shi felt like this dialogue was way too familiar—as if he’d already repeated it several times somewhere before.
Worried that something unexpected might happen, he clutched the officer’s hand after the statement was done and anxiously asked, “You guys don’t recruit hosts here, right?”
“…”
The officer’s expression twitched. He couldn’t be bothered to answer, simply poured him a cup of tea and told him that after the inspection, he’d be free to go.
Huai Shi sighed heavily, still shaken as he sat in the chair.
The alley, the dead man, the little goldfish, the iron box.
So many bizarre elements piled together—even someone as experienced in life’s ups and downs as Huai Shi couldn’t quite make sense of it all.
But one thing was certain—this was definitely not normal!
Thinking about the explosion at the port just now… could it be some internal fight between drug dealers?
What if the box contained pure, snowy white powder? Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the police caught him with that?
Sure, he was poor enough to barely afford food, but that didn’t mean he wanted to eat government meals in jail, right?
In this situation, as a citizen of the Eastern Xia Republic—no, as someone with even the slightest bit of common sense—calling the police was definitely the right thing to do!
“You did the right thing. When you encounter something like this, the smartest move is to immediately call the police.”
In the evidence room, the officer returning his belongings nodded approvingly. “If that box had turned out to be a bomb instead of drugs, things would’ve been much worse…”
“So, what was inside that box?” Huai Shi asked curiously.
“Don’t know. We ran it through X-rays and explosives tests—it doesn’t seem dangerous. Looks like some kind of antique. As for what exactly, we’ll wait for the experts tomorrow to open it. But that’s none of your business anymore. You can go home.”
Saying this, the officer placed a basket in front of him.
Because this was a death-related case, all of Huai Shi’s personal items had been thoroughly inspected. Once he got them back, the first thing he did was check the heavy notebook he’d carried around for years.
It hadn’t been tampered with.
The officer noticed his nervousness and laughed out loud. “What’s the matter? Afraid we peeked at your diary? Kids these days still write diaries, huh? Don’t worry, we didn’t look, we didn’t look…”
Huai Shi gave an awkward smile, stuffed the notebook into his pocket, and when he picked up his phone, happened to see the bank balance text message again.
His heart throbbed painfully.
After confirming several times with the police that there was no reward money for this report, he walked out the station doors with a heavy heart, feeling that the world itself was bleak.
As he trudged down the street with his head hanging, the streetlight behind him stretched out his shadow long and thin.
Among the swaying shadows, it seemed as if a crow flapped its wings and took flight.
Boom!
Thunder rumbled across the night sky.
Almost as if waiting for Huai Shi to step outside, the pouring rain roared down again amidst lightning and thunder, after pausing only briefly in the evening.
By the time Huai Shi got home, he was soaked through.
Standing before the large iron gate, he sighed, pulled out his key, unlocked the chain fastened to the door, and pushed hard against it as its sharp creaking noise pierced through even the sound of the heavy rain.
“I’m home…”
Darkness. No reply.
Under his phone’s flashlight, the old courtyard, covered with fallen leaves, revealed its dilapidated and crumbling face.
Beneath layers of creeping ivy and vines, the wall’s plaster had long peeled away. The courtyard behind the iron gate was full of debris and fallen leaves. The long-dry fountain sat abandoned. Stone sculptures on both sides were damaged and incomplete, looking eerie and cold.
A flash of sharp lightning split the clouded sky, illuminating the grim silhouette of the ancient house stretching out over the yard.
At the foot of Qingxiu Mountain in the suburbs of Xinhai City stood Huai Shi’s home.
Long ago, it was known as the “Yuyuan Shisui Hall.” Back then, this garden, which had taken five years and a fortune to build, was a place of lavish extravagance. Flowers bloomed all year round, verdant pines and cypresses stood evergreen before the gate, and the mansion’s luxurious interiors needed no further description. The owner was once the most famous and wealthy merchant in East China, with carriages and visitors crowding the entrance daily…
But that was ninety years ago.
The world changed too fast. In just ninety years, humanity stepped from the old steam era into the electronic age, and then from the electronic age into the next. From peace to chaos, and from chaos to peace again… too many things happened—too many to remember—so that some things simply faded from people’s memories.
Now the Yu Garden, after its brief glory, had long fallen into silence and decay, forgotten by most.
Weeds grew rampant; past splendor was gone. Ivy spread over the cracked walls; the courtyard statues were broken and incomplete, unrecognizable. After being squandered and trampled on by generations of wastrels, the once-grand mansion was now empty, desolate, its walls bare. It was not even famous as a haunted house.
For Huai Shi, this decrepit house, a cello as old and fragile as the house itself, and his pitiful life were all he had left.
But as the house fell further into ruin and the cello’s seams began to crack, Huai Shi felt as if even his own life was about to say goodbye.
“Account ending in 8193: Savings account balance—144.444 yuan…”
Against the roaring wind and rain outside the window, Huai Shi finally checked his bank balance.
“Dear god… how am I supposed to live like this?!”
Even ignoring that string of ominous-looking numbers at the end, he felt an overwhelming urge to die.
What else could he do?
This was the ‘legacy’ left behind by his dearly departed parents.
When he was born, the family at least had some remaining foundation. If they’d worked hard, they could have revived the family business. But after his grandfather passed away when he was three, his parents began a swift and dazzling descent into ruin—blowing through the family fortune in a matter of years.
A pair of junkies who drank, gambled, whored, and smoked, until just before the company went bankrupt, they took off with the last of the money—leaving little Huai Shi alone to face furious creditors at the door…
Nearly everything valuable in the house had been hauled away.
If it hadn’t been for his Grandpa specifically leaving a will before his death—entrusting the lawyer to ensure this old house would be passed down to Huai Shi, allowing him to officially inherit it upon reaching adulthood—Huai Shi probably would’ve been wandering the streets like a stray dog long ago.
Sometimes, a person’s capacity for endurance was truly limitless. Take Huai Shi, for example. Ever since he was ten years old, he’d felt like he was going insane. But what he didn’t expect was that his nerves were so unnervingly resilient—so much so that even now, he showed no signs of schizophrenia.
At most, he occasionally hallucinated footsteps in the old house, heard water dripping upstairs in the dead of night, or sensed someone sighing while he slept…
But life had to go on.
Even if it couldn’t go on, it still had to.
Looking back, the fact that he’d survived this long was nothing short of a miracle.
Originally, things were slowly starting to improve. He would grow up, earn a special university admission with a full scholarship thanks to his grades, and then find a better-paying job. At last, life seemed to be straining toward something resembling the right track.
It was just that… he was so poor he was about to starve to death.
“Is life always this painful, or is it only childhood that feels this way?”
Sadly, there was no kindly middle-aged man who liked growing flowers to answer him.
He was neither a child, nor Matilda.
And so, in the midst of this long, bitter night, Huai Shi squatted on the balcony smoking, gazing helplessly into the distance at the torrential rain.
Thunder rumbled.
Cold rain poured from the sky as if it intended to swallow the entire world.
All the frustration that Huai Shi had been bottling up these past days finally exploded, rising from his chest and bursting forth as he roared at the heavens: “You damned sky! What’s the point of doing all this? If you’ve got the guts, just strike me dead already!”
“—I’m going to defy the heavens!!”
With that furious shout, all the pent-up anger in his heart was released, and at last, Huai Shi felt a bit better.
But the very next moment, he heard a deafening boom. The storm clouds above the Shisui Hall trembled violently, bursting open with the shriek of ripping steel.
Right there above the hall, the clouds split wide, and a blazing bolt of lightning lashed down like divine punishment from the heavens, striking the railing in front of him dead-on and blasting the old iron into dust.
The air stank of ozone and scorched stone as fragments scattered in every direction. Huai Shi collapsed onto the floor.
“Holy crap… that actually worked?”
He scrambled frantically back into the house, and before shutting the window, he nervously poked his head out and shouted, “No more defying! No more defying, big brother! I was just kidding!”
Smack!
The window slammed shut.
Huai Shi sat down on the chair, eyes brimming with unshed tears, ready to howl toward the ceiling again.
Life was impossible like this!
His bank balance had officially dropped to three digits. He’d nearly landed a job at a host club by mistake while searching for work. Even coming home involved strange deaths. And now, trying to defy heaven had nearly gotten him struck by lightning…
At this point, his only hope lay in his idiot friends on the internet bringing him some small bit of joy to his miserable life.
Clinging to a shred of hope, Huai Shi opened his phone, only to see someone in the class group chat post a photo of him standing outside that host club. A whole crowd was @-ing him excitedly. Someone named Beast and Submissive Heart was even shouting: “Congrats to President Hua on his official debut as the number one host! Should all the girls in class chip in to send you a flower wreath?”
“Get lost! I don’t like the girls—I prefer delicate pretty boys like you two cue-ball freaks!”
After replying, Huai Shi shut his phone and couldn’t help but cover his face in despair.
Great. Now the entire world knew he almost became a host…
What was the most frustrating thing in life? It wasn’t losing your good name after doing something vile—it was losing your good name without even doing anything vile yet.
How unfair!
Why was this happening?
He had this huge house now. He even had a golden finger. Two great fortunes should have doubled his joy, brought even more happiness, given him the dream life. So why—
Boom!
Before he could finish the thought, another bolt of lightning crashed outside the window, making Huai Shi flinch. He didn’t dare think nonsense anymore. Sniffling, he dug out that thick notebook from his bag.
“Can’t you be a little more useful? Look at other people’s golden fingers—they get stat boosts, missions, even turn into pretty girls! All you do is write diary entries?”
Yes, this stupid thing was his so-called golden finger.
Ever since he’d found it after running a fever at age nine, Huai Shi knew it wasn’t an ordinary item. He kept it safe, dreaming every night of hearing a mysterious voice saying, ‘Super XX System loaded successfully!’ so he could rise to fame and fortune, become a god, have his life turned into a wish-fulfillment novel, count money until hundreds of cash counters burned out, become so famous that even after death he’d turn into a pretty girl in a gacha game…
And yet, to this day, the damned thing showed no signs of actually doing anything useful.
It just looked like a thick, indestructible notebook—couldn’t be torn, couldn’t be burned, couldn’t even get wet. Its only notable feature was that it automatically wrote diary entries every day, recording every single thing he did… as if it intended to archive all his most embarrassing moments for future mockery.
He opened the heavy cover. On the title page, the silhouette of a crow still stood out clearly.
Huai Shi flipped straight to the end to review the magical chaos that was his life today. When he reached the part describing his release from the police station, he paused in surprise.
“In the shifting shadows, it seemed a crow spread its wings and flew away?”
Huai Shi read the line aloud and couldn’t help but sigh, “Didn’t expect this thing to bother with setting the mood… Maybe I can plagiarize a few passages from it and sell them in some fantasy novel for cash.”
Of course, this shameful thought was also mercilessly recorded.
“…”
Huai Shi sighed and idly flipped through the pages, but unexpectedly—where there should’ve been nothing but blank paper in the back—he found a thick separator. Behind it were strange files…
They looked like resumes, complete with two-inch ID photos.
Most showed brawny men with big heads and thick arms—guys who could beat up Huai Shi ten times over. A few unfamiliar snake-faced women were among them too. And one bald, haggard-looking middle-aged man whose face seemed vaguely familiar from the local news…
Chen Bo, Wang Quan, Mu Jing, Lu Bai…
Those odd files multiplied rapidly until there were over seventy of them.
“What the hell…”
Huai Shi stared dumbfounded at the notebook, stroking his chin. Had the lightning strike activated it?
He set the notebook on the balcony and shouted toward the sky, “Hey, hit me a few more times, will you?”
But Heaven ignored him, not even bothering to throw him a bone.
In the awkward silence that followed, the notebook dutifully updated itself with his latest stupidity…
“Ahem, let’s all pretend that never happened.”
Huai Shi sighed, took the notebook back, and tossed it onto the desk.
Forget it. No idea what was going on anyway. He still had to find a job tomorrow. Might as well sleep. In dreams, anything was possible…
He flopped onto the bed and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, under the dim streetlight stood a hunched figure, crouched like an ape. As it slowly raised its head toward him, a hideous mask came into view.
In the next instant, he died.
Sub-title: Shocking! Failed to sell body, destitute boy tragically dies at home.