Cross the Boundary GL - Chapter 12

Li Chu remained motionless. Suddenly, Qin Song honked the horn loudly, causing the female students waiting for a bus nearby to cover their ears and jump, turning their heads to yell at the window, “Are you crazy?!”

The person inside the car, a woman with heavily tattooed arms, propped her elbow on the window frame, ignoring the insults and using the horn to amplify her emotions.

Li Chu felt that if she didn’t get in the car soon, Qin Song would attract a traffic cop. She quickly pulled Lin Zhiyan along and opened the car door.

Just as she was about to step into the back seat, Qin Song, without turning her head, commanded in a flat tone, “You sit in the passenger seat.”

The front seat was much more spacious than the back. Li Chu carefully buckled her seatbelt, secretly observing Qin Song and occasionally glancing at Lin Zhiyan in the back.

Lin Zhiyan didn’t dare to make a sound and sent a message to Li Chu: “Is this a client? She seems more like a sugar daddy!”

Li Chu sent a dizzy emoji: “She’s that regular I told you about. This is the first time I’ve known she has a car.”

“Maybe she doesn’t usually drive? That means she lives close by. There are only two high-end residential areas around here, one on this side of the road, and one on the other. Which one do you think it is?”

Li Chu held her phone and thought carefully. There was only one high-end residential area on the other side of the road, and the rent was more expensive than the one on this side.

“Cheng’an Apartments? The one where the monthly rent is over eleven thousand?”

She yearned for that place, and had once considered buying a house there if she ever became rich.

Lin Zhiyan replied instantly: “How can you be sure she didn’t buy it?”

Li Chu was speechless.

The car drove fast and steady. Even the navigation system lagged a few times. The forty-minute journey was cut down to twenty.

By the time they reached the entrance of Hongfu, Li Chu and Lin Zhiyan still hadn’t finished their conversation.

Qin Song had already unlocked the doors: “Get out.”

The area was relatively remote, with old and narrow alleys. The wide car barely managed to squeeze through, and after parking, there was no room to open the doors.

Lin Zhiyan, with her bag on her back, whispered to Li Chu, “Will she be able to get out later?”

Li Chu’s intuition told her: yes. Qin Song was always formidable, nothing seemed impossible for her. She even felt that nothing could ever really stump her.

Except for the unknown threats at the bar, and her masochism.

Her intuition was correct, but Qin Song didn’t get out because she was slender. Her way of getting out was simply unique.

This was also the first time Li Chu realized a car’s sunroof could be used this way. With a flick of her tattooed arm, Qin Song was already on the car roof, then her long legs stepped down. The movement was incredibly fluid, as if she did this often.

Lin Zhiyan’s eyes widened again: “Wow! That’s cool!”

“…” Do normal people get out of a car through the sunroof? Li Chu thought. Lin Zhiyan saw everything so simply. She couldn’t tell that Qin Song’s mental state was very troubled.

If she wasn’t troubled, why was she so unpredictable? And why was she so hot and cold, so moody, yet so desperately yearning for warmth?

Just as Li Chu was nervously wondering if Qin Song would do something else insane, Qin Song walked up to her and asked in a tone without any discernible fluctuation, “Aren’t we going to eat?”

“We are!” Lin Zhiyan reacted, “I’ll take you.”

The boiled fish restaurant was deep in the alley. They passed many other restaurants crowded with people. Li Chu walked and looked around.

It was too crowded here. She didn’t think Qin Song would be happy.

Qin Song was indeed not very happy. She walked on the very edge, her body trying to avoid contact with people, her face grim.

The deep alleys and crowded places reminded her of bad memories, as if they were etched into her brain. Many times, she would have forgotten, but once a similar person or thing appeared, it would madly invade her nerves.

This pain had tormented her for many years, and still did.

The boiled fish restaurant entrance was, of course, also full of people. Lin Zhiyan went inside, brought out a chair, and said to the two of them, “I only got one chair. I’ll go queue, you two do rock-paper-scissors?”

So Qin Song sat on the chair, and Li Chu stood leaning against the wall.

Lin Zhiyan gave the pink-haired woman a strange look. From her perspective, Li Chu was younger, so the chair should have been given to her, but Qin Song’s action of sitting down was so natural, she didn’t seem to have any intention of giving it up.

When Lin Zhiyan first saw Qin Song, her first reaction was that this person must not be in good health. The dark circles were obvious and sickly on her pale face. She even considered for a few seconds if Qin Song might have… dabbled in drugs.

But now, aside from climbing out of a sunroof, she didn’t seem to be connected to that kind of thing. She drove steadily and spoke logically. She was just too cold. Lin Zhiyan was so chilled she barely spoke.

Here, Li Chu was leaning against the wall, picking at the hangnails on her fingers. The skin she tore off stung and hurt. She couldn’t feel the same pain as others.

She turned to look at the person sitting on the chair. Qin Song had her arms crossed, head down, eyes closed, resting. The various ornaments on her ears hung down, catching some of her pink hair.

The way she sat quietly in the corner made one mistakenly think this was a peaceful corner in a bustling crowd. Unfortunately, it was actually a volcano about to erupt, with a snowy peak suppressing the vent.

She didn’t look easy to mess with, even with her eyes closed, even with the dark, weak restaurant lights making her features look soft.

With her eyes closed, Qin Song felt a little tired. The crowd was noisy. She wasn’t used to this environment. It made her lose control of her emotions.

The doctor should have warned her, this was also an illness.

She had countless illnesses. She had once made a list of them, but the list was eventually thrown into a shredder, turning into scraps.

Her eyeballs rotated under her eyelids, but she still couldn’t escape the overly noisy background. Qin Song simply opened her eyes and raised her head.

In front of her, Li Chu and Lin Zhiyan were holding hands, chatting animatedly, not noticing someone carrying a tray passing by behind them. The three of them collided by chance, and hot oil sizzled and dripped down.

Lin Zhiyan quickly leaned over and pulled Li Chu into her arms.

“Watch where you’re going!” she frowned.

The person carrying the tray turned around: “You’re the ones not watching where you’re going! Who are you blaming?”

Lin Zhiyan’s expression became incredulous: “We’re queuing properly! What are you doing? What if that hot oil burns someone?”

Her domineering stance with her bag on her back wasn’t intimidating. Because she was so cheerful and bright-looking, she just looked a little like she was pouting.

So the other person wasn’t cowed either: “You little girl, you’re just making things up. You’re standing in the middle of the road and you’re slandering me for bumping into you?”

“Who’s slandering you? This is the queueing line.”

The argument went on. Li Chu was afraid they would start fighting. Lin Zhiyan’s personality, to put it nicely, was sunny and cheerful. To put it badly, she was a bit brainless.

Her words were not polite, so the other person was, of course, even more defiant.

After listening for a while, Qin Song couldn’t bear it anymore: “Shut up.”

With her one word, everyone watching the show went silent.

She walked unhurriedly to the middle of the three, glanced at Li Chu, who was leaning against Lin Zhiyan’s shoulder, and her expression instantly darkened: “So noisy.”

Her two tattooed arms were loosely crossed. Her eyes were as deep as an endless black, like ink.

This wasn’t like her. Only certain words would make her move. But just now, seeing Li Chu stumble and fall into Lin Zhiyan’s arms, her heart inexplicably felt empty. The unsettled feeling was like a water snake, coiling from the tips of her nerves.

Qin Song was getting irritable again. She turned sideways to look at Li Chu and said coldly, “Are you going to lean on her until this is over?”

Li Chu didn’t understand the necessary connection between the two things, but Qin Song looked so harsh and desolate that she instinctively pulled away from Lin Zhiyan, hastily retreating to the other side.

After she finished this series of movements, Qin Song’s expression was slightly better. She turned to deal with the person carrying the tray: “You’re probably not blind.”

Before she even finished speaking, the other person, who had just sat down, stood up with a “swish”: “Who are you calling blind? What’s your name? You three women, if you’re sick, go get treatment. Don’t come here to cause trouble!”

Lin Zhiyan immediately stepped forward: “You fucking say that again?!”

“I’m fucking saying it, what about it!”

“Carrying hot oil and not watching where you’re going, you must be blind, huh?”

The atmosphere was like a fire sparking, with billows of smoke. Li Chu’s eyes quickly turned red. She whispered a plea: “Stop arguing. He didn’t hit me anyway. Let it go, Zhiyan jie.”

Lin Zhiyan’s brows were on fire. She didn’t look like she wanted to give up.

So she had to look at Qin Song.

Qin Song was extremely irritated by the fact that Li Chu prioritized Lin Zhiyan. She couldn’t control this escalating emotion. She raised her eyes and stared at the person without moving: “Then none of us will leave today.”

The calm and slow way she added fuel to the fire and the indifferent way she said something crazy had a similar effect. Li Chu had a vague feeling that this atmosphere was not good.

One Lin Zhiyan was enough to cause a mess here. She couldn’t have another Qin Song, especially a mentally unstable Qin Song.

So Li Chu, without a second thought, stepped forward and blocked the three people’s line of sight with her body: “Zhiyan jie, didn’t we come here to eat boiled fish? It’s almost our turn.”

Her eyes were so wet and clear, glistening with tears. Anyone who saw her couldn’t bear to refuse. Lin Zhiyan’s expression softened, and she returned to her normal demeanor: “Okay, the boiled fish is more important after all.”

A farce must come to an end, but Qin Song was not very happy with this ending. Her emotions had been agitated, but Li Chu only spoke to Lin Zhiyan, as if she were a machine that was only turned on when needed.

This feeling of being rootless was both disgusting and unwanted. Ever since she met Li Chu, she had been forced to endure this loss of control.

So on the way back, it was the maximum of Qin Song’s tolerance to let Lin Zhiyan get to the subway station unharmed.

After Lin Zhiyan left, Li Chu said quietly, “You shouldn’t have been like that either. Why did you go crazy with Zhiyan jie?”

The tendons on Qin Song’s hands gripping the steering wheel were protruding, looking frighteningly fierce. She changed from using both hands to one, and the other hand pressed hard on Li Chu’s collarbone, which was covered by the seatbelt.

“Are you comparing me to her?” she laughed very, very slowly, but it was a laugh filled with a chilling, deathly aura.

Li Chu only gave her a terrified look, then immediately turned her eyes to the front glass: “There’s a car ahead!”

The hand Qin Song had on the steering wheel moved. The car narrowly scraped past another, but because she turned too sharply, the dark SUV shot out of the road and crashed into a concrete post in the median.

Li Chu was thrown around by the inertia. She held her head tightly and ducked her body down. In that instant, she felt like she had been to the gates of hell. Even the extreme pain of the seatbelt on her neck seemed less important.

She caught her breath and immediately looked at the driver’s seat. Qin Song’s pale collarbone rose and fell weakly. If you didn’t look carefully, you wouldn’t even notice she was still alive.

But she was indeed alive, and perfectly fine. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and her forehead, yet the corner of her mouth lifted in a terrifying smile.

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