Chapter 12 Wedding March

Chapter 12 Wedding March

"...Things have really been getting weirder lately. Even when I get home, I feel like there's something soft and wet slithering in the dark across the floor all night... No, no, I didn’t actually see it. It’s just that the floor looked unusually clean, with damp patches, as if it had just been mopped. But when I glanced at the mop by the sink, it was completely dry..."

"And then there’s my roommate. When I was playing basketball with him, the sky turned this really dark pink... Not the usual dark red you sometimes see—I know that’s just light scattering, a physics phenomenon. But the dark pink I saw yesterday... how do I put it? It felt like a giant stomach had swallowed me, my roommate, and the entire basketball court. And later, on my way home, it was like there was this intestine leading all the way to my house, and I was walking inside it..."

Dr. Cen adjusted his glasses. "Don’t worry. Symptoms flaring up is normal. Didn’t you say you worked overtime again on Friday? And you argued with your boss. Like you said..." Dr. Cen chuckled here, "Who isn’t driven crazy by work?"

"I get it, I get it. I know I’m having episodes because I’m stressed again. I can actually tell what’s real and what’s a hallucination." Lin Jianyuan said, "But there’s one thing I really don’t understand. I’ve been thinking about it since last night..."

"What is it?"

"When I got home last night, I noticed the windows were wet. Rain was hitting the glass."

"Mhm. It rained last night, quite heavily."

"But I was completely dry."

"..." The typing stopped. Dr. Cen turned to look at him.

Lin Jianyuan looked down at his hands. They were calloused but otherwise empty.

Lin Jianyuan muttered in frustration, "It was raining so hard outside. How could I have walked all the way home and stayed dry? How do you explain that? Unless I really did walk back inside an intestine..."

"You mentioned your place is quite far from here, right?" Dr. Cen turned back to his keyboard and continued typing. "A City is huge. It might be raining here but not at your place yet. Yesterday’s rain came on suddenly—maybe it just started pouring right as you got home?"

Lin Jianyuan: "I thought about that too, but isn’t that too coincidental? Doctor, am I overthinking this?"

Dr. Cen laughed softly and shook his head. "I’ve noticed you’re always very calm. Whether it’s hallucinations or these things you can’t figure out, you analyze everything so calmly and objectively."

Lin Jianyuan smiled bitterly. "So I’m crazy but lucid, is that it?"

Dr. Cen: "Not exactly. Actually, I think your condition is still under control. It hasn’t worsened, because you’ve always been able to distinguish between hallucinations and reality. That’s really not easy. Look, even though you often feel like you have violent tendencies, you’ve never actually hurt anyone in real life, right? You’ve only ever fought your hallucinations."

"I am NOT a hallucination—" The stress toy thief suddenly popped out of Lin Jianyuan’s pocket, protesting indignantly.

Squelch! Lin Jianyuan casually flattened it, getting some instant stress relief.

"Right, right." On a whim, Lin Jianyuan held up the squeeze toy for the doctor to see. "Dr. Cen, can you see this?"

Dr. Cen’s gaze fell on his palm. "A snail-shaped squeeze toy? That’s a first. Seems like you can get squeeze toys of anything these days."

"So squeeze toys are real too..." Lin Jianyuan murmured. "So that day in the live-streaming break room, when I was feeling around for my phone with my eyes closed and touched a squeeze toy, the cold sensation startled me, and that’s why I had another hallucinatory episode and heard the squeeze toy talking to me..."

"@#%￥@￥！..." The squeeze toy struggled frantically in Lin Jianyuan’s palm.

"Thank you, Doctor. I understand now." Lin Jianyuan let out a long sigh, his eyes filled with hope. "I feel like there’s still hope for my recovery."

"There was always hope," Dr. Cen said with a smile.

As the session was winding down, Dr. Cen suddenly called out to Lin Jianyuan again: "I think your roommate is actually quite a good guy. You should invite him to play basketball more often."

"How did you come to that conclusion?" Lin Jianyuan asked, surprised.

Dr. Cen: "I think you two get along well. Don’t you think?"

On his way home, Lin Jianyuan kept pondering Dr. Cen’s final question.

He quickly reached a conclusion: Dr. Cen actually wanted him to make more friends.

Thinking about it, he really didn’t have many friends in A City... Maybe that was part of why he developed a psychological condition.

If he could occasionally hang out with a few friends, play some ball, have a drink, and release stress in time, maybe he wouldn’t have ended up like this.

Since it was medical advice, Lin Jianyuan didn’t hesitate.

As soon as he got home, he said to his roommate, "Are you free next Saturday? Come with me to a wedding banquet."

Roommate: "?"

Lin Jianyuan expected him to hesitate, but he quickly said, "Sure."

His tone was light, almost laughing, and his voice was quite pleasant. The upward lilt at the end had a natural playboy vibe.

"I need to think about how to make an appearance..." the roommate said leisurely, smiling.

"What do you mean, 'how to make an appearance'?" Lin Jianyuan was amused. "Are you planning to dress to impress? Don’t go overboard; you don’t even know these people. Honestly, I don’t know most of them either. Just wear whatever, and we’ll go with our mouths ready to eat. I mainly invited you so I’d have someone to help me get my money’s worth from the cash gift. Otherwise, giving such a big cash gift would be such a waste."

Lin Jianyuan realized his roommate’s thought process was indeed strange. What normal person thinks about peacocking at a stranger’s wedding?

This roommate of his...

Was he always this vain?!

Workdays always passed in a blur of nothingness, and before he knew it, another week had gone by.

Looking back on the past week, he felt a hollow sense of having accomplished nothing.

He really wanted to go out and have fun.

On Saturday evening, Lin Jianyuan grabbed a random set of clothes and walked out of his room.

He hadn’t been particularly interested in his roommate’s fancy attire, since no matter what he wore, in Lin Jianyuan’s eyes, he still looked like a pile of naked offal.

But when the roommate appeared before him, Lin Jianyuan froze.

The offal was still the same offal. A slender throat, stomach, pancreas, liver, gallbladder, and below that, a long, coiled mass of intestines.

The pink offal was still pink and tender, with the only difference being that today his entire body was enveloped in a soft glow. Like a heavenly glow shining down from above.

...I must be seeing things. Since when does offal glow?

Suspicious, Lin Jianyuan pulled him away from the beam of sunset light coming through the window.

"What’s up?" the roommate asked with a smile.

Even without the sunset filter, the roommate was still faintly glowing.

The entire mass of offal shimmered softly, looking exceptionally... fresh.

Lin Jianyuan looked him up and down, puzzled, then suddenly felt a stir in his heart.

Damn, is he so handsome he’s literally glowing?

Lin Jianyuan couldn't help but wonder just how handsome someone had to be for a straight guy like him to think they were radiant.

His mind immediately conjured an image of a fair-skinned, good-looking guy with long legs in a suit.

A black suit or a white one? Both seemed appealing. There should also be a little ponytail at the back of his head, because that would make him look even more vain and like a fuckboy.

As for the "fair-skinned" part, that was Lin Jianyuan's bias. He always felt his roommate had a damp, chilly vibe about him—not very masculine.

Rather than a vibrant male college student, he seemed more like a damp, gloomy grad student ghost who couldn't graduate.

Lin Jianyuan: "Hey, shall we go?"

His roommate smiled and said, "Let's go."

The wedding was held at a well-known five-star hotel in City A. The hotel entrance was decorated with a huge photo of the bride and groom surrounded by flowers, and a sign pointing to a certain banquet hall read: "Hao Menghai & Lu Xiangxiang, Everlasting Love."

The entire wedding venue was lavishly and romantically decorated.

If this had been five years ago, right after graduation, Lin Jianyuan might have felt self-conscious about his casual T-shirt and pants.

But after five years in the workforce, office worker Lin Jianyuan only thought, "Since the hotel is this nice, the food today probably won’t be bad."

Bringing his roommate to eat was definitely worth it.

Guests gradually took their seats, but the main courses were taking forever.

Lin Jianyuan asked around and found out the wedding wouldn’t officially start until 18:18.

"If I’d known, I would’ve brought something…" Lin Jianyuan sighed.

After finally enduring the ceremony, around 7 p.m., the hot dishes finally started coming out. The bride and groom also began going table to table for toasts.

Lin Jianyuan wasn’t close to the groom, and even less so to the bride. Heck, he wasn’t even familiar with this plate of raw offal (a dish he didn't recognize) sitting next to him, hahaha.

The only thing he was familiar with was the 888 yuan cash gift he’d handed over at the door.

City A had a high cost of living, so wedding cash gifts usually started at 800 yuan.

After forking over 888 yuan, Lin Jianyuan was pretty much broke for the rest of the month.

He had to make sure he ate his money’s worth.

Just as he’d expected, the dishes prepared by the five-star hotel chefs were exceptional.

The key was that the dishes were all rich—sea cucumber, lobster, one fancy platter after another. A few extra bites of seafood, and he’d easily gotten his money’s worth.

As Lin Jianyuan was chowing down, large pink bubbles suddenly began rising throughout the banquet hall.

When the bride had entered, bubble machines on both sides of the red carpet had released a flood of soap bubbles. Under the lights, those bubbles turned into a rainbow of pink hues, creating a dreamy atmosphere.

Bubble machines were low-cost, easy to operate, and highly effective.

Lin Jianyuan had worked at a wedding planning company right after graduation, so he knew this routine like the back of his hand.

The huge, transparent soap bubbles, tinted dreamy pink by the stage lights, added an unreal, romantic vibe to the wedding.

A faint, pleasant fragrance filled the air. Lin Jianyuan sniffed, trying to place the smell, but couldn’t identify it.

Ah, whatever, he never knew much about perfumes anyway. But this smell was really nice—sweet and made you want to fall in love.

"Really? So we actually met back then! What a coincidence!"

"Let’s exchange WeChat?"

"Sure, sure… By the way, do you have any plans later tonight?"

From the next table came the excited chatter of a man and a woman.

Lin Jianyuan didn’t even look over, focused solely on eating.

"Mmm… yeah."

At a table to the left, a young couple suddenly embraced and started making out.

The guests at their table began applauding, then joined in, making out too, couple by couple.

Lin Jianyuan continued ignoring them, head down, eating away.

"." His roommate suddenly put down his chopsticks.

"What?" Lin Jianyuan mumbled through a mouthful of food, turning to see a pink bubble the size of a human head floating right into his roommate’s plate.

Lin Jianyuan casually swatted it.

Pop!

The pink soap bubble burst, sending little splatters everywhere.

"There are way too many of these bubbles. What’s the deal?"

Lin Jianyuan finally started to feel that something was off. He swallowed his mouthful of lobster, stood up with a frown. "Where’s the staff? Who’s managing the bubble machine? Can someone turn it off for now—"

"Dun-dun-dun-dun~ Dun-dun-dun-dun~"

Lin Jianyuan stopped dead, turning in surprise. A bright spotlight beam shone directly on the symphony orchestra on stage.

Crash!

A kettle drum hit kicked off the wedding march!