[La Maison Restaurant — September 15, 6:50 PM]
The sun had set some time ago. In the sky, a deep bluish base, with patches of purple and other colors moved slowly, like far away clouds. Not a single star can be seen.
Lin Feng checked his watch. It was already 6:50 in the evening.
He then stepped out of his car, the streetlamps letting out a light yellowish glow on the cobblestone road, a valet walking gracefully towards him.
"Mr. Lin! Welcome!"
The valet was at his elbow, his body bowed at a thirty degree angle, his hand out for the keys. Lin Feng handed them over. A second man in a tailored uniform stepped forward — this time, a chaperone — and fell in beside him as they crossed the cobblestone toward the mahogany doors.
"Miss Lin has been waiting, sir." The chaperone's voice was warm. A little too warm. "She arrived at two o'clock this afternoon. She has been using the kitchen since."
Lin Feng's eyes flicked toward him.
"Five hours?"
"Yes, sir." A small conspiratorial smile. "Very dedicated, the young miss. She also rented the restaurant for the evening, so please make yourself comfortable. You won't be disturbed."
Lin Feng didn't respond.
The chaperone pulled the door open for him. Warm interior light spilled out against the bluish-purple sky behind him.
He stepped inside.
--------------------
The restaurant was empty.
The crystal chandeliers had been dimmed to nothing. In their place, a scaffolding where fluorescent bulbs let out a warm white light. The only sounds were the quiet hum of ventilation.
It looked like someone had stripped away all the formality of an expensive European restaurant to create a private dining room.
Under that scaffolding, was a single square table covered with a white tablecloth.
And there, standing by a single table set for two in the center of the room, was Lin Weiwei.
Lin Feng stopped mid-step.
In a venue like this, she should have been draped in an elegant gown, jewels, and designer heels.
But Lin Weiwei stood there wearing soft cotton pajamas covered in small cartoon characters he hadn't seen before. Paired with it was an oversized cream-colored button-down blouse that fell past her hips and nearly reached her knees.
She was even wearing a pair of rabbit-ear slippers.
Her long jet-black hair hung loose, released from its usual practical ponytail to flow past her shoulders in soft waves caught by the soft white light. She wore no makeup, and had made no effort whatsoever to dress for the occasion.
And yet she was still devastating, looking every bit like a housewife waiting for her husband to come home.
Lin Weiwei spotted him, and her whole face changed. Her shoulders dropped, the tight line of her jaw softened, and then she was smiling — bright, unguarded, the kind of smile she never wore outside the house.
Then she moved.
She didn't walk elegantly or approach with sophistication. She just ran, her slippered feet padding across the polished floor as her oversized blouse billowed slightly behind her, her chest bouncing before her, catching Lin Feng off-guard.
"Big Brother!"
She threw herself into his arms without hesitation, wrapping around him tight and burying her face against his chest.
Lin Feng caught her instinctively, his arms came up around her smaller frame as her soft front pressed into his chest.
She was warm against him, and she smelled like vanilla and butter — like she'd been standing over a hot stove all afternoon.
But she was holding on too tight. Her fingers dug into the back of his shirt, and he could feel her trembling against him.
She looked up at him, her eyes bright with happiness that couldn't quite mask something sharper underneath.
"You came!"
"Of course I came," he said quietly. "I promised."
Her smile flickered, brows drawing together for just a moment before she smoothed them back.
"So you keep your promises now." Something surfaced in her voice before she buried it. "I like that!"
"I do," he said, meeting her eyes steadily though the sight of her smooth collarbone made him look away from her.
Meanwhile, Lin Weiwei maintained her gaze on his face, reading his expressions like a book. Then a smile appeared on her face and she stepped back, though her hands lingered on his arms before finally letting go, like she couldn't bear to break contact all at once.
"I made all your favorites!" She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the table. "Come see!"
Lin Feng followed her and let her pull him to the table.
--------------------
Before they could sit down to eat, Lin Weiwei pulled her phone from her pocket.
Her expression shifted as she looked at the screen, the warmth cooling into something harder underneath. Something calculated.
"Big Brother, I need to ask you something."
She turned the phone toward him.
It was a photo of him and Xiao Yue walking out of Central Plaza Restaurant together, hand in hand. The image was crisp and clear and damning.
Her voice tried for neutrality and failed completely.
"Did you... replace Su Qingxue and that snea— uhmm… that girl too with this... bi—"
Lin Weiwei paused. A smile that didn't quite reach her eyes was visible on her face. Lin Feng looked at her with a calm expression.
"...this girl?"
Lin Weiwei finished. The smile remained unwavering on her face.
Lin Feng watched her — the smile, the voice that sounded like a mother catching her child's hand inside the cookie jar, the venom she'd barely swallowed, the way her whole body had tensed at the sight of Xiao Yue's face.
She almost said sneaky bitch. And that bitch — one for each of them. One of them must be Xiao Yue and the other Zhang Tingting.
"The two of you knew each other?" Lin Feng pulled out the chair for her. "By the way, there was one thing I remember. You were supposed to be my fiancée, right?"
Lin Weiwei froze for a moment. The unexpected recognition made her skin glow red. "Yes— Yes… Yes, I am."
Then she gathered herself together, straightened her back, and continued. "Which is why I'm asking."
After that, she lowered her head, her fingers fidgeting with the hem of her blouse. "After all, I'm the fiancée."
And then she deflated, her arm limp at her side. "Or rather, I was the fiancée."
Lin Feng's hand patted the back of the chair, twice, then his hand came down to her shoulder, and he remained standing, waiting for her to sit first. "Well, you still are. Actually… Weiwei, how about we start over and well… have a date?"
Lin Weiwei sank into the chair he had pulled out for her, her eyes still on his face.
"What about Su Qingxue?" Lin Weiwei raised her head to look at him.
"What about her?" Lin Feng asked her back with a dismissive tone.
"And what about, well… her?" She asked again, her look a little more serious this time. "And what about that matchmaker of yours?"
"About Xiao Yue and Tingting? Well…" Lin Feng paused for a moment, trying to find the words to say to her.
"So?"
"Uhmm…"
Silence hung in the air. Lin Weiwei watched him struggle. Then, seeing that he was having a hard time telling her that he intended to not only two-time but three-time them, Lin Weiwei stood up from her seat, went on tiptoe, picked up a napkin from the table and wiped the tip of his nose clean.
Then she planted her own kiss on the tip of his nose, and a smile finally appeared on her lips.
"There, at least this part is clean now." Lin Weiwei happily said as she sat back down in her chair, then turned back again to Lin Feng. "Anyway! Let's eat! Everything's getting cold!"
Lin Feng breathed a sigh of relief as he saw Weiwei finally settling down at the table. However, right before he managed to sit down, Lin Weiwei spoke once more.
She said: "I won't lose to any of them, Big Brother."
He paused for a moment, looking at the beautiful wife-material girl sitting in front of him. Then he too took his seat.
"I know you won't."
"I'm glad that you know, womanizer."
--------------------
The food was incredible.
Lin Feng looked at the spread before him — wagyu belly glistening under the white light, mapo tofu bubbling gently in its clay pot, the high-grade silken kind.
Hand-folded dumplings in neat rows.
Egg and tomato stir-fry, the way someone's mother made it.
Congee with century egg and lean pork, slow-cooked long enough that the grain had broken down into cream.
Lin Feng blinked.
Wait.
He looked at Lin Weiwei who was looking back at him with expectant eyes.
These are my favorites. No, the original Lin Feng's favorites, but also mine.
He looked back at the food, his chopsticks reaching out to the dumplings.
How is this possible?
Or does that Lin Feng also share the same favorites with me?
He then brought the dumpling to his mouth. The dumpling — thin skin giving way to broth that ran hot down his tongue, pork and what tasted like crab roe, the filling broke open against his teeth and the broth poured out before he could catch it.
Then he went to take the pork belly, the mapo tofu, and the congee, taking a little of each.
It was basically the same street food. Except that a single one could fetch a hundred yuan. Literally a poor man's food done in the way of the rich and powerful.
"Big Brother?"
Lin Weiwei called out his name with a smile, pleased by how enthusiastically Lin Feng was eating.
"Do you like it?" Her fingers tightened around her own chopsticks. "Several years ago, I remember you were always eating at street food stalls back when you were chasing Ms. Su."
Lin Weiwei said, her voice full of venom the moment she uttered the word 'Ms. Su'.
"You liked it very much back then." She continued, placing her hand on her chin, watching her Big Brother eat his fill.
"And I like it still. In fact, Weiwei, this is perfect." Lin Feng scooped up the century egg and continued, "These are exactly my favorites."
Lin Weiwei's face glowed brighter, nodding with her eyes closed. "Well, I'm glad that Big Brother likes it."
So that's the story behind it, Lin Feng thought, taking a spoonful of congee. If I remember correctly, Su Qingxue's family wasn't always rich. So the original Lin Feng must have been spending time at those places to eat with her.
They ate in comfortable silence for a while, the soft clink of porcelain and the distant hum of the kitchen filling the space between them.
In the middle of their meal, while she was reaching for the clay pot, spooning more mapo tofu onto her plate, then into his without asking, Lin Feng looked at his beautiful stepsister.
"How are your projects going? The coding ones."
Lin Weiwei blinked. She looked at Lin Feng suspiciously as if he had told her that the sky is green and not blue. Then her eyelids blinked one more time and finally she spoke.
"They're... going well, Big Brother." She set down her utensils, suddenly unsure what to do with her hands. "I've been working on something at home. Just a hobby. I've been writing my own custom operating system, writing the kernel from scratch."
"A whole operating system?"
"Yes, I actually just started this summer. Three months ago. The classes are so slow — I sleep through most of them, honestly. I needed something to do."
She glanced up. He was still listening, then she continued. "I built a test rig in my room first. Pulled chips out of some broken electronics, soldered the board, wrote the firmware. The kernel has taken the rest of the summer."
"What does it do that the standard one doesn't?"
"It's... it's faster. I've been writing my own scheduler. The existing kernels waste cycles on context switching, so I rewrote it from the ground up."
She leaned forward, her face changed when she said scheduler as a small smile she didn't notice appeared on her lips. "The hardware ceiling is the problem. These 240nm chips can only do so much. So I attacked it from the software side instead. Current best is 38% improvement on the same hardware."
Lin Weiwei continued to talk about computer science after that, mostly about operating system architectures — all technical content.
As she talked about her hobby, her mood had considerably improved, the suspicion in her face giving way to a more proud expression. On his side, Lin Feng listened to her talk about it.
He didn't understand chip architecture, and while he understood what a 240nm chip was, it was only on the level to which his former profession as counter-intelligence was concerned. Technical terms like schedulers washed past him.
Soon, the food on the table began to run out as Lin Feng would pick something from the table to eat while listening to Lin Weiwei speak enthusiastically about her interests.
"Weiwei. Do you understand what you are building right now?"
"I — what do you mean?"
"I don't understand most of what you said about the scheduler. The chip stuff is past me. I don't understand many things at all, but think of it like this."
Lin Feng paused for a moment as his mind looked for words to say to her.
"Think of the implications. If you can run your own operating software, and with our family's chip production capabilities as well as design and electronic assembly, we can make an independent system."
She stared at him. Across from her, Lin Feng's expression was dead serious. He wasn't being polite to her, or flattering her, or even speaking for the sake of making conversation.
She blushed and looked down at her now empty plate, the heat spreading across her cheeks, her ears and down to her neck.
Then, a few moments later, she looked back at him, her face this time still red but her eyes showed sharpness in them, as if she had stumbled into something inside her head.
"...Big Brother."
"Yes."
"Since when did you start thinking that way?"
Her voice was small. But her hands had settled flat on the table.
"Big Brother, you get tired easily when someone speaks highly technical terms to you. You are not exactly an attentive listener either. And you tend to fall asleep during these kinds of conversations."
Lin Weiwei looked at him dead in the eye, looking for any subtle clues from him. Seeing her gaze laser locked on him, Lin Feng held her gaze back.
Then, Lin Feng let out a sigh.
"You indeed truly love your Big Brother."
Lin Weiwei's earlier composure crumbled, her face flushing red like never before. Her gaze that was locked on him earlier began to wander anywhere but on him.
"...Don't say things—"
Then, she paused again, as if she was in a deep thought, her finger landing on her chin. Then, she also let out a sigh.
"Uhmm… Yes, I do… Big Brother." Her eyes landed back at him again. "But what does it have to do with you changing all of a sudden?"
Then Lin Feng reached for the line that had worked at lunch, and across the table for her hand.
"To tell you the truth, something has changed since I woke up this morning."
A small easy smile.
"I'm a time-traveler. From the future."
Across the table at lunch, Xiao Yue had rolled her eyes and asked what the future was like.
Lin Weiwei didn't.
Her face didn't move. Her hands didn't move. Her chopsticks stayed where she had set them down.
"...Big Brother."
"Yes."
"Prove it. Let's assume you indeed are a time-traveler… though this assumption is already outlandish, I tell you."
"So, tell me, what will happen in the future?"
Lin Feng went very still. For a moment, there was only silence at the table. Seeing that he was silent, Lin Weiwei was about to press on when Lin Feng finally answered her question.
"I will die eight years from now. You will die too — and so will Xiao Yue."
A longer pause.
She looked at him for a long moment. Lin Feng was dead serious. He was looking back at her as if he had nothing to hide anymore. Lin Feng wasn't shaking nor was he looking like he was guilty of something.
Lin Feng instead looked composed.
Lin Weiwei's lips opened slightly, letting out a soft voice. "...okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay. I know you are hiding something. Perhaps you were telling the truth, or a half-truth."
"Weiwei—"
"Big Brother. I don't know what happened. Why you changed so much that you don't seem like Big Brother anymore. But…"
A pause.
"How can I be a proper fiancée to you when I cannot trust you?"
Lin Weiwei let out a long breath, slipping her hand from his, then looked at their plates and the food in front of them. They were all empty.
"Oh… Looks like we need to go to the next leg of our night." Lin Weiwei stood up and went to Lin Feng's side. Her expression went from her looking like she was going to pry open his brain to that of being the domestic wife once more.
"The next leg of the night?" He asked, his confusion audible in his voice.
"Yes! After all, the night is still young and it's too early to go home yet. And besides, you gave that bi… I mean that girl a proper date. And god knows how many times you brought that other bitch to so many dates."
"If you have to three-time us, you better do it properly, time traveler!"
"Now stand up, we have a movie to watch tonight."
Lin Weiwei said as she pulled his arm like a spoiled girl.
"Well then, let's go… fiancée." Lin Feng said as he stood up and placed his arm across Lin Weiwei's shoulders.
"The Lin Feng I know definitely wasn't this thick-skinned." She said as she leaned toward him, her arm sliding across his back and wrapping around to his far side.
"Eight years is a lot of time for someone to—ouch!"
Lin Weiwei happily walked with him and pinched his waist as they went. "Stop talking and more dating."
Then the two of them left the empty table and exited the restaurant.
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[Zhang Tingting — Motel Room, 7:55 PM]
Across the city, Zhang Tingting lay on a stiff motel bed near the east gate, staring at the water stain on the ceiling.
Getting here had been an experience.
She'd checked in still wearing the chef uniform — she had nothing else — and on the stairs she'd passed a couple who were already warming up for whatever they'd rented the room for. The woman had paused mid-grope to look Zhang Tingting up and down, then grinned.
"Chef costume? That's so hot. I love it when girls commit to the bit."
The man had nodded sagely. "Respect."
That had been a while ago.
Now she lay in a room that smelled like mildew and cheap air freshener, on sheets that scratched against her skin, with something crinkling under the mattress that she refused to investigate.
"It's still so early in the evening!"
"Can't those two do it inside their room?"
"Why is everyone in this city insane?"
Zhang Tingting rolled on the bed, feeling the dampness of the pillow on her face, her hair still slightly wet from an earlier bath.
She was now out of her uniform, wearing new clothes she'd bought, her chef uniform hanging on a hanger nearby.
On a normal evening, she'd either be with Su Qingxue, receiving whatever Su Qingxue didn't want anymore — clothes, snacks, Lin Feng's attention.
Or being with Lin Feng, playing the role of the matchmaker where they 'practice' with her pretending that she was Su Qingxue, and he treating her as if she were indeed his girlfriend.
Now she was alone in a love motel. Both of them had become strangers in a single afternoon.
Once, the two of them were not strangers to this kind of place.
The memory from this morning came into her head. She was talking with Lin Feng at four in the morning in a video call while he was so proud of showing her the dishes he made specifically for Su Qingxue in a slightly grainy presentation.
Usually, by morning, Lin Feng would send her a good morning message and ask if she was fine. And she would reply yes and ask him back with a smile on her face.
Yet not only had Lin Feng not sent her anything, he acted as if everything they'd done meant nothing.
As if she meant nothing to him.
And Lin Feng even rejected Su Qingxue in front of everyone and replaced her with that Xiao Yue.
But the strange things didn't end there. Su Qingxue and Zhang Yuting — her best friend and her cousin — all of a sudden began acting weird. Every time they talk about Long Tian, they speak about all sorts of things like destiny and dragon among men.
The conventional heroine lines for the protagonist — telling her things about that Long Tian like he is some cult leader.
"I wonder how Lin Feng is right now..."
She murmured in a soft voice as her thoughts drifted to Lin Feng. The way he had looked today — calm, controlled, like he was seeing the world with new eyes.
"Is he alright? Did he eat dinner already? Did that girl take good care of him?"
Then she paused there, her body curling into a fetal position.
"When he walked out of that restaurant with that girl, he looked like someone who actually knew what he was doing."
"What happened to Lin Feng? Could someone change so fast? Did he really change, or is he just trying to make Qingxue chase him?"
She straightened and then rolled on the bed, this time facing the window.
"No. I don't think that's the case…"
Zhang Tingting reached for her phone only to open the messaging app and just look at Lin Feng's profile picture.
"Maybe I should..."
She stopped.
"Should what? Ask him why Qingxue and Yuting are acting like they joined a cult in a single afternoon? Why doesn't he suddenly want Qingxue anymore?"
"Besides, he has someone now. That girl with the hoodie. That girl loves him too, just like—"
She then stopped — almost saying the words she swore she'd never acknowledge. But she kept speaking anyway, to no one, in a room with no one to hear.
"And she looks like everything that I'm not."
"After all, I'm nothing more than Qingxue's double."
"And now that he doesn't want Qingxue anymore… he probably doesn't want me anymore."
But her thumb hovered over his contact, the screen casting pale light across her face in the dark room.
"Why would he want to hear from me anyway?"
"What right do I have to message him now?"
"And besides, he hasn't even said a thing to me. I doubt he still remembers our plan to have dinner together."
"He doesn't want me anymore."
Zhang Tingting sighed. But it only took her a few seconds to start typing after she said that to herself.
[Zhang Tingting: Lin Feng, I need to talk to you about something.]
She stared at the words. Deleted them.
[Zhang Tingting: Hey, are you free tomorrow? There's something weird going on with Qingxue and I think—]
Deleted.
[Zhang Tingting: I know we're not really friends, but I noticed something strange today and—]
Deleted.
[Zhang Tingting: Lin Feng—]
The cursor blinked after his name, waiting for words that wouldn't come.
Then, she locked the phone and set it on the nightstand, screen down.
"Tomorrow. I'll figure things out tomorrow."
"Maybe I'll go and see him on campus. Not as a matchmaker anymore, but just me."
"But still, would he even still look at me?"
She pulled the thin blanket up to her chin and closed her eyes. Then she curled into a ball under the covers.
But one thought kept circling back, refusing to let her rest.
"I hope I can still be friends with him."
She said to no one in particular, a single wet streak sliding down her face and into the pillow, her hand pressed to her chest.
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[#18: Zhang Tingting] ★☆☆☆☆☆☆ (1-Star Heroine)
├─ Previous Affection: -50
└─ Current Affection: -40
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[End of Chapter 17]