Chapter 275: Chapter 275

Shi Nian thought for a moment and laughed lightly, "Lobby manager, I suppose."

At this moment, the sky was high with scattered clouds, the sunshine like gold, and the always stern-faced Huangfu Huazhang couldn’t help but stand at his own doorstep, looking up and laughing out loud.

"Fortunately, it’s the lobby manager. Actually, just a moment ago, I was worried you’d set me up as a porter carrying a suitcase."

With this, Shi Nian’s heart, which had been hanging high, could finally be set down. The grand door to the mysterious ancient castle seemed not so intimidating to step through anymore.

As the two stepped through the door, the two men bowed in unison, "Sir."

He chuckled, raised an eyebrow at Shi Nian, and then instructed the others, "Today... call me the lobby manager."

Shi Nian was caught off guard and couldn’t help but burst into laughter, and Huangfu Huazhang followed with a soft laugh as well, his elbow gently guiding Shi Nian as they stepped through the door.

Shi Nian hadn’t been in M Country for long, and during those four years of marriage, she hadn’t had many opportunities to leave the house; back in China, she had never gone abroad for travel, so she didn’t know much about ancient Western architecture.

She wondered if it was because she’d only ever seen Kangchuan University and Yanwu Square, two century-old Western-style buildings, that the castle before her felt so similar to them. The architectural style, the structure, even the use of wood seemed so familiar, though the decoration here was far more extravagant and dazzling.

The high ceiling of the hall, and even the four walls, were adorned with intricate tile mosaics. There were religious themes, but more of it reflected a courtly style and implication, all with rich colors and full-bodied lines, offering a strong visual impact and decorative effect.

Shi Nian couldn’t resist touching the surface of the tiles, feeling that the glaze was more lustrous and vibrant than that of ordinary china.

Huangfu Huazhang understood what she was wondering about, so he nodded lightly, "You’re right, there’s gemstones mixed into this glaze. It’s imitating the most expensive Chinese Ru porcelain technique. Ru porcelain’s glaze included agate, which creates that jade-like lusciousness and ice-like translucence."

Shi Nian could only silently click her tongue.

What kings, what earls, that world truly wasn’t something an ordinary person like her could fathom.

Huangfu Huazhang led her into the study, invited her to sit, and asked her to wait a moment.

He then stepped through a wooden teak door, and a few minutes later returned with a large manila envelope. He walked slowly back, standing before Shi Nian. First, he gazed deeply into her eyes, then handed her the manila envelope.

Shi Nian’s heart was lifted.

He had once told her, "What you dwell on will echo back to you," saying she wasn’t unable to understand him, just that she’d forgotten.

These words that seemed to hold hidden meanings left her confused. Rather than staying confused, she wanted to face the reality head-on, so she plucked up the courage to visit his home.

No matter what it was, she chose to confront it directly.

This manila envelope looked old, but more significant than its age was its style. This style was clearly that of a document folder commonly used in China in the eighties and nineties, with the front printed in red characters, "Archive Bag."

In the past, the case files that Dad brought home to study were also packed in such manila envelopes, used to sort and categorize. Every time she saw Dad bring home one of these envelopes, she knew he would be up all night again, so she would consciously put away all her thoughts, not letting Dad play badminton with her, not letting Dad go for a walk with her, and she would even stop troubling him with questions she couldn’t solve.

Remembering those past events made her sniff softly, and for some reason, she dared not take the envelope directly, raising her eyes to meet his gaze instead, "What is it?"

He looked down at her, "Open it and see."

Shi Nian took a deep breath, accepted the manila envelope, unraveled the white cotton string on the back, and reached in—pulling out a thick stack of photos!

When the stack of photos appeared before her eyes, Shi Nian was so shocked her eyes widened, and her mouth hung open.

—The photos, surprisingly, were all of her!

They weren’t from the same day; her clothing changed with the seasons. The only constant was the angle from which they were taken and the half of her face that was visible.

And she remembered that period. It was the six years from junior high to high school!

Shi Nian jumped up in astonishment, and asked Huangfu Huazhang in surprise, "President, how do you have these photos?"

The first thing that leapt into Shi Nian’s mind was suspicion, "Did you have someone investigate me? Where did these photos come from? They were taken so many years ago, and from the same angle for a full six years?!"

Facing Shi Nian’s astonishment, Huangfu Huazhang quietly lowered his eyes to look at the paleness on her face and the involuntary trembling of her body, and sighed softly.

"The answers are all in this stack of photos. Now you are a journalist, and you have helped the police solve cases before; you have your own observational and reasoning abilities."

He reached out and lightly tapped Shi Nian’s forehead.

Shi Nian surprisingly did not avoid him.

He bent down slightly, making his gaze level with hers: "I don’t plan to tell you the answer, I want you to recall it yourself."

Shi Nian just felt her breathing rapid, as if an invisible hand was gripping her neck, making it impossible for her to breathe enough oxygen.

She took deep breaths, commanding herself to calm down.

She sat back on the sofa and simply dumped all the photos from the brown paper bag, spreading them out on the large coffee table. She organized the photos into a timeline by year.

After sorting them this way, she observed something different: there were more photos from the three years of middle school, concentrated more in the same season; later, in the three years of high school, there were noticeably fewer, and in the last year, there were only two photos, one in winter clothing and the other skipping straight to summer.

Shi Nian furrowed her brows, murmuring to herself, "This suggests that the photographer might have been present at that angle for long periods during the three years of middle school; and only occasionally during the three subsequent years."

"And the location where the photos were taken, let me think..." Shi Nian closed her eyes, recalling the topography around the middle school.

The vivid blur captured in the photo within the frame of the window gave her a hint.

She clapped her hands, "Oh, I remember now! There was an area with old houses near our school. Because that area was once the embassy district, the houses there were both European and Japanese styled. Because those houses were beautiful, sometimes I would take a longer route, get off a bus stop earlier, and walk through that alley crossing through the old houses to get to school."

Shi Nian pointed to the vaguely focused magenta shadow in the photos, "Every summer, the walls of the courtyards of those old houses would bloom with flowers of this color. I later learned those were wild roses."

Huangfu Huazhang finally curled his lips into a smile, nodding approvingly.

Yet he still didn’t interject, allowing the room to remain quiet for her to recall on her own.

Shi Nian carefully discerned the angle from which the photos were taken, suddenly exclaiming, "Oh, I remember! It should be the white, pointed-roof three-story small building at the corner of the alley, with similarly white walls, slightly different from the surrounding old houses. My classmates and I even joked that it was the ’Little White House’ and we were curious about who lived inside."

At this point, Huangfu Huazhang couldn’t help but interject, "Do you remember what kind of person lived there?"

Shi Nian’s eyes lit up, "I remember, how could I forget?"

Because of curiosity, and perhaps because that area with its rich foreign flavor could trigger endless romantic imaginations in a young girl, she had once asked the community auntie of that old community about the kind of person living there.

The auntie, with a red arm band, seriously yet full of wistfulness, told her, "... A young man lived there, oh, such a pitiful one. Although his family was either wealthy or noble, he couldn’t walk and could only sit in a wheelchair every day, looking out the window."

The auntie said she had only seen the young man a few times. She only saw him wearing white clothes, sitting under the flower arch in the courtyard, lonely looking outside the yard. But once he noticed someone approaching, he would disappear immediately...

After listening to the auntie’s account, she also felt a pang of pain in her heart that year, unable to resist a feeling of compassion.

Hence, whenever she passed by that white small building again, she would glance at the window to see if she could see the lonely young man in white the auntie had described. Even if she couldn’t, she would gently send a smile toward the window.

Until the wild roses were in full bloom that year, she finally saw that young man in white for the first time.

It was a morning when the morning mist hadn’t yet cleared. Middle school students started school earlier than office workers began work, so when she walked through that alley, there was no one else ahead or behind.

When she walked in front of that white small building, it was just as the morning mist gradually cleared, bringing the small building into relief from the fog. Against the white morning mist and the white small building, the wild roses on the wall appeared even more vibrant and eye-catching. The source of this content ɪs Nove1Fire.net

She couldn’t help but stop and watch, then inadvertently looked up, and saw emerging from the fog alongside the small building, a young man in white.

She couldn’t guess the man’s age, but from her perspective, he appeared slender and pale, seemingly only seventeen or eighteen years old.

He sat alone under the rose arch covered with magenta wild roses, silently gazing at the world beyond the garden walls.