Chapter 58 Becoming Vigilant

The text message read as follows:

My dearest Zhenri:
Remember to come back early, I am lonely!
Thinking of you, Furong.

Xu Qi was a woman of great self-restraint. She immediately calmed down, revealing none of the displeasure in her heart, but forcefully memorized the phone number from which the message had been sent. Then, with a few presses of the buttons, she closed the message screen on the phone, restored it to its original state, and continued tidying up the living room as if nothing had happened at all.

At that moment, a flurry of thoughts raced through her mind, primarily boiling down to two possibilities: either some attention-seeking woman was playing around and recklessly sending flirtatious texts to men—seducing if she could, and giving up if she couldn't—or Wu Zhenri genuinely had something going on behind her back. Shortly after their wedding, he had claimed to be busy with business elsewhere and stayed away from home for many days; there was definitely more to this story than met the eye. The situation would be manageable if it fell into the first category, but if it belonged to the second, the problem was grave.

Xu Qi knew that it was both unnecessary and premature to pick a fight with Wu Zhenri based solely on a text message; she needed to gather solid evidence first.

Valuing her reputation dearly, Xu Qi pondered in secret: if something was indeed amiss, making a scene with her husband was no solution. She intended to have a talk with that mysterious, unacquainted wild woman she had yet to meet, demanding that she withdraw of her own accord, stop harassing a married household, and cease acting as a shameful third party.

Just then, Wu Zhenri emerged from the bathroom, entirely unaware that a text message strictly forbidden for his wife's eyes had already been seen by her. Because of his sudden urge, he hadn't carried his phone with him. While sitting on the toilet suffering from a bout of diarrhea, he had disliked the unpleasant sounds and turned on all the water faucets, letting the water roar down the drain so loudly that he completely missed the ringing of the text message notification coming from the phone left on the study desk—not to mention that he had closed the bathroom door behind him.

Upon returning to the study, Wu Zhenri discovered that the phone on the desk had been touched. He instantly guessed it must have been his wife, as there was no second person in the apartment.

Apprehensive, he picked up the phone to check. There were no incoming calls, but upon opening the inbox, he found a text message sent by Bao Furong that he hadn't yet read. The moment he looked at it, he knew he was in trouble: his wife had already seen this ambiguous message before him. Strangely enough, however, his wife wasn't making a scene and appeared completely calm.

Wu Zhenri, on the other hand, was far from calm. To mask his guilty conscience, he remained seated for a moment before suddenly jumping to his feet and cursing aloud, "Who the hell is this whore sending me a text message? Absolutely inexplicable!"

He repeated profanities of a similar nature, deliberately making sure his wife, who was still wiping surfaces in the living room, could hear him. He then walked over to her, opened the text message on his screen, and offered to show it to her, but she merely shook her head.

Wu Zhenri asked her, "Do you know a woman named Furong?"

"Are you putting on an act?" Xu Qi retorted to her husband.

Wu Zhenri deleted the text message right in front of her, then said, "I remember now. It must be some hotel receptionist from where I stayed, just randomly messing around and sending texts to whoever, and it somehow ended up on my phone."

Hearing this explanation, Xu Qi felt it sounded too much like "the buried treasure is not here," suspecting he indeed had something going on with the hotel receptionist he mentioned. Staring at him with wide, angry eyes, she said, "Zhenri, if you are messing around with women out there, don't you dare come near me. Women outside entertain a thousand guests by day and sleep with ten thousand men by night; it's inevitable they might contract syphilis. If you fool around with women out there and bring syphilis back home to harm me—I won't have anything to do with you, because I'm afraid of you."

Having said that, Xu Qi walked out, went downstairs, and headed to the classroom of the class she supervised to accompany her students during self-study.

Originally, Xu Qi had no need to work overtime that evening and had planned to stay with her husband. However, that text message and Wu Zhenri's words had left her agitated and filled with suspicion, completely draining her desire to keep him company.

Unable to persuade his wife to stay—and with her turning a deaf ear to his so-called explanations—Wu Zhenri felt it was pointless. Shortly after, he also locked the door and left.

In a secluded spot outside the school gates, Wu Zhenri called Bao Furong to scold her, demanding to know why she had to send a text message at a time like this.

On the other end of the line, Bao Furong offered schadenfreude-laden sarcastic remarks, asking, "Did that text message get seen by your bride and ruin your little game?" Infuriated, Wu Zhenri hung up immediately, spat out a few curses, and headed back to Kapok Village.

By the dusk of the following day, just as Xu Qi had returned to her dormitory and closed the door behind her, she heard footsteps outside, followed by a knock. Opening the door, she saw none other than Wu Zhenri.

She turned around as Wu Zhenri closed the door and immediately stepped in front of her, holding a piece of paper and saying, "Take a look at this."

Not understanding what it meant, Xu Qi took the paper and saw it was a hospital diagnosis report. The handwriting was so wildly cursive that she couldn't make out most of it, but she could barely decipher the word "Normal" written in the final section.

While she was struggling to make sense of it, Wu Zhenri chattered on with continuous explanations: "Yesterday, you suspected me of having an affair with a receptionist at a hotel outside and worried that I had caught syphilis. Today, I made a special trip into the city to get checked at the hospital, and the result shows—take a look—'Normal,' no problems at all. This proves my innocence."

Xu Qi let out a cold snort, handed the paper back to Wu Zhenri, and said, "And what is that supposed to prove?"

Wrapping his arms around her, Wu Zhenri replied, "It proves that we can make love without any hindrance."

Twisting her body away, Xu Qi said, "Let go of me, you're filthy all over." Knowing when to yield, Wu Zhenri released her and consciously walked into the compact bathroom, turning on the faucet equipped with both hot and cold water. After adjusting the temperature, he indulged in a thoroughly refreshing shower, dried himself off, wrapped a dry towel around his waist, and stepped out. Darting past the living room—whose windows and doors remained unclosed—he rushed into the bedroom and threw his body onto a Simmons mattress, shouting, "Wife, wife, I'm all clean now."

With a soft acknowledgment, Xu Qi bathed for a short while before joining him. The moment she climbed into bed, Wu Zhenri impatiently lunged forward.

Right at that moment, Wu Zhenri's phone rang, the sound traveling from the living room into the bedroom. Wu Zhenri grew somewhat tense, worrying that it was Bao Furong calling again. He ignored it completely, letting the ringing continue until it stopped on its own.

Pausing his intimate movements with Xu Qi, he said, "Pay no attention to it."

Recalling the ambiguous text message on her husband's phone from the day before, Xu Qi suddenly asked, "Could that be the woman named Furong calling?"

"Furong or no Furong, I don't know her. They're all just cheap women," Wu Zhenri muttered evasively.

Having finished making love to his wife, he lay motionless like a well-fed, satisfied fat pig, and within moments, began to snore loudly.

Still in an excited state and devoid of sleepiness, Xu Qi got out of bed, left the bedroom, and walked into the living room to check the missed call on the phone Wu Zhenri had left on the coffee table. The number matched the ambiguous text message sent the day before, instantly heightening her vigilance. That woman named Furong definitely shared an unusual relationship with her husband; otherwise, why would she keep reaching out to him?

Exercising her characteristic self-restraint, Xu Qi did not wake her husband, but she had no intention of letting the matter go.

After finishing her classes the following day, she went to the China Mobile service counter for phone bills. Reciting the strange number she had memorized under the pretext of paying a phone bill, she asked whose name it was registered under.

The clerk displayed the user profile stored in the computer system and informed her that the subscriber for this number was named Bao Furong.

When Xu Qi pressed for further details, the clerk refused, asking, "If you aren't paying the phone bill, why are you asking about this?"

"I'm sorry, I asked the wrong person," Xu Qi apologized to the clerk, thinking to herself: *The person I asked about is precisely the right one—the very woman who sent that ambiguous text message and called to harass my husband. I need to dig up her background so I can deal with her.*

Though Xu Qi failed to achieve her full objective, she had secured an extra piece of information: this woman's surname was Bao.