Reality Programming Association

Chapter 29: Chapter 13: Parents’ ”Relics

The bell on the glass door jingled. Amidst a uniform, cloyingly sweet chorus of ”Arigato gozaimasu-daaa~!”, the four of them fled the maid-themed restaurant.

Wen Xiao and Shao Yiyi huddled together under one umbrella. Wen Xiao’s bun swayed in the wind as she commented on how it was truly a mecca for anime fans.

Shi Zuozhou looked like he still wanted more. He had just wiped his plate clean, not even sparing the parsley leaf used for garnish.

In the curtain of rain, at a corner of the commercial street’s intersection, the four of them parted ways.

After watching their figures recede into the distance, Yu Xian hailed a taxi.

”Where to?” The driver was a middle-aged man. Golden oldies from the 90s were playing in the car.

”Brocade District.” Yu Xian gave an address he hadn’t said in a long time.

The car turned onto the elevated highway. Yu Xian leaned back against the seat, watching the downpour outside the window.

Due to the rain, there wasn’t much traffic on the highway. Along the way, he only saw a few green pickup trucks with military license plates speeding past.

Brocade District was an old residential complex built around the turn of the millennium. It was where he had grown up, and it was once his home with his parents.

After his parents had their accident back in elementary school, he moved into a boarding school. Later, after starting university, he rented a small apartment for himself near campus.

He only went back occasionally to pick up some living expenses and to open the windows to air the place out before leaving again.

The money on the card was what his parents had left him. He never withdrew it all at once. He treated it like an allowance, taking some out every few months and going back when he ran out.

He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to control his spending, and he was also afraid of it suddenly being empty.

He was going back this time for two reasons: one, he was running out of money, and two, he needed to deal with his visa.

There was a government-funded overseas exchange program in his department. A few students had been selected, and he was one of them.

He had never applied for a passport before, and the visa required a birth certificate. All of his parents’ things were in that old house.

The taxi stopped at the entrance to the complex. Yu Xian got out and walked into the building, stepping on fallen leaves and through puddles that covered the ground.

His family’s apartment was the west unit on the fifth floor. He inserted the brass-colored key into the lock, turned it twice, and the door opened.

It was quiet inside. The curtains were drawn, and he could make out the familiar silhouettes of the furniture.

He closed his umbrella and pulled open the curtains. Daylight streamed in, illuminating a scene that hadn’t changed at all: the fabric sofa, the old coffee table, and the old-fashioned CRT television, all draped with dust covers.

The surfaces of the furniture were very clean. Even though he hadn’t been here in weeks, there was hardly any dust.

It was as if a family of three still lived here, having just stepped out for a walk and due to return any moment.

Yu Xian subconsciously walked over to the TV stand. A simple wooden photo frame sat there, the picture within it yellowed and faded.

In the photo, a young man in a plaid shirt and a woman in a floral print dress held the hands of a five- or six-year-old boy standing between them.

That was a young Yu Xian. He was smiling foolishly, a starch sausage still in his hand.

He thought his dad had probably bought it for him on the way home from work, but he couldn’t remember clearly.

He stared at his parents’ smiling faces in the photo, lost in thought. ℴ

He straightened the photo frame and turned to enter the master bedroom.

The master bedroom held a familiar scent. For some reason, even after all this time, the smell still brought him a sense of peace.

A row of dark, solid-wood wardrobes and bookcases stood along the wall. His parents had lived a simple life; the wardrobes held only a few sets of everyday clothes, with no jewelry or watches to be found.

The bookcases, however, were packed full. There were only a few literary books; most were academic texts and thick journals, in both Chinese and English.

When he was little, he didn’t really have a concept of what his parents did for work. He only knew they were ”researchers,” that they were very busy, and that the house was always piled high with books and draft paper.

It wasn’t until he started university that he slowly began to understand the specific fields his parents had worked in.

His father had researched information theory, and his mother, topology—both fields of theoretical mathematics.

One studied how to ”encode information,” the other, how to ”construct figures.”

He pulled open the top drawer of the cabinet, took out the bank card that was tucked inside an envelope, and put it away safely.

Next, the birth certificate.

He crouched down and pulled open a lower drawer. It was stuffed with all sorts of yellowed papers, notebooks, and printed theses.

The drawer was deep. The further down he went, the older the papers became. He was almost at the bottom, but apart from a pile of old newspapers, there was nothing.

’It’s not here?’

’If I can’t find it, I’ll have to go to the police station to get a replacement issued.’

His fingers touched the wooden bottom—it seemed he’d reached the end of the drawer, but the board felt a little loose.

Suddenly, Yu Xian’s hand paused.

’Wait... why is there such a big difference between the cabinet’s exterior and interior depth?’

Ever since his parents passed away, he had been somewhat reluctant to go through their personal belongings, driven by a subconscious urge to avoid it.

That was why, in all these years, he had never examined this cabinet closely.

Only today did he realize that the difference between the cabinet’s exterior and interior depth was nearly 20 centimeters.

Sensing something was wrong, Yu Xian carefully took everything out of the drawer and set it aside, emptying it completely.

He knocked on the wooden board with his knuckles. The sound was crisp, less like rapping on a solid piece of wood and more like knocking on an empty box.

He took a deep breath and pressed on the edge of the board. Sure enough, the previously flat panel tilted upward.

Yu Xian found a long, thin tool and slid it into the gap along the tilted board. He wedged it in and slowly pried upward. The grating sound of wood scraping against wood set his teeth on edge.

As if activating some long-sealed switch, the wooden board came off.

It revealed a square hidden compartment underneath.

There were no gold or silver treasures inside. The compartment merely held two stacks of items, lying quietly, weighed down by the passage of time.