Chapter Five: The Renter from Three Years Ago
After the call ended, Chen Yaoting didn't call back right away.
He sat in the driver's seat of the Porsche, staring at his phone screen.
An unfamiliar number.
Call duration: forty-two seconds.
The car was so quiet that all he could hear was the air conditioner blowing.
"Three years ago, Gu Chengyue rented my body too."
That sentence kept replaying in his mind.
If it was true, then Gu Chengyue hadn't done life experience for the first time.
So why had Ms. Shen and LEV never mentioned it?
More importantly—
How did that person know Gu Chengyue had left something for him?
Chen Yaoting lowered his head and looked at the envelope.
The paper was very thin.
There really was only the short letter inside.
He flipped it over.
No writing.
He felt along the envelope's inner lining again.
Nothing.
He read it once more.
"On the fifth day, I woke up once."
"Not inside your body."
"Inside mine."
"At the time, my body was lying in a hospital."
"But the person inside wasn't me."
The passage was even stranger than before.
The simplest possibility surfaced in Chen Yaoting's mind.
A synchronization failure.
Gu Chengyue had briefly returned to his original body midway through, while this body of his had perhaps lost control at the same time.
But the sentence "the person inside wasn't me" didn't make sense.
If he had really returned to his own body, how could he say that the person inside wasn't him?
Unless what he saw hadn't been experienced from a first-person perspective.
Unless it was some kind of memory confusion.
Or…
Maybe LEV hadn't simply switched the two people.
At that thought, Chen Yaoting immediately shook his head.
"I'm overthinking this."
He didn't want to scare himself into madness on the first day after getting NT$150 million.
The most reasonable explanation was neural-sync side effects.
Gu Chengyue was seventy-three, and his physical condition was poor.
Hallucinations were perfectly normal.
As for the call just now, it could simply have been someone with inside information about LEV trying to stir up trouble.
He folded the letter neatly and slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket.
Then he called Ms. Shen again.
This time, she answered.
"Mr. Chen."
"Why didn't you answer just now?"
"I was in a meeting."
"Has Gu Chengyue done life experience before?"
There was a pause of less than a second on the other end.
"Yes."
Chen Yaoting froze.
She had admitted it far too readily.
"Three years ago?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because it has nothing to do with this contract."
"Whose body did he rent?"
"That involves another participant's privacy."
"Someone just called me and said Gu Chengyue rented his body three years ago."
This time, Ms. Shen didn't answer immediately.
"What else did he say?"
Chen Yaoting's eyes shifted slightly.
Her first reaction hadn't been to ask who it was, but what the other person had said.
"You knew someone was going to contact me?"
"I didn't know."
"Then why did you ask that?"
"Because a former participant contacting a current participant privately constitutes a violation of the confidentiality agreement."
"How did he get my number?"
"That's something we need to confirm as well."
"What about the letter Gu Chengyue gave me?"
For the first time, Ms. Shen's voice noticeably faltered.
"What's in the letter?"
Chen Yaoting didn't answer.
He remembered what the unfamiliar man had said just now.
Don't give it to LEV.
"Nothing."
"Mr. Chen."
"Really, it's nothing. He just thanked me for lending him my body."
There was silence on the other end for two seconds.
"If the letter involves a synchronization abnormality, please be sure to inform us."
That confirmed one thing for Chen Yaoting.
LEV knew there could be an "abnormality."
"What do you mean by a synchronization abnormality?"
"For example, dreams, memory confusion, or brief consciousness residue."
"Did that happen to Gu Chengyue?"
"There is currently no official record."
Official record.
That wording again.
Chen Yaoting was beginning to find talking to LEV exhausting.
They practically never lied.
But every sentence answered only the narrowest possible question.
"I'll ask you about it again later."
He hung up directly.
Then he called the unfamiliar number back.
Beep.
The first ring.
The other person answered.
"Hello."
It was the same young man.
"Who are you?"
Chen Yaoting wasn't polite this time.
"You tell me where you are first."
"Why?"
"I want to meet you."
The man was silent for a moment.
"Is LEV following you?"
Chen Yaoting turned to look around the parking garage.
There were only a few cars.
Ms. Shen wasn't there.
"No."
"Do you have the letter?"
"Yes."
"Don't take a picture of it."
"Why?"
"Don't let it exist on your phone."
"Why the hell not?"
The other person's voice grew slightly urgent.
"Because they can read your devices."
Chen Yaoting snorted.
"You watch too many movies."
"Before yesterday, did you also think renting your body to a seventy-three-year-old billionaire sounded like a movie?"
That shut him up.
The man continued.
"Leave the medical center first."
"I'm already in the basement."
"Drive out."
"Then what?"
"I'll call you again in fifteen minutes."
"Are you messing with me?"
"Chen Yaoting."
It was the first time the man had said his full name.
"If you just want the money, go home now and pretend you know nothing."
"But if you want to know why Gu Chengyue woke up in his original body on the fifth day, do as I say."
The call ended again.
Chen Yaoting leaned back against his seat.
There were really two voices in his head.
One told him to leave it alone.
He had the money.
He had the car.
Everything was fine.
NT$150 million was enough to give him a completely different life.
Why bother touching all this bizarre nonsense?
But the other voice kept reminding him:
That was his body.
The seven days that had vanished were his time.
If something had really happened, he had at least the right to know.
In the end, he pressed the ignition button.
The engine roared through the basement.
It was his first time driving this car.
He had expected to be thrilled.
But as the car left the medical center, almost all his attention stayed on the rearview mirror.
Was anyone following him?
Was there a black Mercedes?
He drove for more than ten minutes.
Nothing.
The unfamiliar number called right on time.
"Where are you?"
"Near Minquan East Road."
"Head toward Songshan Airport."
"Where exactly are you taking me?"
"A coffee shop."
The man gave him an address.
Twenty minutes later, Chen Yaoting parked near an unremarkable coffee shop.
It was small.
Tucked away in an alley.
Not an Instagram-worthy place.
There was no line outside.
A little after two in the afternoon, only three tables were occupied inside.
As soon as he entered, he saw a man at the very back raise a hand.
He looked about thirty-five.
Short hair.
Black-framed glasses.
A gray T-shirt and ordinary jeans.
He looked nothing like a mysterious figure.
If anything, he looked like an average engineer.
Chen Yaoting walked over.
"You?"
The man nodded.
"Lin Zhekai."
"The one from three years ago?"
"Yes."
Chen Yaoting sat down.
He didn't order a drink.
His first question was direct.
"How did you get my number?"
Lin Zhekai took a sip of coffee.
"Gu Chengyue gave it to me."
"He did?"
"Three days ago."
Chen Yaoting's expression changed immediately.
"Three days ago, he was inside my body."
"I know."
"So he contacted you using my phone?"
"No."
"Then how?"
Lin Zhekai pulled a very old phone from his pocket.
He set it on the table.
"Only he and I know this number."
"When did he give it to you?"
"After the experience ended three years ago."
The more Chen Yaoting listened, the more confused he became.
"So you've been in contact all this time?"
"No."
"Then he suddenly contacted you three days ago?"
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
Lin Zhekai didn't answer right away.
Instead, he glanced at Chen Yaoting's jacket.
"Did you bring the letter?"
"Answer me first."
Lin Zhekai nodded.
"He sent me one sentence."
"What sentence?"
"I saw that person again."
Chen Yaoting frowned.
"Who?"
"That's why I asked you to come today."
A server walked over.
Chen Yaoting ordered an Americano at random.
Only after the server left did Lin Zhekai continue.
"I was twenty-two three years ago."
"You don't look twenty-five."
"I'm thirty-five now."
Chen Yaoting paused.
"Then you were thirty-two three years ago?"
"Yes."
"And then?"
"I owed a lot of money at the time."
"Sounds familiar."
"Did you also find LEV through an ad?"
"No."
Lin Zhekai shook his head.
"LEV wasn't publicly recruiting three years ago."
"I was introduced through a debt broker."
"How much were you paid?"
"NT$30 million."
Chen Yaoting almost thought he'd misheard.
"For seven days?"
"Seven days."
"Damn, I got NT$150 million."
Lin Zhekai smiled faintly.
"So when I saw the rates you get now in the news, I also thought I'd sold myself cheap."
"Wait."
Chen Yaoting frowned.
"What news?"
"It wasn't actual news. I was just making a comparison."
He brought the conversation back on track.
"When Gu Chengyue first rented my body, his physical condition was much better than it is now."
"During those seven days, he did roughly the same things as this time."
"Ate, drank, drove, wandered around?"
"Yes."
"What was the problem?"
Lin Zhekai looked at him.
"I woke up on the sixth day."
Chen Yaoting's hand stopped on the tabletop.
"You personally?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Inside my body."
"Isn't that normal? Did Gu Chengyue end the experience early?"
"No."
Lin Zhekai spoke slowly.
"I was awake for only thirteen minutes."
"After thirteen minutes, I disappeared again."
Chen Yaoting said nothing.
"For those thirteen minutes, I was in a hotel in Kaohsiung."
"I was wearing clothes I'd never bought."
"There was a glass of liquor on the table."
"I had no idea what had happened during the first six days."
"The first thing I did was check the date on my phone."
"The next second, someone knocked on the door."
"Who?"
"People from LEV."
Chen Yaoting's brow furrowed even deeper.
"They knew you'd woken up?"
"Yes."
"How is that possible?"
"That's what I thought too."
Lin Zhekai looked out the window.
"When they entered the room, they weren't surprised."
"One of them simply said, 'Mr. Lin, please lie back down.'"
"I asked where Gu Chengyue had gone."
"They didn't answer."
"Then they gave me an injection."
"The next time I woke up was after the experience officially ended."
"Didn't you report it?"
"Report it to whom?"
Lin Zhekai gave a bitter little smile.
"The contract I signed was thicker than yours."
"It included medical authorization."
"And the NT$30 million was already in my account."
"At the time, I just wanted to take the money and leave."
Chen Yaoting understood that completely.
Without the letter, he might have made the same choice now.
"So Gu Chengyue also woke up midway and returned to his original body three years ago?"
"I don't know."
"How did you get in touch afterward?"
Lin Zhekai was silent for a moment.
"On the ninth day after the experience ended."
"Gu Chengyue came to see me personally."
"What did he say?"
"He asked whether I'd woken up on the sixth day."
Chen Yaoting sat up straight.
"He knew?"
"He didn't just know."
Lin Zhekai stared at him.
"He said that during those thirteen minutes, he had woken up too."
The coffee arrived.
The server set the cups down.
Neither man spoke.
Only after the server had walked away did Chen Yaoting ask:
"So during those thirteen minutes, you were in your body and he was in his?"
"On the surface."
"Then what was the problem?"
"The problem was…"
Lin Zhekai lowered his voice.
"During those thirteen minutes, my body was still moving around inside the hotel."
Chen Yaoting stopped.
"You weren't inside your body?"
"Correct."
"Then how could it still be moving?"
"Because the security cameras recorded it."
"Recorded what?"
"They recorded me leaving the room."
"But I was clearly still lying on the bed inside that room."
Chen Yaoting couldn't process it for a moment.
"Say that again."
Lin Zhekai took out his own phone—not the old one from before.
He pulled up a video.
The image quality wasn't very good.
It looked like footage filmed off a security monitor.
The timestamp was from three years ago.
A hotel hallway.
A door opened.
A man walked out.
Chen Yaoting immediately looked at Lin Zhekai.
"That was you?"
"My face."
The man in the video wore a black jacket.
He walked quickly without looking at the camera.
A few seconds later, he disappeared around the corner.
Lin Zhekai paused the video.
"During that period, I was inside the same room."
"Impossible."
"I know."
"Then the video was faked?"
"That's what I thought at first too."
"Gu Chengyue gave it to you?"
"Yes."
"Where did he get it?"
"I don't know."
Chen Yaoting stared at the frozen image.
"So you think that wasn't you?"
"At least, it wasn't me while I was awake."
"Maybe the timestamp was wrong."
"We checked it."
"What about the hotel's system?"
"That room card also accessed the elevator during the exact same minute."
Chen Yaoting's head began to throb.
One person couldn't be in two places at once.
"How did LEV explain it?"
"Gu Chengyue never told LEV about the footage."
"Why?"
Lin Zhekai paused for several seconds.
"Because he suspected it wasn't a malfunction."
"Then what was it?"
"A third person."
Chen Yaoting stared at him.
"What third person?"
"Me and Gu Chengyue."
"There should have been only two consciousnesses."
"One renter and one participant."
"But he suspected that another consciousness existed inside the system during synchronization."
Chen Yaoting nearly laughed.
It wasn't because he found it funny.
It was so absurd that laughter was the only possible reaction.
"A ghost?"
"I don't know."
"Artificial intelligence?"
"I don't know."
"Someone who works for LEV?"
"I don't know."
"So you don't know anything."
"Correct."
Lin Zhekai didn't argue.
"Three years ago, we couldn't find out anything."
"Later, Gu Chengyue's health deteriorated, and he didn't do it a second time."
"Until now."
Chen Yaoting suddenly thought of something.
"Wait."
"He said that if I was willing, he could rent me for another fourteen days."
Lin Zhekai's expression changed.
"He offered you a second time?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"NT$300 million."
Lin Zhekai didn't look envious.
Instead, he was silent for a long time.
"Don't agree."
"Why not?"
"At least not now."
"It's NT$300 million."
"I know."
"What the hell do you know? You only got NT$30 million the first time."
Lin Zhekai didn't get angry at the jab.
He only said, "That's why I know even better what a person will think when he sees that number."
Chen Yaoting leaned back in his chair.
"Let me ask you one thing first."
"Go ahead."
"Three days ago, Gu Chengyue sent you, 'I saw that person again.'"
"What did he see?"
Lin Zhekai shook his head.
"He didn't say."
"You didn't ask?"
"I did."
"And?"
"He sent one more sentence."
"What?"
Lin Zhekai looked at him.
"This time, he knows me."
The coffee cup stopped halfway to Chen Yaoting's mouth.
"Who knows him?"
"I don't know."
Another I don't know.
Chen Yaoting was getting irritated.
"Then why did you call me here?"
"Because Gu Chengyue sent a third sentence too."
"Can't you just say everything at once?"
"The third sentence was your name."
Chen Yaoting made no sound.
"Chen Yaoting," Lin Zhekai said.
"And a string of numbers."
"Your phone number."
"That's how I knew how to find you."
That meant Gu Chengyue had already anticipated, while inside his body, that Lin Zhekai would need to contact Chen Yaoting after the experience ended.
"Why didn't he tell me himself?"
"You can ask him."
"He's in the hospital."
"I know."
Lin Zhekai took a folded sheet of paper from the edge of the table.
He pushed it across.
It was the address of a private hospital.
"He's there now."
"How do you know?"
"His assistant contacted me yesterday."
Chen Yaoting looked up.
"Why?"
"Gu Chengyue wanted to see me."
"Did you go?"
"I did."
"And?"
Lin Zhekai fell silent.
This silence lasted longer than any of the others.
"He didn't remember me."
Chen Yaoting froze.
"What do you mean?"
"I walked into the hospital room."
"He looked at me."
"I said I was Lin Zhekai."
"He asked who I was."
"Dementia?"
"No."
"Then what?"
"He remembered his company."
"He remembered his assistant."
"He remembered his family."
"He even remembered the life experience from three years ago."
"But…"
Lin Zhekai spoke one word at a time.
"He said the body he'd borrowed three years ago wasn't mine."
Chen Yaoting's back slowly pulled away from the chair.
"Whose did he say it was?"
"A man named Xu Mingzhou."
"Do you know him?"
"Not at all."
"Does LEV have anyone by that name?"
"I couldn't find anyone."
"Then maybe his memory was confused."
"I hope so too."
Lin Zhekai picked up the old phone.
He opened a photo and handed it over.
It was a picture of a sheet of paper taken in a hospital room.
The handwriting was messy, clearly written by an old man.
There were only two lines.
The first:
"Third completion."
The second:
"Chen Yaoting is not the fourth."
Chen Yaoting stared at the words.
His heart inexplicably quickened.
"Gu Chengyue wrote this?"
"Yesterday."
"What does 'third completion' mean?"
"I don't know."
"Didn't he only do it twice, with you and me?"
"According to LEV's records, yes."
"Then what does 'fourth' mean?"
"That's why I came to find you."
Chen Yaoting suddenly felt that the NT$150 million wasn't as simple as it had seemed when he first woke up.
He touched the letter in his pocket.
Gu Chengyue had clearly been lucid when he wrote it.
Now, however, memories that didn't belong to him were beginning to appear.
This really didn't look like an ordinary side effect.
"Let me see the letter."
Lin Zhekai said it.
Chen Yaoting didn't hand it over immediately.
"Promise you won't take it."
"I'll only read it."
He placed the letter on the table.
Lin Zhekai read it from beginning to end.
When he reached "On the fifth day, I woke up once," his expression barely changed.
But when he reached the final sentence—
"But the person inside wasn't me."—
Lin Zhekai's face turned noticeably pale.
"What is it?"
"Three years ago, he said something similar to me."
"Which part?"
"The first time he came to see me after the experience ended."
Lin Zhekai handed the letter back.
"He asked me:"
"If one day you wake up,"
"and discover that someone is more like you than you are,"
"how will you prove that you're the real one?"
Chen Yaoting frowned impatiently.
"Do rich people and tech companies love speaking in riddles or something?"
"I'm not rich."
"That's not the point."
Lin Zhekai smiled faintly.
Then his expression turned serious again.
"I'm not asking you to give up the money."
"Then what?"
"Find your seven days."
"How?"
"Your phone."
"I already checked it."
"Not the chat history."
Lin Zhekai said, "The location records."
Chen Yaoting froze.
"If you didn't turn off location access, the places you went during those seven days may still be there."
That was true.
Even if Gu Chengyue had deleted the messages, system services might still have left a trail.
They immediately began searching.
The map timeline.
Nothing.
LEV had clearly disabled the relevant permissions.
Photo locations.
Most of the photos had been deleted.
Parking records.
There were a few.
The credit card wasn't his.
But the ride-hailing app history was still on the phone.
Day one was normal.
Medical center to hotel.
Day two.
Hotel to Xinyi District, Taipei.
Day three.
Yangmingshan.
No record on day four.
None on day five either.
Then a new entry suddenly appeared on day six.
1:27 a.m.
Pickup location:
Jinshan District, New Taipei City.
Destination:
An address in Nangang District, Taipei.
Chen Yaoting frowned.
"What's there?"
Lin Zhekai searched it on his phone.
A few seconds later, both men fell silent.
The address wasn't a restaurant.
It wasn't a hotel.
And it wasn't a company owned by Gu Chengyue.
It was an old data center that had been shut down for years.
One belonging to Chengyue Group.
News reports showed that it had stopped operating four years ago.
Chen Yaoting stared at the date.
Early morning on the fifth day.
Exactly the day Gu Chengyue's letter said he had "woken back up in his original body."
"Want to take a look?" he asked.
Lin Zhekai didn't answer immediately.
"Now?"
"When else?"
"You only just regained consciousness."
"I feel great."
"LEV might know."
"Weren't you the one who told me to find my seven days?"
Lin Zhekai watched him for several seconds.
"Fine."
The two men left the coffee shop.
Lin Zhekai stared when he saw the Porsche.
"Gu Chengyue bought that?"
"Yeah."
"He gave me something three years ago too."
"What?"
"A watch."
"Expensive?"
"A little over NT$400,000."
Chen Yaoting slapped the roof of the car.
"Inflation really is out of control."
Lin Zhekai laughed for the first time.
"You can still joke around?"
"What else am I supposed to do?"
Chen Yaoting opened the door.
"I have NT$150 million in my account now."
"Even if there really is a ghost, I'm going after it in a Porsche."
The car headed toward Nangang.
Along the way, Lin Zhekai gave him a fuller account of what had happened three years ago.
After his experience ended, LEV had also given him a complete examination.
There had been no abnormalities.
Only two things had changed.
First, he had suddenly learned to cut steak with his left hand.
But he had always been completely right-handed.
Second, he had started hating cilantro.
"How is that an abnormality?"
"I used to love it."
"Maybe Gu Chengyue hated it."
"Exactly."
"Then that's just memory residue."
"That's what we thought at first too."
"And later?"
"It went away after six months."
"That sounds even more normal."
"But three years ago, I couldn't speak Japanese at all."
"What about now?"
Lin Zhekai looked ahead.
In perfectly fluent Japanese, he said something.
Chen Yaoting couldn't understand a word.
"What does that mean?"
"I said I don't know either."
"Gu Chengyue spoke Japanese?"
"A little."
"Then isn't it his?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"He couldn't understand what I just said."
Chen Yaoting glanced at him.
For once, he didn't immediately make a snarky remark.
Forty minutes later, they reached the area around the address.
The old data center was more isolated than he had imagined.
Not in the middle of nowhere, but the surrounding area was mostly warehouses and old industrial buildings.
The exterior walls were gray-black.
A rusted sign reading "CLOSED" hung on the gate.
The security booth was empty.
But the iron gate wasn't fully locked.
Chen Yaoting parked farther away.
The two of them walked over.
Lin Zhekai said quietly, "If there's anyone inside, we go back."
"Sure."
The gap was wide enough for one person to slip through sideways.
It was even quieter inside than outside.
The air smelled of dust and dampness.
One corner of the glass entrance door to the main building was shattered.
Yet there wasn't much trash on the ground.
It didn't look completely abandoned.
Chen Yaoting noticed something.
"Look."
In the corner of the wall was a new security camera.
Its indicator light was still on.
Lin Zhekai's expression changed.
"Why would an abandoned place still have a security camera after four years?"
They didn't continue toward the main entrance.
Instead, they circled around to the side.
The side door wasn't locked.
When they pushed it open, a blast of air conditioning blew out.
Chen Yaoting stopped.
It looked abandoned from the outside.
But there was air conditioning inside.
The hallway lights were on too.
The walls were old, but the floor was clean.
As if someone had been using the place all along.
"This isn't abandoned," Lin Zhekai whispered.
At the end of the hallway was an elevator.
Its buttons had power.
B2.
B3.
Every floor above the first had been disabled.
Chen Yaoting stared at B3.
"Going down?"
Lin Zhekai didn't answer.
Chen Yaoting pressed it.
The elevator doors opened.
The inside was brand-new, completely unlike the building outside.
They stepped in.
The doors closed.
B3.
The elevator descended.
Ten-some seconds later—
Ding.
The doors opened onto a white hallway.
The lighting was bright.
There were several metal doors on the left.
On the right was a huge glass wall.
There were no servers behind the glass.
There was a row of medical beds.
Chen Yaoting's steps gradually slowed to a stop.
One.
Two.
Three.
At least twenty.
Beside every bed was neural-sync equipment extremely similar to that at the LEV medical center.
But there was no one in the beds.
A huge logo was printed on the wall at the very back.
LEV.
Beneath it was another line of English.
LIFE EXTENSION VAULT.
Chen Yaoting couldn't quite understand it.
"What does that mean?"
Lin Zhekai stared at the words.
His voice was very low.
"Life Extension Vault."
Just then, footsteps suddenly came from the other side of the hallway.
The two men turned at the same time.
A man in a white coat and mask stepped out from around the corner.
He clearly paused when he saw them.
Chen Yaoting was about to run, but the man called his name first.
"Chen Yaoting?"
He froze in place.
The man in the white coat slowly pulled down his mask.
He was about fifty.
Chen Yaoting had never seen him before.
But when Lin Zhekai saw that face, he visibly took a step back.
"Impossible."
Chen Yaoting turned to him.
"You know him?"
Lin Zhekai's lips had gone pale.
"Three years ago."
"He's the one who gave me that injection."
The man didn't deny it.
He merely glanced at Lin Zhekai, then shifted his gaze back to Chen Yaoting.
"You shouldn't have found this place so quickly."
Chen Yaoting frowned.
"What is this place?"
The man was silent for two seconds.
Finally, he looked at the security camera above the hallway.
"You have about three minutes left."
"What?"
"LEV security will be here in three minutes."
Lin Zhekai asked, "Why are you helping us?"
The man didn't answer.
He turned and walked toward one of the doors.
He swiped a card.
The door opened.
"If you want to know what happened on the fifth day, come inside."
Chen Yaoting remained where he was.
"Why should I trust you?"
The man looked back.
"You don't have to trust me."
"You only have to look at one thing."
In the end, the two of them followed him inside.
There was only one computer in the room.
And an enormous wall of servers.
The man logged into the system quickly.
He entered a string of authorization codes.
A database appeared on the screen.
Hundreds of names.
Each name had an ID, a year, the number of synchronizations, and a status beside it.
Chen Yaoting found his own name at the top immediately.
CHEN YAO-TING.
2026.
SESSION: 01.
STATUS: SUCCESS.
Below it was Lin Zhekai.
2023.
SESSION: 01.
STATUS: PARTIAL LEAK.
"What does Partial Leak mean?" Lin Zhekai asked.
The man didn't answer.
He searched for Gu Chengyue.
The result displayed KU CHENG-YUE.
But there weren't two entries.
There were seven records in total.
2019.
2020.
2021.
2023.
2024.
2025.
2026.
Chen Yaoting stared at the years.
"He didn't only do it twice?"
"There are only two public records," the man said.
"Then what are the others?"
"Not renters."
"Then what are they?"
The man opened the 2024 record.
A photograph appeared on the screen.
It showed a man in his twenties.
Name:
XU MINGZHOU.
Chen Yaoting immediately remembered Gu Chengyue saying in the hospital room that the body he'd borrowed three years ago had belonged to Xu Mingzhou.
"This person really existed?" Lin Zhekai asked.
The man looked at him.
"He existed."
"What do you mean, existed?"
The man didn't answer.
He only slid the record to the right.
In the status field:
TRANSFER COMPLETE.
The next line:
ORIGINAL HOST: DECEASED.
Chen Yaoting didn't understand the English.
"What does that mean?"
Lin Zhekai's expression had already changed.
He said slowly, "The original host… died."
Chen Yaoting looked at the man in the white coat.
"Who died?"
The man was still staring at the screen.
"Xu Mingzhou."
"Then what about Gu Chengyue?"
"Alive."
"So?"
The man finally turned around.
"You've always thought life experience technology temporarily places one person's consciousness inside another person's body."
"Isn't that what it does?"
"At first."
"At first?"
The man took a breath.
"Then they discovered something."
"If the synchronization lasts long enough, consciousness doesn't necessarily have to go back."
Outside the hallway, the elevator arrival chime suddenly sounded.
Ding.
The man's face changed instantly.
"Security is here."
But Chen Yaoting didn't move.
"Finish what you were saying."
"There's no time."
"Then what exactly happened on the fifth day?"
The man looked at him.
Finally, he said, "The fifth day wasn't Gu Chengyue waking up in his own body."
"Then what was it?"
Fast footsteps echoed down the hallway.
The man lowered his voice.
"Someone was trying to switch him back."
"Who?"
He looked at Chen Yaoting.
"Xu Mingzhou."
The next second, someone shouted from outside the room:
"Nobody move in there!"
The man in the white coat immediately shut down the screen.
But just before the display went dark, Chen Yaoting saw what seemed to be another line of tiny red text beneath his name.
Not SUCCESS.
A different field.
CANDIDATE STATUS:
NEXT HOST.