Brocaded Night, Part One

Life is like a night dressed in brocade. You know it is dazzlingly beautiful, and yet you never quite see it clearly. That is all right. I know the darkness is like silk. I know walking can feel like wind. I know I am not cold.

And that is enough. Enough for me to keep going, all nerves and expectation, waiting for the day the sun finally rises.

The answer will reveal itself.

Prologue

At Baifeng Academy of Arts late at night, the moon was out and the stars were not.

The wind had picked up, but not a single scrap of paper stirred along the immaculate school road. Only a small pile of fallen leaves shifted with it, scattering for a moment and gathering again.

This was one of the most famous art schools in the country. Privately funded and jointly run with prestigious institutions, it had produced no small number of movie stars and famous directors in the past twenty years.

The well-known white teaching building with its pointed roof stood under the moonlight, quietly carrying the dreams of countless would-be stars.

And yet, on the top floor of that building, in the principal's office area on the eleventh story, there was the faintest trace of movement.

The elevator, which normally shut down exactly at midnight, was still lit. The display glowed with the number 11.

There were two doors leading into the principal's office suite, and both of them were closed.

But someone was unmistakably inside.

The ceiling light was off. By moonlight alone, a dark figure could be seen moving slowly toward the principal's massive desk. He reached out and turned on the desk lamp.

At its dimmest setting, it cast only the weakest pool of light, enough to outline the black-clad figure's back in silence.

With his head lowered, he took a ring of keys and unlocked several drawers, searching for something.

After a while he pulled out a notebook and set it on the desk.

Then he turned the lamp up a little.

The orange light, soft but brighter now, fell across the page before him. A sheet from a file was tucked there, and in the upper right corner was a small photograph.

On the page was written:

Chapter 1.

Sakakibara Yuzuha's butt hurt terribly, because freight trucks were not allowed through the city center, so Old Yu had taken a long detour in his big rig, cutting through a half-finished construction site just to get her there. That stretch of road had jolted what was already not a particularly delicate behind so badly she felt it might come apart for good.

Old Yu was very pleased with himself. As he drove, he took a call from an old friend.

"I absolutely had to tell you this," he boomed. "My daughter got into Chengjin!"

On the other end came the mocking voice of his mahjong buddy, Old Zhao. "You've finally gone crazy wanting your daughter to be a star. If Xiaoyan had taken after her mother instead of you, maybe you'd at least have had a dream to cling to."

Old Yu spun the wheel, hit the horn, and laughed out loud. "Listen to me. There's nothing fake about this. It's as solid as a biscuit. I'm driving her there to register right now. Haven't you ever worn Li-Ning sportswear? Then you don't know that anything is possible. Go buy yourself a tracksuit and learn something."

To Old Zhao's disbelieving grunts, Old Yu hung up in triumph.

Still in high spirits, he tilted his head toward his daughter.

"Good girl, let me tell you a joke. Three people went to an orchard to pick fruit. A while later they met again by the washbasin. The first one said, I picked grapes. The second said, I picked pears. The third one didn't say anything. He was washing his feet. The other two asked him why. Guess what he said?"

Sakakibara Yuzuha clutched her chest and made a dry-heaving noise.

Old Yu went on anyway, enthusiasm blazing. "Come on, good girl. Guess. Guess!"

"I'm not guessing."

"Go on, just once. I promise it's hilarious. Hahahaha."

"I'm really not guessing."

He sighed in defeat. "Just one guess. Or should I tell you the answer?"

"Fine," Yuzuha said. "He stepped in dog poop. I told you that joke the day before yesterday."

Before Old Yu could answer, a barrage of horns exploded ahead of them.

Red, blue, silver, black, cars of every color, brand, and size had clogged Jinxiu Road until not a drop of space remained. People said that every September, Jinxiu Road looked like an old widow in a brand-new padded jacket, gaudy enough to scare a person to death.

That had been the annual spectacle ever since Baifeng Academy of Arts was built there nearly ten years earlier.

Yuzuha waved one hand at Old Yu, grabbed her enormous suitcase with the other, and fought her way toward the sidewalk.

She left him sitting in the driver's seat of his monstrous truck with a deeply aggrieved look on his face, as tiny furious cars swarmed around him from all directions. For the moment he could neither move forward nor back, and there was nothing to do but let his daughter go on without him.

Inside Chengjin, though, the school road offered an entirely different scene.

The medium-sized camphor trees transplanted there ten years before had already grown lush and full. Their deep green canopies almost blocked out the sky, and the bits of golden light that fell through the leaves were as lovely as rhinestones in a girl's hair.

All vehicles were forbidden on campus, so the road was filled with new students carrying bags and dragging suitcases. Wiping sweat from her forehead with one hand, Sakakibara Yuzuha lifted her eyes toward the legendary white building she had admired for so long with a look of pure devotion.

A month earlier she had only been able to dream of it.

And one month later, she was standing right in front of it.

I'm here, Chengjin.

She shouted it in her heart.

"I'm here, Chengjin!"

The words rang out behind her in a man's voice so sonorous and metallic it sounded as if iron were striking iron. The poetically overblown emotion in it stunned everyone on the road, and every head turned at once in Yuzuha's direction.

Yuzuha nearly launched herself into a forward roll and fled ten meters on instinct. When she turned around, she saw a buzz-cut boy standing exactly where she had been a moment earlier. He wore nothing but a pair of athletic pants, his entire powerful upper body bare. He had spread his arms like a white dove and planted his feet in an absurdly steady martial pose, his face full of the sort of ecstatic expression usually seen on people who had taken the wrong pills.

Most eye-catching of all was the giant gold earring hanging from his left ear, almost the size of an egg.

As it swung wildly beneath his enormous earlobe, Yuzuha found a heroic poem rising unbidden in her heart: if the heavens feel love, the heavens too will age; if a man has money, he'll hang gold bars from his ears.

At the boy's feet stood a giant black leather suitcase. He was clearly another freshman here to enroll.

Just as everyone else was still standing there thunderstruck, half-charred in spirit and fully numb in mind, he snapped cleanly out of his pose and returned to an ordinary standing stance.

But before anyone could let out the breath they had been holding, he launched into a flurry of punches, fast as wind and lightning. In the sun, his bronzed back gleamed, every muscle standing out sharply as he moved with enough force to stir the air.

It was, in all fairness, fairly spectacular.

The students who had failed to get away in time had already formed a wide ring around him, shouting and cheering.

And the more noise they made, the more energized he became, until the whole road seemed to boil.

Yuzuha, who had originally been closest to him, was now elbowing her way desperately out of the crowd. She needed to find her dorm. Then, suddenly, she saw the tightly packed ring of people begin parting in both directions. A small white car was slowly making its way down the campus road toward the gate.

Whispers immediately broke out among the freshmen, and everyone's attention shifted to the car.

No private vehicles were allowed inside Chengjin. That rule was absolute. It did not matter how rich or powerful your family was, everyone parked outside the gates. So who exactly was inside that little white car who could ignore the rule?

The gold-earring boy, high on adrenaline and still performing like a man possessed, noticed nothing of the changing atmosphere around him, nor of the crowd thinning out. With a thunderous shout, he threw himself into a backflip and landed neatly to the accompaniment of a chorus of screams.

Then he struck his original finishing pose again: feet rooted in his martial stance, arms spread like a dove toward the heavens, eyes dreamy and tearful.

Wind. Sunlight. Collective petrification.

When no applause or cheers came, the gold-earring boy slowly lowered his head in confusion and looked in front of him at a normal angle.

A small white car.

Its window was rolled down. Leaning out from inside was a glamorous woman wearing an expression of utter disdain.

Under that gaze from a beauty, the gold-earring boy collapsed inward on the spot. He backed away in a daze, then suddenly seemed to remember something, rushed to where he had first posed, and dragged away his huge black suitcase.

The little car rolled out the school gate and in a moment was swallowed by the roaring current of traffic outside.

After a round of laughter, the crowd's topic of interest changed just as quickly.

"Did you see that? I think that was Weng Lu."

"Was it really Weng Lu? She looked even prettier than on TV."

"She used to be a Chengjin student too, right? Does she have special privileges?"

"Forget her. It wasn't her. It was the other person in the car. You didn't see?"

"Who?"

"Wu Ziguang. The director Wu Ziguang. I bought an issue of Great Director once, and they had his interview photo in it. He's so handsome. It had to be him."

"Wow!"

In the noisy flow of campus life, everyone quickly went back to their roles. Those picking up freshmen went back to picking up freshmen. Those looking for dorms went back to looking for dorms. Those carrying luggage went back to carrying luggage.

Only the gold-earring boy, who had just been the center of attention, stood in utter defeat by the side of the tree-lined road, his bare torso now looking distinctly ridiculous.

Yuzuha had already been about to leave, but when she saw the lost and miserable look on his face, she could not help feeling sorry for him.

Freeing one hand, she patted him on the shoulder. "You were actually pretty good."

The boy looked as if an immortal beauty had descended from heaven just to praise him. "Really? My name's Lu Bobo. My dream is to become a martial-arts superstar like Bruce Lee."

Yuzuha could not help adding one more sentence. "You will make your dream come true."

Lu Bobo suddenly lowered his head in visible tension. Just as Yuzuha was about to run for it, he asked in a tiny voice, "What do you think of my muscles? I feel like the entertainment industry is really missing my type."

Yuzuha fled.

The girls' dorms at Chengjin held four students to a room, each with its own bathroom. The building had only been completed a few years earlier, and everything was still fairly new. It did not take Yuzuha long to find the room marked on the dorm assignment card she had received when she registered.

Room 405.

There were already three girls inside. The last empty lower bunk apparently belonged to Sakakibara Yuzuha.

The short-haired girl in red on the upper bunk above her bed immediately waved at her in a broad, cheerful way and pointed downward to the bed below.

"Hi, here, here!"

Yuzuha smiled back, nodded, and dragged her suitcase over.

As she unpacked, she quickly formed a general impression of her new roommates.

The easygoing red-haired girl above her was named Hu Wanjun. She came from a newly rich family and had a little tyrant of a brother at home. Because she had grown up in an environment that favored boys over girls, her personality had turned bold and competitive, almost boyish. Her goal was to become a famous director.

The moment she finished introducing herself, she pulled out a pirate-captain sticker and slapped it over the slip of paper with her name on the bed rail.

"From now on," she announced gravely, "if anyone calls me Hu Wanjun, I swear I'll turn on them. Call me Erina. E-ri-na."

"But Wanjun is such a nice name." That came from the girl on another lower bunk. The instant she said it, Erina gave a visible shudder.

Shiraishi Jun was as her name suggested, pure white. She looked like a harmless little rabbit, with narrow eyes, pale skin, and a soft, delicate voice. Whenever she looked at someone, she smiled shyly.

"Wanjun is obviously what happens when my mother gets poisoned by old Qiong Yao dramas," Erina snapped, slamming a hand against the bed board. "If I ever meet the real Qiong Yao, I swear I won't let her off."

Shiraishi Jun shrank at the sound and stopped talking.

The pretty girl on the bunk above Shiraishi Jun let out a giggle. "Oh my, why must one old lady make life hard for another old lady..."

Her name was Onda Kaori, and she claimed she came from a fallen aristocratic family. Fallen or not, she said, noble blood still ran in her veins, which was why she held herself to especially high standards. Her dream was to become the kind of beautiful ornamental star Lin Chi-ling had once been.

When she saw the murderous look Erina shot her, she stuck out her tongue and swallowed the rest of what she had been about to say. "All right, all right, Erina. I'll treat everyone to lychees. I brought loads."

The moment food was mentioned, the atmosphere warmed up. Yuzuha, Erina, and Shiraishi Jun all dug out their own secret stashes as well and distributed them around as a ceremonial gift for the formation of this year's united revolutionary front.

Erina produced a huge bag of spicy duck necks.

Shiraishi Jun brought out a box of French truffles.

Yuzuha offered a small carton of koala biscuits.

All three of them waited eagerly for Onda Kaori's lychees, while she fiddled with something on the top bunk.

Only after a long while did she finally climb down, moving at a snail's pace.

"Here. Fresh lychees. I had a really hard time finishing three of them yesterday. They need to stay in the fridge, and they spoil easily."

The other three froze as one.

Shiraishi Jun cupped the two lychees she had been given in both hands, looked at them, and said nothing.

Yuzuha tugged at the muscles in her face. Even the words thank you jammed in her throat.

Only Erina reacted at once. She put one lychee on each eyelid and muttered to herself, "Two? Couldn't finish them? Onda Kaori, did you come here from outer space?"

Kaori looked aggrieved. "But lychees are so full of sugar. I really can't eat that much. I'm going to be a star, you know. If you want, you can eat my two as well."

Then, in an atmosphere of pure unreality, the three of them watched Onda Kaori, who could not manage two lychees, proceed to devour six spicy duck necks, eight truffles, and half a box of koala biscuits before climbing back onto her bunk with a belch.

"Don't call me. I'm going to take a nap. I don't usually eat dinner. I have to maintain my figure. I'm going to be a star."

Yuzuha and Shiraishi Jun both remained silent.

Only Erina let out a wordless scream of despair. "Have I really entered outer space ahead of schedule?"

Into that strange atmosphere came a knock at the door.

Shiraishi Jun went skipping lightly to answer it on tiptoe.

The door had barely opened when she clutched her chest like a startled rabbit and ran back into the room, her face turning as red as if she had just gotten drunk. Erina, baffled, charged over, and at that exact moment the person outside stepped in.

There came an earth-shattering crash, followed by two human voices howling in agony.

Erina rubbed her head furiously, her already short hair sticking out even more wildly than before.

"State your name!" she barked.

The other person crying out in pain was a boy whose hair was somehow longer than Erina's. He wore a powder-pink shirt, and his innocent eyes were bright and watery. He was, by any reasonable standard, a highly ornamental specimen of handsome young man.

Unfortunately, Erina was not the sort who pitied beautiful things. She bared her teeth and seized the boy by the collar as if trying to haul him bodily into the air, only to realize that he was at least one meter eighty and abandon the idea.

"Are you... a girl?" were the first words out of his mouth.

That detonated Erina on the spot. It did not matter that he rose to his feet with the elegance of a willow in the breeze, nor that his voice was gentle enough to make a person melt. None of that could stop Erina from charging him like a bull that had just seen red.

Yuzuha reacted in a flash and grabbed the rampaging Erina from behind. Shiraishi Jun gave a tiny scream and covered both eyes with her hands. Onda Kaori, despite all this, kept sleeping with the faintest of snores.

The boy looked at Erina with sympathy, then rubbed his forehead. He now resembled a prince who had just been trampled by livestock, disheveled but still somehow noble.

Yuzuha could not help privately admiring him. In looks and bearing, he absolutely met the standard for the male lead of a Korean drama.

The boy edged back carefully, flashed Yuzuha a grateful smile, and then turned to the only person not physically occupied at the moment, Shiraishi Jun.

"Excuse me. Which one of you is Sakakibara Yuzuha?"

Shiraishi Jun slowly lowered one hand from her eyes, pointed a single finger toward Yuzuha, and immediately covered herself again.

The boy tilted his head and studied the two young women wrestling in place, apparently trying to determine which of them was the one he was looking for.

"Sakakibara Yuzuha," he said at last, "my name is Tsukishima Hikaru. It's a pleasure to meet you. May I invite you to dinner?"

Yuzuha and Erina froze in their gladiatorial pose.