First-Class Lawyer

A lawyer’s day was always exceedingly busy, yet they didn’t actually spend much time seated behind a desk. There was a saying within Southcross Law Firm that whenever taking on a new client, it was necessary to inform them that any appointments had to be arranged with the lawyer in advance, and not to charge right up to the law firm out of the blue.

For the lawyer that they were looking for might be anywhere else, but his office. 

Under normal circumstances, the same held true for Gu Yan.

But today was an exception to the rule.

Apart from going out to retrieve new evidence in the morning, he spent the whole day holed up in the hotel, quietly seated and working on his photon computer with an electronic pen.

The several video recordings that he had picked up in the morning were playing on the holographic screen before him. Wearing a white earpiece, he leaned back in his chair. A hand lay on the armrest, whilst the other held on to a cup of coffee. 

There were a few blank pieces of paper placed on his knee. Sporadically, he would write a few words on it very neatly.

Long ago while he was still studying, he had a streak of arrogance in his character. His brain would store anything that he saw or finished studying, so he felt it a waste of time picking up a pen to write. First, he felt that the speed of his writing could not keep up with the turn of his thoughts; secondly, he liked things to be kept extremely neat and tidy. It was only natural that handwritten words could never bring the same satisfaction as the neatness and clarity of uniform specifications that electronically-inputted words would have.

Later when he was in the office of a certain dean, he caught a glimpse of what the other was making notes of. There were several pieces of paper with keywords freely scattered all over. Important things would be larger, whereas some were conversely written like footnotes, even with the occasional circles and lines casually sketched out.

It should have been beyond messy, logically speaking. But a glance through it wouldn’t irritate the eyes; it could even be considered a visual delight.

The young dean, who was Gu Yan’s direct mentor, had also given Gu Yan some advice. Seated behind his desk, he said with a smile, “I suggest that you pen down any ideas that occur to you when reading case files because every person has a unique way of recording details, layouting, and marking out points. This cannot be expressed just by selecting keywords with a cursor. Handwritten notes can represent the most three-dimensional state of a person’s thoughts, which is different and unique from anyone else.”

At that time, Gu Yan felt that there was a nugget of reason in the words. So, he eventually tried and began writing with a pen, intentionally cultivating this habit all the way to the present.

The video on the holographic screen was looped again from start to end. Gu Yan hit the pause button, massaging his neck. In this short break, he clicked on the screen and pulled up the pages that a certain someone had given him.

On the page was what the other party had written down after watching the video all night. 

To this day, he had to confess that there was a lot of truth in what a certain someone said—handwritten notes could indeed express a person’s most three-dimensional and unique state of mind.

Because, on these pages in front of him, despite the handwriting having been intentionally modified, the temperament in his bones couldn’t be concealed. It was obvious at first glance that this unruly thing followed no set rules, just like the way it was back then.

Silently, Gu Yan skimmed through them, pinching the bridge of his nose as he closed the pages before him.

“…” 

How should he put it? It was probably already a feat that Yan Suizhi had remembered to modify the font.

—

Even though the anti-inflammatory and fever medicine that Gu Yan had chosen had the least side effects, they still caused Yan Suizhi to fall into a deep sleep.

Covered in quilts, he slept from eleven in the morning all the way to eight in the evening. And this sleep was uncommonly practical and dreamless, so much so that he woke up feeling disillusioned by time. 

He awoke very quietly.

Ktf gbbw’r mflilcu iluta kjr rfa bc rboa iluta wbvf. Pa kjr kjgw jcv sfiibk, jcv cba abb ygluta. Llr fsfr mbeiv jvpera ab atf ibk iluta klatbea fnfc cffvlcu ab rdelca.

Ktf rboa ktlaf delia mbnfgfv tlw eq ab tlr mtlc, cba lwqfvlcu tlr ygfjatlcu, yea cba ifaalcu lc jcs mbiv ygffhf flatfg.

But the room wasn’t completely silent. As he slowly shook off the last vestiges of sleep, he could hear the occasional sound of fabric rubbing very lightly, quiet so as to not disturb his sleep, yet making the room feel less empty. 

Yan Suizhi turned his head towards the muted sound and saw Gu Yan sitting by the French windows, looking at the holographic screen with paper on his knees and an electronic pen held loosely in his hand. His face was calm and quiet.

Perhaps he had slept for too long; during those few minutes, Yan Suizhi was suspended between a state of dazedness and inertia to speak.

Until Gu Yan unconsciously glanced towards this side…

“Awake?” Gu Yan took off his earpiece, setting it down on the glass coffee table. He got up and walked over. 

Only then did Yan Suizhi lazily respond, “Mm.”

Another moment passed before he asked, “You’ve been here all this while?”

As his tone came out in a lazy drawl, even the upward tone that a question should have instead fell very lightly like a declarative sentence.

“Otherwise?” Gu Yan walked over to the bed, replying coldly. But he very naturally pressed the back of his hand to Yan Suizhi’s forehead. “I’m the one who has to take responsibility if you get any repercussions from this fever,.” 

Yan Suizhi halfheartedly arched his eyebrows. “Do you know that most hotels have a thermometer in the bedside cabinet? I think it’d be more accurate than the back of your hand.”

Gu Yan, “I’m used to making a mental judgement first.”

After making this mild remark, he followed through and opened the drawer. Sure enough, there was an electronic thermometer in it.

“I bet you forgot.” Yan Suizhi’s hoarse voice was very light, and very slow, perfused with the satisfaction of a deep sleep. “You didn’t use it in the morning, either.” 

“With all due respect, I don’t have to rely on a thermometer to judge your temperature when it’s high enough to scald my hand in the morning.” Holding the thermometer, Gu Yan casually touched the tip to Yan Suizhi’s face.

The thermometer beep’ed.

“…And with all due respect, this is my first time seeing someone use this type of thermometer by jabbing it at the face.” the esteemed Professor Yan, with only his head poking out the quilt, said.

With such spirit, his fever should probably have gone down. 

Gu Yan glanced down at the thermometer and reset it to zero. Eyes casted down, he said to Yan Suizhi, “Hand.”

Professor Yan condescended to stick out a paw from his nest of blankets. Gu Yan tapped the thermometer on his palm.

Beep—

Yan Suizhi, “How’s it? Gone down yet?” 

“Mn, went down.”

Yan Suizhi, “I think the medicine you gave me is quite problematic, I don’t really feel like moving after eating it.”

“Did I ask you to move?” Gu Yan asked curtly.

Yan Suizhi smiled, but the laziness permeating his entire body had washed away. He propped his body upright, looking all ready to hop out of bed. 

Gu Yan was probably traumatised by him by now and was particularly sensitive to his every move. He frowned at once, asking, “What are you doing?”

“Shower,” Yan Suizhi.

Gu Yan, “To pour water on the wound and get another bout of fever? Can you try to have mercy on that leg?”

Yan Suizhi sat on the side of the bed. Following his words, he looked down at that injured leg and tsk’ed. “I holed up in the quilts for a day and feel that I’ve worked up a little sweat. If I don’t shower, I’ll start to stink. Can you stand having a stinky intern?” 

Gu Yan, “…”

Expressionless, he looked at Yan Suizhi. His face was very restrained. For a time, it was hard to tell if he was making a very difficult decision or simply rendered speechless.

In any case, after a good few seconds, he said, “Go stinky, then.”

Yan Suizhi, “…” 

In actuality, he didn’t smell much, if at all. But he still felt uncomfortable without a shower, so he ended up finding an excuse to invite the distinguished Lawyer Gu, the venerated Buddha specialised at provoking anger, out the door. Then, he used a wet towel to wipe down his body.

This time, he finally followed the instructions to the word, avoiding the wound all the way and not messing around with it anymore.

When Gu Yan was next welcomed by him through the door again, it was already nine-thirty in the evening.

He came together with the hotel’s room service trolley. After tossing around with fever and suffering from inflammation the whole day, now, Yan Suizhi was famished. But he didn’t have much of an appetite. This time, even if Gu Yan really spread a platter of sweet prawns, crab jelly, lamb chops, etc in front of him, he wouldn’t want to touch it either. So, he had gotten the hotel to cook a pot of porridge for him. 

Perhaps because the young lad was overly shocked by his wound in the morning, Yan Suizhi found that the delivered porridge had many tonics mixed into it, and any heaty ingredients were also carefully screened out.

This hotel was so-so, but their porridge was good. It was easy to eat even with so many ingredients stuffed into it.

Yan Suizhi drank two small bowls of porridge, and Gu Yan took half the pot as well.

“You actually have suppers?” Yan Suizhi was quite surprised. After all, he had only seen Gu Yan skip meals when busy, and would rarely see him stop for additional meals outside the usual times. 

“It couldn’t be that you haven’t eaten dinner yet, have you?” Yan Suizhi glanced at the trash bin in the corner of the room and wondered.

“Ate,” Gu Yan tidied up the bowls and rang for room service, replying.

Yan Suizhi was slightly skeptical, but his attention was soon diverted to work.

After room service staff pushed the trolley away, Gu Yan sat across from Yan Suizhi and projected several recordings from his photon computer to show Yan Suizhi. “I went to find Fix in the morning.” 

“How was it?” Yan Suizhi asked as he tapped the play button.

“There’s good news, and bad news,” Gu Yan said.

Yan Suizhi, “Which do you want to say first? I’m fine either way, it isn’t as if I haven’t received bad news before.”

Gu Yan pointed at the holographic screen. “The person who owns the taxi isn’t Fix. He is hired by the owner, Jamie Black, the middle-aged man we previously saw. He isn’t able to go out and fetch customers everyday at noon and in the evening around the meal hours, so he hands the taxi to Fix.” 

“The good news is that Jamie Black wasn’t stingy and had a dashboard camera installed. It’s the type that can record the happenings outside the car, and even has an infrared setting.”

Yan Suizhi raised his eyebrows, more or less getting a sense of what was coming. “So? The bad news is that it recorded something against Joshua?”

Gu Yan nodded, “Somewhat.”

Yan Suizhi roughly skimmed through the videos and found a few that happened to catch Joshua Dale climbing over the yard wall; in the many days of video footage, it wasn’t just once or twice that he was caught. 

He pulled the progress bar and asked Gu Yan, “Have you watched it already?”

“A few times.”

“Made notes?”

Gu Yan, “…I did. Don’t you think that this isn’t something for an intern to ask?” 

Yan Suizhi, “…I’m just asking.”

He immediately changed the subject. “Right, those pages I handed you yesterday, have you seen them?”

Gu Yan leaned back against the chair, an indescribable expression crossing his face. “Glanced through it.”

Yan Suizhi, “You didn’t look it over carefully? Why’s that?” 

Gu Yan, “Let me give you a suggestion. Next time you pass this piece of divine scripture on to others to read, remember to hire an interpreter.”

Yan Suizhi, “…”

Refuse to read your teacher’s kind advice? Watch out, make sure you don’t come out of court crying.