Chapter 83: Transmigrated as a Fraudulent Male Streamer (7)
Once Cen Yu stepped into the bathroom, he found it even cruder than he had imagined.
The floor was a simple layer of rough concrete, and the walls lacked any finish whatsoever. The only place to hang clothes was a plastic bag hooked onto an iron nail.
Printed across the plastic bag were five characters: Red Apple Supermarket.
One look was enough to tell it had been brought back by Jiang Tuan when he went shopping.
Still wearing his sandals, Cen Yu stripped off his dirty clothes and hung them on the iron hook, tucking his clean change of clothes inside the plastic bag. But the moment he turned the valve on the water heater nearby—
“Fuck!”
He instantly shuddered from the icy blast, and taking a closer look, realized the water heater hadn’t even been plugged in.
“…” Wiping the freezing bathwater off his face, Cen Yu suspected he had been cast in an episode of X-Change.
“What’s wrong, Little Yu?” Hearing Cen Yu’s outburst from inside the bathroom, Pei Hengyun’s tone outside immediately turned anxious. “Did something happen?”
“…Nothing.” Cen Yu genuinely couldn’t fathom why the protagonist shou in a horror novel was this deathly afraid of ghosts.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped back under the showerhead.
The temperature in the mountains was naturally lower than outside. Even in midsummer, taking a cold shower took Cen Yu a moment to adjust… Then, as he prepared to wash his hair, he realized the bath supplies in Jiang Tuan’s bathroom were extraordinarily sparse.
There was only a single bar of soap resting in the corner.
It looked as though one was expected to use this exact bar to wash hair, face, and body alike.
Cen Yu ran a hand through his bleached hair, knowing full well that using this soap on it would turn it into a tangled nest… So he immediately turned his attention to the wooden door.
“Brother Pei.” Perhaps because Pei Hengyun was three years older than Cen Yu, whenever Cen Yu wanted to coax something out of him, he always addressed him as Brother Pei.
“Go grab the shampoo and conditioner for me. There’s none in here.”
Pei Hengyun’s voice filtered through the wooden door and the sound of running water, sounding slightly muffled: “Then wait for me, I’ll be right back.”
With that, Cen Yu caught the sound of his rapid footsteps fading away… So Cen Yu continued rinsing under the cold shower. After a few minutes had passed, he suddenly heard a soft knock at the door.
“Brother Pei?” Cen Yu called out.
“Mm.” The voice offered a low response, though perhaps due to the wooden door and the rushing water, it sounded somewhat indistinct.
Seeing that Pei Hengyun had returned, Cen Yu immediately cracked the wooden door open a sliver… whereup explicit bottles of shampoo and conditioner were shoved through the gap by the person outside.
“Thanks.” Cen Yu pulled them in and promptly shut the door.
He quickly squeezed some shampoo onto his head and worked up a lather. Right then, sensing the soapy water trickling down into his eyes, he squeezed his eyes shut and leaned under the showerhead to rinse off.
It was precisely at that moment that a subtle, unnatural sensation swept over Cen Yu.
He felt as though something had brushed against his calf.
At first, he assumed it was merely an illusion caused by the soap suds streaming down his leg. But when he felt what seemed like an actual hand casually, intimately caressing the skin of his calf, he practically jumped out of his skin—
Cen Yu didn’t care if the soap suds burned his eyes; he snapped his eyes open instantly, only to find his calf completely bare—there was nothing there.
There was no hand appearing out of nowhere, as if everything just now had been nothing more than his own imagination.
Cen Yu looked up. The lightbulb in this bathroom happened to be broken as well, leaving only a tiny skylight overhead for illumination. Outside the skylight, naturally, there was nothing…
The freezing bathwater cascaded down Cen Yu’s body, sending an inexplicable, bone-chilling shiver down his spine.
“…Brother Pei?”
He instinctively called out Pei Hengyun’s name through the wooden door.
Yet he received no response from Pei Hengyun whatsoever.
That shouldn’t be? According to what the man had said earlier, he was supposed to be standing right outside the door the entire time.
Cen Yu didn’t dare close his eyes now. “Pei Hengyun?”
He continued calling out the man’s name, yet met only dead silence… Frowning, Cen Yu kept half his body concealed behind the door as he pulled the wooden door open.
Immediately, his eyes fell upon He Yongning in the courtyard, who appeared to be on a phone call.
The man clearly hadn’t expected someone to suddenly pop out of the bathroom either, giving him a surprised look. Realizing that Cen Yu—his torso entirely bare and half his body exposed—wasn’t wearing any clothes, He Yongning promptly turned his back. After uttering a few final words into the phone, he hung up.
Only then did he turn back around, eyeing Cen Yu hiding behind the door. “You didn’t bring clothes?”
Aside from that reason, he couldn’t think of any other explanation for why the man would hide behind a wooden door without a stitch on.
“No!” Cen Yu stared at He Yongning. “When did you get here?”
He Yongning didn’t quite get Cen Yu’s intent, but seeing the genuine anxiety in the man’s expression, he thought back for a moment. “Three minutes ago.”
“Three minutes ago?”
That would mean right after Pei Hengyun had handed him the shampoo… But had that really been Pei Hengyun?
Suspicion instantly bloomed in Cen Yu’s mind.
“When did Pei Hengyun leave?” he rephrased his question.
“Pei Hengyun?” He Yongning wore a look that plainly said I have no idea what you’re talking about. “He’s not here.”
Realizing Cen Yu was looking for Pei Hengyun, he added immediately, “When I walked over just now, there wasn’t a soul here.”
“…”
Huge problem.
Cen Yu cursed under his breath.
The person who had just handed him the shampoo really hadn’t been Pei Hengyun! And since He Yongning stated the courtyard was completely empty, it meant no one had walked over here at all?!
Then who on earth had handed him that shampoo?!
Now that he thought back carefully, that voice indeed sounded somewhat low and raspy—it truly hadn’t sounded like Pei Hengyun’s voice.
While he was still processing this, Cen Yu spotted Pei Hengyun sprinting out from the three-story house, completely out of breath. The moment he saw that Cen Yu had already pulled the door open, a look of deep self-reproach washed over his face—
“I’m so sorry, Little Yu. I got delayed for a moment just now.”
Pei Hengyun hurried straight to Cen Yu’s side, positioning himself so that his body conveniently blocked He Yongning’s line of sight in the courtyard.
Pei Hengyun’s gaze lingered for a brief second on Cen Yu’s dripping collarbone before he looked up at Cen Yu’s face. “I couldn’t find the shampoo and body wash earlier, so I went to ask Jiang Tuan.”
Holding up unopened bottles of shampoo in his hand, he explained, “This is what Jiang Tuan just dug out for me.”
Right then, Jiang Tuan stepped out of the house as well. Perhaps feeling that Cen Yu was being excessively high-maintenance, he couldn’t resist mocking him the moment he laid eyes on him: “Can’t the young master get used to using bar soap?”
Cen Yu didn’t say a word.
He simply stared at the shampoo in Pei Hengyun’s hand, and then at Jiang Tuan standing behind him.
“You two were together just now?” Cen Yu asked.
Although Pei Hengyun didn’t understand what Cen Yu was driving at, he still nodded. “After I noticed the shampoo wasn’t there, I went to find Jiang Tuan.” As he spoke, a tinge of self-blame crept into his tone again. “I must have been in such a rush when packing my bags that I forgot to bring them.”
Cen Yu stayed silent. He merely took a step back, wrapping a towel around his waist for coverage, before pulling the wooden door completely open.
Pei Hengyun clearly hadn’t expected Cen Yu to open the door wide, making any move to stop him too late.
And so, everyone in the courtyard caught sight of Cen Yu standing there with nothing on except a single towel wrapped around his waist.
He Yongning instinctively averted his gaze, though before doing so, he caught sight of the snake-skeleton tattoo spanning Cen Yu’s lower abdomen. Jiang Tuan, standing directly opposite Cen Yu, flushed bright red, his speech instantly devolving into a stammer.
Cen Yu couldn’t care less about what was running through these people’s minds.
Extending a foot, he lightly kicked the bottles of shampoo and conditioner sitting by the doorway, then looked straight at Pei Hengyun—
“Is this the shampoo and body wash you just said you couldn’t find?”
