An 80s female translator was spoiled rotten by a rough and jealous man.

Chapter 313 "Old Ground"? A Revisit
When Meng Youyou returned to the dormitory, it was already dark. It was rare for the dormitory to be full of people at this time. Deng Shiqi, who had returned in glory from the postgraduate entrance examination interview in Shanghai, had a high-speed rail ticket for this afternoon and was sitting cross-legged on a chair applying a face mask. Wang Li, who had already found a company to work for after graduation and was now fully committed to her internship, was lucky enough not to be exploited and had to stay to work overtime tonight. Liao Zisheng, who had been working on his graduation thesis in the library, also returned with his laptop and entered the room one after the other with Meng Youyou.

"You're back? Want some?" Hearing the door open, Deng Shiqi spun her chair over to Meng Youyou and stretched out her long arm to hand her a pastry box with a floral pattern.

There was only one butterfly pastry left in the box, its layers of flaky pastry still covered in fine powdered sugar. "I saved this especially for you; those two almost snatched it all up."

Meng Youyou picked up a pastry, popped it into her mouth, took a bite, and exclaimed with a smile, "Delicious!"

Deng Shiqi didn't laugh along. Instead, she stared at her face for a few more moments, her brows furrowing slightly. She felt that something was off about the other person, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

Meng Youyou walked straight back to her desk under her bed. As soon as she put down her backpack, she bent down and opened the cabinet door under the desk, took out a taro purple suitcase, unzipped it with a "whoosh", opened the suitcase on the ground, and turned to rummage through the clothes in the closet.

Seeing this, the three roommates all looked puzzled. They exchanged glances, and Liao Zisheng spoke first: "Hey, what are you doing? Are you going back to Hangzhou? It's only been a short time since the start of the semester, are you going home again?"

Meng Youyou continued fiddling with the clothes in her hands, and without looking up, replied, "I'm not going back to Hangzhou, I want to go to Fanzhou City."

"Fanzhou?" The three roommates exclaimed in unison in surprise.

"Why did you suddenly decide to go to Fanzhou? Is it for tourism?" Liao Zisheng was full of questions. Although it wasn't the first time she had noticed her friend's unusual behavior lately, she really didn't expect her to do something like this, and couldn't help but worry.

Liao Zisheng tentatively suggested, "Then let's wait another two or three months, and we can go on a graduation trip together during the summer vacation! Besides, your thesis defense is only a month away, and you haven't finished writing it yet, have you? How can you concentrate on playing around at this time?"

Meng Youyou squatted beside her suitcase, took out her phone from her hoodie pocket, swiped her finger across the screen, opened the weather forecast app, and browsed the weather information for Panzhou City for the next week. As she checked, she replied softly, "I can still write the thesis there. I've almost finished the preliminary data collection and preparation. All that's left is integration and revision, it won't delay anything." Her tone was indifferent, but it was clear that she was determined to go.

Liao Zisheng seemed to want to say something more, but then Meng Youyou looked up at her, smiled, and said calmly, "I've already bought the tickets. The flight is tomorrow morning."

...

Spring is still chilly, with large temperature differences between day and night, and the temperature only reaches two or three degrees Celsius at night, but the heating season in Beijing has already passed.

Meng Youyou has always had cold hands and feet in winter, and she can never stay warm when she sleeps alone. Luckily, she turned on the electric blanket before getting into bed, and the temperature has risen, so she doesn't feel cold anymore. Considering that she has to get up early to catch a flight at the airport tomorrow, Meng Youyou snuggled into the blankets, closed her eyes, and tried to fall asleep.

Just as she was about to fall asleep, Meng Youyou vaguely heard rustling sounds in the darkness. She stepped over the step between the two beds, and the next second, she sensed something crawling into her down comforter.

Almost instantly recognizing the person, Meng Youyou lowered her voice and called out, "Zisheng?"

Liao Zisheng hugged her from behind and suddenly asked, "Did something bad happen to you?"

Meng Youyou's lips moved, but she remained silent for a long time.

Receiving no response for a long time, her suspicions seemed to be further confirmed. When she spoke again, Liao Zisheng's tone was tinged with a slight sob, stemming from a little resentment at not being told what was going on, but more so from heartache: "Why do you have to keep it all to yourself and not tell me? I can help you think of a way." "I've never seen you like this before, always so preoccupied, like you've lost your soul." The arms around her tightened silently, and the girl's voice became increasingly choked: "Oh dear, you're like this... I'm so worried about you."

Meng Youyou turned over and hugged her, her throat also feeling dry: "Zisheng, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hide it from you, I just didn't know how to say it."
"I really don't know what to say?" Meng Youyou said with guilt and helplessness. "Even I myself am not sure about anything."

Having shared a room for nearly four years and been inseparable every day, the two had long since forged a deep friendship. Although Liao Zisheng knew nothing of the secret she was trying so hard to hide, he could sense the deep helplessness and torment emanating from her. So he quickly said, "I won't ask anymore, I won't ask again. If you don't want to talk about it, then don't. I just want you to be happy."

"Yes, I know, I will." It was Meng Youyou who comforted the emotionally distraught Liao Zisheng. She gently patted the girl's back and said softly, "No one can help me. I have to find the answer myself."

Since she didn't want to believe those memories were false, she decided to go find him, at least to find traces of his existence and give her heart some closure.

...

The plane landed in Ximing City at noon. Meng Youyou decided to have a hamburger and cola fast food near the airport to fill her stomach, and then called a ride-hailing service to go to the train station.

There are no direct flights from Beijing to Fanzhou, so Meng Youyou booked a high-speed train ticket from Ximing to Fanzhou that afternoon, making her trip a bit tight.

Stepping out of the train station in Panzhou City, the cityscape before my eyes was naturally quite different from the scenes I remembered.

The city's planning and management are excellent—the paving stones in the plaza outside the station are laid flat and uniformly, the green plants along the sidewalks at the edge of the plaza are trimmed neatly, the shrubs are arranged in straight lines along the railings, and the shops along the street are lined up in a row, with uniform glass doors and blue-and-white signs, exuding a comfortable sense of order.

There are no mobile breakfast stalls set up on tricycles, no shoe repairmen's stools, no sweet songs by Teresa Teng coming from the radio placed at the shoemaker's feet, and no old scavenger carrying a snakeskin bag loitering at the station entrance.

It felt like Meng Youyou was visiting this remote border town called "Fanzhou" for the first time. Like every tourist from out of town carrying luggage as they walked out of the train station, her senses were stimulated, naturally giving rise to a rich sense of novelty and anticipation for the unknown. However, there was an unusual sense of unease in her heart; the closer she got, the more apprehensive she became.

For convenience, she booked a hotel near the Panzhou Railway Station. After taking a shower, Meng Youyou didn't plan to go out to find food. She ordered takeout on her phone and then sat on the bed and opened her laptop.

She leaned against the headboard, her laptop propped up on her lap covered by a thin blanket. The cool light from the screen illuminated her damp bangs. Her fingertips tapped on the keyboard as she typed a few phrases into the search engine: "Mid-1980s, Panyu border, 624th Border Regiment, garrison."

The moment she clicked confirm, the mouse pointer spun twice, and the webpage slowly redirected. However, the search results that popped up on the screen were few and far between, mostly fragmented public records—a collective commendation for the June 24th Border Defense Regiment's participation in combating border smuggling, heroic deeds that emerged during a flood relief effort, and two short articles by veterans recalling their military life published on a local military history public account… But after flipping through more than a dozen pages of results, Meng Youyou couldn't find any information about the old site of the garrison.

As she scrolled the mouse wheel, her gaze swept across the lines of text on the screen, which lacked any clear direction. Meng Youyou had anticipated this. After all, forty years was a long time, enough for a city to be completely transformed.

Over the past four decades, township mergers, road relocations, and infrastructure developments have made renaming and relocation of sites all too common. What was once a desolate wasteland may now be filled with high-rise buildings. Moreover, due to reasons such as troop reductions, troop rotations, and organizational reforms, adjustments to troop designations and changes in troop locations are also commonplace.

Meng Youyou raised her hand to rub her temples, closed the current page, and changed her search strategy, deleting and re-entering: "Fanzhou City Veterans Forum".

After entering the forum, Meng Youyou browsed through the website's sections and a dozen or so highly-viewed posts. Gradually, an idea formed in her mind, and she carefully considered her wording before writing a post seeking help.