Restrictive Zone

RA 1 - Hobby

"Thud, thud, thud."

It was a weekend afternoon. Jiang Chijing was stirred from his afternoon nap.

These sounds weren't unfamiliar to him. He would hear them almost every weekend; they were the sounds of his neighbour, who lived across the street from him, boxing.

Jiang Chijing sat up. He raised a hand to part a section of the blackout curtains. Warm afternoon sunlight slipped through the crack into his house, drawing a divisive line between light and darkness on his fingers.

It was normal to feel parched after waking up from an afternoon nap, and every day that he heard the boxing start, this parchedness would raise another notch.

Jiang Chijing crossed his legs and stretched his waist languidly, then slowly flipped over to pull open the nightstand drawer, taking out a monocular.

The world in his eyes was instantly framed into a perfect circle, and the magnified image that entered his vision was the goose-yellow wall of a building.

Jiang Chijing lived in the suburbs. There were no high-rise buildings, only rows after rows of small, two-storied houses. All the houses had yellow walls and brown roofs; even the architectural layout was the same, visually pleasing in their uniformity.

As such, when Jiang Chijing gazed over from his bedroom, he was directly facing the bedroom of the person living across from him.

The monocular was slightly off-focus. He calibrated it for a moment. This time, the view of the opposite bedroom fully appeared within the circle.

There was a road less than 8-metres wide separating the two-storied houses. A monocular with a 12x magnification was sufficient to clearly see every detail of the opposite bedroom.

The neighbour living across the street was a twenty-something-year-old man, about 1.85-metres tall. Similar to Jiang Chijing, he lived alone in a two-storied home.

However, unlike Jiang Chijing, he worked in the city and would leave half an hour before Jiang Chijing every day. Therefore, despite having been neighbours for the better part of a year, they had never formally run into each other.

Or, to be accurate, Jiang Chijing was deliberately avoiding him. If he ever happened to be going out at the same time as the other man, he would quietly sit inside for another two minutes and wait until he heard the roaring of the engine fade into the distance before leaving the house.

Jiang Chijing wasn't a social recluse. It was only that he had a... hobby of voyeurism.

He couldn't control his desire to peep into the lives of others. For example, if he passed by someone handicapped, he couldn't help but guess the reason behind it. For example, if a colleague kept yawning at work, he would unconsciously analyse the other's activities the night before.

Perhaps these could be passed off as having a vibrant curiosity. However, even Jiang Chijing knew that being unable to stop himself from using a pair of binoculars to spy on the opposite flat was crossing the line explainable by curiosity.

He himself didn't want to be this way, so he had applied of his own volition to move into a sparsely populated community.

The densely packed flat across his residence turned into a solitary young man. This discrepancy greatly reduced Jiang Chijing's voyeuristic appetite, until—

The sounds of boxing came from the opposite bedroom.

"Thud, thud, thud." White bandaged fists slammed into a thick sandbag, the dull thuds particularly abrupt in this quiet community.