My Mr. Mermaid

Untitled Part 3

Chapter 3: Reversal and Exposé by ryuxenji

In a burst of spontaneity, Teacher Sun decided to go out for dinner with his old classmate, leaving Yun Duo to find her own way back to the hotel. She had not gained much in her interviews today. The only bright spot she had was the issue of Qi Rui-Feng's nickname, but when she recalled Qi Rui-Feng's troubled expression back then, Yun Duo was truly worried that Qi Rui-Feng's performance might suffer if she exposed it in the news. If that happened, she would feel very guilty.

Leaving business matters aside, she turned on her computer and entered the words 'Tang Yi-Bai' into the search engine.

She was really very curious about him.

There were a lot of hits, but most of them were unrelated. It looked like there were many people who shared his name. Yun Duo then added another word before 'Tang Yi-Bai': 'swimming'.

This time, there were much fewer results, but they were also much more relevant.

Right at the front were news pieces from online media reporting on the latest results from the national swimming championships. Flipping several pages forwards to skip this topic, the search results became a little messy. Yun Duo kept her eyes wide open as she searched, and after browsing through 10 or so pages, she finally found a scrap of news.

This news was from 3 years ago, reporting on China obtaining the gold for the 4x100 medley swim relay in the Asian Games. The members of the winning team: Zhao Yue, Song Le, Tang Yi-Bai, Qi Rui-Feng.

The article also had an accompanying picture. Tang Yi-Bai was standing beside his teammates, a bouquet of flowers in one hand with the medal in the other as he smiled at the camera. His smile was wide, but it also carried a faint trace of youthful innocence.

So he had already earned a gold medal before three years ago ... and it was a gold medal at the Asian Games, which carried more weight than that of the competition yesterday.

Still, it was no wonder Yun Duo did not know about him. For the extremely youth-oriented professional sports circle, 3 years was enough time for a generational shift.

Yun Duo then looked back at the name list of the four boys and froze. This was a medley swim relay. In other words, the athletes would have to follow the fixed order of backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, and freestyle in the swim event. Tang Yi-Bai was in the third spot both on the list and on the podium, so it was clear to see that he had swum the butterfly.

But he had clearly become the champion of today's freestyle event!

Yun Duo could hardly believe her eyes. At first, she thought that the organizers must have messed up the order of participants on the name list, but she soon refuted this assumption. Because there was still one more person in the 4-man team: Qi Rui-Feng. This prodigy was already shining brilliantly back then, so the final leg of the relay, the freestyle, would definitely have been his; it could not have been given to anyone else.

Yun Duo looked up the news coverage specific to the Asian Games of that year, and she discovered that Tang Yi-Bai had also won the gold for the men's 50-metre butterfly stroke during that year's games.

That's right. Three years ago, Tang Yi-Bai had specialised in the butterfly stroke. From his results in the games, he was already a mature athlete with a promising future back then. But this brother, after already achieving such good results, actually gave up on everything to start over and switched over to freestyle. Wasn't that just asking for trouble? That was not at all professional!

Why on earth would he do that? No matter what perspective one took, he had no reason to do so.

Yun Duo was about to die from curiosity. She continuously changed her key terms to search for more info, but even after she had searched until her eyes were about to go blind, she was unable to find the reason for his switch to freestyle. It wasn't just the reason either; she could find nothing else. Ever since that Asian Games, Tang Yi-Bai vanished. In all the various competitions — large or small, national or international — his figure was nowhere to be found. Well, there were quite a few swimming enthusiasts who had been searching for traces of him all this while, but their efforts were in vain.