The group finished their idle chatter, paid the bill, and left. The owners were a middle-aged husband and wife, and they came over to Chu Ge's table with a smile: "What can I get you two?"
Chu Ge was still sitting there with his mouth half open, watching the fat guy's fat backside waddle off through the door. He badly wanted to talk with this reader who had punched him through an internet cable, but he turned it over in his head for ages and still couldn't work out how to break the ice.
I'm Chu Ge?
That would be way too awkward.
Or is one punch through the cable just not enough for you? Well, here I am, come hit me.
In that one moment of hesitation they were gone. Chasing after them would only be more awkward, so he could do nothing but watch them leave — he even forgot to answer the shopkeeper.
Qiu Wuji, by contrast, used to sit there like a wooden dummy watching him whenever Chu Ge had to deal with outsiders. Now she was a mature paper character — she could order for herself...
"Two bowls of beef noodles, both with an egg."
The owner went off beaming.
Meanwhile Qiu Wuji transmitted a message directly into his ear: "This bunch was holding a meeting in here. I'm following them with my divine sense, to hear what else they say."
Qiu Wuji now rarely used her arts, divine sense above all, in order to stretch out how long she could stay in this world. That she was using them now showed how much this group of espers had caught her interest.
And they had all crossed paths by sheer fate... To think they were actually Chu Ge's readers, and that they even liked reading about Qiu Wuji — she found it genuinely hilarious.
Chu Ge came back to himself and lowered his voice: "That fat guy could hit me through an internet cable today. I think that power is completely broken... The strength is nothing, but tracking down information through the network like that is something no top-tier hacker could pull off. I don't know if he can only send a fist through, or if he can bring a weapon along. If it's only a phantom fist, fine, but if he could stick a knife through, that would be killing a man with no trace at all..."
Qiu Wuji nodded slightly. "I told you their powers were interesting. That young man who said he wanted to read Qiu Wuji — he has mind-bewitching arts that actually work on me. Unfortunately the flaw is obvious too; I'd say its practical value is hard to judge..."
"His mind-bewitching arts work on you!" Chu Ge knew better than anyone what weight that sentence carried.
She was no fresh-faced ponytailed beauty — she was the split soul of a tribulation-crossing cultivator... For a mortal's special ability to work on an existence like that, what did that even mean?
And beyond that, as a web-novel female lead, Qiu Wuji's landmine-avoidance settings — the ones covering things like never force-feeding the reader garbage — were first-rate. No heretic cultivator could pull any tricks on her in that area; it was a rule-level protection standing above all settings.
Oh, right — this world is different. The rules are different...
Chu Ge tapped his forehead. It still seemed unbelievable. By comparison, Blue Little Pill's "slap the idiot on the other side of the internet cable" power looked downright ordinary...
Qiu Wuji said with a smile: "They're your readers. What bad intentions could they have?"
"Uh, sure, they're closer than strangers, but if our positions really did come into conflict, that connection would be worthless."
"You live a quiet, ordinary life. What position could you possibly get caught up in?"
The owner brought the noodles. The two of them stopped talking for the moment and bent their heads to eat.
"They've gone into a nightclub nearby. From the way they talked, they planned the timing — the midnight show." Qiu Wuji transmitted it directly into his ear.
Chu Ge nodded and checked the time. It was almost midnight.
Their eyes met, then quickly slid away. The midnight show — well, everyone had seen one of those.
Qiu Wuji said through gritted teeth: "You want to go too, don't you?"
Chu Ge hurried to pledge his loyalty: "What's worth watching there? Nothing that compares to you... uh..."
Qiu Wuji's slender brows shot up. And what exactly do you want to see on me?
Chu Ge scrambled to fix it: "You with your clothes on beat them with theirs off... uh..."
Qiu Wuji nearly dumped her bowl of noodles over his face.
Just as she was about to blow up, her brow suddenly arched: "Here comes the fun part. Put your head over here."
Chu Ge shifted back warily.
"I'm not going to hit you," Qiu Wuji snapped. "I'm sharing what my divine sense sees with you."
Chu Ge gingerly leaned his head over. Qiu Wuji flicked a quick glance at the shopkeeper, then, pretending to fetch a napkin to wipe the sweat from his brow, laid her hand on his forehead.
Before Chu Ge could react to anything, something exploded in his mind, and a clear image of a spot two streets away surfaced — he could even hear the sound.
Four of them, the fat guy and the young man who writes on his face among them, swaggered up to a nightclub entrance. The place had its doors shut and looked closed, but burly guards stood watch at the door, so it didn't look entirely closed either.
Seeing the group try to go in, one of the burly men stepped up to block them: "We're closed. Come back tomorrow."
Chu Ge watched helplessly as the young man turned around and wrote two characters on his face with a signature pen: "Dad."
When he turned back to face the guard, the man's expression had changed completely: "Uh, Dad, what are you doing here? No, wait — why do you have writing on your face?"
The young man said: "I brought a few friends to have some fun. Is that a problem?"
"Uh, no, it's just — this place isn't really suitable for..."
"Come on, it's just that one thing, I get it! Don't make me lose face in front of my friends, yeah?" The young man patted the guard's shoulder and led the others inside. The man wanted to stop him but couldn't very well, his face a study in awkwardness.
Chu Ge was struck dumb with awe.
What the hell kind of freak power is that?
Qiu Wuji's transmitted thought arrived right on cue: "It's forcing the other party to accept whatever he writes on his face... Only, the reaction differs with the target's ability. He can make me feel that he's handsome, but he could never make me like him, much less call him Dad. There's still a difference in degree. It needs training, but the potential is limitless." A pause, then: "At any rate, I truly can't see how the mechanism works. The only thing I can confirm is that the other person must see the writing — writing them small won't work."
Chu Ge's cheek twitched. Part of him wanted that power; part of him thought it made you look like a total half-wit — useful and useless at the same time. He agonized over it for a few seconds, then went back to watching the show.
Over there, the four of them found an empty table and sat down. The waiter assumed that anyone coming in at this hour had to be a VIP member, and warmly urged them to order.
Their order had barely gone in when the pole dancing started inside — the midnight show opening right on schedule. The fat guy pulled out his phone, quietly filmed a few seconds, and hurriedly sent it off. Chu Ge couldn't tell to whom. The police, presumably?
Right — he sent it straight onto the computer screens of the officers on 110 duty, address included. How he managed it, Chu Ge had no idea.
There were several officers on duty. This was a video playing in the open — there was no covering it up now.
For the moment nothing happened at the scene, and Qiu Wuji's fingers left Chu Ge's forehead. Their eyes met, and they asked in unison: "Should we go take a look?"
Then they both burst out laughing at the same time. Neither had any appetite for noodles left; they shoveled them down, paid, and left.
Behind the register, the owner couple were exchanging looks as well. Watching Chu Ge pedal off on the bicycle, the husband murmured: "That pair are a strange bunch..."
"Mind your own business!" his wife said. "That fellow named Zhong shorted us thirty cents on the bill. Tomorrow you go get it back!"
Chu Ge had just pedaled up to the nightclub entrance with Qiu Wuji on the back when the police arrived.
What made Chu Ge freeze was that it wasn't only regular officers — Lin Wuyang had come too.
The police smashed the door open without a word, and the place erupted at once with squawking, yelping, and women's shrieks.
Chu Ge frowned slightly... Lin Wuyang was City Bureau, not district, and certainly not a local station, and his department was supposed to be a very special one. A routine anti-vice spot check shouldn't need him to show up in person... Unless there was another major case here too, like the underground boxing?
Qiu Wuji said quietly: "They said the one who hired them is Boss Zhang."
Chu Ge said: "Don't tell me this is Zhang Qiren's place again? Is his brother setting him up? Or the other way around — is he setting up his brother?"
Qiu Wuji nodded. That was the usual read of such things: Zhang Qiren was clearly in the middle of a fight for position within the family, and it was either him getting screwed or him doing the screwing.
This time Lin Wuyang's operation went more smoothly than the last one at the Miracle Nightclub. That time, the midnight show had already ended by the time they arrived; this time he caught them red-handed. That gave him ample grounds for a more thorough search — and before he found any underground boxing, he found customers doing drugs.
Lin Wuyang's expression turned very ugly. He sneered at a rich young master who came out to meet them: "Wang Zhenkun, this time you could bring ten more daddies and a hundred more men to lean on, and you'd still be going down. Fuck you!"
Wang?
Not a Zhang family fight for position?