In the little private room, the two of them sat facing each other.
The promised treat turned out to be very simple: stir-fried pork with green peppers, tomato and egg soup, a plate of stir-fried cabbage, and that was it.
Zhong Buli's look at Chu Ge carried a faint note of grievance. So this is what "dinner's on me" amounts to?
Chu Ge sipped his soup and said casually, "What, someone treats you to a meal and you still pick at it? My money doesn't fall out of the sky, you know."
Zhong Buli sighed. "My real name's Zhong Yi. The other stuff, those are just screen names — codenames, more or less... Pleased to meet you, Mr. Chu."
"So you did know me. Dragging their 'Big Chu' into it just now, that was you talking to me." Chu Ge smiled. "You were with the fat guy and the writer yesterday? I didn't pay you much attention — the writer had all my attention."
Zhong Yi looked grief-stricken. "Even if you only go by appearances, my good looks stand out like a crane among chickens. Having your attention stolen by some boring power is really just wrong."
Chu Ge silently pulled up the mirror on his phone and handed it over. "Take a look."
Zhong Yi: "..."
He silently pushed the phone back and changed the subject. "When I saw you get mixed up in the nightclub business yesterday, I figured you'd come looking for us again today. You should be able to figure out that this place is one of our hangouts, so I was waiting here for you."
Chu Ge: "I had no idea this was any kind of hangout. I purely came here to eat."
Zhong Yi: "?"
Did I overestimate you?
Chu Ge said, "I've had a bellyful of questions saved up. Asking Lin Wuyang or Zhang Qiren, neither felt quite right. You're the man my mother sent my way... and here you are, so I won't agonize over it anymore. I want to ask you some things."
Zhong Yi picked up a piece of the stir-fried pork and ate it. "They say you have no power — and even now I don't see any in you. You look like someone who's trained in martial arts instead. So your parents figured you should just live a normal life. Writing's fine too — making money doing what you love. Plenty of people envy that."
"Once the thing you love becomes your job, the love gets ruined."
"Like how the woman you love becomes your wife?"
Chu Ge: "..."
Zhong Yi said, "From where I sit, you don't just still love it — you love it more. Ten thousand words a day, every day, full of pep."
Of course Chu Ge loved it more, because it was no longer just a hobby or a career.
It had become love.
"I don't think I came here to discuss careers with you," Chu Ge said, speechless. "Whether or not I have a power — does having trained in martial arts count as a brawny strength power? Either way, asking about things here should be fine, right?"
"Of course it's fine..." Zhong Yi laughed. "Actually superpowers go back a long way. They're not a matter of the past few years. Just look at how far back film and TV about them goes — decades. It's just that abilities were extremely rare back then. One would turn up now and then with no real impact, existing only as superhero stories, and some simply sank into obscurity without anyone ever knowing."
Chu Ge nodded. "So it's been a blowout these last few years?"
"Right. You could call it the revival of spiritual energy. We believe that long ago the Earth had spiritual energy — or immortal qi, or vital qi, or mana... all different names for something similar — and that it left behind legends of gods and immortals in countries all over the world. Sure, you could say the ancients were ignorant and simply imagined and personified a nature they couldn't understand. That doesn't matter; the theories have been torn over for years and aren't the point of our discussion. Even if there was no spiritual energy before, there's plenty now."
Chu Ge grunted an "Mm." Qiu Wuji had been able to sense that the spiritual energy was thicker than the time before, which showed it was steadily growing richer. The total was still thin by her standards, but causing a few power mutations clearly wasn't a problem. Whether it had existed in ancient times didn't matter.
Zhong Yi said, "And these past few years it's gotten more and more obvious, and the changes have gotten bigger and bigger. Which is why your parents, who used to just clock in and out of ordinary jobs and raise a kid to this size, are now so busy you can't even catch sight of them."
So that was it... Chu Ge rubbed his forehead. "Do you know what's causing the change?"
"We're studying it. No conclusions yet — it's one of the key research topics of recent years, and every country takes it very seriously. The only thing that's settled is this: at the rate the energy is thickening, a revival where everyone on the street has powers is impossible. For at least a few hundred years it'll remain a minority thing."
Chu Ge groused, "Then how come any random time I step out the door I run into one? My roommate has a power, my neighbor has one, my classmate, even one of my readers."
"There's a thing called the law of superhuman clustering, and there's a thing called a protagonist halo. Which do you figure it is?"
"It's really not that mysterious. Say you were an ordinary person — naturally you wouldn't tag along with us to a nightclub to watch the show, so you'd never see any of what we saw, let alone get into a fight yourself. So it's not that you run into them whenever you step outside; it's that you're special yourself, which is why you see things other people never see."
Chu Ge thought that made sense. If he and Zhang Qiren hadn't been special, he'd probably still believe Yueying was a bar hostess. That underground fighting world would never have appeared in front of him.
"Then how do you explain that fat bastard throwing a punch at me right through the internet?"
"If you were an ordinary person, you'd just think you'd been online too long and started hallucinating... like how people see Ah Jun writing 'handsome' on his face and just curse him out for being a fucking show-off. Of course, that kind of reckless exposure isn't advisable. As a rule we don't support it."
"Are they off-the-books people like you too?"
"No — and honestly, I'm not sure I even count. Gu Ruoyan wanted to take us in. We refused." Zhong Yi smiled. "We're just a bunch of... goofballs who don't want the regular government-job life, don't want to be running dogs for rich people, don't want to use our powers for anything bad, and yet aren't willing to live ordinary lives either. We figure our own useless powers ought to be good for something, right?"
Chu Ge: "Emmmm..."
Why does it feel like he's a bit like me...
"A bunch of similar people who ended up together through some lucky chances — call it amusing ourselves, or huddling together for warmth. We've taken on a few interesting jobs, even helped the police catch wanted criminals, so we've got a bit of a reputation. Outsiders call us the 'Black House' — makes us sound like some mysterious organization, hahaha!"
Chu Ge said woodenly, "Outsiders don't come up with nicknames like that. If it wasn't your own vain self-naming, my head can be unscrewed and used as a chamber pot."
Zhong Yi: "...It was our own naming. We argued and voted for ages. In the end we decided this one sounded more mysterious. The actual origin was just that one day somebody posted an explicit pic in the readers' group and got locked in the little black room for 24 hours."
Chu Ge lowered his head and ate, privately trying to recall when he'd ever banned anyone for that long.
"It wasn't your book. Don't bother thinking about it."
"You really think all your readers are espers... It's just that you've gotten popular lately, so a few book-lovers went to read your stuff, and then joined the group."
For some reason, this rather unflattering "truth" made Chu Ge breathe a huge sigh of relief. "That's good."
Zhong Yi said, "I have more contact with the authorities than the others — I filed my records, took the assessment, so I count as off-the-books. I don't mind telling you the truth: it's just so the Black House has fewer headaches and less to worry about. If the authorities ever need us for something, we'd cooperate anyway. That's only right."
"Then why doesn't Lin Wuyang come to you? He says he's short on manpower. Doesn't he know who you are?"
Zhong Yi laughed out loud. "He does know. Gu Ruoyan mentioned it to him. It's just that the trust isn't there yet — and he's not the one liaising with us anyway. Lin Wuyang's under plenty of pressure too. He's afraid that if everyone around him turns out to be a mole, what the hell is he even staying in the job for? One slip and he loses his badge."
He paused, then said very seriously, "Trust has to be cultivated. If he knew we were the ones who called the police before, he'd probably feel much better about us. Right now he knows you're the one who stopped him in the end, so he trusts you. You can tell him it was us, the Black House, who made that report. And if he needs us down the line, he can come to us. We'll help."
Chu Ge nodded. "Sure."
"Actually, the country's espers are very strong. It's just that when it comes down to individual localities, they're stretched thin. Nothing to be done about that — it takes time. For instance, if they really did absorb us, that would be... mm..." Zhong Yi suddenly looked up, thinking it over. "That'd be useless too. Our powers are all stupid."