While they ate, Chu Ge worked his phone one-handed, sending Zhong Yi the information.
The information was simple: "Qiu Wuji, female, age..."
"How old did you want to be again?" Chu Ge asked Qiu Wuji, hesitating.
Qiu Wuji jabbed at her rice with her chopsticks—poke, poke, poke. So this guy finally got to hold my hand, and now that there's food in front of him, he's started playing on his phone...
At his question she blinked, caught off guard. Oh, right—how old am I again?
Originally ten thousand... no, actually not quite ten thousand, just over nine thousand... no, that's wrong too—eighteen plus over nine thousand...
Anyway, over here she'd need a whole new one made up. Qiu Wuji suddenly brightened. "Just say eighteen."
Chu Ge: "?"
"What? What's with that face?"
"No, no, Master, please. Put on all the youthful airs you like—you've still got the bearing of someone who ran a sect for years. Nobody's going to buy 'young girl'... At the very least you'd have to be a white-collar type, twenty-five or up."
"And how old are you again? Twenty-eight?"
"Mm."
"Then I'm twenty-five."
Chu Ge was grinning too. "Fine. Three years younger works nicely."
Qiu Wuji glared. Chu Ge ducked his head fast and typed: "Sent you the info. Qiu Wuji, female, twenty-five years old, birthday May 20."
520 was the birthday already set in the book, and a birth hour had been set along with it: the first quarter of the Wei hour, around 1:14 p.m. Qiu Wuji had never thought anything of it before; now, looking at it, she figured this guy must have meant something by it, and asked, "Why did you set my birthday as that?"
Chu Ge was still grinning. "You're such a good little searcher now. Go look it up yourself."
Qiu Wuji ate in a huff.
She'd gone out of her way to come out here, and she'd been tricked into holding hands, tricked into photos—and he kept finding new ways to annoy her.
A string of question marks came back from Zhong Yi: "Qiu Wuji—isn't that the heroine in your book?"
"Oh? You read my book too?"
"I haven't read it. I've heard Ah Jun and the others rambling about it—wanting to see Qiu Wuji, wanting Qiu Wuji to step on them. Brains full of holes, honestly."
"...She's got no papers, right? Her old name was the usual Cuihua or Zhaodi sort, and I figured I ought to at least give her something decent, so I used my book heroine's name to get by."
The reason he'd asked Qiu Wuji earlier whether she wanted to change her name was precisely that he'd known people would ask. Well—if she didn't want to change it, she didn't want to change it. He'd had a cover story ready long ago; it would hold up.
Zhong Yi clearly wasn't taking it seriously that the heroine had run out of a book. He just laughed: "You've really got feelings for that heroine of yours, huh—naming a person after her."
"Mm-hmm, naturally. Sending you the photo."
Silence from the other end. A good long while later, one line came back: "Where'd you buy that Vietnamese wife of yours? Introduce me—I want one too."
"If you can't hold your liquor, go sit at the kids' table."
"...Forget it. Wait for news. What about your own side? Get yourself a mask, make up an identity."
"I'll come find you tomorrow."
"Usually it's better to come in the evening. Most of our members are free at night; daytime's dicey, everyone's got their own stuff going on. You busy tonight?"
"Yeah, a bit... I'll see later." Chu Ge turned to look at Qiu Wuji—her face was set, and she'd been eating on her own. Almost finished already...
"Busy with what? Writing?"
"The great affair of my life!" Chu Ge shut WeChat, and turned to find Qiu Wuji staring at him with clear ill intent.
"Who's Cuihua and Zhaodi?"
"...It was just something I made up to fob people off. Say one more word and I'll add a setting—Qiu Wuji's original name before she took up cultivation was Zhaodi. Ow~"
Qiu Wuji pulled her foot back off the top of his. "Aren't you the big Father God, huh!"
Chu Ge smiled apologetically. "No, no. I still look to Master for guidance."
That word, Father God, reminded Qiu Wuji of the actual business, and she couldn't be bothered to play around with him anymore. "That divine-sense descent of yours—can you control it yourself?"
It had been genuinely terrifying at the time. If he hadn't gone easy, she really would have felt her very thoughts being "corrected"—a suppression there was no resisting.
In that moment she had been like an ant, stubbornly staring up at the heavens.
Thank goodness it was him.
Chu Ge said, "I don't think that counts as divine-sense descent. It's more like... hmm, an author's corrective awareness toward his work? I can't quite describe it... it's a bit like when I write a sentence and then feel it doesn't fit, so I revise it..."
Qiu Wuji said, "Feedback in the real world—that would be the Heavenly Dao's interference."
"Probably about the same. But I don't know how to make it happen on purpose. I can't exactly have you be the variable every time and then go suppress you, can I?"
"So far you can only interact with me? Have you ever felt a change in someone else that you wanted to correct?"
"Other people have no variables, so naturally nothing triggers." Chu Ge thought about it. "Though now and then I get this feeling of looking down from above—like all living things are ants, and every thread of their fate lies in my palm."
Qiu Wuji said, uncertain, "In that case, maybe... if you keep cultivating, you'll be able to do it on purpose?"
Chu Ge said, "Feels like I should be able to. There's a hint of it already—I just don't know how long it'll take."
The shock in Qiu Wuji's heart was beyond words.
This really was... the vast, slow-rolling Heavenly Dao, holding the fates of all living things in its grip! He had already gone from the abstract act of "writing" to interference with consciousness itself. He didn't seem to realize what a terrifying thing that was—but for a cultivator, the feeling was truly stunning; she didn't know how long she'd have to cultivate before she could touch a similar realm.
If he could descend at will, would she still be able to step on his foot? He'd probably be the one beating her.
Wait... Qiu Wuji said suddenly, "If you try to observe the mortal world on purpose, put your eyes on other people more—don't keep staring at me. Bias definitely won't do any good."
Chu Ge thought that made sense and nodded. "Next time I'll try fixing my attention on Chu Tiange or Yan Qianlie and the others."
Qiu Wuji exhaled quietly.
Spying on me on purpose—out of the question! What if I'm in the bath?
Chu Ge had no idea where her mind had gone. He smiled. "Hey, how about we buy a car? Then we could go cruising at night all the time, and we wouldn't have to squeeze onto the bus when there's something to do."
Qiu Wuji was quite interested. "Sure. Zhang Qiren's looks nice—it's big, holds a lot of stuff."
Chu Ge: "I meant a bicycle..."
"Is the kind Zhang Qiren has expensive?"
"If we grade them like magic treasures, that G-Wagon of his is about on par with Elder Zhou and the others' Brightlight Swords—and I'm glad to say it still doesn't measure up to your Autumn Water Azure. And right now I'm nothing but an entry-level Qi Refining disciple, grinding sect missions to trade in for a standard-issue longsword."
Qiu Wuji was astonished. "Can that junk heap even ascend to the heavens? It dares compare itself to this sect's Brightlight Sword, known the world over and coveted by all?"
"In terms of brand value, it's probably not far off—at least on the 'known the world over and coveted by all' front, not far off..."
"Then what about the other iron-skinned cars?"
"There are cheap ones, sure. I even got a driver's license back when I graduated college... Next time the manuscript payment comes in, once that Golden Sprout money lands, I could buy a cheap one. A parking space, though, I probably can't afford."
Qiu Wuji: "...I think you'd better just come back to Cloud Horizon Sect with me and scrape by. At least parking a travel magic treasure there doesn't cost spirit stones..."
Chu Ge tucked his hands into his sleeves. "Can we consider two wheels? If I can't afford an Audi, I can start with a Yadea."
Two wheels...
Qiu Wuji's gaze drifted out past the restaurant door. Bicycles like the one from that day were actually a rare sight in daily life; on the street, electric scooters that needed no hard pedaling came and went, and plenty of those were parked around the residential compound too—together they made up the picture of ordinary life in this world.
She suddenly felt that this was quite nice.
Just like that day on the back of his bike, feeling the river breeze brush past, soft and cool.
That had been her first taste of early autumn in this world.
"Then an e-bike it is," she said. "Save you some energy."
Chu Ge said, "Shouldn't it be saving you energy on the daily grocery run?"
Qiu Wuji said, "I'm not learning this... I want you to drive me."
The words were hardly out before she seemed to feel they carried a bit of a spoiled, clingy flavor, and she hurried to patch it up: "Isn't it only proper for a disciple to drive his master around?"
Chu Ge didn't answer. He only stared at her, dazed.
Only when Qiu Wuji was about to blow up did he break into a radiant smile. "Okay."