Chapter 45: Forty-four: Debt

Forty-four: Debt

Half-conscious and half-awake, Li Yingqi felt as if she saw a familiar back. Even though the person was now dressed in strange, exotic clothing, that broad back she had looked up to countless times made her realize exactly who the figure that had once again saved her from danger was.

"Dajiang..." Li Yingqi murmured.

Her muddled, chaotic mind was no longer enough to support her in pondering why a dead person would appear here, or why someone who had once died in the wake of an Alien God's power would suddenly possess the strength to crush an Alien God. She only hoped that all of this was not a dream. Although the first half of this dream was so terrible that she felt the end of the world was nothing more than this, being able to see someone she wanted to meet again made all those negative things no longer frightening.

……

"I'm back, Lin Laoban." Wei Jiang pushed the door open and entered. The red ghost mask on his face quickly transferred from his face to his hand, then flowed from his fingertips back onto the door.

Lin Ling seemed to have long anticipated the timing of his return and said with a smile, "Since you're back, sit down and rest first. The tea temperature is just right now."

Wei Jiang dragged his exhausted body to sit in front of the tea table, opposite Lin Ling. His trembling hand raised the teacup, his body slowly becoming transparent and weak; he spilled the tea as he drank, looking quite disheveled.

Lin Ling watched Wei Jiang's clumsy appearance with a smile and asked, "Since you finally had a chance to see an old acquaintance from your past life, don't you want to have a proper chat?"

Upon hearing this, after drinking a few sips of hot tea, Wei Jiang's body gradually returned to a solid state, and his whole body stopped trembling. He caught his breath for a few moments before saying, "No need. Life and death are different, separated by two shores. I don't want to make things difficult for them, or for myself, because of a moment of pleasure."

As he spoke, he glanced at the motionless Other Shore Flower in the pot on the table, his expression complex. "I am, after all, considered a type of Abnormal now. The duty of a Mysterious Investigator is to expel and contain Abnormals; my existence already stands on the opposite side of them. Besides, I am now your employee, Lin Laoban. If those guys asked me to take up my old job and be an undercover agent here, my conscience would be very uneasy."

"Oh, not bad, you're actually considering things for me." Lin Ling looked pleasantly surprised and couldn't help but applaud Wei Jiang's answer, then immediately beamed and said, "However, that sounds quite interesting. If you are truly interested in continuing as a Mysterious Investigator, it wouldn't be impossible to come to my side and be an undercover agent."

"Boss..." Wei Jiang was somewhat touched, feeling that Lin Ling clearly had more of a kind-hearted and reasonable side, but he didn't know why Yu Lianyun always spoke ill of Lin Laoban.

"That way, I could also pay one less salary." Lin Ling's next sentence made Wei Jiang's sentimentality plummet to the bottom. Lin Ling even added with a smile, "Hey, by the way, you could also try 'Infernal Affairs'." His eyes were eager to try.

"Let's not. My acting skills are terrible," Wei Jiang refused with a bitter smile.

Lin Ling sighed with some disappointment after hearing this and muttered, "What a great bit of fun..."

Wei Jiang felt a toothache upon hearing this and hurriedly diverted his boss's attention, changing the subject: "Boss, the Feather that Li Jiahong rented can most likely not be recovered. What should we do?"

"Do what you have to do. If you lose something you rented, of course you have to compensate and pay the debt," Lin Ling said as a matter of course. He precisely plucked a black cat that had surrendered from the shadows and placed it on his lap to stroke.

Wei Jiang felt a strange chill from Lin Ling's eerie smile and couldn't help but ask, "How should he pay?"

"Depends on whether he gives money or something else," Lin Ling said with a smile. "Compensate at double the original price of the item, otherwise, he can obediently come into the shop and work."

"... But Li Jiahong is a human." Wei Jiang's lips twitched slightly.

"Eh, what a coincidence, so am I," Lin Ling replied with a look of surprise.

Wei Jiang: "..."

At this point, how did Lin Laoban manage to be so stubborn.

Everything in this shop, from top to bottom, inside and out, was wrong. It had collected one Abnormal object after another that was almost impossible to know about, and Lin Ling could perfectly control all these Abnormals; this was clearly not something a normal human could do.

However, Wei Jiang also understood Lin Laoban's attitude: "Did you intend for Li Jiahong to become an employee of the shop from the very beginning?"

"Not at all. Everything that led Li Jiahong to where he is today was his own personal choice," Lin Ling said with a light laugh. "I never took the initiative to find him; he was the one who found me."

Wei Jiang was speechless, because the facts were indeed so. When he first saw that there were actually people who took the initiative to ask Lin Ling for help, he couldn't help but be stunned.

With Lin Ling's third-rate sales pitch, anyone with a discerning eye would think it was a scam, yet Lin Ling still enjoyed it tirelessly, and he never expected that there would really be someone willing to take the bait.

"He could have investigated the case alone, but he couldn't resist the kindness and joy of connecting with other families who had lost loved ones. Through a series of karmic consequences, although Xue Hanlei's death was also her own choice, he couldn't escape his share of the blame," Lin Ling said. "Actually, as early as when the Feather was handed to his wife, he himself had already noticed the strangeness about her, but he still blindly prayed that nothing would happen. He didn't strictly follow my instructions, which led to him discovering something was wrong in the end, but it was already too late to save the situation."

Wei Jiang let out a soft sigh after hearing this and said, "He is a good man."

"Not necessarily," Lin Ling said calmly. "When his wife and child met with misfortune back then, have you ever thought about why he wasn't by their side?"

Wei Jiang sat up straight and listened carefully.

"Back then, Li Jiahong was young, promising, and high-spirited. He spent more time at dinner parties and in the arms of women than he did accompanying his wife and child," Lin Ling said, kneading the cat's paw pads. "What is driving the other party to set out on a journey to seek the lonely now, if not the guilt in his own heart?"

This was the first time Wei Jiang had heard such a truth, and he couldn't help but fall into silence.

……

"Ugh—" Yu Lianyun woke up with a start from the Dream Demon. When she woke up, she found herself lying in a hospital bed, her shoulder immobile, with medicine bottles and blood bags hanging. Her memory slowly recovered, recalling exactly what she had seen before she finally fainted.

At this moment, Li Yingqi, with a plaster cast wrapped around her entire leg, walked over from another ward and said, "You're lucky; you almost died at the hands of that guy."

"You're the lucky one. I almost thought you and Team Leader He were both dead," Yu Lianyun said.

Hearing this, Li Yingqi directly and earnestly pressed, "Was the person who saved us Wei Jiang?"

"You must have seen wrong," Yu Lianyun was silent for a moment, thinking about fulfilling the contract of confidentiality, and said, "How could a dead person still be alive, and become an existence even more powerful than an Alien God? That's impossible."