Chapter 131: The Highway

Luo Qi rented an inconspicuous Volkswagen Lavida on the Shenzhou Car Rental website; he was, after all, the one among them most adapted to life in human society. To a certain extent, he understood human society even better than the only human among the four, as he was, when it came down to it, a few years older. Moreover, Luo Qi had truly prepared for many years to live in human society, so he was quite savvy about how to get by.

The four of them sat in the car. Luo Qi was somewhat relieved that Du Zhengyi had not yet found the time to retrieve his flashy red Mustang; otherwise, he would surely have been stuffed into the back seat of the Mustang and cramped for six hundred kilometers. Now, in this economical and practical Volkswagen, Guan Xinyue was sitting in the back seat, and she had demanded that he not sit in the same row as her, so he was sitting comfortably in Du Zhengyi's passenger seat. And because Guan Xinyue had originally refused to go out with Luo Qi at all and would not accept his apology, Mahjong had also been brought along, nominally to take Guan Xinyue out shopping.

The person driving was still Du Zhengyi. He drove very steadily; for a Mage's reaction speed, the 120-kilometer-per-hour speed limit was really not much to speak of, but they needed to keep a low profile now. Luo Qi leaned against the car window, looking at the endless farmland on both sides of the highway, thinking that Mahjong had originally not wanted to come, but since his remaining work was handed over to the Calculation crystal anyway, he was just waiting around wherever he was, so he had reluctantly followed them out. Mahjong was very good to Guan Xinyue. It was probably because, in order to decrypt Guan Yushan's documents, he had heard Guan Xinyue talk too much about her own affairs. People are just like that; when you know too much about someone, it is hard not to care.

Du Zhengyi was also very good to Guan Xinyue, although he was a cold-faced person and did not seem to have as much of the warmth of human life as Mahjong. Luo Qi felt that Du Zhengyi always felt he owed Guan Xinyue; this debt was subtle, more like he owed her on behalf of the Mage World.

Luo Qi felt there was nothing wrong with this, except that these two idiots were dying to tie him up and shove him into a bridal sedan chair to marry Guan Xinyue. The two of them hadn't even considered that Guan Xinyue was only sixteen years old; on this point, Luo Qi considered himself much wiser than the two of them. He felt his own attitude toward treating Guan Xinyue was the healthiest: if they needed to bicker, they bickered, and when they could make up, they made up. However, the two of them refused to let him make up with her naturally; they were practically holding his neck and forcing him to bow his head, which made it seem even more unnatural. What's more, he didn't think it was entirely his fault at all; there were problems on both sides to begin with.

But what could he do? These two old men were convinced that girls were more delicate than boys. He remembered a video he had seen on the internet before, probably a sociological test played on YouTube. They put a little girl, a cat, a dog, and a little boy in a park. Two minutes later, passersby went to help the little girl and even took the girl to find the police. Five minutes later, the cat was picked up, and within ten minutes, the dog was rescued, but even after twenty minutes, the little boy was still running around the park like a fool. Not a single passerby realized that he was also a lost child who needed help. In the end, the staff had to take the little boy away themselves, incidentally ending the test.

So what could Luo Qi say? That was just his fate. He should still try to find a topic first, rather than waiting for Mahjong to lose his temper, and even less waiting for Du Zhengyi to step in and deal with him. Actually, at this point, he already knew that Du Zhengyi couldn't really do anything to him, but he was quite wary of letting Du Zhengyi down.

He pondered how to start a conversation; he was truly not good at coaxing girls, and if he were too insincere, he would end up arguing with Guan Xinyue a second round later. He pondered for a while, his thoughts gradually drifting away from the matter at hand, and he found himself thinking about the real reason for their trip.

"Why would they set their target in Ganzhou?" he said subconsciously again. "Actually, is there even any point to Ganzhou anymore? Thinking from their perspective, if I were doing this, after what happened in Xizhou, I would roughly be able to guess the possibility that the plan had been exposed, and the follow-up plan would have to be terminated."

Mahjong was in the back seat of the car, boredly flipping through a book, and did not respond to what he said. They had set off early in the morning, and he had drunk too much last night, so he still wasn't quite awake yet.

Du Zhengyi said, "Let Wen Lin and her people in the Qionglin investigate how things actually stand. Even if they terminate the plan, since they chose to stir up trouble in Ganzhou in the first place, there will always be some reasons, and they will leave traces behind. If Wen Lin starts investigating from Ganzhou, it's not necessarily the case that she won't find anything."

"I do have a question," Mahjong said, yawning.

"What question?" Luo Qi immediately turned his head, taking the opportunity to glance at Guan Xinyue, who glared at him.

"The question is, do we really have to drive six hundred kilometers before using a Public Post Station?" Mahjong said. "The information from a Public Post Station is very difficult to trace back to its source. Du Zhengyi, aren't you being overly cautious?"

"Public Post Stations are frequented by Mages. It is safer for us to find a place that is a backwater to the Magic World; the probability of encountering a Great Mage is smaller," Du Zhengyi said calmly.

Luo Qi had no objection to this, as long as they didn't keep him cooped up in the courtyard or make him play house alone with Guan Xinyue. He didn't want to hear Mahjong continue to complain, so he took up the conversation and returned to the previous topic. "Honestly, I really didn't expect the clues left by Guan Fashi to be intelligence about an attack. I originally thought that after the document was decrypted, it would be personnel information on those participating in the Lotus Burner."

Guan Xinyue turned her head and said aggressively, "I'm really sorry that my grandfather didn't do his work according to your requirements."

Luo Qi blinked and said in a low, defensive voice, "That's not what I meant."

Guan Xinyue turned her head away and stopped looking at him. He looked to Mahjong for help, but Mahjong had buried his head in that tattered book ever since the atmosphere turned sour.

Luo Qi had no choice but to continue on his own, still speaking to Guan Xinyue. "Here is what I think: since your grandfather was able to find out the intelligence about the attack, didn't he need to first contact the people preparing the attack? This intelligence always has to be obtained from people, right? So where are the people? Why wasn't the information about the people left behind? Why not incidentally leave a little personnel information in the document? Even if it were to stall the decryption speed of the document, there was no need to not leak a single piece of personnel information, right? Doesn't this make it look less like intelligence? I don't mean to offend, but don't you think this kind of intelligence looks a lot like a notice for a terrorist attack?"

Du Zhengyi tapped his hand on the steering wheel. "Luo Qi is right."

Guan Xinyue had been about to say something, but because of this sentence from Du Zhengyi, she held it back and instead glared at Luo Qi.