Chapter 170: A Nosebleed, Young Man

Their conversation ended with Du Zhengyi's silence; Luo Qi, relying on a pair of discerning eyes, could now clearly distinguish Du Zhengyi's various kinds of silence, and today's silence signified agreement. At the very least, it was an agreement to their further course of action.

But for the first time, the atmosphere between them grew a bit tense. They went to the hotel restaurant to eat, and Du Zhengyi kept his eyelids half-lowered the entire time, maintaining a very health-conscious posture.

Luo Qi was in no mood to liven up the atmosphere either; his heart felt cloying because he had spoken ill of Pei Shu. That uncomfortable feeling was just like telling Du Zhengyi, "I think your mother might be a Special Practitioner."

That Du Zhengyi didn't turn hostile more thoroughly already counted as him being a very calm, good person.

So Luo Qi sat in the five-star hotel restaurant chewing on a pile of vegetable leaves; when Du Zhengyi ordered, he only ordered vegetarian dishes, most of which were salads. He didn't give Luo Qi a chance to order, and Luo Qi didn't dare to ask, even though all he wanted to eat every day was meat.

Luo Qi sighed again, listlessly poking at the vegetable leaves, imagining himself as a rabbit. He ate up the tiny bit of egg and breadcrumbs in the green salad; the remaining things were either green or purple, and looking at them made him feel like eating cat food.

Luo Qi couldn't stand this kind of atmosphere at all; he craved the usual relaxed and pleasant feeling, satisfied like a comedian to challenge an unsociable audience member like Du Zhengyi, taking pleasure in seeing the corners of his mouth lift. However, he didn't want to beg Du Zhengyi to make up either; today was different from usual, and if he took the initiative to reconcile, it would mean he was retracting what he had said. He had nothing to retract; everything he said was his true thoughts.

Luo Qi didn't want to stare at Du Zhengyi at this moment; that would only make him angry. In a while, they might end up arguing over the matter of eating vegetable leaves, which would play right into the hands of Du Zhengyi's cunning provocation. Sometimes he really couldn't understand Du Zhengyi; was his calm maturity just an act? But he also understood that geniuses were idiosyncratic, doing whatever they pleased.

He chewed the greens slowly, trying his best to ignore the texture and taste of the things in his mouth, and shifted his attention to the other people in the restaurant. The hotel restaurant was spacious and comfortable, there weren't many people dining, the waiters' service was attentive but not intimate, the guests were conversing elegantly in low voices, and in the restaurant's soothing music, there were almost only the tiny sounds of knives, forks, and dishes gently clinking.

Luo Qi poked at the leaves on his plate with his fork, his tentacles of Yajian slowly stretching out. His consciousness flew up above the restaurant, relaxed and comfortable; he cast off the life of the irritable Luo Qi and lazily seeped into every consciousness in the restaurant. There were twenty-nine people in total, excluding him and Du Zhengyi.

He had no interest in the surface consciousness of most people; he didn't like prying into others' private secrets. They were like a group of chatterboxes, so he turned down the volume of these voices, reduced them to background noise, and merely replicated a portion of his own low-level consciousness to monitor these sounds. He calculated that sooner or later he would need a scientific method to efficiently filter this monitored content; perhaps he should learn about human search algorithms.

His consciousness invaded the deep consciousness of these people a step further, weeding out more than half who were as uninteresting as his dinner plate. He began to take an interest in a Doctor; the knowledge in his brain was frighteningly dense. Luo Qi was like someone who had learned to use the internet for the first time, always curious to download whatever he saw. He copied a massive amount of the Doctor's professional knowledge; these things actually had no great use existing in his consciousness, as he lacked the Doctor's professional way of thinking and it was difficult to become a doctor based on this, even a pathologist wouldn't work. But he already understood that this knowledge could still exist like a database; as long as he needed it, he could search for relevant knowledge at any time.

Next, he entered the deep consciousness of a retired soldier. He was a veteran military enthusiast; Luo Qi didn't touch the part of his knowledge about warships and aircraft—the Mage's world was too far removed from those, and even Luo Qi wasn't particularly interested in them. But Luo Qi soon discovered his memories were more interesting; he had once been a special forces soldier. Luo Qi reviewed his history with great relish, the feeling no less than a first-person VR game.

In the retired soldier's memories, there was one segment that was extremely conspicuous, and Luo Qi's consciousness was quickly drawn to it. That memory seemed to be recalled by the subject often. It was like a warrior's blade, placed at the head of the bed, wiped clean constantly.

Luo Qi plunged into it without a second thought. His world suddenly grew dim, and in the depths of the memory, he smelled the scent of rotting wood, mixed with a trace of alarming bloodiness and an indescribable stench. Luo Qi gained vision within the subject's memory; light fell into a dilapidated house, and dust danced in that pale Sunlight.

Luo Qi turned his head following the subject's memory, looking around this dilapidated factory building. Wood shavings were scattered on the ground, the tall factory building had a ceiling height of two stories, the small panes of glass were filthy, and the broken parts were relatively better for letting in light. The factory had many windows, but the glass panes embedded in them were very small, clearly different from the large tempered glass widely used in today's buildings; Luo Qi could roughly distinguish that it was a building from the fifties or sixties. The factory must have been abandoned for a long time, and this memory was also very old; such places mostly didn't exist today, having long been demolished to sell the land.

Luo Qi's consciousness gradually merged with the subject's memory; even if he wanted to avoid the subject's emotions, the emotions of this memory were too intense, dragging at him like a Black Hole. The subject's perspective suddenly aimed at the ground; Luo Qi couldn't tell if it was he or the subject whose heart was pounding, but he saw that the ground was actually covered in blood, fresh blood pooling into a small puddle in the low-lying terrain.

Luo Qi's heart pounded wildly; he wanted to break free from this memory, but he wasn't fast enough. He watched helplessly as he turned with the subject; a human head rolled next to an abandoned machine, and a burst of sharp pain scorched his heart. The heart-piercing pain was like a misplaced agony in Luo Qi's own memory, making him almost scream out. He vaguely knew that was the retired soldier's comrade-in-arms, his best friend. Luo Qi struggled in the cruel pain, quickly detached from the subject, and under intense fear, retracted all his consciousness in one go.

It was like foolishly returning to the surface too quickly while diving; his ears were buzzing, his heart was pounding, his brain felt like it was about to explode, and a nosebleed gushed out, rushing into his dinner plate.

Du Zhengyi was greatly startled; he heard the sound of Du Zhengyi throwing his knife and fork into the plate, and a wad of napkins was pressed onto his nose. His nearly ruined ears barely heard Du Zhengyi ask him with concern, "What's wrong with you?"

Luo Qi had never once failed to seize an opportunity in his life; he said, "I'm allergic to greens."

He heard Du Zhengyi curse at him, roughly pinching his nose tight, as if intending to deal with Pinocchio's nose that was about to grow long.