Chapter 395: Barbecue Restaurant

Grease sizzled on the barbecue grill, and Luo Qi sighed with satisfaction amidst the overflowing aroma. Du Zhengyi scraped some cooked meat toward him, and he clumsily used a fork to spear the meat to eat. He still could not use his fingers dexterously, so using chopsticks was out of the question for the time being.

"The people around me all think I'm mentally disabled," he said.

"Everyone is eating barbecue and drinking beer; who cares how you eat your meat?" Du Zhengyi said, as he was also slowly drinking a glass of locally brewed beer.

"No," Luo Qi said, frowning with worry, "I truly know that is what they are thinking."

His emphasis fell on "thinking," and he bit down hard on the word. Du Zhengyi realized what he meant, put down his chopsticks, and scanned the surroundings. "Can't you turn it off? Doesn't it feel noisy?"

"A little noisy," Luo Qi made a bitter face. "I can't immediately contain my Yajian ability right now. My physical ability is too weak to even pick up chopsticks, and my Telepathy is like a wild horse off its leash."

Du Zhengyi looked at the people around them. It was currently peak dining time, exactly when people were eating dinner, and the barbecue restaurant was always crowded. He glanced around and indeed saw two people interested in Luo Qi. "I thought they were secretly mocking you for being a loser, putting on airs with a fork like it's a Western meal."

"There are some who think that, too," Luo Qi said. "Can I have some alcohol?"

"No."

"Why?" Luo Qi asked, knowing the answer.

"To keep your nerves from getting even more excited," Du Zhengyi said, trying to be as patient as possible.

Luo Qi's eyeballs rolled around as he looked Du Zhengyi up and down. "You look a bit haggard, buddy. What's wrong?"

"You heartless little bastard," Du Zhengyi said calmly. "Did you spend the last few days going on a National Day Golden Week holiday?"

"Don't tell me you didn't immediately think of me being there?" Luo Qi hid sneakily behind his rice bowl and watched him.

Du Zhengyi did not answer his question. "Did you hide right under the nose of the Progenitor Mage?"

"Hey, that crazy old hag!" Luo Qi got angry just mentioning her. "She was too confident, thinking I had been wiped clean. Actually, she wasn't even the original body; she was just a copy that bossed people around and thought of herself as a person. She was also especially crafty—even though she could run, she still left a copy of a copy inside."

Du Zhengyi and the others had considered this situation beforehand, and he had always been somewhat puzzled. "Could her copy be weaker than her? Why weren't you a match for her, yet you could defeat her copy?"

"Because she doesn't trust anyone. She doesn't want another version of herself in the world while she is in an active state. So her copy was always in a dormant state. I didn't know when she planned to wake the copy or what trigger conditions she left behind, so I spent a lot of time studying that place, terrified of triggering that zombie soul," Luo Qi said.

"Liu Ziyu detected an energy peak; was that your doing?" Du Zhengyi asked, remembering this matter.

"That was me trying to find a way to traverse the copy's memories, which ended up causing an energy fluctuation. I was worried that the energy was gathering to activate the sleeping energy, so I thought it was better to strike first and released the energy, consuming it. For some reason, that place has the ability to create metal, so I instantly forged a large amount of metal inside the mountain. Um... I didn't expect it to cause a landslide."