Chapter 41: Jin Yu 1

A monotonous and annoying tapping sound stirred her into a state of agitation; she cursed under her breath, but the tapping persisted relentlessly until she woke up with a start.

She breathed rapidly, her heart racing; being suddenly startled awake from a nap was always unpleasant, especially now that the weather was gradually turning hot and the lethargy of spring was hardest to shake off. She felt dazed for a while, then realized her arm was aching; she hurriedly braced herself against the desk to sit up, constantly moving the arm that had gone numb from sleeping on the desk.

Had she fallen asleep in the classroom?

A familiar small classroom, the desks were single-seaters, with light-colored synthetic wood grain pasted on the surfaces. The windows were tightly shut, making her feel somewhat stifled. So, was she supposed to be attending an afternoon class here? She turned her head in a daze, looking for traces of others.

A tall boy sat on a chair in front of the teacher's podium, his long legs crossed casually, leaning lazily against the back of the chair. A girl stood beside him, a very small girl, not yet of school age.

Other than that, there was no one else in the classroom. The little girl stared straight at her, her face a mixture of curiosity and timidity. That boy... a Bone-Hilt Knife was in his hand, and he was rhythmically tapping the chrome edge of the chair with it; the noise that had woken her up was created this way.

That knife looked inexplicably familiar. Those two people also looked exceptionally familiar.

She suddenly realized, memories flooding back, and she trembled as if waking up for a second time. She knew this lag in memory was a common phenomenon when entering a Sandbox. Her heart rate accelerated, blood rushed to her head, and she began to tremble as if from an overdose of caffeine.

"Awake?" Du Zhengyi asked her, expressionless, his mind seemingly not even on her. "What is your name?" he asked absentmindedly.

She did not speak, looking at Du Zhengyi with hostility.

"Your name is Jin Yu," Du Zhengyi glanced at her and said impatiently, "You graduated just a year ago and entered the Execution Mage reserve team early. Can we save some trouble and get straight to the point? I have plenty of things to do today."

She trembled even more violently; she regretted her reckless actions today. She had been ordered to monitor that little girl for a long time, and she had been mixed in among humans for too long; now that she thought about it, she had nurtured too much of a sense of superiority among a group of fools who knew no Magic. In this boring position, she was surrounded by a group of human girls who both admired and envied her; she was smarter and prettier than them. Of course, more importantly, she had a bit of talent; she could make people happier or sadder. Among Telepathic Mages, she was not considered outstanding, but this little skill was enough. It was like how, although she could not cook a full feast, she knew how to season it.

Relying on this little skill, she incited people's hearts; they liked her, and they were driven by her without knowing it. When she expressed a wish, she only needed to gift the other person a feeling of joy, and that happiness of doing things for her could urge them to charge into battle for her. She was smug, as if she were a queen. She watched people coming and going every day, and occasionally she would meet a few Mages—all of them were low-class Mages—and they, too, fell at her feet one by one.

But as things stood now, as long as she thought about it seriously for a moment, she would know that the things they charged into battle for her to do were nothing more than voluntarily going across the street to buy her takeout or finishing the floor-mopping chores for her. Or they would blindly pursue her, have a meal, watch a movie; her influence on them never lasted more than an hour after they parted ways.

But none of this mattered; the most fatal thing was that she should not have touched the man before her. When they first met, she only carefully recorded the situation and reported it to the person who sent her, cautiously doing nothing. The higher-ups reacted very strongly to this man's appearance, and her curiosity was buried from then on. The second time they met, everything was different; this man was clearly in low spirits and somewhat decadent. At the time, this seemed like a good opportunity; perhaps she could control him. She had not even thought about what kind of reward she would get after successfully taking him down. She had not thought that much, had no such complete ambition. She only thought that he was a prestigious young Mage, and subduing him in itself gave her a sense of achievement. In the world she had always known, she was a powerful woman; as long as she wanted to, she could do anything. As long as she tried a little harder and was more serious, success belonged to her.

But the moment she touched him with caution and skill, her mental tentacles were rapidly corroded as if they had merged into strong acid, and what was even more terrifying was that a thought of fear and despair backlashed against her. She retreated in a panic, but it was already too late; that overwhelming power followed her, marking her. She had heard that Great Mages possessed powerful secret arts to counter Telepaths; even if they were not Telepaths themselves, this kind of secret art had been tempered for thousands of years and evolved by generation after generation of Mages in countless battles against Mind Mages—how could a Mage of her level possibly resist it?

She had not even imagined this kind of devastating blow and suppression; her only thought left was to flee for her life.

In front of her, Du Zhengyi stared at her for a full minute, taking in every subtle expression of hers. He spoke, seemingly determined to dig deeper into her, "You lost your mother in your early childhood; your mother died in a human traffic accident. A truck driver was driving while fatigued, hit two cars, and drove the truck onto the sidewalk; your mother was buying a cake for you at the street corner at the time."

"How do you know?" she asked in a low voice.

"I naturally have the authority to look through files," Du Zhengyi said. He looked her up and down, and suddenly his expression became even more annoyed. "But this is all crap; the Langhuan Pavilion always collects a lot of garbage."

Her complexion changed abruptly, panic making her body start to sway; she knew she was about to suffer a fatal blow—he was going to shatter her spirit. Even Guan Xinyue noticed the anomaly and looked at her curiously. Her face turned bright red; she hoped this man would not continue, she hoped he would let her go, and she would leave and never do anything for anyone ever again.

"Your parents are both alive and well, it's just that their Magic Ability is shockingly low, not even qualified to enter the Execution Mage sequence, so there is almost no record of them in the files. Only then did you have the opportunity to spout nonsense and deceive the Lotus Burners, successfully sneaking into the Lotus Burners by relying on a fabricated experience of hating humans. Life relying on power is much better than before, right? Your parents have no Magic Ability, so they would be invisibly expelled by the Magic World and completely cast into human society. But they had never received human education and had no human survival skills, so what did your parents rely on to make a living? Sweeping streets or being nannies? Or clearing sewers? None of those? Ah, it's manual labor, right? Did I guess right? We are much stronger than humans in physical fitness; if there were no Magic, doing manual labor would be a good choice. Your father has smashed walls for quite a few humans, right? And where does your family live? Urban villages in human cities? Shantytowns? It's truly pathetic for a Mage to end up like this."

She felt as if she had been struck by lightning; she had never been humiliated like this before. She could make people spit out friendly words; wherever she went, there were friends, and no one did not like her. She could even modify her parents' emotions, making them dote on her, and they would never be able to do anything about her.

She resisted weakly, still holding onto a last shred of faint hope. "What are you talking about..."

"You are a low-level Telepath; Telepaths themselves are very rare, and even in family lineages with this bloodline, Telepaths often only appear every other generation. So it's nothing strange for parents without ability to give birth to a Telepath. It's also normal for your parents, born into a Mage family, to send you back to our world. But your life hasn't been too good, has it?" Du Zhengyi spoke these words smoothly, as if he himself were not interested in the slightest. He looked as if he were reading a book he was not interested in, and this Mage girl named Jin Yu was that book.

It was even more uncomfortable for Jin Yu than that; she was not an open book, she was just a dry instruction manual, and this young man was reading the manual out, for lack of anything better to do. Her heart felt as if it were about to ache intensely.

"Mages generally don't lack daily necessities; we are supported by humans, but we cannot take too many resources from humans at once, destroying the balance of the human system and making them alert. So we rely on credit points to exchange for quotas to obtain resources, and Calculators will calculate our value and pay us credit points. But you have no credit points because your parents have no value in the Magic World, and their value in the human world is only enough to get a bite to eat. What can you rely on to survive in the Magic World? Relying on those little tricks of yours to cheat a meal?" Du Zhengyi suddenly laughed, as if he had finally found a punchline in the instruction manual, "Do you rely on charming men who will forget you the moment they turn around to pay your bills? That big and flashy Magic Crystal on your neck can only be exchanged with credit points; who bought it for you? No, that's not a Magic Crystal; that's an Obsidian necklace made by human hands, the polished style just looks like a Magic Crystal; did you have it custom-made?"

Jin Yu trembled even more violently, her face full of anger, and the area around her eyes was completely red. She wanted to restrain her tears for the sake of her dignity, but the tears flowed down like a broken dam. "Are you... are you a Mind Mage?"

"I am not," Du Zhengyi said, lifting two fingers to tap his temple lightly, "I don't read people by Telepathy; I read people with this."

She wiped her tears with trembling hands, but could not help sobbing even harder, "How on earth... how on earth do you know about my parents... my parents' affairs?"

"Truly interesting," Du Zhengyi said, tapping the armrest of the chair indifferently with that sacred Bone-Hilt Knife, "A Mage who sells her life to the Lotus Burners actually feels wronged? Your adoptive parents are your biological parents. The human household registration system is very detailed; it's very easy to find your parents using your human identity. There's no need to look at the data closely at all; you and your parents are too similar in appearance."

He said nothing else, but she knew the household registration would not have told him that much information; it was he who had seen through her, just like when she was a child and always felt that some people could see through her outer clothes to the tattered and old underwear inside. She suddenly could no longer hold it back and burst into tears.