Chapter 63: Battle Mage

The negotiation between Du Zhengyi and Luo Qi had completely broken down; Luo Qi had retreated into his own shell, refusing to step a single inch out of the defensive perimeter no matter how Du Zhengyi berated him. When Du Zhengyi relaxed his guard slightly, he even fell asleep, seemingly determined to insulate himself from PTSD, possessing an incredibly strong self-healing ability.

Du Zhengyi had also reviewed his textbooks for a while and searched through some papers, looking to see if Telepaths lacked emotions and were born with the attributes of super soldiers. But perhaps because Telepaths generally place extreme importance on privacy, research papers were extremely limited, and there wasn't even a single relevant chapter in the textbooks. However, in the few papers that explored the inherent characteristics of Telepaths, researchers generally believed that Telepaths had extremely delicate inner emotions and were sensitive and prone to overthinking, which is why they often preferred to live alone to exclude outside interference.

Du Zhengyi looked at Luo Qi, who had rolled to his feet after falling asleep, and then thought about Luo Qi's usual dim-witted, goofy personality and his "hardcore straight man" style of having no sympathy for the fairer sex... He crushed all the paper data floating in the air into dust in one go.

How could that be?

These scholars who wrote the papers must be charlatans who had never seen a Telepath in their entire lives.

Du Zhengyi sat down in the chair, silently pondering the next step, when the Crystal hanging from the silver chain around his wrist suddenly grew warm. A familiar yet uncomfortable Entanglement was being gently tugged at the distant other end.

He hardened his face, watching a short message precipitate out of the Crystal. There was just enough time for him to finish reading it before the message burned away in cold flames.

Du Zhengyi put the chain back around his neck and, as he had wished, stepped on Luo Qi, venting some of his pent-up frustration. Luo Qi was stepped awake, groaned, barely revealed a pair of eyes, and looked at Du Zhengyi blankly.

"I'm going out for a bit," Du Zhengyi said.

"Where to?" Luo Qi asked muzzily.

Du Zhengyi did not answer him. "I'll try to be back as soon as possible. If you're hungry, find something to eat in the fridge to tide yourself over. I'll leave Guan Xinyue's phone for you; you can make a call and chat with her, she's very worried about you. But don't order takeout, lest you accidentally eat the brain of the Meituan delivery guy."

Luo Qi forced his eyes open to listen to him, shivered, and buried himself back into the quilt.

Du Zhengyi briefly pondered whether Luo Qi's behavior was normal; perhaps he hadn't accepted this reality at all. He wanted to say something, but Luo Qi had already fallen back asleep.

He hesitated for a moment before opening the door and walking out; the empty hallway was piled with quite a bit of construction waste. Aside from the unit he lived in, the other rooms on this floor had no doors installed. From the doorway, one could see that the interiors were basically finished, even the windows had been installed, but the developer seemed to have suddenly lost confidence and withdrawn all the workers. At this moment, he was standing on the twelfth floor, looking down through the hallway window; below was an empty road, and only occasionally would a car drive by after a long interval. The spacious yet empty road was complemented by appropriately proportioned green belts, there were grand lawns along the sidewalks, and the roadside was lined with high-rise buildings, carrying the style of an emerging city, yet a close look revealed no sign of people.

This area was a famous ghost city; the city had opened it up as a new district several years ago with scientific and reasonable planning, but with the loss of the city's population, not many people had moved in. Therefore, after Du Zhengyi was injured in his fourth year and it was no longer suitable for him to live in Qionglin, he chose this place. It couldn't be called great, but just like using it to house Luo Qi today, it was simply very suitable, and that suitability was enough.

Not many people knew where he lived; his social life could hardly be called rich. However, he was not the only one like Du Zhengyi; even in the world of Mages, they were somewhat isolated and independent, and where they lived or what they were doing was often unknown.

It was these people who notified Du Zhengyi to meet today; Du Zhengyi drove there, determined to make the people who summoned him wait a while.

He drove along the highway outside the city for a while, exited the highway at the first toll station, and drove into a mountain outside the city. When the dirt road came to an end, Du Zhengyi stopped the car and hiked into a small path in the mountains.

The mountain was not high, and the slope was not steep; the hillside was covered with huge pine trees, and the Pine Branches were a dark green that was almost black. A mountain breeze blew, and there was a chill of the netherworld among the pine trees.

Du Zhengyi stopped on the mountainside and stepped on a fallen tombstone. "Come out. What do you want by calling me here?"

Two figures appeared on the mountaintop, looking like the forms of two men, both wearing dark trench coats. They looked at Du Zhengyi from afar, and the latter kicked the tombstone impatiently. "Hurry up. Every time you arrange to meet in a graveyard, what kind of obsession do you people have?"

Du Zhengyi paused on the last word. He turned his head slightly, as if his vision had blurred, and two figures appeared at the foot of the mountain to his rear right. Without needing to look back again, he already sensed that two more people had come to his rear left.

"This is getting interesting." Du Zhengyi turned his head back, a smile on the corner of his mouth. "Is such a big formation aimed at me?"

The figures on the mountaintop disappeared, and Du Zhengyi folded his arms across his chest, watching indifferently as the two appeared no more than two meters in front of him.

"Why did it take so long to come? We almost thought you wouldn't dare to come."

The ones who came were a pair of brothers; Du Zhengyi was very familiar with them. The one who spoke had quite a bit of leadership charisma, and he was indeed the leader of this group. But how to put it, Mages were like a group of cats; no one could be a leader to a group of cats.

Du Zhengyi looked at him indifferently, lazily disdaining to answer his question.

This squad of Mages stood in silence in the graveyard, each of them possessing enough coldness. The reason the middle-aged man standing in front of Du Zhengyi could become the captain was likely because, although they were all cats, he was a very rational cat. He looked at Du Zhengyi with patience. "If Han Yi hadn't filed a complaint against you in front of everyone and volunteered himself as a witness, I would not have summoned you for questioning."

Du Zhengyi tilted his head back slightly. "Do you need to put on such a big show to question me?"

The other party's expression did not change, and his voice was waveless and calm, saying mechanically, "If I had only sent one person to notify you, would you have answered?"

Du Zhengyi didn't know what was wrong with himself; perhaps he had been with Luo Qi for too long and had been somewhat infected by him, as he actually found it quite funny and couldn't help but laugh out loud.