Chapter 9: Girl & Girl

Behind the door was a corridor leading to a living room, four bedrooms, a kitchen, and two bathrooms. The layout inside the house was that of a quintessential human home, complete with all electrical appliances, and it was disappointingly mundane. Luo Qi guessed that the house was the domain of the lady of the house; Guan Jiana had kept it comfortable and tidy. The only uncomfortable thing was the windowsill filled with dead flowers, but that was only because no one had lived here for a long time.

Du Zhengyi vanished into the house's corridor at high speed; Luo Qi didn't even see where he went. He himself strolled slowly into the dim living room and turned on the light. The furnishings in the room were in a Chinese style, and the rosewood-colored furniture warmed up the old house, which lacked any sign of life, by a few degrees.

The first thing Luo Qi saw upon entering was the zither table in front of the south window, with a guqin displayed on top, the cover half-draped. The two rosewood chairs under the window were placed slightly askew, as if someone had just stood up and left. He wandered over, and as if his obsessive-compulsive disorder had flared up, he covered the zither back up. Turning around, he saw a narrow desk against the north wall with some ornaments on it, and a piece of calligraphy hanging on the wall.

In front of the desk sat a small side table and two horseshoe-back armchairs, a very honest, old-fashioned layout. A pipa leaned against one of the chairs, also looking as if someone had just played it and set it aside. But when Luo Qi walked closer to look carefully, he discovered a layer of dust on the pipa, and one of the strings was broken. On the side table sat a jade ruyi, which looked as if it had been frequently handled, the jade texture worn very smooth and moist. Yet how ridiculous it was; this family had ultimately failed to have things go as they wished.

He was somewhat astonished, and unconsciously, he lightened his footsteps. Everything here exuded a strange feeling, as if the owner of the house had lived in elegance and ease until some change occurred, catching them off guard and forcing them to leave in a hurry. Life had originally seemed to be playing a "Qingping Yue," only to have the string snap suddenly right there. This made him feel as uncomfortable as a thief, as if he had inadvertently broken into someone else's life and peeked at their privacy.

He steadied himself, looked up at the calligraphy on the wall; the brushwork seemed decent, but he couldn't make out what it said, so he quickly lost interest. On the desk below sat an antique porcelain vase, with a bouquet of thoroughly dead flowers stuck inside. Beside the vase was a photo frame containing a family portrait. At first glance, Luo Qi didn't feel anything was wrong. He was drawn to the photo because everyone in it was dressed in a very vintage style; the men wore long gowns and mandarin jackets, and the women wore old-fashioned cheongsams. But this wasn't strange; Luo Qi knew that taking family portraits like this had become very popular recently; his human friends had mentioned it.

His gaze swept over the Republic-era style backdrop in the photo, struggling to identify the massive gramophone and the bulky telephone, and he studied the human clothing from a hundred years ago with interest, glancing over the people in the photo. Their faces were all gentle, no different from any ordinary family photo. Judging by the number of people, this should have been a very complete family portrait. Thinking that half the people in this photo were now dead, Luo Qi felt true sorrow for the first time.

With a hint of mourning, he carefully looked over every face in the photo: the old couple, their children, their son-in-law, and... Luo Qi suddenly froze, then silently counted the number of people in the photo again, shocked into shouting, "Du Zhengyi!"

After shouting, he grabbed the photo frame and turned to run, but his vision blurred, and a figure suddenly appeared. He was scared into a cold sweat and stopped hurriedly. Once he calmed down slightly, he immediately realized that in this eerie place without a soul in sight, the only person he could run into was Du Zhengyi.

But that guy had appeared before him without a sound; he certainly hadn't walked in. His ability to traverse space was indeed as natural as he had claimed. Luo Qi barely swallowed the profanity in his throat, unable to spare the energy to be jealous of Du Zhengyi's ability, and shoved the family portrait frame into Du Zhengyi's hands. He didn't know how to describe his discovery, so he roared in a highly summarized fashion, "Look!"

Du Zhengyi only took one look before grasping the point, saying with a touch of annoyance, "This family has two girls?"

Luo Qi echoed Du Zhengyi's sentiment, saying indignantly, "That girl told her family's business so cleanly, even the love story of her grandparents, but why didn't she mention a single word about having a sister? Is this girl dead or alive now? Most importantly, regarding Guan Xinyue's personal file—whether it's the one we obtained or the one I looked up online myself, there is no indication of the existence of another girl."

Du Zhengyi was much more composed than Luo Qi; he just stared at the family portrait in thought. Luo Qi couldn't figure it out, so he also stared at the photo. The photo was taken at least three years ago; Guan Xinyue was much younger than she was now, but her appearance hadn't changed much. She was already a delicate-looking child back then, wearing a bob with straight bangs, kneeling in the first row of the photo. Her head was intimately pressed against another girl's head. That girl's sitting posture was perfectly symmetrical to hers, but that was the only thing that was the same. The girl was a few years older than Guan Xinyue, with a face full of mischief, wearing a high ponytail, and at a glance, she...

"... at a glance, there is no blood relation," Du Zhengyi murmured, completely consistent with Luo Qi's guess.

In fact, the nameless girl's features were more like the young woman in the photo; Luo Qi guessed she might be the daughter of Guan Xinyue's Gugu.

"If she is a girl from a Mage family, she might have been attending school in our world since she was young. Unless necessary, she could completely lack a human identity. The files we have are all from human society; it's actually normal that there's no record of her existence," Du Zhengyi said thoughtfully, putting down the photo frame.

Luo Qi thought what Du Zhengyi said made a lot of sense, but the strange thing was that Guan Xinyue had no reason not to even mention this "older sister." He could tell from Du Zhengyi's expression that he must also find it troubling.

"Did you find anything on your end?" Luo Qi couldn't think of an answer, so he decided to put the question aside for now and ask if Du Zhengyi had found anything.

Du Zhengyi glanced at him without answering, instead signaling for him to follow. They walked out of the living room, through the corridor, and all the way to the kitchen at the end of the hall, where a small door led to the backyard.

This door was directly opposite the front door, connected by a corridor, and the two doors were almost the same size. Du Zhengyi had already pushed the door open, and Luo Qi could see all the way to the low earthen wall of the backyard and the mountains beyond it. He walked to the doorway and observed carefully; the ground in the backyard had clear furrows, obviously a vegetable garden. In the middle of the vegetable patch was a well. Compared to the front yard, this looked more like the yard of an ordinary farming family. Looking past the low earthen wall, he could see the mountain forest behind. Although he knew the Guan Family lived at the very north end of the village, he hadn't expected it to be so close to the forest. Although the mountain behind the village wasn't a high mountain, the dark, dense trees in the mountain were thick, and mist faintly permeated the forest halfway up the mountain, giving it the atmosphere of a deep, remote forest.

"Here..." Du Zhengyi whispered, contemplating the scene before him.

"There might be wild boars roaming here," Luo Qi interjected.

Du Zhengyi ignored him. "There are a few things wrong here."

Luo Qi raised an eyebrow, silently asking him what was wrong.

"Do you remember Guan Xinyue saying that after she and her father entered the courtyard gate, they passed by the well in the yard?" Du Zhengyi said.

Luo Qi nodded. Guan Xinyue said she heard the sound of heavy breathing at the well, just like the wheezing of her Houye when his emphysema flared up; he still remembered that.

Du Zhengyi continued, "Regardless of anything else, she said the well water was used to irrigate the vegetable garden, which checks out; there is indeed a vegetable patch in the backyard. But the problem is, how could she have passed by the backyard well if she entered through the front door? We checked the front yard, and there is no well. Unless she came in through the back door, but outside the back door is a small path up the mountain, and there is no road for a car."

"Maybe they got out of the car at the front door, discovered they didn't have the gate key, and decided to jump the wall from the back; the backyard wall is much lower than the front wall," Luo Qi said. However, he was just casually humoring Du Zhengyi; he didn't really care about this explanation himself. Yesterday he had felt a bit wary of that well with emphysema, but now that so many strange things had happened, curiosity had overwhelmed his fear, and he couldn't wait to go over and take a look.

His restless nature took over, and he stepped out first, jumping over the threshold of the old house. At that very moment, he heard Du Zhengyi "tsk" behind him, and almost simultaneously, he felt a faint stinging sensation on his face. His hair made several loud crackling sounds in the dry northern air, and he suspected his hair had all stood on end.

Du Zhengyi's "tsk" turned into a curse, his voice filled with anxiety, "I really have to worry myself to death with a hairball like you."

Luo Qi let out an "ah" and stopped in surprise. He felt as if he were in a very subtle electrostatic field, his senses stimulated to be extremely sharp. But after a slight, sharp irritation, his senses went to the other extreme; everything became unclear. He could see the world and feel the world, but he felt a barrier between himself and everything around him, as if he had been swallowed by a huge, invisible bubble.

He stopped, but the ground beneath his feet was moving quite vigorously. He wasn't panicked yet, mainly because the change happened too fast; he hadn't had time to believe he was in trouble before he was swept into a turbulent flow.

His eardrums bulged uncomfortably, buzzing with tinnitus, his intestines seemed to churn, and his head began to spin. The ground accelerated its rotation, or perhaps he had started spinning himself; his senses became increasingly blurred. His vision also became extremely unreliable; he couldn't see the mountain forest he had been facing at all, and several unattractive ribbons of light drifted uncertainly before his eyes.

In this critical moment, he instinctively thought of a few Mage survival skills, but he didn't know if his power was enough to execute them, and he wasn't sure which one to use. The timing was very short, fleeting. In this moment of hesitation, he suddenly felt his Yajian begin to dissipate, as if the thing that had condensed into thought began to scatter.

Fear brushed his heart for the first time; his heart must have been pounding wildly, which restored some of his senses. If his body were human, his adrenaline levels would be high right now. He wanted to seize this opportunity and desperately resisted his consciousness, which was about to melt away. Countless light and shadows and faint, noisy sounds emerged in his Yajian and then suddenly departed; he gasped in his imagination as if drowning.

He struggled, gathering the last bit of his mental strength, but before he could do anything, he hit a reef in the turbulent flow, the force so great it almost made him vomit. He was in agony, and he opened his eyes wide. The feeling of drowning came and went quickly. When the dizziness completely disappeared, he was surprised to find he was no longer in the yard. He was lying on his hands and knees on the marble floor of the corridor. Then his body collapsed like a pile of mud, as if he had just experienced weightlessness. His brain was very clear, but he had lost the ability to mobilize his muscles.

He struggled to lift his neck, just in time to see Du Zhengyi one last time. The latter was standing in the yard, and by the last bit of daylight, Luo Qi saw an expression of surprise on his face. That surprise turned into realization in the last second, and then Du Zhengyi disappeared without a trace.

"Don't..." Luo Qi shouted half a sentence with a hoarse voice. Don't let it be him; the unlucky one should be himself.

The sky grew dim.

Luo Qi, like a corpse with an unsightly death, stared blankly at the place where Du Zhengyi had disappeared, shock and shame burning him, then turning into anger.

The aftereffects of weightlessness were unavoidable; he could only lie there motionless. But the symptoms disappeared quickly, and Luo Qi soon recovered the ability to use his body. He climbed up from the ground in a disheveled state. He walked forward with uncoordinated limbs and stepped on the threshold. The wind blowing in his face pricked his skin—that wasn't wind; it was particles carrying energy. He should have realized that earlier.

He stopped, blankly feeling the force field in front of him, and a sense of frustration washed over him. He knew he had to figure out what had happened and why Du Zhengyi had disappeared. He tried to recall several methods he had learned in class; many formulas ran through his mind, but unfortunately, most were incomplete. He had returned all that knowledge to his teachers after the exams. And most importantly, he didn't know which one to use.

Actually, even if he could remember all these things, what was the point? In the end, he simply lacked the power and sharpness a Mage should have. He was like a computer with no processing power; no matter how much data was stored, it was of no use. He stood there, no more powerful than a human, and he began to be angry with himself, angry to the point of death.

He looked up, and layers of cloud and mist spread out above his head, passing over the eaves of nearby farmhouses and suddenly becoming gloomy and dark halfway up the mountain behind. The mountain peak could no longer be seen, and the evening sky gradually blurred, as if a Chinese painting were dissolving into thick ink; the world was left with only this isolated village.

This was like the boundary between the human and Mage worlds, he thought vaguely, and suddenly he thought of Guan Xinyue's story again.

The ancient well, the thick fog—everything was similar to the scenes in the story. He turned his head abruptly, as if this strange world had sensed his Yajian, and the knocking sound that had rung out in the story suddenly sounded behind him.

The keywords of the story were all about to be complete.

He shivered, came back to his senses, and walked through the dim corridor as quickly and silently as possible to the front door, holding his breath.

The door was not knocked on again. In extreme tension, he subconsciously glanced at the window; there was only thick fog outside. The door was unlocked. After a moment of silence, someone from the outside slowly pulled the door open, bit by bit.

Fear turned into a viscous lump in his stomach. Luo Qi swallowed secretly, forcing himself to stare at the widening crack in the door.

At first, there was only thick smoke in the crack, smoke that choked the throat spreading inward from the crack, as if gray vines were dragging onto the door panel. Luo Qi looked suspiciously into the distance; the smoke was so thick it was like a solid, and the light from the living room could barely penetrate the thick fog in the yard. He suddenly realized that whatever was knocking was right behind the door. He barely had time to think before deciding to pull the door shut, but just then, the thing seemed to sense his intentions again. Just as he was about to move, a white hand reached out and gently grabbed the edge of the door.

Luo Qi's hair stood on end. The force he intended to use to pull the door was forcibly withdrawn, and he instinctively took a step back. A weak magical power condensed on his hands as a stress response. He didn't dare to breathe, his heart pounding, and he doubtfully strengthened the magic on his hands, not knowing if his meager power could actually be of any use.

He watched helplessly as the door panel was pulled wider and wider until a pale face appeared at the doorway. He froze. His raised hand dropped, and he stared at the person in astonishment.

In the thick fog, the obscure moonlight fell on her. She still looked pale and fragile, with deep dark circles under her eyes. But she was no longer the cute girl from yesterday; her expression was as hollow as a Ghost.

She looked up and stared straight into his eyes. Fear, like a grim reaper wrapped in black rags, still followed her like a shadow. But although that fear existed, it could not control her; instead, it wore heavy gloom on her face like a mask, which was clearly one of the forces supporting her. She revealed a faint smile under the mask, a smile mixed with childish triumph and radiating a trace of adult venom.

"Did you catch the Ghost?" Guan Xinyue asked him. She let out a somewhat neurotic laugh, sarcastically mocking him, "The Ghost-catching master team!"

Luo Qi was speechless.

She smiled with satisfaction, her face full of irony and sarcasm.

"You..." Luo Qi looked at Guan Xinyue in bewilderment; he really couldn't sort out the situation. In the hazy moonlight and the pale light coming from the living room, Guan Xinyue really didn't look like a living person, and he himself wasn't much better; he might have already gone crazy.

He stood there blankly, but Guan Xinyue walked into the house with the air of an owner, triumphantly circling Luo Qi, both sizing him up and inspecting her ancestral property. However, her air of importance overdrawn her spirit, and Luo Qi felt once again that she was like a broken car at the end of its rope, burning engine oil. As if possessed, this girl seemed like she should have been dead long ago, but her body was running by burning her spirit. When her spirit was burned out by the fire, she would vanish into thin air.

But Luo Qi could not say for sure. When he had slightly overcome his shock and was finally able to close his gaping mouth, he said, "You are not a Mage."

"Oh," Guan Xinyue stopped at the doorway of the living room, turned her head back, and asked him with a smile, "What makes you say that?"

Her expression was like she was teasing a kitten. Luo Qi mentally deducted a point from himself; Guan Xinyue's mental age seemed to be even older than his, and his performance had actually made a sixteen-year-old girl look down on him. But this pause of his was keenly perceived by Guan Xinyue; she immediately understood that she had the upper hand and looked at him with a mocking smile. Luo Qi's face turned a bit red, half because he was holding his breath.

He twisted his neck and said, "Mages almost never lie. Even if they do lie, they wouldn't lie the way you did yesterday. Mages never let their imaginations run wild, so they couldn't tell a lie like yours. You wrote those ghost stories online to lure Mages to appear, and the lies you told yesterday were also to lead us into your trap."

Guan Xinyue looked at him sarcastically. Her eyes almost flashed with light, and sparks flew as she retorted, "Don't be shameless, Great Mage. You were the one who was smooth as silk when you lied yesterday. If you ever can't make a living from magic tricks, you can go to the Himalayas to record ghost stories."

Luo Qi was choked up. Various emotions clogged his heart in a messy heap, and not knowing which one had the upper hand, he blurted out, "I am not a Mage at all."

Once these words were out, both he and Guan Xinyue were stunned. He flinched, as if someone else had shouted those words just now. But there was no one else here; the one who had spoken his deepest fear was himself.

He had spoken the secret of the king with donkey ears himself, personally admitting his fatal flaw that could no longer be concealed.

But suddenly, he felt miraculously relaxed. It was as if the heavy burden he had been carrying on his back for so long had finally been lifted. He had always vaguely known that he was not a Mage at all, and he didn't know what was wrong with his genes—whether they had mutated or degenerated—but in any case, he simply had no ability. He should have admitted this long ago instead of covering it up, increasing his own mental burden in vain and implicating Du Zhengyi as well.

He let out a heavy breath and, looking back, suddenly caught a glimpse of Guan Xinyue's face looking terrible, as if she had been frightened by him. Things were indeed a bit off-track; it seemed nothing had gone according to her plan.

He blew out another breath from the depths of his lungs, shifted his attention from his own troubles to the current problem, and his whole body relaxed. Guan Xinyue was standing in the doorway of the living room, so he simply bypassed her, walked into the only room with the lights on, sat down in the armchair placed in the center, and reached out to scratch the pipa nearby.

The few strings that hadn't broken made a crisp sound. In this situation, the timbre of the pipa was still surprisingly pleasant to him. He turned his head and glanced at the pipa carelessly, then was attracted by the sequins inlaid on it and picked at one.

Guan Xinyue let out an angry scream, which startled him into letting go immediately. Turning his head, he saw that Guan Xinyue's face was flushed with anger, which had actually restored quite a bit of color to it.

"You little..." The word 'bitch' was on the tip of her tongue, but it was swallowed back in Guan Xinyue's throat; Luo Qi guessed she must still have some upbringing.

She looked at Luo Qi, furious, "That is an antique pipa! Are you trying to pick off the mother-of-pearl? Idiot!"

Luo Qi shrugged, "Does an incomplete condition affect the resale price?"

Guan Xinyue's face turned even redder with anger, and her already faint eyebrows looked even more colorless on her furious face.

He chuckled and added, "This is your Nainai's, right? Your relationship with your family doesn't seem to be that good. You didn't care at all when you mentioned them yesterday; you were only worried about your own safety."

Guan Xinyue did not take his bait and asked him, suppressing her temper, "You aren't a Mage? Then why are you with a Mage? I know he is a Mage; otherwise, he couldn't have seen what I was thinking." Her gaze drifted outward unconsciously, and she added with a hint of hesitation, "Why is it that the one who is unlucky isn't you?"

"Because I..." Luo Qi paused, his face darkened, and he said mechanically, "Because my Luck is high."

Guan Xinyue scoffed at his nonsense, looking down on him even more. She pointed with her chin toward the direction where he was sitting, "Only elders are allowed to sit in this seat in our family. You really have no upbringing."

Luo Qi snorted, "Your family is quite traditional. Since your family is so traditional, when you call him Houye, does your Nainai not slap you across the mouth?"

Guan Xinyue gave him a cold sneer.

Luo Qi looked at her, wanting to read more from the face of a sixteen-year-old girl. She stood there looking at him, alive yet eerie, with undisguised disgust in her eyes. That disgust was too deep; it wasn't the level of hatred a glib-tongued boy could provoke in a girl. That kind of hatred seemed deeply carved into her life. If a comparison had to be made, the hatred of a father's killer or a wife-stealer would be about right. Luo Qi suddenly felt as if he had grasped something, but for a moment, he couldn't quite put it into words.

He felt a bit restless and secretly glanced at the watch on his wrist. Du Zhengyi had been missing for ten minutes. "I know you are a smart person. You played us like two idiots yesterday, so let's stop with the nonsense. You posting those paranormal events everywhere online was actually setting a trap. As it turns out, we really came, and you rushed over to close the net. So now, tell me straight: what do you want?"

Guan Xinyue looked at him calculatingly and gave him a fake, ugly, joyous smile. "I want you psychos all to die."

"I don't know who the real psycho is," Luo Qi said. "A sixteen-year-old girl should be watching TFBoys. I'm much more normal than you; my idol is Nogizaka46."

"At least I defeated the Mage." Guan Xinyue had a way of dealing with him, rolling her eyes and making his chest burn with anger. "If you hope to see your friend alive, you have to listen to me."

Luo Qi couldn't help but laugh. At first, he chuckled while biting his lower lip, but later he couldn't help but laugh so hard that the empty house echoed. He felt a bit like a big villain in a brain-dead drama and felt a trace of shame, which was when he restrained his laughter. Guan Xinyue's expression became very abnormal again, though what remained unchanged was her blind anger toward him.

Luo Qi straightened his face and said, "Don't you feel embarrassed saying such old-fashioned lines at such a young age?"

"As long as it's useful," Guan Xinyue said, cautiously sparing her words.

Luo Qi grew impatient and, as if he couldn't stand it anymore, stood up from the chair. "Stop it. So, the few Mages in your family all died at the hands of you, this little witch? How did you curse them to death? By performing shamanistic dances?"

Guan Xinyue did not answer him, standing in place and looking at him with a complex expression.

He had never been able to handle girls, and this eerie girl was even harder to deal with. He paced back and forth in the spacious living room, irritable, pondering how a human girl could possibly make a Mage disappear into thin air.

Suddenly, a thought flashed through his mind.

He turned his head and stared at Guan Xinyue, "Pendragon Orbital System!"