Qin Shu understood. This was Qin You Wei’s permission and acceptance.
It sounded slightly helpless, but at least it meant he would not interfere anymore. Qin Shu could do whatever he wanted, as long as he did not make enough noise for the entire world to hear about it.
Fresh stir-fried dishes arrived at the little restaurant one after another. Neither father nor son said much more, simply lowering their heads and eating hard.
There really was not much to say. Qin You Wei could not talk about his upcoming work, while Qin Shu could not talk about what he was going to do either… especially not out in public.
If father and son wanted to enjoy a rare moment of peace together, they could only rely on home-raised chicken, stir-fried lamb, and the fresh sea fish delivered from a fishing boat that very morning.
Qin Shu’s appetite gave his father quite a shock.
Halfway through the meal, Qin You Wei paused and looked at Pei Zhao, who had barely touched his chopsticks. Then he looked at Qin Shu, who appeared completely unconcerned with whether Pei Zhao had eaten properly, and frowned abruptly. “This is how you treat your boyfriend? Xiao Pei, is the food not to your taste? I’ll have the owner make you something less spicy.”
“…Cough, cough! Qin You Wei, stop talking nonsense!” Qin Shu nearly choked on chili. Irritated, he shot back, “I’m only dating this one person in my entire life. Don’t sabotage our relationship. He doesn’t need to eat. Don’t force your hospitality on him and create extra work.”
He doesn’t need to eat. Was that something a human being said?
Qin You Wei froze, then turned toward Pei Zhao’s beautiful eyes, faintly smiling and showing no dissatisfaction at all. Just as he was about to object, the snow-white dragon that had flown away earlier suddenly flashed through his mind.
That dragon’s eyes had been the same color, only slightly darker.
“You… You found yourself an immortal boyfriend?” Qin You Wei abruptly lowered his voice and asked weakly in disbelief.
“More or less. Zhaozhao is even stronger than an immortal.” Qin Shu did not elaborate, afraid the information overload would make his father’s brain crash. “Is there a milk-tea shop in town? Frozen desserts are fine too. We’ll buy some on the way back. Zhaozhao likes sweet cold things.”
“They have ginger milk curd and double-skin milk pudding. Can Xiao Pei eat those? I’ll ask the owner to chill them.” Qin You Wei immediately picked up the conversation, forcibly dragging his attention back toward something normal. “This tiny place has nothing else going for it, but the food is excellent. The meat, eggs, and milk are all locally raised. The flavor is especially rich.”
“I like all of it. Thank you, Uncle.” Pei Zhao curved his lips in a shallow smile, somehow looking even prettier than when he did not smile.
Qin You Wei relaxed and glanced at Qin Shu. “You’re really something.”
No wonder Qin Shu had never dated anyone growing up and showed no interest in anybody… Qin You Wei silently complained. He and the boy’s mother had even worried before that this brat might still be running around acting like everyone’s “central air conditioner” at thirty, warm to everyone yet never realizing what romance was.
Elio’s Notes: “Central air conditioner” (中央空调) is Chinese internet slang, usually for a man who is equally warm and attentive to many women rather than one person in particular, often with a mildly pejorative implication of romantic ambiguity. Here Qin You Wei jokingly applies the idea more broadly to Qin Shu being warm to everyone while remaining oblivious to romance.
So it was not that he had never figured romance out. His standards for figuring it out were simply this high. Without making a sound, he had gone and found a partner so beautiful he barely looked alive.
Mm. Quite possibly, he really was not alive.
Qin You Wei thought Pei Zhao was dangerous. Some instinct he could not explain made him reluctant to provoke the boy. But he did not dare ask about that yet either. Better to let the two brats date and deal with it later.
After eating their fill, they carried bags of chilled desserts to Anping Town’s only guesthouse and moved into its largest room.
This was Qin You Wei’s territory too. Whenever he contacted his superior through their one-on-one channel, he made the calls here. He had already bought off the owner, who knew how to keep his mouth shut, never checked identification, and never asked questions he should not ask.
“Once my mission ends, I’m reporting that old man myself. He doesn’t even care about minors renting rooms.” Qin You Wei locked the door behind them and spoke in a low voice. “Are you sleeping tonight? If not, eat some more now and keep your energy up. Anping Town has a big temperature swing between day and night. It’s easy to catch a cold after midnight.”
“The drug lab here was already blown wide open and your mission still isn’t over?” Qin Shu frowned as he surveyed the room Qin You Wei had rented long-term.
The blankets were messy, the pillows tossed at different heights, and several pairs of jeans and T-shirts lay casually piled on the sofa by the window. The ashtray was full of gray water with cigarette butts floating in it. Deliberate filth, necessary disguise.
“Of course it isn’t over. Right now I’m a fugitive who slipped away in the chaos, and I still have value.” Qin You Wei noticed the state of the room too and awkwardly tossed Qin Shu a pack of disinfecting wipes. “Wipe the chair before you sit down.”
Qin Shu pulled out several wipes and cleaned his hands first. “What value? The value of infiltrating another criminal organization? Is Anping Town really this fierce?”
“This was only a laboratory and factory. The boss isn’t here. He won’t return to the country for a while. The people arrested this time might not be able to provide the complete chain of evidence, so we can’t grab him directly yet… I still have to keep watching. If the boss doesn’t go to prison, another lab can always be built. Arresting a hundred underlings won’t solve anything.”
Qin You Wei did not reveal any specific details about the organization, but that explanation was enough for Qin Shu to understand. A transnational group, enormous in scale, with a complicated structure. It could not be solved through one raid and one seizure of evidence.
And an undercover operative whose identity had not been exposed yet was too valuable to pull out casually.
Qin Shu fell into thought. After wiping the chair, he even forgot to sit down. Instead he opened the dessert bags and arranged the bowls one by one.
He tasted a spoonful of chilled ginger milk curd. The sharpness of the ginger softened the milk fragrance into something even sweeter and gentler, with none of the gamey dairy smell. It melted in his mouth like jelly.
Qin Shu took another large bite. Only when Pei Zhao stole the spoon from him did he remember what he had meant to say. “Right, Zhaozhao. Can you put a Turtle-Breathing Technique on my dad, or something similar? It doesn’t need to be particularly high-level. Just make him harder for other people to notice.”
“I already did. A small illusion. It should last around three years. It won’t affect his daily life, but his presence will feel weaker, and his facial contours will appear more ordinary and less memorable.”
Pei Zhao had anticipated the request long ago. He leisurely tasted the dessert and added, “Also, give Uncle some of the artifacts Chang Liu Yi sent. A jade thumb ring would fit, and a thick gold chain would work too.”
“How are you this smart? I didn’t even think of that!” Qin Shu suddenly understood. He turned, dug the luminous pearl out of his backpack, and selected several especially nouveau-riche designs for Qin You Wei.
“Magical… artifacts…” Qin You Wei fell into thought, then instinctively tried to refuse. “These are real. No, Qin Shu, this is too expensive.”
Qin Shu glanced toward the door and lowered his voice. “Your son isn’t broke. I’ve still got tens of millions in liquid funds.”
“You brat, did you rob a bank?”
“No. Robbed a foreigner. Impressive, right?” Qin Shu’s voice dropped even further, a rare trace of pride in his smile. “If you want details, once your mission is over you can ask the Jiangcheng police. Captain Wu has records of everything.”
“Hiss… cough. Mm. Fine, fine, fine. And you’re not casually telling your mother about this either, you living ancestor.”
Qin You Wei had no moves left. He did not take everything, only the jade thumb ring and thick gold chain Pei Zhao had mentioned. Curious, he turned them over and examined them. “How do I use these? They work even if I can’t cast spells?”
“Of course. If your life is in danger, explosions, gunfire, things like that, they’ll activate automatically and protect you, like an invisible shield. One artifact can be used two or three times. Once it’s spent, come ask me for another.” Qin Shu deliberately emphasized the last sentence. “You have to come to me and replace it.”
If he could not interfere with his father’s career choice, he could at least interfere with the question of safety equipment.
After witnessing the hidden turmoil beneath Anping Town firsthand, Qin Shu knew perfectly well that wherever Qin You Wei went next would only be more dangerous than this seemingly peaceful town, more dangerous than the lawless guesthouse owner and the tricycle driver who ignored red lights. Hundreds of times more dangerous, just like that gunfight that had erupted without warning.
“Got it. A treasure that can let me slip out from under King Yama’s nose? Of course I’ll cherish it.” Qin You Wei exhaled and first tried on the thumb ring to check the size. “These were all legally purchased, right? Then I can tell your mother about this part.”
“No. If she finds out I came here and happened to run into you, then she’ll be the one lying awake all night. Tell her when you get home.”
“Mm. Very reasonable.”
After a short period of chatting and resting, Qin Shu joined the dessert feast and finished everything Pei Zhao had not eaten in one go.
Talking with Qin You Wei, sharing a meal, chatting a little about childhood and the present, all of that counted only as intermission. The main event of the night was still far from over.
Not long afterward, Senior Yuxu’s voice came through the wooden bead exactly on time.
“Fellow Daoist Qin, Fellow Daoist Pei, the spatial tests are stable. I’ve already begun setting up the formation. You can enter at any time.”
Qin Shu immediately stood. “Received.”
Then he pushed open the guest-room window and shouted toward the pitch-black night sky, “Ao Wang!”
His voice was swallowed by the noisy drinking games at the food stalls downstairs, yet it reached the white dragon’s ears with perfect accuracy.
The snow-white dragon crossed the night sky like a streak of light more translucent than the Milky Way and silently stopped on the guesthouse roof. His enormous head dropped upside down outside the window. “I’ll carry you two over. Hurry up and get on. Stop dawdling.”
Qin You Wei stared dumbfounded again, looking straight into golden vertical pupils larger than his head. “Good lord…”
“Did you greet my dad? Obviously not.” Qin Shu raised an eyebrow. “This is your hometown, and we’ve got a guest. Show some manners. Say hello to Uncle.”
The white dragon rolled his eyes without the slightest attempt to hide it. His attitude was terrible, but his mouth was very obedient. “Hello, Uncle.”
“Hello, hello…” Other than those two dry words, Qin You Wei suddenly had no idea what else to say or what expression he was supposed to make.
His formidable psychological tolerance was being challenged like never before.
Even Qin Shu was a little surprised. After saying goodbye to Qin You Wei, he climbed skillfully out the window and onto the white dragon’s back, then reached down to help Pei Zhao up. Only afterward did he whisper to Pei Zhao, “Did this guy take the wrong medicine? Why is he suddenly so obedient?”
“I can hear you!” the white dragon roared irritably, then turned and dove toward the auditorium at terrifying speed. He avoided the remaining police at the scene and headed straight into the basement.
Qin Shu did not even have time to say another sentence before discovering he had returned to that familiar yet unfamiliar place: the spherical space.
This was the safe room Yuxu had built herself, separating them from the void exposed by the fracture so nobody could accidentally fall into a breach left without divine protection.
“The people who used this place as a laboratory before were extremely lucky. If they had excavated even one meter farther east, the consequences would have been serious.” Yuxu was still preparing the formation. She caught the snow-white dragon pearl spat out by Ao Wang without even lifting her head. “Choosing this place for drug production wasn’t random either. They definitely consulted a feng-shui master.”
“That can happen too?” Qin Shu’s eyelid twitched. “Being this close to the void, could the chemicals they manufactured have picked up things they weren’t supposed to?”
“To some extent, yes. Stronger hallucinogenic effects, stronger pain relief, more serious addictiveness, easier extraction of higher-purity crystals… Fortunately, this batch was intercepted before it was formally sold. If it had entered circulation on a large scale, the consequences might have been impossible to estimate.”
“Thank you, Senior. I need to tell my dad about this. Building laboratories near world fractures may not be an isolated case.” Qin Shu frowned faintly. “And it probably isn’t limited to Huaguo. The situation overseas could be worse.”
Drug-trafficking organizations scattered around the world could not be solved by Qin Shu alone, but he possessed a map marking every known fracture. For narcotics officers, that map might also have significant value.
Of course, that discussion could wait until tomorrow. Right now, the priority was getting Ao Run out. Qin Shu glanced at the white dragon, who was quietly grinding his teeth, and raised an eyebrow.
If they kept “wasting time talking,” this impatient creature really would be ready to rebel.
After repeated rounds of practical training, setting up the Spirit-Guiding Summoning Formation this time was remarkably fast and smooth. Yuxu and Pei Zhao had developed a certain rhythm together, and the improved formation was no longer as complicated and cumbersome, eliminating several repeated and unnecessary steps.
Qin Shu had armed himself in advance too, preparing the Soul-Stabilizing Pearl and several pieces of spirit food he could shove into his mouth at any time, while wearing the Phoenix-Feather Pendant Pei Zhao had given him.
He sat cross-legged at the center of the formation early and deliberately calmed his mind and regulated his breathing, withdrawing his attention from the environment around him until he was fully immersed in the dimly glowing patterns beneath him. Establishing the connection early meant that once the formation spirit emerged, the two of them would cooperate more naturally instead of feeling awkward and unfamiliar like the first time.
After Qin Shu had regulated his breathing for a while, Yuxu gently raised one hand and placed Ao Run’s dragon pearl in his palm. She transmitted softly, “When the formation activates, send its power into the void together with your divine sense. The dragon qi can protect your mind and make locating him easier. This time we know exactly who we’re looking for. It will only be faster and more precise than before.”
“All right. I understand.”
Qin Shu drew a deep breath. Once the formation was fully prepared, Pei Zhao’s cool hand settled unhurriedly against the back of his neck.
The soft chill lingered only for an instant before vanishing abruptly. Pei Zhao’s figure disappeared with it.
But Qin Shu could still feel his presence, his power, extraordinarily clear and strong, surrounding him from every side and resting against his soul. It was like air entering every gap, seeping into every corner his divine sense could reach. It soothed him even more than the Dragon King’s aura inside the pearl.
“Begin.” Pei Zhao’s voice echoed through his mind. In the next instant, the formation erupted with dim radiance. Three dragon pearls floated into the air, forming a stable triangular arrangement around Qin Shu at the exact center.
Qin Shu did not see this miraculous scene. Even if he had, he would not have been surprised. They had already rehearsed it and adjusted the formation into its most flexible and stable model.
His eyes slowly opened inside the void, looking out across the familiar chaos.
Pei Zhao seemed to be behind him and in front of him at once. With every breath came the illusion that their auras were entangled, a quiet reassurance of being watched over and accompanied.
Darkness surrounded him on every side, but Qin Shu knew what to do: draw out the dragon qi and use it to locate Ao Run.
Although at this exact moment, what he most wanted to do was strip naked, take a bath in the void, then call Qin You Wei and invite him over for a deep-space spa treatment and skincare session.
Qin Shu exhaled softly, ignored the flood of absurd intrusive thoughts rapidly pouring into his head, and silently recited the formula Yuxu had taught him.
It was a string of obscure syllables resembling a dragon’s cry, ancient and drawn-out, difficult for a human tongue to produce. Repeating it through divine sense was much easier. Translated into its concrete meaning, the message was simply: “Light, manifest.”
Two short words took Qin Shu fifteen seconds to pronounce properly. Fortunately, he did not make a mistake. Otherwise, he would have had to start from the beginning.
Dazzling golden light pierced the darkness from somewhere in the void, turning into one fine golden thread that wound itself around Qin Shu’s wrist.
Qin Shu was still fighting the invasive thoughts. Moments earlier, he had been unable to distinguish direction, but now east, south, west, and north became perfectly clear.
The direction from which the light shone was the direction of the fracture’s opening.
As for Ao Run’s location… Qin Shu closed his eyes again, gently tugged the golden thread around his wrist, and began moving through the darkness on his own initiative.
He focused his divine sense on the direction in which the golden thread extended and tried to avoid sensing too much of the complexity and chaos contained in the void. It was a crude form of self-protection, like closing one’s eyes beneath sunlight strong enough to burn the skin.
Weightlessness and crushing heaviness squeezed his perception at the same time. Qin Shu was already used to it. Without stopping, he followed the formation spirit’s spontaneous pull and the golden thread saturated with vitality, rapidly spreading his divine sense outward.
The deathly silence around him continued for what felt like an eternity. He could hear only his own thoughts and heartbeat. The prolonged search gradually destroyed his sense of time as he immersed himself completely in the single task.
At some point, the golden thread suddenly trembled. A faint, strange dragon cry reached him, filled with tortured, disbelieving pain.
Qin Shu charged toward the source of the sound without hesitation, only to stop abruptly halfway there.
Before him stood an enormous skeleton, a hideous, towering mountain of white bone. It rose and fell like mountain ranges stretching for a thousand li, so vast he could not see its end.
He had found the right place. A true dragon’s original body really was incomprehensibly enormous.
Qin Shu approached cautiously, following the winding river of white bone through the center. Only after roughly half an hour did he finally confirm the identity of the skeleton again.
No, calling it nothing but a skeleton was not quite right. At the very front of the towering framework was an enormous dragon head still covered in dense scales, every angle sharply defined. It hung low over the abyss, blood flowing from both eyes.
The golden thread stretched toward the dragon’s head, abruptly magnifying Qin Shu’s perception along with it and allowing him to inspect the creature more closely. Beneath the light, the scales reflected a brilliant snowy sheen. The deerlike twin horns glimmered. Beneath the jaw, the reverse scale where life force gathered still remained intact. And within the bloodstained golden vertical pupils, a dim light continued to flow…
Ao Run was still alive!