VAP - Chapter 38
Chapter 38: The Sleeping Beauty Whose Words Are Law (37)
Would Qi Jiu waste time getting entangled with the unpleasant Qi Yuanhong?
Obviously not.
So after casually uttering those words, she abruptly exerted a crushing force, slamming the door shut against the resistance of the wind ability.
Qi Yuanhong, locked outside the door: “…”
The Wingspan Squad, crammed into the hallway: “…”
“Your sister has quite a temper,” Fang Zheng said ambiguously, adjusting his glasses.
Qi Yuanhong looked embarrassed. “My sister’s temper has never been very good,” he said weakly. “Maybe she just doesn’t want to see me. It’s my fault, too. I knew she was still in the city, but I didn’t go rescue her. I made her and her friend struggle to survive for a whole year before they were brought back to the safe zone…” He paused, lowering his head in disappointment. “It’s only right that she hates me.”
Seeing the team’s darling so dejected, the other members immediately chimed in with words of comfort.
Fang Zheng sighed but said nothing.
Zhan Yi asked him in a low voice, “What do you think we should do about this?”
Fang Zheng replied in an equally low voice, “I suggest you stay out of it.”
“Oh? Why is that?” Zhan Yi asked.
“It’s never a good idea to interfere in family matters. Besides, we don’t know if little Qi is telling the truth this time. What if he’s not in the right? We shouldn’t make enemies for no reason. Those two girls don’t look like simple people.”
“Do I look like a fool who’s easily provoked?”
“Who knows with you. Alright, let’s head back. We’ve been on assignment for days; I’m dead tired.”
Inside, Yue Du found their conversation amusing.
This Qi Yuanhong really had the air of a “white lotus,” acting as if he were the only innocent one and all the blame lay with Qi Jiu.
She turned her head, about to say something, but froze.
Too close.
Qi Jiu was leaning too close. The posture was like she had Yue Du completely encircled in her arms, creating an ambiguous intimacy.
Yue Du’s mind went blank for a moment, but her expression remained unchanged. She calmly ducked and stepped back, smiling. “How did you sleep?”
Qi Jiu watched her quietly, the corners of her eyes and brows drooping. She looked a little unhappy, even wronged.
Yue Du subconsciously avoided her gaze.
Qi Jiu listlessly withdrew her hand. “It was fine.”
A beauty lost in sorrow, her smile vanished and her brow furrowed.
If anyone else had seen such a sight, they would have wanted to tear out their own hearts just to make her smile again.
Yue Du: “…”
Why did she suddenly feel a sense of guilt!
“Don’t worry. I said I’d let you think it over, so I won’t do anything to you,” Qi Jiu said calmly. “There’s no need to avoid me like the plague.”
“I’m not—”
…I wasn’t thinking that, I’m just a little uncomfortable. I really don’t mean to hide from you. We’re bound together all day, where could I possibly hide?
“You don’t have to say it. I understand.”
I don’t think you understand at all!
Qi Jiu sighed softly, cast one last mournful glance her way, and returned to her room.
With her back to the door, Yue Du heard it close softly. Only then did she raise a hand to cover her eyes, her thoughts in a mess.
What… is all this…
Meanwhile, in the other room.
The gloomy expression on Qi Jiu’s beautiful face was long gone. Her eyes were deep, and the corners of her lips curved into a satisfied smile.
“Qi Yuanhong actually did something good for once,” she muttered to herself.
“In that case, I should certainly wish him a period of bad luck to show my gratitude.”
Qi Yuanhong had been having a terrible run of bad luck lately.
It started when he was on a mission outside the safe zone and got kicked in the rear by a mutated black donkey.
The injury wasn’t serious—just a soft tissue contusion that would heal with some rest and leave no lasting effects.
The problem was, while others might have been able to endure the pain, Qi Yuanhong could not. He had been a pampered young master and had rarely been injured, making him especially afraid of pain.
Moreover, the location of the injury was… He had never experienced such embarrassment!
Qi Yuanhong gritted his teeth in frustration. “It must have been—my sister! Didn’t she say yesterday that I’d be kicked by a donkey!”
One of the older guys on the team said, “Your sister really is a jinx, then.”
“No, she must have some kind of bizarre ability,” Qi Yuanhong insisted. “If it wasn’t her, it was her unreasonable friend. This is too uncanny.”
The older guy scratched his head. “But to do something like that, the ability fluctuations would have to be really strong. Weren’t they both supposed to be weak espers? Their fluctuations are as faint as a blade of foxtail grass.”
Qi Yuanhong thought about it and had to agree. He fell silent. The older guy clicked his tongue and concluded, “Probably just a regular jinx.”
Fang Zheng: “…”
He watched with cool detachment, thinking to himself, You call it a jinx, but for her, it’s the power of prophecy.
Qi Yuanhong was still young, after all, and usually proud and arrogant. His acting skills were subpar; he was overly dramatic, and his performance was full of holes.
It didn’t take Fang Zheng long to determine that his relationship with Qi Jiu—or rather, the relationship between his family of three and Qi Jiu—was by no means good.
Why should the Wingspan Squad get involved?
But they were teammates, and the squad needed little Qi’s abilities. They couldn’t just brush him off. The least they could do was listen to him vent.
At that moment, none of them imagined that being kicked by a donkey was only the beginning of his bad luck.
Choking on water, biting his tongue while eating, even getting fruit ripened by a plant-type esper stuck in his teeth—these were all minor incidents.
But things like tripping and landing on his wound, causing it to worsen, or being assigned to attack a mutated creature’s tail only for it to suddenly sprout a poisonous barb that nearly impaled him—that kind of “bad luck” was starting to send a chill down their spines.
“This can’t go on.” Fang Zheng rubbed his temples, his head aching. “This isn’t just about you anymore. These… unbelievable things happening to you are affecting the entire team’s operations.”
The rest of the squad nodded in agreement.
It wasn’t just Qi Yuanhong; the entire team had been plagued by bad luck over the past few days. No one believed anymore that Qi Jiu was merely a jinx. She had to have some kind of terrifying ability!
Perhaps she could manipulate a person’s luck. The thought was terrifying!
Fang Zheng continued, “We all sympathize with you, but for the safety of the team, you should go and apologize.”
Everyone nodded in unison, their expressions grave.
Qi Yuanhong felt wronged. He wanted to cry.
With his dark circles and listless demeanor, he looked like a completely different person from the energetic young master he’d been before. It was all the effect of his bad luck aura.
Even so, he stubbornly insisted, “I’m not apologizing! I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Fang Zheng said calmly, “Think about how you fell on your butt in the bathroom this morning.”
Qi Yuanhong was instantly cowed. “I’ll go.”
The phrase was ambiguous, so Fang Zheng wasn’t sure if little Qi was actually agreeing to go or just cursing. He added worriedly, “And you have to apologize sincerely.”
Qi Yuanhong whined, “I can’t…”
Fang Zheng cut him off. “Think about how you got bitten on the butt by mutated ants yesterday.”
“—Say no more. I can do it.”
Zhan Yi, who had been silent, wanted to pat the unlucky kid on the shoulder, but the thought of the bad luck debuff clinging to him made him silently retract his hand. “Good luck.”
“Oh,” Qi Yuanhong replied listlessly.
With a unanimous vote, the entire Wingspan Squad escorted Qi Yuanhong to the residence of the “Two-Person Rotation” squad to offer a sincere apology.
When they arrived, Qi Jiu and Yue Du were at their own home in the city, lounging on the soft sofa like a pair of salted fish.
The conditions here were much better than in the safe zone, and there were no annoying people to bother them—
Two days ago, General Lin had sent people over to ask them, in a roundabout way, if they had taken the Xin Liming A-79 virus from Xin Licheng.
Yue Du said they hadn’t touched it.
The man on the other side had stressed solemnly, “That is a very dangerous substance. It should not be in private hands.”
Yue Du had replied helplessly, “We really didn’t take it. Why would we? What if something went wrong and we infected ourselves?”
The man had sounded skeptical. “Oh, is that so?”
Yue Du: “…”
Believe what you want.
In the end, the man couldn’t find any evidence and had no choice but to leave.
Lying on the sofa, Qi Jiu had lazily hit the nail on the head. “Rather than not wanting it in private hands, what they really mean is that the virus should be in their hands.”
“What’s the use of having it?” Yue Du asked.
“To study its components, eliminate dissidents, fight mutated creatures, get rid of certain unstable elements… anything is possible,” Qi Jiu said nonchalantly. “In any case, contact with that thing means death. It’s quick and convenient, though there’s a small chance it might take 350 million people along for the ride.”
“So it’s better for something like that to just disappear,” Yue Du said.
“Exactly,” Qi Jiu agreed.
After that, they started coming home not just to sleep at night but to rest during the day as well. They ate, slept, played chess, and sometimes played a few video games, as if they had returned to their lazy, salted-fish routine from over half a month ago.
But less than two days later, Yue Du’s surveillance detected Qi Yuanhong at their door again, still with a large group of people crammed into the hallway. It was an annoying sight.
“Why are they here again?” Yue Du asked.
Qi Jiu blinked. “Probably… to ask me to cancel my blessing?”
The moment she said that, Yue Du understood. The host must have secretly used her Word Spirit ability at some point to curse—no, bless—Qi Yuanhong with good luck.
Qi Jiu took a sip of her ice-cold cola in tacit agreement.
Yue Du’s eyes widened in realization. “So they’re here to apologize. Should we go over?”
“I’m not going,” Qi Jiu said. “His apology isn’t sincere.”
“He hasn’t even apologized yet.”
“If he didn’t bring his parents, then it’s not sincere,” Qi Jiu said matter-of-factly.
That was true. If it were a real apology, the Qi couple should have been there too. Yue Du knew exactly what they had said in their chat logs.
Yue Du moved her fingers. Back in their safe zone dorm room, Qi Jiu’s voice emanated from the armrest of the sofa near the door. The sound was loud enough for those outside to hear, as the soundproofing wasn’t very good to begin with.
“If you’re going to apologize, have everyone who did wrong come together. Otherwise, it’s not sincere.”
Yue Du had Qi Jiu’s voice stored in her audio library and could synthesize any sentence she wanted.
However, despite the identical timbre, the system-synthesized voice lacked the lazy, alluring charm of Qi Jiu’s own, leaving one with a sense of disappointment.
Of course, Qi Yuanhong couldn’t tell the difference. He and his teammates stood foolishly at the door for a while, discussed the matter, and finally had no choice but to leave.
Yue Du was a little uncertain. “His IQ doesn’t seem that low. He should understand that she meant for his parents to come too, right?”
Qi Jiu laughed. “You’re overthinking it. If his IQ were high, he wouldn’t have come to bother me in the first place. He would have just hidden at home and cursed me secretly, like his parents.”
“…Oh,” Yue Du said.
That actually made a lot of sense!
After another moment, Qi Jiu suddenly moved closer. “Alright, I was actually lying to you just now.”
Yue Du stiffened imperceptibly, then asked with her eyes, Lied about what?
“I’m not going over there, not because the apology is insincere, but because I’m simply not in the mood to listen to them ramble.” Qi Jiu lowered her voice slightly. “Today, I just want to spend time with you.”
Yue Du: “…”
“Hmm?” Qi Jiu prompted.
Yue Du was speechless.
Get instant access to all the chapters now.
Comments
Post a Comment