Chapter 63: Chengnan Bookstore 10
In the afternoon, Zhuang Ningyu was wheeled away by a nursing assistant for a purification treatment. His brain, which had just barely cleared up, was once again stimulated by electric currents until he was dizzy and muddled, giving rise to a pessimistic feeling that it wasn’t worth working this damn job. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, it was already eight o’clock at night. The surroundings were silent. Only Yi Ke sat by the hospital bed. Looking at the other’s red-rimmed eyes, Zhuang Ningyu felt a moment of confusion, but his brain wasn’t working well enough at the moment to analyze it carefully. He only knew that his own illness probably had to be put on the back burner. He forced his weak body up and used the back of his fingers to wipe away the dampness on his face.
Yi Ke held those weak fingers and pulled the man entirely into his embrace. Zhuang Ningyu coughed twice and asked, “Who upset you again?”
The only answer he received was an increasingly airtight hug. Yi Ke buried his nose in the top of his head, which smelled of a mixture of shampoo and disinfectant. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he tried to suppress all his emotions back into his chest, but with little success. It was a long while before he finally spoke in a muffled voice, “My heart aches for you.”
A trace of a hoarse, nasal tone mixed into his usually clean voice, creating a strange sincerity that made Zhuang Ningyu’s head spin on the spot. He paid no mind to his rumbling stomach and first focused on basking in the sweet fragrance of love for a while.
Yi Ke looked down and asked, “Let’s have Uncle and Auntie go home tonight. I’ll stay with you, okay?”
Zhuang Ningyu’s hands rested on his shoulders. “Okay,” he said without thinking.
Zhuang Yan and Zhong Yu, who had been waiting in the hallway for half the day: “…”
Alright then.
Yi Ke did not sleep on the companion bed. That night, he somehow found himself a new set of pajamas. After the doctor finished their rounds, he moved a chair to the bedside, propped himself up on the nightstand, and devoted himself to admiring his wife’s beauty.
Zhuang Ningyu felt his back tingle from the stare and shifted to the side, wrapped in his blanket.
Yi Ke was ecstatic and got into the bed in a second. A width of one and a half meters might be a squeeze for an old married couple, but for a new couple, it was just right. Yi Ke wrapped his limbs around him. He wanted to kiss him but felt he hadn’t confessed yet. He wanted to confess but felt that a place like the Evolver Research Institute wasn’t quite right. He was being incredibly picky and fussy. Zhuang Ningyu was sweating all over from being held. He pulled out an arm to reach for the air conditioner remote on the headboard, but the next moment, it was stuffed back in. Yi Ke rubbed against his face and asked affectionately, “What are you doing?”
Zhuang Ningyu replied speechlessly, “I’m going to turn on the AC.”
No, why turn on the AC in the middle of winter? Your husband does not approve. Yi Ke pulled the blanket back a little for him. “This is fine.”
Zhuang Ningyu let out a long breath. “Then can I turn over?”
Yi Ke asked first, “Which way are you turning?”
Zhuang Ningyu: “…I regret it. You should go home.”
Yi Ke: “No!”
The little puppy was too much to handle. Zhuang Ningyu had never felt so exhausted before bed. But thankfully, it was only before bed. After he fell asleep, Yi Ke lightened all his movements. All the lights in the ward were turned off, with only two dim yellow night lights on the floor casting a soft glow. Yi Ke held him in his arms, his palm patting his back lightly through the hospital gown. There was no rule zone, no monsters, and no mental contamination, only the steady breathing of his lover, as if the world had completely returned to its original order.
As he thought about it, he couldn’t help but curve his lips into a smile. He lowered his head and kissed that soft hair, saying in his heart, “Good night.”
The next afternoon, Huo Ting came to visit, carrying a bag of apples like a veteran official. “Old Pang grew these. Want one now? I’ll peel it for you.”
Zhuang Ningyu leaned against the head of the bed, cleared his throat with a “ahem,” and said in a clear, formal tone, “No, my cough isn’t better yet. I can’t eat cold things.”
Huo Ting didn’t immediately grasp the reason for this sudden health-conscious attitude. “How is room temperature considered cold?”
Zhuang Ningyu’s attitude was firm. It’s easy for you to say. How is room temperature not cold? You’re not the one drinking bitter medicine.
“There’s a meeting next Wednesday,” Huo Ting said, moving a chair to the bedside. “I’d like you to attend.”
“What meeting?” Zhuang Ningyu asked.
“Someone from above is coming,” Huo Ting poured him a glass of hot water. “Regarding how to artificially create a rule zone. It’s not just foreign organizations led by the Invisible Giant that are researching this; governments of all countries are researching it too, just with different objectives.”
“Understood,” Zhuang Ningyu nodded. “So can we confirm the nature of the Zeus Grand Hotel rule zone now?”
“Next Wednesday’s meeting is to discuss this,” Huo Ting said. “By the way, I want to transfer you back to the Order Maintenance Department. You won’t be on field operations. You’ll stay in the research group for a while. Is that okay?”
“Okay,” Zhuang Ningyu agreed readily. He had been running around a lot recently anyway, occupying a spot in the Dispute Resolution Department without doing the work. Director Wang had probably been holding back his complaints for a long time. “Consider promoting Wu Tao. Her qualifications and abilities are solid, and she works well with Xiao Qian.” Although he was quite reluctant to part with these two formidable generals… and while the research group’s office building was a bit far from District 15, it was thankfully still in the same city. They could still meet up for meals and basketball on weekends.
“What about Xiao Yi?” Huo Ting asked again.
“He went to find the doctor in the purification room,” Zhuang Ningyu said without batting an eye. “To conduct some reasonable medical discussions.”
These included but were not limited to: “Is this already the most advanced purification instrument in the world?”, “Is there any possibility for optimization?”, “Money is not an issue,” “How much do you need?”, and “I’ll donate.” What an incredibly wealthy man, full of passion for the medical field. It made the director of the purification room slap his thigh in his office, lamenting that there weren’t any new instruments to buy recently.
Huo Ting had intended to ask about his relationship status, but he promptly remembered his empty tea cabinet. Having learned his lesson, he decided it was better to stick to work talk. He said, “Currently, it’s probably not easy to create a rule zone from scratch, but… it can be replicated.”
“Replicated?” Zhuang Ningyu sat up.
“Replicated,” Huo Ting nodded. “The research group in the capital recently had a successful experience. This case will also be mentioned at Wednesday’s meeting. I’ll give you a heads-up. That experiment… wasn’t a complete success, either. About seventy percent successful. The researchers first entered a rule zone with a dimension detector to collect data, then tried to restore it after leaving.”
“What do you mean by seventy percent successful?”
“Just like the Zeus Grand Hotel, both the monsters and the logic were full of visible bugs. For example, the original rule zone had five rules, but the replica only had two, which wasn’t enough to form a complete logic chain. Therefore, it was an unsolvable ‘wrong problem.’ However, since the researchers had already solved the ‘original problem’ once, they ignored the process and skipped directly to the final step, trying to see if they could use the correct ‘answer’ to leave.”
“Did they succeed?”
“It was random.”
The same experiment was conducted five times. Each replica had missing problem statements to varying degrees, and the method of skipping directly to the final step only succeeded twice. In the other three instances, the researchers successfully left by attacking monsters and tearing through space at two different points.
Huo Ting continued, “Replicas have extremely unstable characteristics, so the collapse of the Zeus Grand Hotel might be related to you manually clearing the mental contamination, which is like removing one of the founding conditions from an already flawed problem statement.”
“If the Zeus Grand Hotel was a replica, that means there was once an original Zeus Grand Hotel problem,” Zhuang Ningyu analyzed, holding his cup. “Can the replica’s address be changed?”
Huo Ting shook his head. “No, at least not in our experiments.”
“Chengnan Bookstore and the original Zeus Grand Hotel share the same address. So in ‘their’ experiments, it should only be able to reappear at the original site,” Zhuang Ningyu said. “According to our current observation capabilities, once a new rule zone appears, even in the wilderness, it will show up on the electronic coordinate map within thirty-six hours. What’s more, the area around Chengnan Bookstore is already quite bustling, so this time frame would be even shorter.”
“Within twenty hours,” Huo Ting said. “After the ‘original problem’ of the Zeus Grand Hotel appeared, ‘they’ had at most twenty hours to replicate and solve it.”
Chengnan Bookstore wasn’t open yet, its doors tightly locked. Ordinary people had no way to get in. The only people who could have been swept into the rule zone immediately would be one of two types: the renovation crew or the bookstore staff.
“The owner of Chengnan Bookstore?” Zhuang Ningyu frowned. “I originally thought he was suspicious, or rather, that this whole reading event was suspicious from the start. In the past, reading clubs usually had about twenty people sign up. It’s impossible for the number to double just because more people are free during the New Year, to the point that the original venue couldn’t even hold them all.”
Liu Qijing had once accidentally revealed that Zhuang Ningyu would be attending an event, causing the number of participants to skyrocket. Since then, she had been very careful about keeping things confidential. The list for this “Crime and Punishment” reading was not disclosed in advance.
“The investigation team has already asked around,” Huo Ting said. “The extra people really weren’t there for you or Xiao Yi. They were there for Fu Han. Someone must have leaked that he would be attending. Among the later registrants, there were women who admired him, businessmen who wanted to connect with him, and even a newspaper reporter. The identities were diverse and the reasons numerous, but all were within a reasonable scope.”
Hearing that name, Zhuang Ningyu sighed. “Let’s be clear first, if you guys can solve it yourselves, then solve it yourselves. Try not to make me go ask him.”
Huo Ting smiled and took the empty cup from his hand. “The sun is nice. Shall I take you downstairs for a walk?”
Director Huo, taking time out of his busy schedule to condescend to be a caregiver, was met with a firm refusal from a deeply moved Zhuang Ningyu. He wasn’t going. Because the doctor had said “walk around more, it can relieve headaches,” he had already been dragged to the garden three times by Yi Ke today. His knees were weak, and his fresh air quota was full. He was not considering a fourth time for now.
When Yi Ke returned with food, Huo Ting was peeling an apple. Zhuang Ningyu immediately distanced himself from it: “He’s the one who wants to eat it.”
Huo Ting: “…It is indeed me who wants to eat it.” But what are you so nervous about?
He had originally wanted to stay and lend a hand, but then he felt that his current self was a bit superfluous. So, he had no choice but to take his half-peeled apple and leave, making way for love.
Zhuang Ningyu asked, “What are we eating today?”
“I had Auntie steam a yellow croaker, and there’s also the salted egg yolk shrimp you like,” Yi Ke set up the dining table. “Did Director Huo come to see you or to talk about work?”
“A bit of both,” Zhuang Ningyu got out of bed to wash his hands. “He said the Zeus Grand Hotel might be a replica. Also, I might be transferred to the research group for a while.”
“The research group?” Yi Ke’s hand paused as he heard this. “Is it the office on Wenying Road?”
Zhuang Ningyu watched him lift the lid of the food container. “Yeah.”
Yi Ke cleared his throat and continued, “I live on the next street.”
