GRMFBS CH240

For a moment, Zhan Suiru doubted her own reading comprehension.

Huh? Huh? Huh?

Deep Shadow thought Yan Yan liked melodramatic soap operas, so he specially memorized dramatic lines just for him… was that what he meant?

Zhan Suiru stared at her younger brother’s reply, reading it back and forth a full three times. In her mind, she involuntarily envisioned the calm and rational Deep Shadow when being hunted by her, the fierce and brutal Deep Shadow when slaying Black Nest, the wildly icy Deep Shadow when declaring he would destroy Infinite, the confident and steady Deep Shadow when deciding to help Yang Ran, the arrogance described by Black Wolf, the reliability during cooperation, the candor upon dropping his secret identity… In the end, all these impressions shattered noisily all over the floor, recombining into Deep Shadow reciting domineering CEO lines to her younger brother.

Zhan Suiru couldn’t help recalling a melodramatic soap opera she had recently watched and roasted together with her mother, and mentally swapped the domineering CEO shouting in the rain—”Damn it, can’t you feel whether I like you or not?!”—with Deep Shadow’s face…

Zhan Suiru shook her head vigorously.

No, I can’t picture it… This plotline is just way too abstract.

From the duration of his sister’s silence, Zhan Yan sensed her sheer shock.

Zhan Suiru couldn’t help trying to find something unreasonable in this whole situation.

Zhan Suiru: [Why did he think you liked melodramatic dramas?]

Zhan Yan: [It was a misunderstanding! I was joking with a classmate, he heard it second-hand through my classmate, and ended up misunderstanding.]

He continued putting in good words for Gu Jiancheng.

Zhan Suiru took some time to accept the premise that Deep Shadow was actually a lovestruck fool, and felt that Deep Shadow’s image had collapsed quite a bit.

Zhan Yan sent a voice message to act cute with his sister: “So you see, Jie, we’re really doing great. You and brother-in-law are so sweet, harmonious, and blissful, and I never pry into your business. Jie~”

Caught off guard, Zhan Suiru tapped the voice message directly.

Half a minute later, Zhan Yan saw his sister’s reply.

Zhan Suiru: [Fine.]

Yay! Plan successful!

After a while, Yang Ran sent a message asking Zhan Suiru about the situation.

Zhan Suiru: [I think… it’s actually quite normal for Deep Shadow to love my brother this much.]

Yang Ran: ?

What on earth happened?

Zhan Suiru explained in detail how Deep Shadow had watched melodramatic dramas for her brother, and thus, yet another person in this world experienced a total mental collapse.

Zhan Suiru: [His attitude was only this good recently because he was coveting my brother!]

Yang Ran: [I feel that if Deep Shadow is capable of memorizing melodramatic lines just because he thought your brother liked soap operas… it should be very difficult for him to control or manipulate your brother.]

It practically seemed like Deep Shadow had been brainwashed by her brother…

Zhan Suiru huffed indignantly: “Yan Yan shared so much about Gu Jiancheng, probably because he couldn’t stand dodging me every day. He avoided me for days on end just for Gu Jiancheng’s sake!”

“He even acted cute with me!”

Zhan Suiru forwarded her brother’s voice message over.

All Yang Ran heard was the word “brother-in-law”.

Yang Ran: [Does your brother still like the cookies I made? Does he want anything else to eat? I made regular flavor last time, but I can also make chocolate or cranberry. Does he have any preferences?]

Zhan Suiru: …

“Xiao Ran, you are far too easy to coax.”

If anything came up in the future, she definitely couldn’t let Yang Ran try to persuade Yan Yan.

Having handled his sister, Zhan Yan finally breathed a sigh of relief and began browsing Gu Jiancheng’s gossip strips.

[Gu Jiancheng believes he has overcome the greatest hurdle to meeting the parents, and is extraordinarily happy.]

Zhan Yan couldn’t even bear to burst his bubble.

What else could be done? He could only secretly find ways to help him farm favorability.

[Gu Jiancheng is considering how to get Zhan Suiru to cover for him.]

Zhan Yan: …

How should he put it? As expected of Boss Deep Shadow?

He really dared to dream. His sister was someone he had only just properly handled!

Before he could keep scrolling down, Mom and Dad called him to come down and clean up the yard together.

Zhan Yunkai and Ji Yueming felt their youngest son had been far too much of a shut-in lately. Aside from morning and evening workouts, he barely stepped out of the house, and aside from meals, he barely left his room; this was very unhealthy.

Zhan Yan went downstairs to the yard to help clean up. Keeping the gossip strips for the Chronicle of the World and “Molting Cicada” running in the background, he was even humming a tune while tidying the yard since he had settled things with his sister.

Who planted greenery in the dead of summer? But that didn’t matter, as long as Mom and Dad were happy. They had also been separated for several months because of the apocalypse border incident.

Zhan Yunkai was tinkering with the sprinkler irrigation system, while Ji Yueming moved potted flowers from the car into the yard. Fortunately, they had bought potted plants, so transferring the whole root ball into the soil wouldn’t damage the roots. As long as watering kept up, they wouldn’t fail to survive.

Carrying a pot of sunflowers inward, Ji Yueming heard Zhan Yan murmuring something.

“What is he humming?” Ji Yueming set the flower down and asked Zhan Yunkai.

Zhan Yunkai listened intently: “‘I have a little secret, and I won’t tell you.'”

Ji Yueming: “Pfft.“

It was still morning, so the sun wasn’t scorchingly fierce yet.

Zhan Jinli had gone to work, leaving just three people at home, all out in the yard. Left home alone, Xingxing couldn’t sit still, crying incessantly at the glass door.

The house was well soundproofed, but thankfully Mom and Dad had sharp ears and went over to open the door for Xingxing.

“There’s air conditioning inside the house, don’t you think it’s hot out here?” Ji Yueming closed the door again.

Xingxing didn’t feel hot. Xingxing wanted to play with everyone.

One moment he darted beside Zhan Yan getting underfoot, and the next he scurried over to Ji Yueming, burying his face into a large cluster of black-eyed Susans and letting out a hearty sneeze.

Once Zhan Yunkai installed the sprinkler system and began testing it, Xingxing dashed over to swat at the water with his little paws.

You’re playing without me!

“Aren’t cats supposed to be afraid of water?” Zhan Yunkai marveled.

“Xingxing isn’t afraid.” Zhan Yan grinned, scratching Xingxing under the chin. “Our Xingxing is a brave and clever kitty, right?”

Xingxing narrowed his eyes and purred.

What’s so scary about water?

Seeing Zhan Yan looking bounds beyond happy, Zhan Yunkai and Ji Yueming couldn’t make heads or tails of it either.

Ji Yueming whispered, “This child was so dejected and completely exhausted a couple of days ago, why is he suddenly this cheerful today?”

Zhan Yunkai replied profoundly, “The child has grown up, and everyone has their own little secrets.”

Zhan Yan’s joy lasted an entire day. He wasn’t too busy recently; to avoid missing any news on the Chronicle of the World, he had put other tasks on hold for these past few days, only needing to keep the gossip strips running most of the time.

However, organizing the patterns concealing Ghost King Wan Yan’s secrets was still doable, provided he didn’t enter the system backup interface, ensuring he would immediately see any new gossip strips regarding the Chronicle of the World the moment they refreshed.

He attempted to reconstruct those patterns using pen and paper. As Zhan Yan drew, he became completely absorbed, only looking up when reminded by pop-up alerts to forward newly refreshed gossip strips to the Librarian, before burying his head again to organize the designs.

It wasn’t until Zhan Jinli came knocking on his door that Zhan Yan snapped back to reality.

Still immersed in the distorted transformations of those lines, he got up and opened the door right away upon hearing the knock, only realizing after opening it that his brother was standing in the doorway.

His brother handed him a paper bag filled with a batch of cookies, which looked roughly the same size as the ones Yang Ran had gifted him earlier.

Zhan Jinli believed his deduction was spot-on: his younger brother preferred bread over cake, and bread was drier and harder than cake. Cookies were drier and harder than bread, which was why his brother liked the cookies his sister brought from her friend.

He hadn’t made cookies much in the past, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t know how. Didn’t these pastries all share the same underlying craft? Today, he would bake cookies for his brother to taste!

Opening the paper bag, Zhan Yan was delightfully surprised.

Bread still required being rolled into balls, but cookies didn’t—you could just snap them into pieces and swallow them down with water, which was way more convenient than bread!

The only question was whether an equal volume of cookies or bread restored more energy—a question that wasn’t usually important, but at critical moments severely tested his stomach capacity.

He’d test it out tonight.

Zhan Yan cheerfully thanked his brother, but as soon as he looked up, he saw Zhan Jinli standing before his desk, looking at the messy pile of papers on it.

Zhan Yan: Crap! He forgot to put those drafts away!

Ahhh, those patterns are all related to the cat Wan Yan, would Brother recognize something? Could it be that his secret identity can’t be saved?!

Zhan Jinli hadn’t originally intended to see what his brother was up to, but the desk was far too cluttered, and those spread-out sheets were covered in all sorts of messy drawings, involuntarily drawing his attention.

He looked up at his brother.

His brother wore a look of pure panic.

Zhan Jinli: Why is he so nervous? Isn’t it just doodling? Mmh… a bit childish, but quite cute.

He typed to comfort him:

Zhan Jinli: [What are these messy lines?]

Seeing his brother’s question, Zhan Yan blinked.

Messy lines? That wasn’t right. The top sheet was the exact pattern he had just organized, with clearly orderly lines, like a brick removed from a mural. Although one couldn’t deduce the entire mural’s appearance from the lines on this single brick, it was obvious that it belonged to a complete piece of work rather than random scribbles.

Zhan Yan looked at his desk again and froze in confusion.

No, that wasn’t right; he clearly remembered this was a pattern block he had just organized, so why did it look like a tangled mess of lines now? Like a child who didn’t know how to draw scribbling haphazardly on paper with a pen.

He blinked once more.

The input box of the Cipher Translator appeared before his eyes, its borders abruptly expanding and stretching until they covered his entire field of view like a filter.

Looking through this filter, the chaotic lines on the paper morphed back into the neat, organized design from his memory.

What was going on? Did this Cipher Translator come with an auto-encryption function? When had he turned on this “cipher filter”?

Seeing his younger brother standing there, Zhan Jinli assumed he felt embarrassed after being caught displaying a childish side.

He patted his brother on the shoulder and considerately stepped out of the room.

Zhan Yan turned off the Cipher Translator’s filter. The lines he had drawn on the paper turned back into garbled chaos. Under this state, he pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and began drawing the pattern he had already sorted out in his memory.

One stroke, two strokes, three strokes—Zhan Yan paused.

He couldn’t draw it… why? The image in his mind remained crystal clear, and the lines on the paper hadn’t erred, but the fourth stroke simply could not land in the correct position. That “correct position” did not exist on the paper.

Just like the recurring Penrose stairs, which could be drawn on paper but could not exist in physical reality, the image in his mind could exist within his thoughts, but could not truly be drawn out. It could only convey its meaning through distorted encrypted lines via the Cipher Translator’s encryption filter—possessing meaning, but impossible to realize.

Zhan Yan was stunned. Comparing the paper with the image in his head, he faintly began to realize that the essence of these “images” seemed to be a higher-dimensional form of information. They could exist within the Gossip System and within his mind, but could not be expressed through ordinary means. Even if barely expressed using ciphers…

Zhan Yan tried to reverse-engineer the contents of that chaotic line draft using decryption logic.

It didn’t work; he could only decipher fragmented scraps that were nearly impossible to piece together. In other words, only someone possessing higher-dimensional information abilities could possibly decipher what these encrypted drafts represented. And even if that person deciphered it, they would only be able to know it themselves, unable to convey it to others—because they would likewise be unable to express this information.

Zhan Yan was dumbfounded.

Then, after deciphering this information, how was he supposed to tell anyone else…

“I have many little secrets~” His phone rang with an incoming call from Gu Jiancheng.

Huh, why is Xiao Gu calling this early today? I haven’t even gone down for my evening workout yet.

[Having handled Zhan Suiru, Gu Jiancheng was excited all day and wanted to call you, finally unable to hold back any longer.]