GRMFBS CH240

For a moment, Zhan Suiru began doubting her own reading comprehension.

Huh? Huh? Huh?

Deep Shadow thought Yan Yan liked melodramatic TV dramas, so he specifically went and memorized melodramatic lines for him… did that mean what she thought it meant?

Zhan Suiru stared at the reply from her younger brother and reread it three full times.

In her mind, she couldn’t help picturing one version after another of Deep Shadow: the calm and rational Deep Shadow she had hunted down, the fierce and ruthless Deep Shadow who slaughtered Black Nest, the crazed and icy Deep Shadow who said he was going to kill Infinite, the confident and steady Deep Shadow who decided to help Yang Ran, the arrogant Deep Shadow described by Black Wolf, the reliable Deep Shadow from their cooperation, the open and straightforward Deep Shadow when his cover dropped…

Then all of those images shattered into pieces and reassembled into a Deep Shadow reciting domineering-CEO lines to her younger brother.

Zhan Suiru couldn’t help recalling one of the melodramatic TV dramas she had recently watched and ridiculed together with her mother, and mentally replacing the domineering male lead who stood in the rain shouting, “Damn it, can’t you feel whether I like you or not?!” with Deep Shadow…

Zhan Suiru immediately shook her head.

No, impossible. She simply couldn’t imagine it… this scenario was a bit too abstract.

From the length of time his sister stayed silent, Zhan Yan could fully sense how stunned she was.

Zhan Suiru couldn’t help trying to find the irrational part of all this.

Zhan Suiru: “Why did he think you liked melodramatic TV dramas?”

Zhan Yan: “It was just a misunderstanding. I was joking around with a classmate, and he heard it secondhand through that classmate and ended up misunderstanding.”

Then he continued saying good things for Gu Jiancheng.

It took Zhan Suiru a while to accept the idea that Deep Shadow was actually a love-brain, and at the same time she felt that Deep Shadow’s image had collapsed a bit.

Zhan Yan sent her a voice message in a spoiled tone: “So yeah, Sis, we’re really doing fine. You and brother-in-law are all sweet and loving and harmonious, and I don’t pry into that, right? Sis~”

Zhan Suiru wasn’t prepared and clicked on the voice message directly.

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

Zhan Suiru: “Okay.”

Yay! Plan successful!

A little later, Yang Ran messaged Zhan Suiru to ask about the situation.

Zhan Suiru: “I think… it actually makes sense that Deep Shadow loves my little brother this much.”

Yang Ran: ?

What exactly happened?

So Zhan Suiru explained in detail how Deep Shadow had watched melodramatic TV dramas for the sake of her younger brother — and as a result, one more person in the world experienced image collapse.

Zhan Suiru: “The reason his attitude has been so good lately is because he has designs on my little brother!”

Yang Ran: “I feel like if Deep Shadow can do something like assume your brother likes melodramatic TV dramas and then go memorize melodramatic lines because of that… it should be very hard for him to manipulate or control your brother.”

Deep Shadow was practically like someone who had been brainwashed by her little brother…

Zhan Suiru huffed angrily. “Yan Yan told me so much about Gu Jiancheng. He was probably just tired of dodging me every day. He avoided me for so many days straight because of Gu Jiancheng!”

“And he even acted spoiled at me!”

Zhan Suiru forwarded her younger brother’s voice message over.

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

Yang Ran: “Does little brother still like the cookies I made? Is there anything else he wants to eat? Last time I made the regular flavor, but I can also make chocolate or cranberry ones. Does he have any preferences?”

Zhan Suiru: …

“Xiao Ran, you’re way too easy to placate.”

In the future, she definitely couldn’t let Yang Ran be the one to persuade Yan Yan if something came up.

Now that he had settled things with his sister, Zhan Yan finally let out a sigh of relief and started checking Gu Jiancheng’s gossip feed.

[Gu Jiancheng believes that he has already resolved the biggest hurdle in meeting the parents, and is very happy.]

Zhan Yan almost couldn’t bear it.

What else could he do? The only thing left was to quietly find ways to help Xiao Gu earn more favorability himself.

[Gu Jiancheng has started considering how to get Zhan Suiru to help cover for him.]

Zhan Yan: …

What should one even say? As expected of Big Boss Deep Shadow?

He really dared to think that way. Sister was someone Zhan Yan had only just truly gotten on his side!

Before he could keep scrolling, his parents called him downstairs to help tidy up the courtyard.

Zhan Yunkai and Ji Yueming felt that their younger son had become far too much of a homebody lately. Aside from exercising morning and evening, he almost never left the house, and aside from meals, he practically never left his room either. This was not good.

So Zhan Yan went downstairs to help in the courtyard. He still had Chronicle of the World and “Shedding Cicada” gossip lines hanging in the background, but since he had settled things with his sister, he was humming songs the whole time he worked.

Who planted things in the middle of summer anyway? But it didn’t matter. As long as Mom and Dad were happy. They too had been separated for months because of the apocalypse-world overlap.

Zhan Yunkai was fiddling with the sprinkler system, while Ji Yueming moved flowers out of the car and into the courtyard. Fortunately, they had bought potted flowers, so they could plant them directly into the ground without hurting the roots. As long as the watering kept up, they wouldn’t wither and die.

Ji Yueming carried in a pot of sunflowers and heard Zhan Yan muttering and humming to himself.

“What’s he singing?” Ji Yueming asked Zhan Yunkai after setting the flowers down.

Zhan Yunkai listened carefully for a moment. “I have a little secret, and I won’t tell you.”

Ji Yueming: “Pfft.”

It was still morning, so the sunlight wasn’t too fierce yet.

Zhan Jinli had gone out to work, so there were only three people at home, all in the courtyard. Xingxing, left alone in the house, couldn’t sit still anymore. He kept meowing nonstop at the glass door.

The house had excellent soundproofing. Fortunately, both parents had sharp ears, so they went over and opened the door for Xingxing.

“There’s air-conditioning inside. Aren’t you hot out here?” Ji Yueming asked as she shut the door again.

Xingxing didn’t think it was hot. Xingxing wanted to play together with everyone.

One moment he ran over to Zhan Yan and got underfoot, the next he ran over to Ji Yueming, buried his face in a big bunch of coreopsis flowers, and gave an enormous sneeze.

Then when Zhan Yunkai finished installing the sprinkler and started testing it, Xingxing ran over and began pawing at the water.

You’re all playing without me!

“Aren’t cats all supposed to be afraid of water?” Zhan Yunkai said in surprise.

“Xingxing isn’t,” Zhan Yan replied with a smile, scratching under Xingxing’s chin. “Our Xingxing is a brave and clever little kitty now, right?”

Xingxing narrowed his eyes and purred.

What was there to be afraid of about water?

Seeing how ridiculously happy Zhan Yan looked, Zhan Yunkai and Ji Yueming couldn’t make sense of it.

Ji Yueming quietly asked, “This child was gloomy and exhausted just a couple of days ago. Why is he suddenly so happy today?”

Zhan Yunkai gave a profound answer: “The kid’s grown up. They all have their own little secrets now.”

Zhan Yan’s happiness lasted the whole day.

He actually wasn’t too busy lately. To avoid missing news about Chronicle of the World, he had already put his other tasks on hold over the past few days. Most of the time, all he had to do was keep the gossip lines running in the background.

Still, he could continue organizing the diagrams hiding Wanyan’s secrets. As long as he didn’t enter the system backup interface, he could still see any new gossip line related to Chronicle of the World the moment it refreshed.

So he tried reconstructing those diagrams with pen and paper. The more he drew, the more absorbed he became. Only the sudden appearance of refreshed gossip lines would snap him out of it. After forwarding them to Librarian, he’d lower his head again and keep organizing the patterns.

It wasn’t until Zhan Jinli came and knocked on the door that Zhan Yan snapped back to reality.

He was still immersed in the twisting and distortion of all those lines. When he heard the knock, he got up and opened the door almost automatically, only realizing after opening it that it was his brother standing there.

His brother handed him a paper bag filled with a pile of little cookies, about the same size as the cookies Yang Ran had sent him before.

Zhan Jinli believed his reasoning was perfectly sound: his younger brother liked bread better than cake, and bread was drier and harder than cake. Cookies were drier and harder than bread, so naturally his younger brother must like the little cookies Sister brought from her friend.

He hadn’t made cookies much before, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know how. Weren’t all these pastries fundamentally similar? Today he would make cookies for his younger brother to try!

The moment Zhan Yan opened the paper bag, he was delighted.

Bread still needed to be rolled into little balls before eating. Cookies didn’t — they could just be broken into pieces and swallowed with water, making them even more convenient than bread!

The only question was whether cookies or bread restored more energy at the same volume — not an important issue under normal circumstances, but a very crucial one when it came to how much his stomach could hold in a critical moment.

He’d test it tonight.

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

Zhan Yan: oh no!

He had forgotten to put those diagrams away.

Ahhhh, all those drawings were related to Wanyan Cat. Would his brother recognize something? Could it be that his own cover identity couldn’t be preserved anymore?!

Originally, Zhan Jinli had had no intention of looking into what his younger brother was doing, but the desk was too messy, and the papers spread across it were covered with all sorts of chaotic drawings. His attention had been drawn over involuntarily.

Then he looked up at his younger brother.

His younger brother had a panicked expression.

Zhan Jinli thought: Why is he this nervous? Isn’t it just a bit of messy doodling? Hmm… though childish, it’s actually kind of cute.

He typed a reassuring message: “What are these messy lines?”

When Zhan Yan saw his brother’s question, he blinked.

Messy lines? That couldn’t be right. The top sheet was clearly a pattern he had just sorted out. The lines obviously had structure — like a single brick taken from a mural. Even if you couldn’t infer the whole mural from the lines on that one brick, you could still tell that it belonged to a complete work, not some random scribble.

Zhan Yan looked back at the desk and froze.

No, that wasn’t right. He distinctly remembered that this was one part of a pattern he had already organized. Why did it now look like a tangled mass of random lines? Like a small child with no drawing skill had simply scrawled all over the page.

He blinked again.

The password-translator input box appeared in front of his eyes. Then the tiny input box suddenly stretched and widened, covering his entire field of vision like a filter.

Looking through that layer of filter, the chaotic lines on the page instantly turned back into the properly organized pattern he remembered.

What was going on? Did this password translator also have an automatic encryption function? When had he turned on this “password filter”?

Zhan Jinli, seeing his younger brother standing there, assumed he was embarrassed about being discovered doodling childish things.

He patted him and thoughtfully left the room.

Zhan Yan turned off the password-translator filter. The lines he had drawn on the paper once again became gibberish. In that state, he pulled out another sheet of paper and began trying to redraw the organized pattern exactly as he remembered it in his mind.

One stroke, two strokes, three strokes — then Zhan Yan stopped.

He couldn’t draw it… why? The image in his mind was still perfectly clear, and the lines he had put on paper were not incorrect, but the fourth stroke simply could not land in the correct place. That “correct place” did not exist on the paper.

Like a Penrose staircase that could be drawn but could not exist in reality, the image in his head could exist in thought but could not truly be drawn. It could only be expressed through the password translator’s encryption filter as twisted encrypted lines — something that carried meaning, but could not itself be realized.

Zhan Yan froze.

Comparing the paper to the image in his mind, he began dimly realizing that the essence of these “images” seemed to be a kind of higher-dimensional information. They could exist in the system and in his mind, but could not be expressed in an ordinary way. Even if they were reluctantly expressed through encryption…

Zhan Yan tried reversing the logic of decryption to infer the content of one of the chaotic line-drawings.

It didn’t work. He could only decode scattered fragments, and it was very hard to assemble them into a whole. In other words, unless the other person also had some kind of higher-dimensional information ability, they would have no chance of decoding what these encrypted diagrams represented. And even if they did decode them, they could only know it themselves and wouldn’t be able to pass it on to another person — because they too would be unable to express that information.

Zhan Yan was numb.

Then once he decoded this information, how was he supposed to tell anyone else about it…?

“I have many little secrets~” His ringtone sounded. Gu Jiancheng was calling.

Huh, why was Xiao Gu calling so early today? Zhan Yan hadn’t even gone for his evening exercise yet.

[Because Gu Jiancheng settled things with Zhan Suiru, he has been excited all day and wants to call you. He has finally held out as long as he could and can’t hold back anymore.]

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