GRMFBS CH251

[Zhan Suiru felt that in their family, only her brother Zhan Jinli was a purely ordinary person who needed to be taken care of, so she went to the Sweet Sweet Cake Shop, only to find that the puppet she had made was working there as a shop clerk.]

[Through the conversation of the Five Ghosts, Zhan Suiru confirmed that her brother Zhan Jinli was the Ghost King Lin Yuan.]

Zhan Yan: …Oh no, I got busy and forgot!

He decided to play dumb: “Right, sis, we were interrupted before we could finish talking. I wanted to tell you, our brother has his own little secrets too.”

Zhan Suiru: “Uh-huh?”

Zhan Yan: “Let’s talk about it when we meet! Let’s talk about it when we meet! It’s not safe to talk over the phone!”

Zhan Suiru: …
It really wasn’t safe to talk about this over the phone.
She could only let her brother off the hook for now.
She’d wait until the next time she met her brother to settle the score!

After hanging up the phone, Zhan Suiru received a private message from “Approaching Science” in the backend of her forum.

Approaching Science: “Ghost King Lin Yuan; his divine ability is that fortune and misfortune are interdependent, but currently, he cannot control it. It easily triggers passively when he speaks or listens to others.”

“That’s about it.”

Zhan Yan quickly finished replying. He wasn’t going to wait to discuss his brother’s secret identity until he met his sister in person. Chatting by typing was easier to gloss over than talking on the phone, and talking on the phone was easier to gloss over than face-to-face. He wasn’t stupid. Since they had the Chaofan Forum platform, why not use it?

He searched for gossip posts while sending messages. If it was just their brother’s cover being blown, his sister shouldn’t have used that tone… Why did she sound like she was about to turn completely dark…

Good heavens! Asking to revise to the 16th version and then finally wanting the 1st version, plus adding two more versions to make it 18 versions, is it?
No wonder his sister was so angry… This was something fit for a weird client complaint board, right?

Artisan: “I suddenly remembered, there was a while back when I had a ton of orders and was super busy…”

Zhan Yan searched a bit and confirmed her guess.

Sorry, bro…

Zhan Suiru straightened out the timeline and confirmed it. That period was exactly when she was making a mini-program for her brother, but forgot to set a maximum order limit, resulting in her brother being flooded with orders.

What a petty Ghost King!

She sent a message to Xiao Ran.

Have you made the cookies for my brother? Swap all the sugar for salt!

Zhan Yan changed into a loose T-shirt and sat cross-legged on the bed, his hair half-wet. The air conditioning in the room was on, and the temperature was cool. Gu Jiancheng had just wanted to blow-dry his hair for him, but was shooed away to take a shower.

Enjoying the AC for a bit wouldn’t give him a cold, but discussing his brother’s secret identity with his sister right in front of Xiao Gu always gave him a guilty conscience, as if his own cover was about to be blown.

Just after successfully diverting the disaster (not really), Gu Jiancheng also came out of his shower. Broad shoulders, a narrow waist, long legs, with water dripping from his wet hair.

Zhan Yan took a glance, and his gaze unexpectedly met Gu Jiancheng’s.

It was very normal to shower in a dorm in the summer, normal to come out wrapped in a bath towel, and normal to have a roommate in the dorm.
But this wasn’t a dorm, not a rented internship apartment, and there were no other roommates.

Gu Jiancheng’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

Zhan Yan felt the room getting hotter and hotter… No, not really, right? He admitted he was tempted, that his heart fluttered more than just a little bit, but, ah… but why was the temperature rising so fiercely?

Gu Jiancheng: “The AC stopped.”

Zhan Yan looked up at the air conditioner. Oh, right, the cool breeze circulating in the room had vanished at some point, and the high heat of midsummer immediately began to show its might.

Gu Jiancheng pulled on his clothes, his voice a little dry: “I’ll go down to the front desk and ask.”

The room door quickly closed, bringing in only a tiny wisp of heat. Zhan Yan touched his own face with the back of his hand.

The AC had stopped, and the temperature in the room was rising, but it wasn’t that fast.
It was him who was burning hot.

Zhan Yan decided to do something else to distract himself.
His sister was still sending him messages. Zhan Yan felt he couldn’t let his brother suffer too much, so he started to change the subject.

Approaching Science: “Do you have any clues about our parents’ situation?”

Artisan: “The Tianshi and the Chongming Demon King have a pretty good relationship, right?”

Approaching Science: “Right, they both appreciate each other quite a bit.”
“But they basically haven’t met much.”

Meaning this appreciation currently only stayed on the surface, not enough to break through their respective stances.

Artisan: “Find a chance to let them interact with each other?”

Approaching Science: “Do you think that’s safe?”

Artisan: “…”

Zhan Suiru also realized it.
With how clingy their parents were to each other, they knew every aspect of each other’s little movements, habits, and tones inside out. If they interacted for a long time, it probably wouldn’t take long for them to strip off each other’s secret identities.

If they didn’t meet and interact, they couldn’t deepen their affection; if they didn’t deepen their affection, they wouldn’t dare let them drop their covers; if they didn’t dare let them drop their covers, they couldn’t meet… What kind of vicious cycle was this!

Artisan: “Do you think… taking the ‘online dating’ route is feasible?”

Of course, their parents certainly wouldn’t use fake identities to online date each other, but interacting through the internet wouldn’t expose their identities, and it could also increase their affection level. From ordinary mutual appreciation to friends, then from friends to best friends… Wouldn’t this affection level slowly rise to the right place? Didn’t that Fang Pai and Hacker guy break through via online dating?

Although what their parents faced was more troublesome, they couldn’t expect two big shots with firm minds to completely break through their respective stances. As long as they could try harder when they had conflicts due to different stances…
So the most serious issue was still the stance problem. How worrisome.

Approaching Science: “We can try, but I haven’t found a catalyst to get them to interact more online yet.”

Mom didn’t like reading the Chaofan Forum, and the Tianshi’s account was only registered last year.
“If only we could resolve the conflict between the Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau and the Wan Yao Alliance.”

Artisan: “Their main conflict lies in their style of doing things.”

The conflict between humans and demons wasn’t even the main point. Every race had bad ones, and every race had good ones. Even if there were no humans, there would be conflicts among the various different species within the demon race itself. Even if there were no demons, humans would categorize themselves with labels to engage in internal strife.

The Demon King and the Tianshi wouldn’t be pushed by small labels, nor would they be swept up by big labels. The real conflict lay in their ideologies.

The Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau had too strong of a controlling nature. But this wasn’t Ning Xi’s problem; the Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau was born precisely for the sake of “management.”

Even if Ning Xi was replaced, the newcomer wouldn’t let go of the power in their hands. Compared to others who might want control for the sake of power, at least Ning Xi wanted control for the sake of stability.

The Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau believed that in the face of the Infinite and the Anomalous, carrying out some extraordinary control to maintain safety and stability was necessary. The Wan Yao Alliance, on the other hand, believed that wasn’t this very control also one of the soils from which anomalies were born?

Everyone made quite a bit of sense. The Wan Yao Alliance’s territory frequently had mishaps due to lax management, and the Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau also had a history of almost causing a disaster while collecting Infinite fragments.

But how could this kind of conflict be reconciled, ahhh?

The siblings summarized for a long time and unanimously agreed that the root of the conflict still lay in the Infinite and the Anomalous.
If they resolved both the Infinite Will and the Anomalous, wouldn’t their parents no longer have an ideological conflict?

Gu Jiancheng came back, and Zhan Yan exited the Chaofan Forum.translate.google+2

“There’s a problem with a nearby cable, the power went out.” When Gu Jiancheng came back, he brought up two bamboo cooling mats and a pack of cold drinks. He bought them all from a nearby supermarket while the cool air inside hadn’t dissipated yet.

Zhan Yan tried the light switch, and it didn’t turn on either. Sure enough, there was a power outage.

The hotel also didn’t know when the cable would be fixed, stating that the ice cream and cold drinks in the mini-fridges in the guest rooms were given to the guests for free. After a while, someone even came up to hand out ice cream. These were all from the hotel’s large freezer; they had to save their ice to keep the ingredients fresh, and normal ice cream left there would just melt anyway, so they might as well hand them out to the guests.

But without the AC, the temperature in the room would just keep rising. Neither of them had the desire to cuddle anymore. The two heat sources left a huge gap between them, sprawling themselves out on the bamboo mats.

Gu Jiancheng quietly adjusted himself to a non-heat-producing mode. Actually, he could also make himself icy cold, but he couldn’t explain it to Yan Yan, so he could only lie on the other bamboo mat spacing out…

Zhan Yan was rambling on, murmuring about things related to the game convention. Gu Jiancheng was also thinking about this. Zhan Suiru had told him that Luo Yigang had set his sights on Zhan Yan. Fortunately, she was right beside him, and Zhan Yan hadn’t noticed.

The Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau suspected that the Mind-Reading Gu on Luo Yigang wasn’t planted by the Chronicle of the World.

Of course it wasn’t. While being hunted down, the Chronicle of the World absolutely couldn’t have had the time to also control a Luo Yigang. The Monster Doctor definitely had a hand in this.

He had already checked when he arrived, but he failed to catch the Monster Doctor’s tail.

This was very normal. The Monster Doctor didn’t need to come here; on the day the Chronicle of the Worlds was caught, he should have already completed his control over Luo Yigang. And he missed the opportunity… Gu Jiancheng couldn’t help but feel remorseful. Although he also knew clearly that if the Monster Doctor were that easy to deal with, he wouldn’t still be alive right now.

The muggy irritability of summer seemed to have transferred to him as well, but his thoughts were quickly pulled away by the broken murmurs lingering in the room.

Zhan Yan was talking about the arrangements for the next few days. He didn’t seem to have much of a plan either; the things he talked about jumped from having to go home to get luggage on the day school started, to planning on taking him to experience a pseudo-holographic game tomorrow or the day after.

It was completely disorganized and chaotic, but it instantly pulled one into real life. Trivial, daily, vivid—making one think of how, when an ice cream is half eaten, the bottom is already melting, so one hurriedly takes a bite of the bottom corner; think of deliberately not shaking the yogurt when eating it, just to lick the thick texture off the yogurt lid; think of the suddenly dead AC, the bamboo mat sprayed with mosquito repellent, and every unexpected little accident in life. Thus, missing out seemed to become not that unbearable anymore.

Zhan Yan murmured and murmured, then suddenly went quiet. Gu Jiancheng turned his head and saw his eyes closed, breathing steadily, looking as if he had already fallen asleep.

The sun gradually set, and the muggy room seemed to be slowly cooling down as well.
Gu Jiancheng, therefore, also closed his eyes, relaxing in the company of the other’s breathing.

Zhan Yan really was sleepy.
It wasn’t even his usual bedtime yet, but his thoughts had already started to drift. His experiences today were thrilling enough. Earlier, when running away at the game exhibition, that bizarre high-perspective route planning seemed to have consumed a lot of his energy. He hadn’t felt it earlier, but now, as the sky grew darker, his drowsiness surged up.

His phone suddenly vibrated. Zhan Yan opened his eyes and picked up his phone. The message that popped up on the screen was from his sister.

Zhan Suiru: “Be careful; he might harbor illicit intentions towards you.”

Zhan Yan glanced at Gu Jiancheng, who was resting with his eyes closed not far away, and typed out a line:

“Sis.”
“Actually, I harbor quite illicit intentions towards him too.”