“He opens the way for the cycle from birth to death, neither foul nor clean. He represents the beginning of a circle. All his power comes from the unknown, so neither blazing fire nor icy water can kill him. He likes all new and strange things. At the same time, the earliest form of the Magician represents a skilled performer. In his bones is a desire to show off. You could also say that he’s a crowdpleaser. The moment the curtain goes up, he begins to desire others’ gazes. Each of his gestures has a hint of a certain fierce longing for others’ applause.” 

Huang Jinchen hit with one shot. As usual, he ducked into the shrubbery without even a look back, quickly withdrawing. 

He never needed to check whether he had hit his mark. Each trajectory was in his mind. He didn’t need to look, in the same way that a person didn’t need to turn on the lights and look in the mirror to avoid putting food up his nose. This was a part of his body. 

There were no exceptions, no missed targets. 

The flames blossomed into the form of a flower on the Magician, as if he had gotten shot on purpose and Huang Jinchen, who had fired the gun, was only an assistant who had caught him off guard. 

But however beautiful his performance, there was still no audience. The sole audience member’s curiosity was truly limited. He didn’t bestow a single glance on him. The Magician was like a clown who had done his makeup and adjusted his expression, but when the curtain had suddenly gone up, there had been no one there to see him. He stood all alone amid the blossoming fire flower. 

The flame-hastening crows quickly encircled him, but the next moment, they turned into completely lifeless scraps of paper, falling off of him pile by pile, blown away by the wind along with the ashes. 

The Magician chased instinctively. 

“He’s only a card, no matter how powerful he seems. All the projections originate from the girl’s own understanding of the cards and from unconditional obedience to this special conscious subject. They don’t have the complicated emotions of a human being. His mind only contains simple logic. He can’t really feel anger or fear. If he has feelings, they’re probably only curiosity and the desire to show off.”

Huang Jinchen was a magical person, no matter what aspect you considered him from. 

The Seed Project was already buried deep underground. No one knew where the genes carried by those people who had undergone cruel experimentation and could still live like normal people had come from, or whether…they actually came from human beings. 

Much of the time, Huang Jinchen seemed easily able to surpass humans in terms of physiology and psychology. Though the Magician could float through the air, could fly, could move extremely fast, even had a big stack of paper turned into claws and beaks to lead the way for him, he still couldn’t catch Huang Jinchen. But each time he thought that he had lost him and stopped, Huang Jinchen’s figure would flit by in some corner, let off a cold bullet, and hit him or the big group of crows. 

“Out of instinct, he will hate cramped places and won’t go into dead end alleys. But what we need is precisely a space that is to a certain degree sealed off. So we need a bit of an inducement.” 

Huang Jinchen stood firm at the mouth of a little street. He turned. The Magician stopped along with him, only three meters away. 

The two of them stood opposed in silence for a while. Qin Qin’s order began to suppress the Magician’s instincts—kill the person in front of him. 

All the roses on him began to wilt and turn into lilies.—“The white flowers represent the concluding end of the spectrum, but the character of the Magician is always a performer, an opener, a guide. He doesn’t kill. This will make this card very sad—this is the conflict between the paranoid master of the tarot cards and the card itself.” 

Three meters was a close enough distance for Huang Jinchen to see clearly that the pupils of the oddly-dressed man in front of him seemed to have contracted some strange disease. They rapidly changed color, now red, now back to blue. Then the Magician suddenly extended a hand. The wilted rose vines tangled around his forearm. Black flowers opened on it. The little thorns on the vine were as sharp as brambles, pouncing on Huang Jinchen like a wild beast. Huang Jinchen ducked into the alley without hesitation and stuck himself to the wall, dodging. The vine came up empty. The second time it came at him head on, Huang Jinchen shot methodically. Flames soared through the air, quickly swallowing the whole vine. 

Then, like a precise calculating machine, he grabbed the top of the wall and heaved himself up with his strong arms. He bent his back, unerringly dodging the flames, extremely agile, not letting the fire burn a single hair. There was a whistle in the distance. 

The crows madly drawn by the firelight blocked his line of sight. The Magician had no attention to spare, and Huang Jinchen once again disappeared from his field of vision. 

Just then, the sound of clapping suddenly came from the depths of the alley. Kou Tong walked out from there step by step. There was no hurry in his steps, as though he was only casually walking by. With his head slightly lowered, he took a pair of white gloves from his pocket and put them on, neither fast nor slow. The hem of his long trench coat dragged beside him. His hair lay on the bridge of his nose. He lilted his head slightly, and the strand of hair fell at the corner of his eye. It was the same color as his eyes—black as night. 

He walked through the boundary between dawn and first light. He seemed to be wrapped in mist. 

The Magician looked at him and automatically implemented his master Qin Qin’s second order, “capture Kou Tong.” So he gave up on chasing Huang Jinchen. Like the first time, maintaining a very inhuman posture, he floated three feet up into the air, gave an elegant bow, and made a gesture of invitation. He turned to go back. 

“This card isn’t skilled at violence. You could say that he also has some attack capabilities, but in fact, what he is more skilled at is deception and temptation. Every tool has its strengths and weaknesses. The best user may not necessarily be able to do anything, but at least they will understand how to use everything for its proper purpose, how to use their tools to complement each other, bring out each other’s strengths and make up for each other’s weaknesses. Obviously, for a woman absorbed in delusions who hasn’t received a great deal of education, this is a rather high degree of difficulty.” 

The Magician walked for a time but found that Kou Tong wasn’t following. He looked back and saw the man quietly standing in the depths of the alley, with a seeming trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth, watching the Magician go without a care. 

The Magician became uncertain. He turned hesitantly and took a step forward. But probably because he instinctively disliked the little lane behind Kou Tong with its invisible end, he only approached it by a small step. He softly said, “Our master invites you to return, sir.” 

Kou Tong didn’t speak. He kept his eyes fixed on the Magician with an enigmatic smile. 

The crows were influenced by the will of their master. They settled one by one on top of the wall, looking at Kou Tong with their bright red eyes. They seemed a little frightening, but Kou Tong took no notice. Even when a crow landed on his shoulder, he actually stroked the crow’s head. Sadly, the moment his fingers touched the crow, it turned back into paper. 

Kou Tong caught the piece of black paper cut into the form of a crow and casually folded it, rolling up the edges of the paper and turning it into the shape of a flower. The Magician could no longer control his curiosity and took another step forward, looking carefully at Kou Tong’s long, slender, agile fingers. 

The back of Kou Tong’s hand suddenly rose, blocking the Magician’s view, then quickly moved away once more—the paper flower in his hand was gone, having turned into a real flower that seemed to still have dew on it. 

The Magician stared—though this was only a little magic trick, he still felt that he had been challenged. 

Just then, the lilies and roses on him, as though vying for territory, bloomed, waned, and changed, stretch after stretch, faster and faster. 

He imitated Kou Tong’s movements, grabbing a crow turning it into paper. Then he pinched out a flower in his hand. He shook it, and the fake flower had turned into a real flower. Raising the flower, the Magician looked up at Kou Tong, but Kou Tong shook his head, smiling, then turned and walked into the little alley. 

Rejected by his audience! 

The Magician followed without hesitation, making a sudden turn after Kou Tong. A blinding light came from the corner. The Magician felt his eyes dazzled by something—a mirror! 

He was startled and retreated, but just then, a bucket of water suddenly splashed over his head. The Magician gave a start. Someone cried out, “He Xiaozhi!” 

Before he could work out what this meant, the ground suddenly vanished from beneath the Magician’s feet, and he fell straight down. 

Huang Jinchen immediately spilled the prepared bucket of grit, perfectly turning the water into mud. The briefly-appearing “mirror” was thus broken, and time jammed perfectly. 

Kou Tong stuck out his head and gave a thumbs up in the direction of a mirror in a corner. “Well done, young man!” 

He Xiaozhi only then shyly walked out. “I…I don’t know. Is he gone?” 

“Take a look.” Kou Tong pointed into the sky. 

The crows filling the whole sky above the city and blocking out the sun had all turned into papers that were slowly floating down. From the ground, they looked like a thick, black snowfall—but before they could reach the ground, they all turned into ash and were scattered by the wind. 

“The mirror is still there. We can go have a look.” As Kou Tong spoke, he stroked the back of He Xiaozhi’s head and led him in the direction where the mirror was standing. 

“Wait!” The neglected Huang Jinchen suddenly called him to a stop, looking at Kou Tong with a grievance. He pointed at the tip of his own nose. “What about me? You haven’t praised me yet!” 

“Well done, Da Huang!” Kou Tong extended a hand. He had planned to make the same thumbs up gesture, but looking at Huang Jinchen’s smug expression, he switched fingers at the last moment, changing to his middle finger. 

“I’ve never bungled an assignment.” Huang Jinchen sat on top of the wall, swinging his legs, looking down at Kou Tong from on high. “Though I know you want to offer your services in bed, you still shouldn’t be so direct, darling.” 

Then he quickly jumped off the wall and happily followed Kou Tong. The moment he went into the mirror, he put an arm around his shoulders and entered Lao Tian’s country estate leaning on him. 

The Magician had turned into a card, lying quietly in the field at the other end of the mirror. 

Kou Tong picked up the card and tore it to shreds. Then he quietly said to the other two, “Let’s go back. We won’t bother Lao Tian.” 

Without the crows, the power could be repaired when it was daylight. He could take the opportunity to sleep. When the power had been restored, he could begin analyzing the signal received by the control box. 

The familiar feeling of crossing over came, and the three of them carefully returned home. 

He Xiaozhi suddenly asked, “Actually…I don’t really understand. Why did he change into a card when he got there?” 

“Because according to Lao Yao’s analysis, the Magician’s power comes from the unknown, and the second time axis just happens to be a place that kills ‘the unknown.’ There is no life there. Everything is perpetual,” Kou Tong said. 

“But Lao Tian and Huanhuan, and the flowers…aren’t they life?” 

“Life is impermanence.” Kou Tong patted him on the shoulder. “Perpetual things can never be called life.”