Su Qing first blearily opened his eyes and felt himself held in someone’s arms. Then he looked around and was thoroughly awakened—by fear. 

Let anyone find themselves flying through the air head-down at maglev speeds—they would all be scared speechless. 

Chen Lin felt the person in his arms falteringly clutch him like an octopus and knew he had woken up. He laughed. “You woke up pretty quickly. Well, how about it, feeling good?” 

Su Qing was silent for a while, feeling that if he opened his mouth, the wind would choke him. Then he gripped the back of Chen Lin’s coat tightly and stammered, “I…I didn’t…buckle my seatbelt.” 

Chen Lin was silent. He was finally beginning to understand that under this delicate exterior were hidden nerves as crude as a bucket. God really could skimp on making people. 

Chen Lin suddenly leapt up. Su Qing felt himself helplessly suspended. Though he had managed to scrape through university physics only by treating the teacher to dinner, he still understood that if either he or Chen Lin couldn’t keep a firm grip now, he would fall out of the sky and make a big hole in the ground like a meteorite! 

So the meteorite Su began to howl. 

His screams mixed with Chen Lin’s clear laughter in an exceedingly thrilling spectacle—luckily the rumble of the cars passing in the street was extremely loud, or else this scene of voices coming from invisible people would have made it onto a paranormal TV show. 

Chen Lin leapt up, then fell back down. Su Qing rapidly became heavy and then just as rapidly weightless. His face was white. 

The scene in front of his eyes changed constantly. Su Qing didn’t have the strong constitution of a blue seal. Soon his head was spinning, and he had to close his eyes, forcing down dizzy nausea. After some time, Chen Lin finally put him down. 

Su Qing’s feet touched the ground and his legs folded. He nearly paid his respects to the ground once more. Luckily Chen Lin was there to help him get his footing. 

Chen Lin stuck up his index finger and blinked at Su Qing, who absolutely didn’t understand what was happening. Like a child committing a prank, he quietly said, “Don’t make a sound.” 

Su Qing glared at him. 

Chen Lin took him to a small residential home. He turned back and saw Su Qing looking around in all directions, then grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him through the gate. Su Qing saw him actually get out a key and unlock the door and couldn’t resist asking, “Is this…your place?” 

Chen Lin laughed quietly, nodded, and opened the door. “Come in.” 

Su Qing hesitated. He knew he didn’t have any freedom and had to follow him inside, but he hadn’t expected Chen Lin to live in such a “human” place—the house wasn’t large, not in a luxury estate, and had no connection to a “mansion.” It was extremely ordinary, and the furnishings inside were simple and comfortable. 

“Where I lived before,” Chen Lin said, pointing to the couch. “You can sit down.” 

Su Qing’s throat bobbed; he decided that a wise man knows when not to fight and acquiescently sat down. His movements were cautious, as though he was afraid that an alien life form would pop out of the couch and bite his venerable buttocks. 

Chen Lin poured him a cup of water and felt his forehead, looking him over in some surprise. “You seem so soft. I didn’t expect you to have a fairly resilient mind. I don’t go out ‘hunting’ often, so I couldn’t quite control myself. I figure that the average person would have lost his mind. I didn’t expect you to recover so soon…and it seems that you weren’t even affected.” 

Su Qing didn’t answer. He lowered his head and drank in silence, thinking, Oh, go banana your guava. 

Chen Lin looked at him and laughed, then got out the switch for the magnetic neckband. Su Qing tensed up, guardedly watching Chen Lin. 

He saw Chen Lin open up the center of the switch. A little screen popped up from inside. He pressed lightly on it a few times. Su Qing felt as though several ropes appeared in the air and lightly wrapped around his limbs. It was just a moment. Before he could work out what this was, the strange feeling vanished. 

Chen Lin put away the switch. “I have some business to take care of. Don’t run around.” 

Su Qing nibbled the edge of the cup and rolled his eyes at him. But Chen Lin seemed very unconcerned. He looked at him, then left. He didn’t even lock the door from outside. 

As soon as he was gone, Su Qing jumped off the couch and swore, “You shitheel, you think I’ll stay put just because you told me to?” 

He made two circles around the couch and kicked it. That didn’t scratch the itch, so he ground his foot into the couch, leaving a black footprint. Only then did he feel he had gotten his money’s worth out of his vandalism. He muttered, “Son of a bitch lives in this human nest, does he really think it means he isn’t some kind of freak?” 

Then Su Qing laughed nastily and heroically kicked the coffee table over like a bandit. He boldly opened the door and prepared to go out. The moment he walked out the door, the thing around his neck suddenly tightened. Then, as if some switch had been turned on, the magnetic neckband flared up. 

Su Qing gritted his teeth and clutched the doorframe. Enduring the pain, he took another step forward. The magnetic neckband seemed to be trying to snap his neck. With each step he took, the pain became more intense. 

He accidentally bit through his lip. Pressing down on his neck, he took another step—in his experience, when it hurt bad enough, your sense of pain would go numb. But he was wrong. 

When he had taken three steps, Su Qing couldn’t stand up anymore. He plopped to the ground and nearly couldn’t resist rolling around. 

His first attempt failed. He practically crawled back inside on all fours. Once through the door, the magnetic neckband calmed down. Su Qing sat in a heap at the door with his back against the doorframe, gasping deep breaths. After a long time, his breathing calmed. He spat bloody saliva into his hand. 

Su Qing let out a long sigh and raised his head. After the shock, his head was clearer. He thought, What should I do now? Sit obediently in the house waiting for that four-eyes Chen to come back? Or go wreck the place? 

Su Qing shook his head. He could imagine what Chen Lin would do if he came back and found a mess—he would call over a crowd of his henchmen and wave his hand, and all the furniture would be replaced. It would be useless work, a waste of energy. 

Anyway, he was seriously exhausted and didn’t have the strength to play an amateur Sun Wukong getting up to mischief. So Su Qing began to ponder. Chen Lin had left him here…and gone to do what? 

He had been associating closely with Cheng Weizhi for over a month and had been somewhat influenced by the old professor. He couldn’t help applying his usual methods of thought to considering this question—had today’s “feast” ended? If it had ended, why not return to that carefully-hidden rathole of a base? Why had he wasted all that roof-leaping, wall-scaling power to bring Su Qing to this place, then left him here? 

Was Su Qing in his way? 

Su Qing climbed up and poured himself another cup of water, then collapsed on the couch. He washed his bitten lip as he continued to think—what could he be in the way of? 

Chen Lin had such vast powers. He could keep him from speaking with the press of a button and confine him inside a circle with another press. Carrying a hundred-some pounds of grown man, he could still leap around in defiance of the force of gravity. So what…?

Suddenly, a light went on in Su Qing’s mind. He remembered Cheng Weizhi once referring vaguely to the “RZ Unit.” He had heard this term from both Shi Huizhang and Chen Lin. It seemed that unlucky Hu Bugui was a member. 

Could it be that for their large-scale criminal activities, they were being pursued by this legendary “RZ Unit?” 

Su Qing blindly emulated Cheng Weizhi’s “propositions,” but he found that he had no grounds to use as proof, only wild guesses. 

In fact, he had made a lucky guess—Hu Bugui kept in hot pursuit on Chen Lin’s heels. After five minutes, not a second more, the image darkened. When they looked again, he couldn’t be found. 

Before Hu Bugui could speak, Fang Xiu shouted into the walkie-talkie: “Lao Xu, how can you drop the ball at a critical moment like this? It’s humiliating for all of us!” 

Xu Ruchong was so busy he was going around in circles. He had no time to spare to pay attention to him. All he wanted was to grow a third hand. 

Hu Bugui spun the steering wheel in a big arc, turning onto a vast stretch of lawn. When they came to a deserted place, he ordered briefly: “Split up, stay in contact.” 

Then the whole car actually split into two halves, the driver’s cab completely breaking off from the rear. Two more wheels appeared on the front and back. There was a clatter in front of Fang Xiu. The inner wall of the car opened and “re-grew” a driver’s cab.

When the three of them looked again, Hu Bugui had vanished. Only his voice came faintly from the comms: “He must have noticed us just now. That man…I went up against him once. He wouldn’t lead us here for no purpose.” 

In his haste, Xu Ruchong spared the energy to respond, “I told you it was a trap…” 

Hu Bugui ignored him and continued: “This man isn’t the same as the other blue seals. I personally think that rather than calling this a trap for us, we should say this is a trap for his companions.” 

Xu Ruchong still wouldn’t give in. “Captain Hu, how can you guarantee that your idea is correct?” 

Hu Bugui paused. “Xu Ruchong, how long before the pursuing image can be restored?” 

Xu Ruchong wilted and didn’t answer. 

Qin Luo said, “I have pretty much all of his data collected here. His name is Chen Lin, a Type 1 Conversion Type Blue Seal, so the grey seals he uses are the very uncommon Type 2s. It’s hard to find a suitable grey seal. With this restriction, he can’t ‘eat’ often. My guess is that he’s in a bad position among the blue seals.” 

“But he doesn’t have a dependent or compliant personality,” Hu Bugui said, “so for him, if he’s smart enough, rather than dealing with us, it would be better to choose to use us to deal with the other blue seals.” 

Xu Ruchong butted in: “No wonder you didn’t hesitate to follow when you saw him on the screen, but…” 

Hu Bugui and Fang Xiu spoke in unison: “Xu Ruchong, shut up. The image!” 

Xu Ruchong sighed and felt himself move another step further from the field work he yearned for day and night. His fingers tapped out dense strings of commands. Then he hit enter. “OK, it’s restored, but if he’s still moving quickly, in another five minutes we’ll lose…huh?” 

Chen Lin’s figure appeared on the screen again. He was alone, his back to the screen, his hands stuck into his coat pockets. He was walking along a street. The grey seal he had been holding was gone. They didn’t know where he had stashed the the unfortunate youth in five minutes’ worth of time. 

He seemed to have a particular reaction to the spying gaze. When the “monitor projection” fixed on him again, Chen Lin suddenly came to a halt, turned his head, and made eye contact with the members of the RZ Unit. 

The people in the car all froze simultaneously. A mild male voice came from the comms: “A blue seal’s sensory system is a magical thing. Reasonably speaking, the physiological structure shouldn’t be anything different from a normal human’s, but there’s an enormous difference in function… Of course, I’m personally more inclined to say that the blue seals have recovered some latent potential humanity lost during the course of evolution. This is a very interesting problem, very interesting…” 

“Dr. Lu, I don’t think it’s interesting at all. I feel like my head is so swollen it’s nearly overloaded.” Fang Xiu slammed on the gas pedal and bitterly followed Chen Lin. 

Hu Bugui immediately pulled up a map of the area Chen Lin could have passed through in the gap between vanishing and reappearing. It was likely Su Qing had been hidden there. The veins on Hu Bugui’s hand stood out. He thought, no matter how deep he had to dig, he had to find this person today. 

Su Qing was turning circles around Chen Lin’s “former residence” like a donkey pulling a millstone. He had turned it over and over in his mind and thought he had better run. 

Because he was rather ignorant and had never heard of such a thing as someone simply dying of pain, he decided to make like a martyr and fight the villains to the end—Su Qing breathed in deeply from the diaphragm, opened the door, backed up a few steps for a more convenient run-up, then charged out in large strides.