The young man on the screen heard the whistle and squeezed right into the crowd like a child slinking off after doing a bad deed. He turned back and pulled a face. He was extremely lively. Among the crowd of people whose expressions were numb or terrified or insane, he was like a unique splash of bright color. 

The coffee in Chen Lin’s hand was no longer steaming, but he showed no signs of drinking it. With his chin in one hand and his eyes narrowed, he watched the playback of the security camera recordings. 

Without Su Qing knowing, he had watched many days of security camera footage. Now Chen Lin’s mind was a little numb. Suddenly, like Su Qing on the first day he had become a little grey, he too wondered, was he still human? 

He could hear the subtlest feelings in many people’s hearts. He had superhuman strength. He possessed vast riches. In this world, he had only to want something to have it. 

So-called power sometimes doesn’t depend on the number of followers you possess, on how many people will come at your call. As long as you hold something that surpasses others, something that places you above others—as long as ordinary lives are like something you can grasp with your fingertips at any time, break at any time—then you hold authority.  

Like Superman, like Spider-Man, like the omnipotent martial arts masters in the stories who can leap onto roofs and vault over walls—it’s hard to say whether these people were designed to save the world or only to show the fascination power holds for people. 

It captivates people, and it frightens them. It is like a double-edged sword hanging over people’s heads, rising and falling, making them think themselves now omnipotent and now powerless. 

Just then, a human figure silently appeared standing behind him. Chen Lin didn’t turn back. His eyes remained fixed to the screen, once more rewinding the last several days’ scenes of Su Qing schooling the Type 4s and playing them again. He shook his cold coffee, then said to the person behind him, “Jiang Lan, don’t just show up behind people. Sometimes I’m distracted. I might automatically attack you.” 

Jiang Lan gave a cold laugh. “You think I’m afraid of you?” 

Her eyes swept the screen, seeing the heroic excerpt of Su Qing stamping on a man. She exclaimed in surprise. “I’ve made an error of judgment. That pretty boy isn’t gutless?” 

Chen Lin casually spilled the coffee into a flower pot next to him and looked at her. “What, you want to vent your spleen on behalf of your little grey?”

Jiang Lan casually sat on his desk, her attention still on the screen. She absently responded, “The little grey? The little greys aren’t my people, only my tools. If your chopsticks knock down my spoon, am I going to break your chopsticks to vent my spleen?” 

Her eyes were like a cat’s, big and round, and seemed to have a trace of peculiar quiet depths, and there was a bit of makeup on her face, giving her a demonic look. Chen Lin’s eyes were hidden behind the lenses of his glasses. He didn’t continue the conversation. 

But Jiang Lan turned to face him. “Shi Huizhang said he was holding a brief meeting to revise the plan for the next feast. Why didn’t you go this time?” 

Chen Lin laughed lightly, mechanically rewound the recording, and played it again. His manner was irreverent, as though the question wasn’t worth a response. 

“Shi Huizhang,” he said. From his expression and his tone, it was as if that name was a piece of straw he had put in his mouth to chew and disdainfully spat back out. “What the hell is he?” 

At the mention of Shi Huizhang, his drained self-confidence came flying back. This was the power of comparison—because he thought that, if you said he was a superhuman as strong as an ox, then Shi Huizhang was the ox. While they seemed to have the same power, they were still beings from completely different dimensions. 

Jiang Lan said, “You look down on him, but Gui Song and Luo Xiaofeng take Shi-ge as their guide, and Li Gu goes where the current takes him. If you oppose him so openly, aren’t you afraid Shi Huizhang will trip you up?” 

Chen Lin exited the video and closed the laptop. He straightened his clothes and looked at Jiang Lan. “Don’t forget…” As for what she shouldn’t forget, he didn’t breathe a word, only tapped lightly on his collar as though hinting something. “It’s not Shi Huizhang’s place to throw his weight around.” 

Jiang Lan’s expression curdled. Seeing Chen Lin heading outside, she couldn’t resist calling him back: “Where are you going?” 

Chen Lin didn’t look back. “Going to have a look at my chopsticks.” 

Jiang Lan frowned. “Little greys are little greys, not worth a second look. Why do you keep paying attention to him?” 

Chen Lin said, “Even with chopsticks, sometimes you come upon a beautifully carved pair and can’t resist admiring them a little longer before they’re discarded as useless—don’t you think?” Then he gently closed the door and went out. 

Just then, the carved pair of chopsticks Su Qing was making daily strides in his studies—Cheng Weizhi was a good teacher. He thought that this was fate. Would a normal person provoke lunatics? What person, suddenly dropped into a place like this, wouldn’t be too worried about his own life to pay attention to others, wouldn’t be constantly on edge? Tian Feng’s reaction was the normal one. 

Cheng Weizhi didn’t know whether this Su Qing had especially coarse nerves or was himself especially simple. Su Qing could feel afraid, could feel powerless, but these were all passing matters. After a time, he would be back to eating and sleeping and even attempting to think of a way to escape this terrifying grey house. 

Though to Cheng Weizhi, all his ideas, like “sneak some butter and smear the guards’ eyes with it” or “steal a white coat’s almighty little carry-on taser”—he obstinately believed that this object that could strike a person like a thunderbolt was a taser—“and cut down all barriers in our way” or else “pretend to be sick to get anesthetic or something, then knock out a blue seal during the next ‘feast’ and hold him hostage”—they were all lousy and far-fetched. 

But he would still be moved by his never-abandoned spirit. 

Su Qing’s thoughts were very simple. He had never expected that he would die like this, and he absolutely wouldn’t believe it. So he could only firmly trust in the expression “when we get to the mountain, there will be a way through.” 

He believed that Professor Cheng was a very learned person. There were strict guards in the grey house’s corridors. Apart from when the bell rang at mealtimes, no one wandered the halls. Normally, they stayed in their room with nothing to do. The two of them, one with a late-coming desire to learn emerging for the first time in his life, the other with a teaching addiction that hadn’t been satisfied in a long time, simply hit it off from the start. 

So Su Qing got busy, learning every day from Teacher Cheng and doing battle with the Type 4s. Sometimes he won a complete victory, sometimes he was wounded in action, and sometimes he looked into new tactics and strategies. Each day was extremely lively. 

Cheng Weizhi hadn’t clearly said what he used to be a professor of, but he was an excellent tutor. He could tell Su Qing many things. Concretely, he taught principles of logic and psychology, and he could also discourse boundlessly about historical events; he had everything at his fingertips. Now and then he would insert some of his inferences about blue seals and energy crystals. 

“By what mechanism does the energy crystal operate? I considered it at length without being able to understand its mysteries, until one day I heard a bit of conversation between two white coats. Then I learned of the so-called ‘Law of Emotional Attraction.’” 

Today, a Type 4 had gone crazy and scraped Su Qing with a shard of porcelain, drawing blood. Cheng Weizhi had gone out to ask a white coat for a first-aid kit and was carefully bandaging his wound. Su Qing, meanwhile, was becoming tougher the more he fought, and he had become considerably more agile. He had picked up quite an understanding of fighting. He had one leg carelessly crossed over the other while sticking out his bleeding paw, listening to Professor Cheng discuss the energy crystal. Having listened to this point, he couldn’t resist asking, “What does the Law of Emotional Attraction mean?” 

“Have you ever had the feeling that when everyone around you is laughing, it’s easy for you to be driven to laughter as well? And when everyone around you is sad, even if you aren’t sad yourself, you still become sad along with them?” Seeing Su Qing nod thoughtfully, Cheng Weizhi concluded: “That’s the Law of Emotional Attraction in action. Simply put, it means that human emotions with similar origins attract each other.” 

Su Qing, half-understanding, titled his head. “You mean that the energy crystal actually functions as an intermediary, letting some emotion of my own attract those of others? Like…a magnet?” 

“And like a lever—careful not to get the wound wet.” Cheng Weizhi finished tying the bandage for him and admonished him, then drew a lever on paper with one long arm and one short arm. “My understanding is that the energy crystal is like this lever. It uses a comparatively small amount of your own emotions to leverage a large quantity of emotions with a common origin, then guide it into the energy crystal and convert it into energy. If that’s true, then we can come to a conclusion—the energy crystal itself only possesses a certain attribute. It can’t truly distinguish emotions.” 

“What…does that mean?” Su Qing thought that he understood each word individually, but put together they knocked him dizzy.

Cheng Weizhi patiently explained: “It means that the energy crystal is like an animal that can only eat one type of food, but it can’t tell itself what it’s eating.” 

“Oh, it’s stupid.” Saying this, Comrade Su Qing took no notice of the fact that this “stupid” thing existed in his own body. 

Cheng Weizhi smiled. “If the foregoing conclusions are accurate, then we can understand why each person only has one type of energy crystal. The fact that up to this point no one has had two types bears out my conclusion from the opposite direction.” 

Su Qing had just turned a corner, but now he opened his mouth, feeling dizzy again. 

Cheng Weizhi explained: “I don’t know about the blue seals, but a grey seal’s energy crystal is normally externally stimulated. You know that as long as you’re alive, your brain will operate without stopping. All of your emotions maintain a certain balance through subtle proportions in your body’s hormones. If you add yet another energy crystal to this, what will you get?” 

Su Qing pressed on his temples and said, “A big mess.” 

“Right, you get a big mess. Ordinarily it isn’t a problem, but the moment the energy crystal is stimulated, you instinctively begin to absorb emotions. I trust you’ve already felt it. At that time, an energy inside your body absorbs emotions from the outside world. The absorbed emotions will be split into two paths in the instant the new energy crystal forms, then blend with another type of feeling in the new energy crystal. You’ll fall into chaos.” 

Su Qing lay on the table like a dead dog and indicated, “Teacher Cheng, I’m in chaos right now.” 

Cheng Weizhi stood by the window, hands pressing on the window frame, looking at a small patch of woods. The trees were listless in the winter cold. He said, “You know, Su Qing, I actually suspect that there’s a flaw in this energy crystal system, even for the blue seals.” 

Before Su Qing could respond, a voice came from the door: “Oh? What flaw?” 

When he heard this voice, all the hair on the back of Su Qing’s neck stood up.