Chapter 258 - Veils of Enigma (1/2)
We finally got Chongxi to wake up the next morning, not without any difficulty. He rubbed his eyes drowsily as he clambered up, looking at us with a sleepy and blank look. “What time is it? It is time to go?” “What go?! It’s already morning!” Lin Feng bellowed, slapping the back of his friend’s head.
Chongxi spun around, his eyes blinking wide with confusion until he saw the bright, vibrant rays of sunlight coming through the window. He scrambled up quickly. “What happened yesterday, Shiyan? I was dreaming! I dreamt about us being trapped somewhere, and then…”
I cast him an ugly look. “That was no dream,” I uttered, “We were really trapped last night inside the pocket dimension of the Bamen Dunjia bounded field. Fortunately, we were able to get out, all thanks to you, otherwise, we would still be inside by now! Somehow in your sleep, you were able to cast the Windchaser magic!” “Ah?!” Chongxi gasped, hardly believing a word I said. “Good job. Just like that, you’ve learned Zhu Mei’s most prized technique,” Lin Feng quipped beside me. “But since when?! How come I don’t know anything about this?!” Chongxi muttered with shock.
We recounted to him what happened last night inside the Bamen Dunjia enchantment and explained with judicious detail how the Windchaser technique he cast had helped us in the nick of time. “Me?!” He breathed. “The Windchaser magic?! Come on, how this can be impossible?!” Lin Feng and I traded a look. I was right. It was by accident and luck that he managed to use such high magic and it would be pointless to expect him to be able to use it again in the future.
Lu Shengnan, now having recovered from the events last night, was fiddling with her dounao (or doufunao, a Chinese soybean pudding) and she asked, “What’s a Windchaser?” “Have you ever seen in TVs how wizards can cover a lot of distance with a single step?” Lu Shengnan shook her head. “It’s magic that allows its user to shrink or expand distance at will. It’s high magic and you won’t understand anything even if I try to explain,” Lin Feng muttered. That earned him a scowl from Lu Shengnan who pouted her lips indignantly, no longer interested in delving further and took a crunchy bite off her youtiao (Chinese fried dough stick).
“Do you have Huang Li’s contact number?” I asked Lu Shengnan, chomping down my breakfast, “Should we not call her for our wages now after a job well done?” She stopped short, unmoving with a fixed stare at me before she exploded. “Oh, my God! I’ve completely forgotten about that! Wait up! I’ll give her a call!” And she rummaged for her phone.
She clicked on Huang Li’s number and waited, listening to her phone. But her face formed into a frown and she put down her phone seconds later, saying flatly, “It’s dead. She’s turned off her phone.” The rest of us looked at each other. Huang Li must have found out what happened here. I chuckled. “All right then. We’ll go back with Shengnan to her teaching center after this. Let’s see if Huang Li’s still there.” Lu Shengnan bobbed her assent but she looked worried just a beat later. “Surely you won’t just break out into a fight there? Or anywhere outside, for that matter?” I cackled, shaking my head. “Course not. At any rate, I don’t think Huang Li has such guts to do so, or else, she would have long come to Wu Zhong to find me. There would have been no need for a trap then.”
I took a cab back to the pub we went to last night where we collected our car and Lu Shengnan drove hers and we followed her lead back to her teaching center on Xinhua West Road. With only the three of us in the car, Lin Feng finally asked, “Shiyan. You’re sure we can depend on Lu Shengnan? I still get the feeling that the visit to the pub yesterday was a ruse to get us drunk so that Huang Li could trap us… Just seems too much of a coincidence to ignore, ain’t it?”
Without hesitation, I placed an arm on the car window sill and said, “So far, she looks innocent. But we have to be wary of her too. Be it Huang Li or Lu Shengnan, everything is happening too quickly.” Lin Feng nodded. “But you told Lu Shengnan quite a lot last night. You shouldn’t have, if that’s the case.” “It’s a test. I wanted to find out if she was indeed Huang Li’s cohort. I was observing her during my story and that was how I concluded that she was only an unwitting pawn used to lure us. She’s not unlike Cao Xuedong. Cao Xuedong might be a cohort of Huang Li’s but Huang Li has conveniently kept a lot of details from him. I looked at Lu Shengnan closely last night when I told her Huang Li’s true purpose to abduct me and she should have been looking more collected if she was really part of Huang Li’s team. But she was shocked. Positively shocked.”
Chongxi’s head peeked from the center, between our seats and said, “But what if she’s hiding it well?” “Tell me. What do you think accomplice, or accomplices, the one who is or are oblivious of what’s going on, would do?” I chuckled. Chongxi pondered for seconds and replied, “What would they do… Cower or retreat to the sidelines to get a better read of the situation, I guess?” Rubbing my chin, I said, “Yep. If it were me, this would be good timing to remain on the sidelines for now.”
We found a parking slot to stop our car and we followed Lu Shengnan back to her teaching center. We waited for a little more than an hour there until it was almost nine when Huang Li finally arrived.