Chapter 324 - Spring Cleaning (1/2)
The incident of the unconscious man on the train was no more but a small episode that quickly passed. After discussing the matter for a while, the passengers quickly shifted their attention back to what they were doing. Before contacting Why Do You Always Look Unhappy (# 0′), Zhang Heng checked out the train, using the excuse of filling up water. However, he saw nobody behaving abnormally. The person who had attacked the middle-aged man was most likely not on the train.
After returning to her seat, the TOEFL girl still chatted enthusiastically with Zhang Heng. Zhang Heng’s thoughts, however, were still on what happened earlier. Obviously, the matter wasn’t so simple. This wasn’t the end, since the three major guilds had been offering handsome rewards to capture the mysterious woman that appeared suddenly at that night’s auction.
Everyone present at the auction got played by her, and the three major guilds wanted her to pay for what she did to them. More important for them was to retrieve the Grade B-game item, Dreamland of Death from her. Since they still couldn’t locate this weapon of mass destruction, nobody from the guilds felt safe. After all, nobody knew if they would end up like Silver Wing’s former guild leader.
Zhang Heng had been playing solo for some time, and when the participated in his only single-player-with-competitive-mode quest, no one else ended up alive. Thus, he should be relatively safe for now. Under normal circumstances, he shouldn’t be a prime target. It was simply a coincidence that the killer chose the man next to him since he changed seats with the boy earlier.
Nothing extraordinary happened until the train arrived at the next station.
The TOEFL girl wanted to get Zhang Heng’s contact, but she was too shy to ask. As she watched him disappear into the crowd with a backpack and suitcase, she could not help but feel a sense of loss. She knew that they would never see each other again.
Zhang Heng did not bother his granddad to pick him up from the train station. However, his grandpa came anyway with his old Volkswagen. As they met, he hugged his grandfather outside the exit before placing his luggage in the trunk before entering the passenger’s side. This reminded him of another incident. He was an apprentice of Takeda in the Tokyo Drift quest, managing to learn some rather impressive drifting techniques from him. And he even won a death race. Yet, he still couldn’t drive in the real world.
It was because he did not have a driver’s license yet. Perhaps it was time to get his licence once and for all.
“How is school life?” Grandpa asked while driving
“It’s not bad. Same old.”
Even without warnings from the weird man in the Tang costume, Zhang Heng couldn’t possibly tell his granddad about what happened to him recently. Let alone making anybody understand and accept such things, there was nothing the old man could do but worry if he knew about it.
However, after the Zavilcha incident, Zhang Heng wondered if he should remind his grandpa to look over his shoulders for any threats. After contemplating for a while, though, he knew how difficult a normal person would react even if they knew about in advance. And as a part of the older generation of intellectuals, grandpa held a firm belief in Marxism. He wasn’t one to get involved in such matters.
“You seem to have matured a lot recently,” smiled grandpa as he looked at Zhang Heng through the rearview mirror. “Very well, don’t be as frivolous like your father. A man should look like a man. Speak less, and do more.”
“Why then, did you let him marry my mother in the first place?” Zhang Heng asked while opening a box of CDs. He took one out called “Qi Li Xiang”, an album about the same age as this car, and inserted it into the player.
After a while, the catchy tunes of Jay Chou started to play over the stereo.
Grandpa harrumphed, “Your mother’s always had a bad taste since she was a child. Inherited it from your grandma…”