Yu Sheng had no idea why the woman across from him—the one who claimed to be the director of the Special Affairs Bureau—had suddenly frozen up. He simply sized her up with some curiosity, and when she didn't speak, he took the initiative to break the ice: “Say, the level of protocol your Special Affairs Bureau uses when it ‘contacts’ a person of interest is pretty high, huh? I figured it'd be Li Lin and the others who'd come meet me—never expected to run right into the director. Is it always like this for you all?”
Baili Qing quickly recovered her usual detached composure at his words. “No. Only when the situation is special.” “When the situation is special?”
“For instance, someone who has long lived in a foreign domain yet has gone on living in the boundary zone as an ‘ordinary person’ for over twenty years... a ‘strange one,’” Baili Qing said, looking into Yu Sheng's eyes. “Sorry—I hope you don't mind me referring to you that way.”
“Uh, I don't mind, but am I really that strange in your eyes?” Yu Sheng was a little embarrassed. “Seeing the reactions Li Lin and Xu Jiali had before, it's the same—my way of living really did surprise them, though I suppose it's not hard to understand.”
“Perhaps you haven't noticed it yourself,” Baili Qing said with a sigh. “Many people in the Special Affairs Bureau have been watching your movements. Just in the past few days... a great many operatives have been busy over this.”
Yu Sheng's mouth fell open a little. “...Huh?”
Baili Qing looked at him. “You have an ability to ‘open doors,’ don't you?”
“Ah, yeah,” Yu Sheng nodded, reached out and grabbed a handful of the empty air beside him, and a door materialized out of nothing at his side. “Li Lin and the others and I used this thing to get back—”
Before he could finish, the woman across from him suddenly raised a hand. “There's no need for a demonstration!” Baili Qing, always calm and aloof, rarely got this worked up.
Yu Sheng sheepishly let go of the door handle. Seeing her reaction, he vaguely caught on. “Uh... from the looks of it, my opening doors affects you all, huh?”
“When you open a door, the entire boundary zone detects spacetime tremors of unknown origin,” Baili Qing said bluntly. “The staff responsible for monitoring it have been quite vocal in their complaints lately—you really don't feel anything at all?”
Yu Sheng's expression went a little blank, and a subtle look crept into his eyes. After a good while, he shook his head with an odd expression. “No feeling... So it turns out that opening a door makes an impact big enough to cover the whole boundary zone? Does that mean I'd better not use this ability anymore?”
He clearly wasn't happy saying it. After all, the “door” really was handy; he'd only recently been getting the hang of this ability and had started to get a taste of how convenient it was. And now the Special Affairs Bureau people suddenly came over and said the thing was a public nuisance... that was a bit awkward.
But judging by the attitude of this female director before him, the scale of the “nuisance” his door-opening caused seemed... to be no small thing. That was a bit awkward, too.
Baili Qing naturally noticed Yu Sheng's mood. After thinking briefly, she shook her head. “I'm only making a suggestion. I hope that from now on you can try to keep the frequency of your ‘opening doors’ under some control—at the very least, don't open over a hundred rifts in a single night like before, or at least give advance notice. After all, this is your ability, and it hasn't actually caused any substantial damage to the boundary zone; in principle, we can't directly forbid such behavior—of course, on the condition that you're willing, under a legal identity, to cooperate with us in some registration. In turn, we'll accommodate your ability and make some technical adjustments to our monitoring methods.”
Yu Sheng was a little surprised.
This female director looked cold and stern in temperament, giving off the feeling of someone very hard to get along with. Yet he hadn't expected her to actually be quite... reasonable.
As for the “over a hundred rifts opened in a single night” she'd mentioned, Yu Sheng of course knew exactly what that was about the moment he heard it. At the time he really hadn't felt anything, but now, just imagining it, he could picture just how big a commotion he'd actually kicked up that night—and despite that, this “Director Baili Qing” before him was even willing to sit down and resolve the matter with him in a reasonable, consultative way, even coming over in person to talk it out..
Yu Sheng wasn't some brash fifteen- or sixteen-year-old hothead; he of course knew that, from the “official” side, this already counted as an enormous proactive gesture of goodwill.
This “reasonableness” even caught him a little off guard—the moment Baili Qing had brought up the “nuisance” business, he'd already been braced for a battle of wits with the Special Affairs Bureau, but before he could even throw that punch, the cotton was already plastered to his face.
Instead, he felt a little embarrassed. “Well, that's easy enough—registering certainly won't be a problem... but I've got a few questions. Could you answer them for me first?” Baili Qing nodded. “Of course. What would you like to ask?”
“First—this ‘Special Affairs Bureau’ of yours... what kind of organization is it, exactly?” Yu Sheng promptly sorted out the questions he'd long kept bottled up inside and spoke, his expression serious. “What's its nature? How wide is its jurisdiction?”
“Is that all you're curious about?” Baili Qing seemed a little surprised by the questions Yu Sheng was focused on, but she quickly went on. “The Special Affairs Bureau—its full name is the ‘Special Security and Service Support Bureau.’ It is a department directly administered by the Council, the highest governing body of the boundary zone, and it is also the boundary zone's highest-level official department for handling all manner of ‘extraordinary incidents’ involving foreign domains, entities, anomalies, and the like. If you split the boundary zone into a ‘natural’ side and a ‘non-natural’ side, then you can consider us the highest authority in charge of the ‘non-natural’ side.
“But our scope of activity—or rather, our jurisdiction—is not limited to the boundary zone alone. I don't know whether you've already learned about the special nature of the boundary zone...” Baili Qing paused and looked into Yu Sheng's eyes.
“The special nature of the boundary zone.” Yu Sheng frowned, immediately recalling the various pieces of information he'd heard from Irene before, as well as one thing he'd come to realize when opening those doors that led to distant lands—
this world had far more than just a single boundary zone; beyond this bizarre “city” lay countless “distant lands.”
“I know a little, roughly,” Yu Sheng said as he thought. “From its name, it seems to connect to a lot of places? I hear there's every kind of strange thing here—they're just all hidden beneath a ‘normal’ surface..”
“Hiding the things that exceed common sense, that exceed the boundary zone's ‘baseline,’ keeping this city running and developing according to ‘standard parameters’—that is one of the Special Affairs Bureau's jobs,” Baili Qing said with a slight nod. “Just as you understand it, this place is connected to many other places, and the number and breadth of those connections... exceed anyone's imagination. You can picture the entire world as a great ‘net’ woven from countless transit lines. These ‘transit routes’ do not exist in the physical dimension, and ordinary people cannot sense them, but on the ‘non-natural’ side they intertwine and influence one another, and there is a single place where all the lines converge..
“That is the boundary zone.”
Baili Qing paused briefly, and only continued once she was sure Yu Sheng could fully grasp all this.
“And the Special Affairs Bureau's work—first, within the boundary zone, to maintain the boundary between the ‘natural’ and the ‘non-natural,’ to ensure order on the ‘non-natural’ side; and second, to deal with all the threats that spread over from the ‘transit network,’ everything that points toward this ‘point of convergence’—whether they come from just inches away, or from deep space thirty-six billion light-years distant.”
Yu Sheng's eyes widened, and only after several seconds did he blurt out, “...Isn't the gap between those two a bit too big?”
“To the boundary zone's special properties, the distance is the same,” Baili Qing said calmly, and raised a hand to point at Yu Sheng. “And to you—isn't it the same too?”
Yu Sheng was taken aback for a moment, then quickly understood what her words meant.
“Among those hundred-plus rifts, the ones pointing to more than ten billion light-years away were no fewer than double digits,” Baili Qing said evenly. Yu Sheng said nothing.
His expression was very calm, but inside his thoughts were churning.
In fact, he wasn't surprised; when those doors had opened, he'd already made that guess—just how far away were those distant scenes, really?
He had no definite answer, but when he'd been discussing it enthusiastically with Irene, he'd felt that... some of them might reach the very limit of his imagination. The number he now heard from Baili Qing felt like nothing more than a “footnote” suddenly appended to what he'd imagined in that moment.
What truly stunned Yu Sheng was the “coverage” of the “Special Affairs Bureau”—he had met Li Lin, an “operative” who'd once stocked up on instant noodles with him at the supermarket and who, when tailing him, disguised himself as one of those flashy young guys squatting by the roadside scrolling short videos (he'd put it together by now). At best, the guy's vibe was that of a neighborhood beat cop, and yet here was this character... suddenly being told that the organization behind him had a background of “stars and seas.” That was genuinely hard to imagine..
But Yu Sheng hesitated for quite a while and, in the end, didn't have the nerve to voice this particular sentiment to the “director” before him. Mainly, he was worried it might affect Li Lin's career prospects.
Yu Sheng didn't speak, and neither did Baili Qing, so the two of them fell into a brief silence. It wasn't until half a minute had passed that Baili Qing broke the silence on her own initiative: “Is there anything else you'd like to ask?”
“Yes,” Yu Sheng said, immediately sweeping away the messy thoughts in his mind, and after organizing his words, he spoke. “Next question—Jiecheng... is there only one?”
Chapter 71