Good Night, Miss Crow

Picking up the folding knife from the ground, Bai Zhou flicked it open with a crisp *snap*. Beneath the moonlight, the scratched blade showed glints of white through yellowed metal, a telltale sign that this cheap folding knife had seen frequent whetting. "A toy for grown-ups, right?" Bai Zhou blinked. With a loud thud, the skinny man dropped to his knees, begging for mercy with a miserable, tear-streaked face. "Big brother, please, just treat me like a fart and let me blow away! I was only joking with Old Zhao earlier!" "Yeah, yeah!" The muscular thug nodded like a pounding pestle. "We know we were wrong!" *Walk the night too often, and you're bound to meet a ghost!* Where the hell did this brat get a gun?! Although the firearm looked strange and unfamiliar, seeing the boy's calm, fearless composure... It didn't seem fake. The skinny man was closest, and he could even catch the pungent scent of gunpowder wafting from it. —As if the gun had just been fired! This kid was no soft persimmon; he was a solid iron weight clutching a durian. Not only prickly and rock-hard, but stinky too! Faced with their desperate pleas, Bai Zhou shook his head. "I don't think you realize what you did wrong..." They were merely terrified. Yet fear bred only flattery, never genuine goodwill. "Look at me." The dark muzzle of the gun swayed gently before the skinny man's eyes, drawing his gaze along with it involuntarily. A very simple technique of hypnosis. It was completely useless against an Extraordinary, and wouldn't even work on an ordinary, sound-minded person. Against an emotionally unstable individual gripped by sheer terror like the skinny man, however, it hit the mark every time, making him do whatever he was told. ...Gradually, following the swaying muzzle, the skinny man's eyes grew dull and vacant. "What did you mean by 'last time'?" "It was..." Under the muscular thug's dumbfounded, ghost-struck gaze, the skinny man began to answer in a daze, faltering yet obedient. "Last time, a little kid..." "To the black market... we made a fortune." "But soon, we gambled it all away, so..." "...Nobody knows about it." *Made a fortune.* To Bai Zhou, that phrase struck a sensitive chord. The smile on his face gradually faded. As expected. —The one who understands fear best is often the most vicious of all. "Aah... W-witchcraft!" The skinny man snapped out of it, collapsing onto his rear, scrambling and crawling aside with terror in his eyes. In that brief instant just now, his mind had gone completely fuzzy, as if he had been placed under a hex. The bizarre, unprecedented experience terrified him to the marrow. "You're a ghost!" Bai Zhou, however, gave an unrelated answer. "Once upon a time, there was a mermaid who grew tired of life on the ocean floor and wanted to see the warm, wonderful land of legend. "Filled with bright hopes, she paid a tremendous price to reach the land." Bai Zhou had suddenly remembered a story. "...Yet the land was nothing like she had imagined. "She watched with her own eyes as a fisherman pretended to fall into the water. When his companion swam out to save him, the fisherman stole every gold coin from his pockets, then turned around and blamed the rescuer for pushing him in. "She saw impeccably dressed merchants dumping barrel after barrel of foul black sludge into her ocean. "And so, heartbroken and unable to return to the sea, the mermaid became the Lady of the Lake on land. "—And guess what happened next?" "..." The skinny man and the burly man shook their heads in unison, not daring to utter a sound. "Congratulations, you guessed right," Bai Zhou said with an approving nod. "Whenever a woodcutter passed by, she would emerge holding two axes, asking whether they had dropped a gold axe or a silver axe." In the quiet darkness, Bai Zhou slowly holstered his Adjudicator-300 enchanted pistol. This gesture made the skinny man's eyes light up with surprise, while the muscular man in the white vest stared at Bai Zhou's back, itching to make a move. Then, Bai Zhou drew a pitch-black truncheon from behind him. Moonlight gleamed across the darkened surface of the club. Bai Zhou flashed a radiant smile and revealed the ending of the story: "And then, the lovely Lady of the Lake would take those two axes..." "—and chop those greedy, hypocritical humans into mincemeat!" ... Dark clouds slowly drifted away. Tonight's moonlight was exceptionally bright. "This Blue Star... or rather, Tinghai, doesn't seem much better than I expected." Stepping out of the bushes with brisk strides, Bai Zhou walked away under the moonlit sky. "You can't really put it like that." "...There are good people and bad people everywhere," Crow replied softly, walking quietly beside him. "Besides, this is the forgotten fringe of the city—the bottom of the very bottom. "When backed into a corner, people's bottom lines sink remarkably low, if they have any left at all." "True enough..." Bai Zhou shook his head, brushing the mud off his clothes. Dealing with those two had been easy; the real hassle was covering up the traces afterward. Ever cautious, Bai Zhou took his "after-sales service" very seriously. —Yet it was also this incident that made Bai Zhou fully realize how drastically he had transformed over the course of a single night. Two lives had been extinguished by his own hands, yet he felt hardly any emotional recoil. Perhaps the matters involving Adjutant Han and Section Chief Liu had affected him too deeply. He still held reverence for life itself, but precisely because he revered life, he was utterly indifferent toward those who harvested innocent lives at whim. He could no longer trust the so-called efficiency of the Federation's authorities. Besides, people in this world always seemed to believe that bad weeds grow tall and scoundrels live on. That wouldn't do. And so, Bai Zhou figured that running into them was simply the will of Heaven. If he had the power yet did nothing, standing idly by while they continued their wicked deeds... then how was he any different from an accomplice to the perpetrators? If Heaven wouldn't take them, he would. Perhaps this was their "destiny." ... In the end, Bai Zhou walked another street and found a better base of operations in this halted development zone on the outskirts. It was an unfinished villa around five stories high, with a river not far behind it and a highway a short walk to the front. In between, wild weeds and reeds grew rampant. "This is the one," Bai Zhou decided. If he didn't find a temporary shelter soon, the sun would be coming up... He had finally moved into a grand villa of his own. Yet now was not the time to rest. Summoning his remaining energy, Bai Zhou scavenged plenty of discarded industrial materials inside the villa. Using discarded wires and shattered glass, he set up multiple tripwires, concealing them carefully across hallways and stairwells. Rigged to the tripwires were rows of sharp, rusted rebar. ...Bai Zhou even found several mummified dead rats. These were treasures. Ground into powder and paired with small animal bone fragments, they could be used to prepare a warding ritual. —However, Bai Zhou's special training hadn't covered such advanced coursework yet, so Crow had to handle it on his behalf. And so, the abandoned villa was gradually "fleshed out." Pitch-black and devoid of light, it kept every trap thoroughly concealed. Bai Zhou finally felt a modicum of security. —He would set up the rest tomorrow! If any uninvited guest came barging into this "Bai Zhou's Funhouse," they would find far too many surprises awaiting them. He only hoped that this uninvited guest would be pursuers from the Special Control Bureau, rather than some foolish petty thief... *Tap...* Bai Zhou climbed the stairs to the top-floor room and swept the area clean. —Life on the run had cured his minor germaphobia, but not entirely. Although half the wall on the top floor was missing, letting the wind whistle through from two sides, it offered the best panoramic view and the most abundant moonlight. "Finally, time to rest!" Spreading his suit jacket onto the floor, Bai Zhou lay straight down. "—No special training tonight, right?" "Mm." Crow nodded softly. She murmured: "You've already handed in your final exam paper." A black ribbon hung suspended in midair; she sat perched sideways upon it, her back to Bai Zhou lying on the floor. Night was waning; the moon slanted low. Dawning light was faint and pale. A tranquil breeze blew across the river, sweeping over wild weeds and reeds with the moist fragrance of earth. It fluttered the hem of Crow's clothes. And so, the breeze took on a hint of orange and coffee. "You've worked hard... Go to sleep." Facing the moonlight alone, her voice drifted gently over. "I'm here." A good night's sleep was all he needed. Once he woke up, it would be a new mood, a new world. Even if tomorrow brought a fresh swarming horde of troubles upon waking... that was a matter for tomorrow. *You worked hard, me of today.* *I'm counting on you, me of tomorrow!* And so... Crossing his arms, Bai Zhou curled up in the corner of the broken rooftop wall, slowly closing his heavy eyelids upon the makeshift blanket of his suit. The anxiety accumulated over days broke forth like floodwaters from an opened sluice. A sudden, inexplicable shiver ran through him, followed by wave after wave of exhaustion crashing down. Dawn was near. Bai Zhou drifted into dreamland. In a haze, it was probably a dream, surely an illusion, he seemed to dimly see— Miss Crow, who had her back turned to him facing the moonlight alone, tilted her face slightly, her rainbow-colored eyes softening as they rarely did... She said: "Good night, Bai Zhou." —It had to be a dream. ...So even when sleeping in a crude, drafty haunted house, tomorrow might still be something to look forward to. Because the very concept of living was to keep running—running until completely exhausted didn't matter, so long as one was certain there was a reason to keep running. Why not just look at the moon in the sky, and gaze at the dawning light slowly breaking on the horizon? A breeze named freedom brushed across his head. And so, within his "dream," Bai Zhou answered in a blur: "Good night." Good night, Miss Crow. See you tomorrow.