The ultimate blue sea

Chapter 9- Fatal flaw

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.