The ultimate blue sea

Chapter 16 - The Return

Hu Bugui sat as motionless as a mountain, not speaking, not resisting, and definitely not cooperating.

"He's right." Into this deadlock came Lu Qingbai's voice from the long-silent communicator. Hu Bugui's eyelid twitched. He looked up. At some point, because of the fracture in space, the monitor projection had unfocused entirely. Lu Qingbai simply took over the video and appeared before Su Qing's eyes in the form of an overeducated beast in human clothes.

His fingers were laced together, propping up his chin. He looked down loftily on Su Qing and Hu Bugui from the screen above their heads. "He's right. A grey seal's energy cycle is an incomplete circuit. As tools, when the blue seals go 'hunting,' their minds are sometimes more damaged than the victims', and for the most part it's irreversible. Even if you bring him back now, he'll still never escape being a grey seal."

Hu Bugui's hand tightened on the steering wheel, bones and tendons coming to the surface of his skin, making him seem a little savage.

Lu Qingbai continued stirring up trouble: "Though his mental indexes are basically within normal range now, it doesn't mean that he'll really be all right. We all know that psychological trauma doesn't always produce an immediate reaction. It may be hidden very deep, or his reactions may be too slow, and the signs of various mental illnesses will only appear after a while. Ultimately, because of the torment of those mental illnesses, he'll reach the same end as those who lost their minds on the spot."

In order to demonstrate the truthfulness of his words, Dr. Lu added, "While there haven't been many, I have seen some cases like this."

In Su Qing's eyes, Lu Qingbai in his white coat suddenly turned into a criminal, turned into an enormous crow in human shape.

Hu Bugui forced out words from between his teeth: "Lu Qingbai, what do you mean?"

Lu Qingbai wasn't afraid of him in the least. At any rate, he knew he couldn't crawl out of the screen. So he cut right to the chase: "I'm saying that if you bring him back, you still might not be able to save him. Since it's his own request, it would be better to let him return..."

"Impossible," said Hu Bugui.

Lu Qingbai suddenly cut him off, changing his face faster than in a Sichuan opera. One moment it had been the face of the mild and gentle guide; the next moment he turned into a yaksha's cousin. He hit the table with a bang and fumed: "It's impossible just because you say it's impossible? Hu, are you the doctor, or am I the doctor? What are you doing butting in when you don't understand shit? Do you think healing psychological trauma is a question of bringing him back and sticking a couple of band-aids to his forehead? Even those blue seal animals know the law of balancing opposing emotions, you damned..."

"Gorilla," Xu Ruchong put in.

"You damned gorilla!"

Hu Bugui frowned. In matters where the final decision was his, he had always stood by his word. But in matters he didn't understand, he had always been able to listen to others talking reason—though Lu Qingbai looked more like he was collecting on a debt or looking for a fight, anything other than being reasonable. So he asked, "You mean that letting him return to the grey house may be beneficial towards his psychological recovery?"

Lu Qingbai waved a hand and turned to Su Qing. "If you come in for treatment now, it will be difficult. If you remember your friend, it will aggravate your sense of guilt. For a Type 2 Grey Seal like you, that will be particularly hard to handle. Returning will be fighting fire with fire. The outcome may be better. But if you decide to return to save him, you must think it through. You may not be able to save him and be broken there yourself. A person can't come back from the dead."