The ultimate blue sea

Chapter 96

The first day Su Qing hurriedly came back, he found a crowd of people gathered together, dithering over a stack of microchips. There were over a hundred microchips in each black box, and each box had the name of a country stuck to it. They had only had time to grab seven or eight.

At first Chang Dou hadn't given up. He had wanted to take along Cheng Weizhi, again synthesize the strange frequency that could nonetheless perfectly correspond to Type 4 emotional energy, and again open that space. But this was unsuccessful. He was sent off by their grim-faced Captain Hu to break the cypher on the microchips.

Su Qing didn't know a single thing about this, so he went to do his own business.

When Su Qing wasn't courting death, he was very reliable and very aware of boundaries. Hu Bugui knew that there were many things that even if he himself had gone into the field, he couldn't necessarily have been able to do as well as Su Qing. Among people...there were always specialties. Each one had the edge in something. That was what gave a team value.

But that didn't mean that Captain Hu could be overly indulgent towards a certain person's staying out all night problem.

Hu Bugui stuck his communicator in his pocket. He had sent hundreds of communication requests, but they had sunk like stones into the sea. There had been no response from Su Qing. So tonight, the people continuing to work through the night saw that their Captain Hu's thoughts evidently weren't on the microchips. Every five minutes, he stood up and walked around, then came back looking even more unhappy.

Around three in the morning, Cheng Weizhi, at his age, couldn't stand staying up any longer. He was asleep. Lu Qingbai had taken over his work, using a program to sort out the cypher on the microchips according to what Cheng Weizhi had said. Qin Luo had already slept. She had gotten back up and was ready to wash her face with cold water, then come back to work some more. But when she passed by Hu Bugui, with one look at the ice-cold aura of gloom he was wrapped in, her head immediately cleared. So she turned around and silently returned to her original position.

Fang Xiu heard the movement and turned to glance at Hu Bugui, meanwhile fiercely slapping the back of Chang Dou's head, which was starting to droop bit by bit. Chang Dou gave a start and raised his head in confusion, blinking tearful, bleary eyes and looking foolishly at Fang Xiu.

Fang Xiu raised his chin. "If you can't hold out, then say so. Go over to the couch if you want to sleep." Then he once again focused his attention on the screen, ignoring him.

But Chang Dou seemed to have been galvanized. He shook his head and was suddenly in high spirits. Even his eyes seemed to light up. Flexing his arms and rolling up his sleeves, he once again shone with vitality, his fingers click-clacking over the keyboard.

"I have to work harder," Chang Dou very foolishly and naïvely imagined, "to prove my capability to Fang Xiu. Then he won't look down on me anymore."

The poor technician. He didn't know that Mr. Fang in fact didn't mean anything by this; he was only having an endocrine imbalance from staying up late, and the unusual jitteriness was coming out as habitual nitpicking.

Kou Tong had been lying on the table sleeping. He was woken by their movements, straightened up, and stretched. He rubbed his eyes, then raised his head and glanced at Hu Bugui. Seeing Captain Hu's grim face, Dr. Kou explicably became clear-headed. He was not only clear-headed, he even seemed a little cheerful.

Probably because...facing a stack of unintelligible microchips every day was truly too dull.

So Dr. Kou yawned and very obnoxiously asked the question that everyone wanted to ask but hadn't dared to ask in view of their superior's dignity: "Huh? Where's Su Qing? Why hasn't he come back yet when it's so late?"