The point about man being a social animal at last became obvious at this inconvenient moment. If it had only been a matter of not having money, Su Qing was a young man with his arms and legs intact. He could have made enough to eat on even if he had to go work as a miner in a coal pit. But he also didn't have an ID.
After unilaterally breaking off the connection with Hu Bugui, Su Qing sat in the train's hard seat compartment, no longer sleepy.
It was just time for the post-Spring Festival surge of farmers going to find work in the cities. The compartment was seriously overcrowded. Even the bathroom was packed. The air was awful. He tilted his head back and looked at the compartment's dim lighting. Narrowing his eyes that had turned into small telescopes, he began to look ahead towards the unseeable future.
When day was about to break, Su Qing and Tu Tutu arrived in C City. The two of them loitered around the train station until it was light. Su Qing now still had 92.5 yuan. He placed Tu Tutu in a little restaurant, spent five yuan to buy him breakfast, and instructed him: "Wait here for me. You're not allowed to go with anyone who asks you to. Do you hear me?"
Tu Tutu, seeing that there was food to eat, behaved. He nodded obediently.
Su Qing took him to sit in a seat by the window. "Sit right here, eat slowly. I'll be able to see you, don't be afraid. I have something to do, and then I'll come back. If someone asks if there's anyone sitting next to you, you say that there is, your dad's just gone to the bathroom, understand?"
For Tu Tutu, whoever had milk was mom and whoever bought him food would be obeyed. Without another word, he nodded again.
Then Su Qing left him and walked out with his remaining eighty-some yuan. From time to time he looked back at the child sitting by the window. He went to a little internet cafe across the street that didn't look especially up to standards, ready to do a bit of something illegal.
The pudgy internet cafe owner was just flirting with a girl online. Hearing someone come in, he only raised his eyelids and looked at Su Qing indifferently. "Show your ID, how many hours?"
Su Qing didn't answer. He saw that there was no one around, then drew close to the internet cafe owner, saying with familiar ease, "I'd just like to ask, do you have 'that' here?"
He mimed the shape of a card with his hands. The owner looked up at him warily. "What? What are you talking about?"
Su Qing gave a gentle cough and leaned his whole body forward. Lowering his voice, he said, "Zhang-ge recommended that I come." Based on his experience, if you said a common surname like Zhang, Wang, Li, Zhao, or Liu, ten to one you could pull off a deception—unless this internet cafe owner didn't know enough people.
As expected, the owner narrowed his eyes and considered. "That's Zhang Xiaoliu?"
He'd pulled it off. Su Qing nodded at once. The owner looked him up and down. "Are you a minor? You don't look like it?"
Su Qing gave a sigh of deep bitterness and resentment. "I've been brought to this against my will. See, I've got a wife in a game, you know how it is, and somehow it got out at home."
The internet cafe owner gave an absent-minded "yeah," his ten short, thick fingers click-clacking on the keyboard.
Su Qing watched this forty-something oily-faced internet cafe owner with a quivering belly type into the chat box: "We rove all over the world for the sake of pursuing art. We have nothing but a bellyful of experience and loneliness." He was instantly astonished into calm. His heart and breathing were steady.
He gave a dry cough and adjusted his situation a little, continuing to invent: "So guess what, the harpy actually hired a private detective to tail me. Wherever I go, there are people watching me. I feel like a member of the underground Party, like I've gone back to before the liberation."
The internet cafe owner at last spared him a piece of his attention. "That's new."
"Don't I know it." Su Qing pulled a long face at once. "There's the 'Anti-Indulgence System' now, and you need to verify your real name. And this harpy took my ID, my bank card, and everything..."
The internet cafe owner looked at him disdainfully. "Buddy, you're an idiot. I can see you're all right-looking, can't you just find someone else? Why go up against her?"
A line popped up in the owner's chat window. Su Qing narrowed his eyes and looked over. He found that the stupid girl being flirted with had said: "Don't be like that, I'm so sad for you that I'm about to start crying."
Su Qing surreptitiously rubbed his own arms, thinking, I'm so disgusted that I'm about to start crying, too.
"Her family has money and power. I can't afford to offend that harpy." As Su Qing spoke, he touched his earring, deliberately or not, and invented more and more smoothly: "Twenty-four hours a day, she can look in on me whenever she feels like it. It's like I've got a fucking security camera on my back. Everywhere I go, I'm carrying enormous psychological stress."
The internet cafe owner sent the line "Only you understand my soul," then said to Su Qing, "One hundred fifty for one. I'll have it for you in a while."
Su Qing thought, Who are you trying to hoodwink? The lousy thing costs ten yuan. But he didn't show it on his face. He drew back his lips in a slightly bitter smile. "Boss...look, could it be a little cheaper? It really is...with the way things are at home, I'm embarrassingly short."
The internet cafe owner sneered. "That won't do. What did Zhang Xiaoliu say to you? These are our rules—an individual purchase is one hundred fifty. No discount without a group purchase."
Before he was through saying this, the girl in the chat box sent the line "Can I see you?" The internet cafe owner's short, thick fingers paused. Su Qing took the opportunity to say, "Listen, brother, no one's fooling anyone here. I'm not some little kid in school with more money than brains. You and I both know perfectly well how much money this thing is worth. I don't mind telling you, the last time I got one, so real that I could take it to the bank and open an account, it only cost me sixty yuan."
The owner sent off "That's no good, I'm not such a casual person." The girl started pestering him to go on video. The owner seemed a little annoyed. He laughed grimly. "Who did that for you? Go straight to them."
Su Qing thought, Motherfucker...
He looked out the window, found that Tu Tutu was sitting there eating quite steadily, and decided to hold out to the end. "Brother, I've really never seen anything like you. Business walks up to your door, earnings are earnings, how can you push it out?"
The internet cafe owner had been hounded into gloom by the girl who insisted on seeing his true face. He didn't respond to Su Qing, letting him chatter on. Just when the young lady was starting to get suspicious and the internet cafe owner had settled on a strategic diversion, Su Qing saw his chance and put in a word: "Hey, go ahead and video chat with her, say there's no microphone, only typing. You take the keyboard, and I'll sit there in your place."
The internet cafe owner raised his head at last and looked right at him.
Five minutes later, the two of them reached an agreement. Su Qing sold sex appeal, working the front desk in the owner's place for ten minutes and landing the girl. Then the owner sold him a fake ID for a fifty percent discount. Fifty percent off was seventy-five, leaving him around ten yuan. He could buy Tu Tutu some buns in the afternoon, and a bowl of noodles in the evening.
When Tu Tutu had been finished with his food for a long time and was beginning to swing his legs in boredom, Su Qing returned with his new ID. He had chosen an "auspicious" fake name for himself, the name he had coveted while at the blue seals' base—he called himself Su Zecheng.
The "Zecheng" in "Yu Zecheng."
And so began his life of swindling and deceit.
With an ID, Su Qing felt much steadier. He didn't dare to delay a minute. He took Tu Tutu to blend in with the crowd of migrant workers surging out of the train station, and in a few words got chatting with an old brother who had a family to feed. Su Qing invented himself another background of bizarre suffering—he found that he simply had a talent for this; the lies came to his mouth as soon as he opened it—he talked the old brother's wife right to tears.
Tu Tutu started playing with the old brother's two children, watched by his wife, so Su Qing started in on looking for work along with the old brother. During the day, the kind-hearted sister-in-law looked after Tu Tutu's food and drink, and Su Qing still had the nutritional capsules. One would do him for a day or two. To save on housing costs at night, he took the child to stay the night at the train station.
C City's train station didn't collect tickets at the door, though he did have to dodge the patrols at night—however, he had even dodged the patrols at the RZ Unit's treatment center; these little skirmishes were nothing to him.
During the day, he would leave the train station and continue rushing around looking for work.
You couldn't call looking for work either simple or hard. The alterations to Su Qing's body from the double core energy crystal system showed themselves incomparably advantageous. He began to work at the lowest level. His hands were quickly worked raw, though they healed soon after. After a night's sleep, all his little bumps and bruises would be good as new.
Later, at the old brother's invitation, Su Qing and Tu Tutu moved out of the train station and into the small house they had rented locally. This was a single-story house as small as a pigeon coop. With the addition of the two of them, it became even more cramped.
The old brother was surnamed Liu, Liu Daqing. People called his wife Mrs. Liu. They were both kind-hearted people. Su Qing at first said that he would give them half his wages every month for rent, but Liu Daqing absolutely refused. Only after politely declining for ages did he agree to accept a symbolic two hundred yuan each month, and warmheartedly helped Tu Tutu get in contact with the school for migrant workers' children.
So, with his fake identity, the only human on earth to possess a complete energy system, the former young master Su Qing, hid in a corner of this noisy, bustling big city, completely devoting himself to the hard labor of construction work. His days were full of untold hardships, and he also had to take care of a thoughtless little whelp. Su Qing thought that if not for the sturdy double core in his body, he wouldn't have survived.
The grey house in the blue seal base had been one kind of misery, and this was another kind of misery. The former had been frightening and tumultuous; the latter was like a blunt, rusty knife hacking at his flesh every day.
It is said that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit. In less than a month, Su Qing forgot his former pampered days and began to get used to the dirtiest, most tiring life; began to get used to days of not being able to shower, began to get used to lowering his level of consumption day by day, even began to get used to asking Mrs. Liu to mend his coat when it tore.
He also got used to Hu Bugui's voice coming over the communicator every evening, more punctual than the news broadcast. Hu Bugui would tell him what means they had tried and what places they had searched. There were still no leads. Then he would advise him to come back. When Su Qing ignored him, he would tell him about the actions of the other group of people looking for him, even guide him in using his power based on Lu Qingbai's examinations of Su Qing's body.
Su Qing learned that what the double core energy crystal system used was his own energy. While it didn't have a fatal weakness, it wasn't as powerful as the energy the blue seals got from robbing others—for example, his wounds healed at a rate much slower than Chen Lin's; for another example, after secretly experimenting several times, he didn't find that he could turn into a human gale like Jiang Lan.
But there was one thing that he found he could do; when he concentrated all his forces, he could faintly sense the emotions of the people around him.
After a period of time, his boss found that Su Qing could write and reckon—though he had graduated from a second-rate university, he was still a university graduate—so he promoted him to bookkeeper, put him in charge of some accounting and writing work, didn't make him do the heavy work of the construction site anymore, and gave him a raise.
Meanwhile, the nutritional capsules Su Qing had taken from the RZ Unit's treatment center were about to run out. He knew that in principle he needed a great quantity of nutrients to support to his energy system, so he began to worry that soon his wages wouldn't be enough to fill his belly.
But while this problem was still weighing on him, something went wrong.