Can Ci Pin - - - Chapter 70

Chapter 70 – Doomed Fate

Lu Bixing shoved the fingers of his empty hand in his mouth and blew a long whistle. A vague figure appeared behind the window above where the bucket of water had been tossed from to stare down at him.

Lu Bixing called up as if he was talking to an old friend: “Hey don’t hide, I saw you already, how can you do that! Look at me, I’m just a humble scholar, and you guys are using these same underhand tricks to get my attention? Not even special treatment for a handsome lad like me, my pride’s hurt!”

A wave of laughter sounded off from the surroundings as the window opened. A woman in pajamas peeked her head out and laughed out loud; it was clear from the way she was dressed that she was involved in some shady business.

“What are you laughing at?” Lu Bixing waved playfully, “Hurry up and throw two packs of cigs down as an apology!”

Some chattering sounds came from behind the window as more heads peeked out. There were men and women of all different looks like a hub of different flavors; most of them were not dressed properly and were playfully pushing each other around. They played around for a little bit before pulling out two packs of unbranded cigarettes and threw them down to Lu Bixing.

From ancient times to the New Sidereal Era, luxury commodities were almost as old as human history. Some had evolved to contain new technologies and become extremely expensive while others maintained their traditional forms, like hand-rolled cigarettes. The cigarette box was decorated with an illustration of a male pin-up model that winked playfully at the consumer; inside the box was a ‘special’ brand of low-quality tobacco from the Eighth Galaxy that emitted a strong and spicy stench even after it was wrapped. Some of the paper inside wasn’t properly wrapped up and folded out from the cigarette head like a little tail.

Lu Bixing waved back towards the window as he striked a similar pose, then took Lin Jingheng’s hand once more and continued walking off: “Thanks, pals!”

The crowd above saw this well-mannered but playful lad leave and blew a number of kisses at him.

Lin Jingheng had been pondering how to pull his hand away without making it seem too awkward and was completely in daze as he watched the whole confrontation. At first, he was just surprised that a nerd like Lu Bixing had acquaintances on Qiming, but then noticed something was off when that same eccentric scientist shoved a box of cigarettes into his hand. It took only about 100 meters of walking before this Wolto-raised Commander Lin finally realized something and asked with an uneasy expression: “Wait, those were prostitutes and scammers earlier, weren’t they?”

Buildings that looked a little more proper than others in a busy city street were often hidden redlight districts. They tended to be considered the lowest of the low in quality, from basic hygiene to its workers and didn’t make enough money normally to sustain their shady businesses; so naturally they resorted to scamming with underhand tricks.

The typical structure of scamming was usually as such– they would have someone wait by the window with a bucket of water, then splash it down when they saw a potential ‘customer’ pass by. The passerby would normally pick a fight or complain to the business, giving the people inside the excuse of an apology or drying of clothes to lure the customer indoors. Then, the apology and service would usually turn into a full package of drinks and partying, where the businesses would strip the customer naked of all valuables.

Lu Bixing turned around and stared into Lin Jingheng’s eyes for a few moments before he finally burst out laughing: “Commander, this isn’t just a slow reaction anymore, you’re at least half a movie late!”

Lin Jingheng: “……”

He’d spent the whole trip pondering the philosophical question of his existence and was not functioning normally since the moment he left the operational base. Half his brain was a daze, almost so much so that he didn’t even notice this entire event happening right before his eyes.

Lu Bixing keenly read the darkening expression on Lin Jingheng’s face— did those fools want to die?

“Hey hold on wait here, we’ve already left, what’s the point of going back just to give them a scolding?” Lu Bixing held out his arms and blocked the way, laughing.

The way he was looking at Lin Jingheng right now was through heavy bias from his heightened hormone levels; watching Lin brutally roast people was cute, insulting others was cute, and even that anti-social and murderous face looked unreasonably cute in his eyes. Lu Bixing felt like a psychotic artist with this newfound appreciation for an extremely questionable sense of aesthetics.

“There must be a lucky star shining above that building today that saved their lives because our commander was in a daze. What is this? Lucky koi fishes! Hold on to the pack of cigs from the lucky fishes in the pond, it must be destiny…hey, look! There’s a fortune teller over there, let’s get some good fortune while we’re still blessed with this luck!”

An old man wrapped in a headpiece sat under the broken tent. The old and crippled table in front of him was a peculiar Bagua board with a deck of old tarot cards that looked like it had been chewed on by rats on it. A small sign saying “Ancient Fortune Telling” hung above the old man’s head.

Lu Bixing called out to the old man under the tent: “Hey gramps, how much for one round of fortune telling?”

The old man gestured at him: “20 notes.”

“Here’s 100, we want to hear some good things.” Lu Bixing poked around his personal device and sent 100 points to the price meter beside the old man. He grabbed Lin Jingheng’s shoulder and pushed the commander in front of him and said, “Read this gentleman’s fortune!”

The old man had probably been here a long while with fairly poor business. He was unhealthily thin and the meter beside him had only racked 200 points up until now. Yet this walking piggy bank by the name of Lu Bixing popped out of the blue and delivered enough points for him to exchange for a syringe that would last him several months.

Overjoyed by this sudden blessing, the old man held up the old deck of cards: “Good sir, please pull a card from this deck and place it in the center of the mystic Bagua map.”

Lin Jingheng: “…What the fuck?”

Lu Bixing took advantage of the situation and leaned in, grabbed Lin Jingheng’s hand, and pulled out a random card from the colorful deck.

The old fortune teller took the money and put on a serious act. He quickly held the card in between his palms and chanted a long line of some unknown sutra, then very confidently said: “My good sir, I could see your bright future from the card. I saw you abandon your doubts and break through the mist of uncertainty to return to your true self. You will be blessed by the power of your fate; you will become an immovable force as you find the answer that you’re seeking. May all the gods bless you.”

Lin Jingheng knew this old man was just bullshitting, but the moment he heard “abandon your doubts and break through the mist of uncertainty to return to your true self”, he felt something touch his heart. As if a rusty chord got pulled by a sudden gust of wind after being left alone for too long and made a strange sound, he looked up and almost wanted to ask “What’s the answer I’m seeking?” The old man looked at him and grinned brightly with a few missing teeth.

Lin Jingheng: “….”

He turned around and left without a word.

Lu Bixing followed behind with a grin on his face: “Wasn’t that nice to hear? Smile, commander.”

Lin Jingheng turned to press his hand on Lu Bixing’s forehead, pushed the loud noise machine back a few steps and walked off as he put his hands back into his pocket.

The old man took his survival money and thanked them as the two men left. When Lu Bixing turned around to give him a wave, the old man took his hat off and exposed his whitened hair to return his gratitude. He stood until the two men walked off into the distance, then sat back down as he carefully turned the card that Lin Jingheng pulled earlier.

In ancient times, the Tarot fortune-telling culture was also quite popular at one point before it became a complete joke thanks to the hands of scammers, even to this day it no longer was a proper business or tradition. The deck that the old fortune teller had was just a five dollar ‘beginner’s deck’ he’d bought off a random merchant for people to play with. Unlike proper tarot cards, they were simpler versions that just had a line of the card’s meaning printed on the edges that didn’t require the reader to actually memorize all of the meanings.

The old man placed the card near his face as he closely deciphered the small line of text on the bottom right corner–

“The Tower: doomed fate.”

The fortune teller shivered as the evening breeze blew by and looked up in the direction that Lin Jingheng had gone, only to see that the two had already left his sight. He struggled to get up, closed his little shop and went off to collect his nutrient syringe.

“There were also night markets like these on Cayley,” Lu Bixing exchanged credits for a few oranges on the way and started peeling them as he walked, “It was filled with a bunch of little shops and scammers inside like these, usually the same pattern. Naive potential victims that didn’t know the rules would come in and join the fun…like you–people would lure you in like it was some sort of festival, then scam you from the inside out. After that, the entire street would party. I used to hang out around those people when I was a kid, just finding a place to read books in some corner, and when I got bored I’d just watch them scam people. When they succeeded, someone would come by and give me a pat on the head and a small toy.”

Lin Jingheng: “Didn’t you say you were sick when you were younger to the point that the Hawk wouldn’t even let you eat barbeque? He just watched you hang out in places like these?”

“Of course he wouldn’t let me run off on the streets,” Lu Bixing continued as he handed Lin Jingheng the freshly peeled oranges. “The little townstreet on Cayley was a place my dad leased out to them, and the entire piece of land behind was his too. The place was just empty anyway, so he built a little house there. If you opened up the windows to the backyard you could pet the little animals that the street performers raised; I was the one that asked him to let me move in. My legs had some atrophy issues during that time and needed rehab, so when I was walking around the house for rehab it was nice to hear the outside be so lively.”

“I don’t eat this.” Lin Jingheng waved off the oranges. “What happened to your leg?”

“Got sick, and got better later.” Lu Bixing answered briefly.

Lin Jingheng: “What kind of illness, exactly?”

A hard expression flashed across Lu Bixing’s face for a few seconds as if he didn’t want to answer. Then, he quickly turned around and said: “Lovesickness, Commander, can you cure it?”

Lin Jingheng: “……”

Lu Bixing quickly turned his attention to somewhere else– he had been trying to feed Commander Lin various foods for a while now, but unfortunately the commander wouldn’t even bat an eye at anything. Only this orange was strangely valuable and was given the grace of a single comment from him. Lu Bixing blinked, then peeled a piece of the orange off as he quickly tapped it against the corner of Lin Jingheng’s lips. “It’s really sweet.”

Lin Jingheng: “…”

“You’re not gonna eat it? No way, you won’t even eat an orange you just kissed?” Lu Bixing pulled the orange back and made a purposeful show of going to eat the orange himself.

This type of filtering was definitely too much for him. Lin Jingheng quickly stole the poor orange out of Lu Bixing’s hand.

“Commander, a lot of things exist for your own pleasure,” Lu Bixing started his endless galactic train of ramblings, “Look, this orange spent so long to grow ripe all its life, and finally managed to grow little ‘capsules’ inside it body after long days and nights, just for you to eat while it’s at its peak sweetness. The taste will spread through your tongue, the fruity flavor taking over your taste buds–don’t a lot of romance movies and novels have this kind of scene? Someone prepares a wonderful and surprise show of fireworks, stars, or fountain for their loved ones, and then invites their loved ones at the right moment to present the show. Everyone is so surprised and impressed with the main character, but if you think about it, isn’t the orange also doing just as much work to win your affection? You look so forced and uneasy, don’t you think you’re letting the orange down?”

Lin Jingheng answered: “If you could stop watching and reading those weird things and save your braincells, you wouldn’t accidentally burn all of them off in one afternoon.”

Even though the words that came out were ruthless insults, Lin Jingheng’s expression relaxed. Perhaps his taste buds were naturally slow, never picking up the flavor of anything he eats and swallows, so he never really developed a particular taste for food. Instead, Lu Bixing’s shady cult-like ramblings on that orange somehow managed to make him pick up an appetite — before he knew it, he had already finished a whole orange and even surprisingly tasted some flavor.

Lu Bixing was following beside him and a little giddy. He felt like this hard puzzle by the name of Lin Jingheng finally showed some signs of having a pattern; he’d discovered that things Lin really had no interest in wouldn’t even earn a glance from the commander. That moment of attention was extremely valuable. And if the commander purposefully made a comment to reject something, it meant that isn’t wasn’t truly something he disliked, perhaps even something that he liked; except it didn’t fit his normal behavior so he would naturally reject it on principle.

He recalled the formal but courtesy rejection he’d received from the confession before, and Lu Bixing felt like he was the orange that the commander had just kissed, feeling like he could almost melt into a puddle of sweetness onto the ground: “Commander…”

Just then, a heavy object flew in and hit the window right behind Lu Bixing. The glass window shattered immediately, shards ricocheted off

into the air. Lin Jingheng lifted his hand, the personal device on his wrist linked to the armed mobile firing a wall of special particles to block off the flying glass shards like an invisible shield.

The heavy object that was thrown had been half a brick, originally aimed towards a small merchant on the side. The merchant held a bag and was running away, clearly being chased by someone covered in long robes. The robe was long enough to even cover the face of the individual, but the act of throwing the brick and anger had ripped the hood off the person’s face to reveal a horrifying face– the person’s skin was rotten, the skin on their lips and chin were already gone, exposing the jaw bone inside while a drop of bloodied tears fell from the corner of their eyes.

He….or she, screamed out of the top of their lungs with a deeply injured and husky voice: “You gave me fake medicine!”

The merchant that was being chased was also stumped by the individual’s terrifying look, and fell down to the ground on his butt while his legs shook in fear. He then screeched in a loud voice: “The Rainbow Virus! This person is infected with the Rainbow Virus!”

The Rainbow Virus was the eternal nightmare of the Eighth Galaxy. The trauma it gave back in the day would perhaps need at least a few hundred years and two generations of people to heal.

The moment the merchant screeched, the entire city street exploded as if a plague god had just descended. Everyone’s expression changed immediately, screaming for their lives as they scrambled for escape. Lin Jingheng pulled Lu Bixing behind him, the personal device on his wrist releasing a gust of particle wind and blocking in front of Lu Bixing: “You leave first.”

“Don’t worry,” Lu Bixing pulled on Lin Jingheng’s arm, “I have immunity, it’s all good.”

Lin Jingheng was stumped: “What?”

When Lu Bixing was born, the Rainbow Virus had been eradicated from the Eight Galaxies for many years. He wasn’t a soldier that needed to face special circumstances in the frontline, how did he obtain immunity for the Rainbow Virus?

Lu Bixing pointed towards the skeleton man and spoke up before Lin could ponder further: “Lin, look at his shoulders!”

The robe that the person had pulled down exposed his neck and a side of his shoulder. The clothing underneath was too dirty to decipher its original color, but they could almost make out a shoulder emblem from it– that was an emblem of the Eight Galaxy’s Executive Center, only given on uniforms for official staff members.

The skeleton man already cleaned up his own bag and turned to run just as Lu Bixing finished his line.

Lu Bixing was ready to chase after them: “Wait!”

“I swear upon your name,” Lu Bixing said, “I will never make you mine if I lie about this.”

Lin Jingheng: “……”

This all-talk little piece of shit that only knew how to run his mouth!