"Just stay at my place if you need to. Everything's already set up!" Ning Linglong cut Guan Fei off.
She walked up to a door and pressed her finger against it. The door lit up, clearly scanning her fingerprint, before opening automatically to reveal a fully furnished room inside.
"Um, Uncle... Zhu," Ning Linglong said, clearly a little uncomfortable with the title. "You can stay here for a night, or a few nights? Anyway, I've already made the bed, but I've never slept here... Once you leave, I'll just wash the bedding again. It's no big deal!"
"Alright, then I won't have to bother Guan Fei," Chu Bamboo nodded. 'Why be so formal with friends?'
Guan Fei's face fell, but he didn't say anything more.
"Oh, right." Li Kang slapped his forehead. He walked over to his room, unlocked it with his fingerprint, and went inside, where he began rummaging through his things.
"Captain, what are you doing?" The ever-inconspicuous Wall Announcements blinked in confusion.
"His old habits are flaring up again! The captain is always doing things that make no sense. He should've retired ages ago!" Ning Linglong pursed her lips. "Besides, with all he's accomplished, if he's not retiring, he should be getting a promotion! I don't know why the higher-ups still haven't approved his report."
Chu Bamboo rolled his eyes. 'From retirement to promotion, all in one breath... On the surface, my dear "niece" is criticizing the higher-ups, but in reality, her rebellious ambition is clear as day. You just want to be the captain of the Third District's special ops team, don't you?'
"So, Wall Announcements?" Chu Bamboo regarded the inconspicuous rookie with interest, asking with a smile, "You've been on the special ops team for a little while. How are you settling in?"
"?" Wall Announcements was taken aback. 'You... sir, you haven't even joined the special ops team, have you? So why do you sound like a leader questioning a subordinate? Wait a minute! That tone is...'
"You... know me?" Wall Announcements gasped, instinctively glancing at Guan Fei and Ning Linglong. He had already guessed something was up when he saw how familiar the two seniors—no, how familiar even the Captain was with this person. But after thinking it over and over, he couldn't recall ever having met Chu Bamboo, so he hadn't paid it too much mind... But now, it looked like he was wrong!
"I've heard of you. Your sister, Wall Fluff, and I were elementary school classmates! We were in the same class from first to third grade. I was the class president, and she was the academics representative!" Chu Bamboo said casually.
"Oh, so that's how it is... Huh?"
The room fell completely silent.
Ning Linglong blinked. She stared at Wall Announcements for a long moment, and after a long silence, she turned to her Uncle Zhu with a complicated expression.
Wall Announcements's brain went into overdrive; he felt like it was about to short-circuit. 'No, something's not right!'
"Exactly how old... are you?" Wall Announcements stammered, his words jumbling together.
"Sixteen, I think? Or seventeen, by traditional counting?" Chu Bamboo said, a little uncertain. 'Of course, if you added up all the time in the Real World, plus all the time from the constant resets, the final number would probably be astronomical...'
Wall Announcements felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. He was starting to lose it. Even though the person before him looked incredibly young, after everything that had happened, he'd just assumed it was some kind of age-halting Skill used by those with profound Cultivation... 'You mean, you're *really* only seventeen?'
"As for you..." Chu Bamboo sighed and shook his head. "Just be careful. The turnover rate on the special ops team is faster than you can imagine."
When he first went to the Police Chief Bureau to seek Li Kang's help at eleven or twelve years old, the special ops team had twelve members. And now? Only four remained. Moreover, aside from Li Kang, the other three could all be considered rookies or semi-rookies.
Indeed, even the slightly more senior members, Ning Linglong and Guan Fei, weren't among the dozen or so people he had met five years ago. And while a few of them had been transferred away, most had been sacrificed.
"There's nothing to talk about," Guan Fei cut in, his voice calm with a practiced numbness. "They're just dead... Then again, in this day and age, where aren't people dying?"
Chu Bamboo fell silent. "True enough."
Before he was eleven or twelve, almost no one dared to go out at night in the shantytown district. When Chu Bamboo went out in the morning to buy groceries or get breakfast, he would casually see ten or so bodies on the road...
Some had frozen to death, others had starved. There were workers who'd died from illness, and even some who'd been worked to death...
If he hadn't found it completely unbearable, why would Chu Bamboo—who at the time still viewed all of this as a dream—have flipped the whole table in a rage?
But even now, after he'd flipped the table, people didn't stop dying in the shantytown district. It was just that now, after death, the union could be notified. The union would organize a team to take the corpse away and handle it—cremation, even finding a burial plot, the union took care of it all. Not a single cent was required.
Or rather, it wasn't as if the deceased or their relatives—if they even still existed—had any money to offer.
That was the only reason the streets of the shantytown district looked somewhat normal.
Such was this ridiculous era.
"...Actually, I just wanted to take the exam and become a normal civil servant!" Wall Announcements finally managed to say, looking like he wanted to cry but couldn't shed a tear. "But when I finished my exam to get into the District Government Office, an alarm went off! Then Captain Li dragged me in here. He even said something about how Transcendents can't be involved in governance! I..."
Wall Announcements felt incredibly wronged. He had gone through hell and back, all because he just wanted to be a freeloader with a cushy government job. But... he never imagined that this world wouldn't even grant him such a small wish.
"Young man, how can you have so little drive!" Guan Fei instantly slipped into his 'wise veteran' persona, ready to dispense grand, inspiring words. "Sure, our special ops team is dangerous, but we get a ton of work! And not only do we get a ton of work, we take the blame for a ton of stuff, too! Most importantly, we get yelled at a ton!"
Wall Announcements: "..."
'Are you sure you're trying to comfort me?'
Ning Linglong almost laughed out loud, but then she found the scene a little hard to watch. 'Wall Announcements is still so naive... Who says that in front of their colleagues, especially with their boss working right there? He's lucky the captain is a good person, otherwise he'd be making his life miserable.'
'You'd never be able to tell... that guy is actually a few years older than Uncle Zhu!'
"Got it!" At last, Li Kang emerged from the room, holding a thick stack of books. With a huge grin, he said, "Ah Zhu, catch."
Li Kang's face was filled with the joy of seeing a friend fall into a trap—oh, no, that was the benevolent affection of hoping a friend would better himself.
"These are the practice workbooks Minmin used when she was cramming for the civil service exam! I left them at the base back then, hoping they'd get blessed by the gods or something, so Minmin could absorb some Literary Qi... Now, they're all yours! The next exam officially starts the day after tomorrow. By the way, have you signed up? If you haven't, the next one after that should be..."