CHAPTER 24: THE QUESTION CHEN GUO DIDN'T ASK
The replay loop had been running for an hour.
Chen Guo sat at the café's front desk, her personal laptop open to a community stream that someone had recorded during the Blood Gunner Yagg fight. The video quality was mediocre—captured from a bystander's perspective, shaky during the combat sequences—but clear enough to show what mattered.
Lord Grim cycling through five weapon forms in thirty seconds.
Shield to spear to gun to tonfas to spear.
Unspecialized.
She watched it again. The weapon transformations. The seamless class-swapping that made Glory's specialization system look like a suggestion rather than a rule.
Nobody plays Unspecialized.
The class is theoretically possible but practically impossible without the right weapon.
There's only one weapon that makes it work.
The Myriad Manifestations Umbrella.
Designed by Su Muqiu. Completed by Ye Qiu.
The weapon of the Glory Alliance's greatest player.
She paused the video on a frame that showed Lord Grim mid-transformation—the umbrella's shape shifting between configurations, the impossible fluidity that only came from years of practice with a weapon that existed nowhere else in the game.
Lord Grim.
The account that set three server records in eight days.
The account that just manipulated four guilds into fighting each other.
The account played by someone at this café.
She turned in her chair and looked across the café floor.
The night manager sat at station three—the same station he'd claimed the first night he walked in, the same position he returned to every shift. His eyes were fixed on his screen, fingers moving across the keyboard with the deliberate precision she'd learned to recognize.
He turned down fifty thousand yuan.
He draws guild patrol maps in his sleep.
He gives frame-perfect Battle Mage advice to a girl he met two weeks ago.
He wears a wrist brace because his hands don't work quite right.
And he plays an Unspecialized character with a weapon that only one person in the world knows how to use.
Chen Guo closed the laptop.
The employee file sat in her desk drawer, half-completed.
She'd never finished the paperwork. Ye Qiu had walked in during the night shift two weeks ago, asked for a job, and she'd hired him on the spot because the café needed help and he seemed competent. The background check had been cursory. The references had been nonexistent.
I didn't ask questions.
I was so excited to have someone reliable that I didn't ask the most basic questions.
Like why a man who can set server records and manipulate guild politics wants to work the night shift at an internet café.
Like why his name sounds familiar.
Like why he flinches whenever someone mentions professional Glory.
She pulled the file from the drawer and looked at the name written on the tab.
Ye Qiu.
The name he gave me.
The name of Excellent Era's retired captain.
The name of the only person who could play Unspecialized.
The implications cascaded. If Ye Qiu was Lord Grim—if the legendary Battle God was working at her café—then everything she'd observed over the past two weeks made sudden, terrible sense.
The expertise that seemed impossible for a casual player.
The mechanical issues that looked like injury but moved like unfamiliarity.
The 50,000 yuan refusal from someone who clearly needed money.
He's not just a skilled player.
He's THE skilled player.
And he's been hiding at my café the entire time.
Chen Guo closed the file without reading it.
She already knew what it would say.
The shift change happened at 11:30 PM.
Chen Guo emerged from the back office and crossed the café floor toward station three. Her night manager—her legendary retired professional player—was reviewing something on his screen, his attention split between the game interface and a notification window that kept pinging with messages.
Guild coordination. Post-boss fallout. The consequences of what he did tonight.
And I'm standing here trying to figure out how to ask him if he's the most famous Glory player in history.
She stopped beside his station.
He looked up.
The silence stretched between them—heavy with questions neither of them was asking. Chen Guo had spent the past hour building evidence. She had enough to confront him, to demand answers, to shatter whatever fiction he'd been constructing since he walked through her door.
But do I want to shatter it?
If I ask and he confirms, everything changes.
He stops being my night manager and starts being Ye Qiu—the celebrity, the legend, the man who retired under circumstances nobody fully understood.
If I don't ask, I get to keep the person who's been reliable for two weeks.
The person who fixed my café's network issues without being asked.
The person who trained Tang Rou in ways that made her better than she's ever been.
The person who, for whatever reason, chose this place to hide.
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
"Do you need anything for your wrist?" She pointed at the brace Tang Rou had given him.
"No."
"Okay."
Six words. An entire confrontation contained in the space between them.
I'm not ready.
Or maybe I'm giving him space.
Or maybe I'm afraid of what it means if I'm right.
Chen Guo went home early for the first time since opening the café.
"Lock up when you're done," she said, handing him the keys. "I trust you."
The words hung in the air. I trust you. The most loaded phrase she could have chosen. The acknowledgment that she'd seen enough to make a decision—and the decision was to wait.
He took the keys.
"Thanks."
She nodded once, gathered her things, and walked out the door.
The café was quiet after she left. The late-night crowd had thinned to a handful of dedicated players, their screens casting blue light across workstations that needed cleaning and equipment that needed maintenance.
She knows.
Or she suspects enough that the difference doesn't matter.
And she chose not to ask.
I sat at station three, processing the implications.
Chen Guo was a Glory fan. In the source material, she'd been one of Ye Qiu's most devoted supporters—the kind of fan who watched every match, followed every tournament, and kept track of statistics that most casual viewers ignored. If anyone would recognize the signs, it would be her.
She watched the Blood Gunner Yagg replay.
She saw Lord Grim's Unspecialized combat.
She made the connection.
And she handed me the keys to her café anyway.
The trust was either naive or deliberate. Either she was too focused on immediate practicality to care about his identity, or she was giving him the space to reveal it on his own terms.
The second option.
She's waiting for me to tell her.
She's decided to trust before confirming.
The encrypted channel pulsed.
[Cleansing Mist (Encrypted): Urgent. Check your messages.]
I opened the main inbox and found a single notification that made my stomach drop.
[Cleansing Mist (Encrypted): Excellent Era is compiling a public statement about the "Lord Grim situation." They're going to name you.]
Name me.
Publicly connect Lord Grim to Ye Xiu.
Force the revelation I've been trying to control.
The café's keys sat heavy in my hand. Chen Guo's trust. Tang Rou's loyalty. Steamed Bun's chaos. Su Mucheng's intelligence.
All of it built on a foundation that Excellent Era is about to demolish.
Unless I find a way to control the narrative before they do.
I locked the café at 2 AM and sat in Chen Guo's chair behind the front desk—the seat of a woman who might already know exactly who I was and chose silence over confrontation.
The Umbrella upgrade material sat in Lord Grim's inventory.
Su Muqiu's design, one step closer to completion.
And somewhere in Excellent Era's corporate offices, Tao Xuan was preparing to weaponize the name I'd been borrowing since the day I arrived in this world.
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