magician in town

Chapter 684 Roach's Paradox (They asked me to write a new title and not be lazy o(*￣︶￣*)o)

Chu Jin stared at Du Zhengyi without answering his question, but Du Zhengyi saw sorrow in her eyes. His heart sank to the bottom.

“According to our original plan, when Roach goes to university, his parents will gradually guide him to break the seal. Although this process will not be easy, it will be relatively gentle. Roach will gradually accept that the door to the world of consciousness is opening to him. He will also gradually regain his proper mage abilities. University is the time when mages truly learn magic. But…” Chu Jin said.

She sighed and complained, "But one day, Rorian suddenly changed his ways and refused to follow the original plan."

“Rocky’s relationship with his parents is indeed a bit strange. He occasionally talks about things from his childhood, and I can feel his parents’ love for him. But his grades aren’t good, and his parents never blame him. When he says he wants to go to the human world, his parents completely agree. This doesn’t make Rocky feel respected; instead, it makes him very sad. He thinks he’s too bad, which is why his parents have no expectations of him, and it’s the main reason for his estrangement from them. His father seems easygoing and open-minded, but he becomes very arbitrary and authoritarian when it comes to deciding which world Rocky will belong to in the future, and he does things very hastily. He loves his son, that’s undeniable; he has sacrificed everything for his son. But he also has an abnormal distance from his son,” Du Zhengyi said. He hesitated for a moment, then tentatively asked, “Are Rocky’s parents afraid of their son?”

Chu Jin hesitated for a moment. "I can't answer this question for them, but I think the actual situation is more complicated. It's more like they don't know what the best course of action is, so they're caught in a dilemma and are doing things in a haphazard way."

She thought for a moment and continued, “Rocky loves the human world, and our whole family hopes that will happen too. When he was very young, his grandfather often took him to play in the human world, and he received almost the same education as human children. Our greatest hope is that he will gradually break free of his seal, successfully conceal his identity as a mind mage, avoid the covetousness of the magical world, and live peacefully in the human world. But you know this is a double-edged sword. Rocky will have a very difficult time in our school. Not only will his magical abilities be extremely low, but his excessive love for human culture will also make him a… strange minority among mage apprentices.”

Du Zheng thought she might want to call him an oddball, but she really didn't want to use that word to describe her nephew.

"When Roach was little, he would come home crying about being bullied, and his family would stand up for him. But gradually... around the age of ten, he stopped talking about it. Occasionally, if he was bullied too badly and the marks weren't hidden, my sister would still find out. But by then Roach was older, and his mother would stand up for him, which hurt Roach's pride even more. The next time, Roach would only hide it more carefully, and he stopped confiding in his parents. Their relationship grew more and more distant. When my sister asked him too many questions, he would tell her that no one could order the other classmates to stop discriminating against him; either he had a problem and deserved to be bullied, or the world was wrong. He said the world was wrong when..." His father was somewhat stressed, and I heard they had a huge argument. By then, I had joined a new project team and had even less time to contact my family. Several years later, when my project was nearing completion, Roach was already in college. I thought he was already methodically breaking the seal, but unexpectedly, Rorian and my sister told me they weren't planning to break Roach's seal anymore. They changed their decision and decided that Roach should live as an ordinary person, in the human world, in that other world, and never return to ours. We had a fight, and they warned me not to overstep my boundaries; Roach was their son, and I couldn't interfere with their parenting methods. They forbade me from seeing Roach.

It sounded like they'd gone mad. Du Zhengyi pondered silently, Luo Qi's growth trajectory unfolding in his mind, the timeline stretching out, and he guessed the reason for their madness.

"But Rorian's idea is just too crazy. He wants to continue to completely suppress Roach's magic, which will put tremendous mental pressure on Roach. He's not an ordinary mage; he's an A-rank telekinetic mage. Such a vast magical power is being held back by a precarious dam, and its collapse is inevitable. The later the dam collapses, the worse the timing, and the greater the damage to Roach. For a long time, I didn't understand why Rorian was so extreme. I tried to talk to my sister alone, but it always ended badly."

Du Zhengyi remained silent. He seemed to want to stand up and leave, to avoid the conversation that was about to begin. However, he remained seated; enduring pain was an instinct for him. But his expression had likely betrayed too much. Chu Jin didn't need to be a telepathic mage; as long as she was born into a family skilled at reading people's hearts, she could guess what he knew, and that he was already capable of saying some things.

“Luo Rui’an is your attending physician, right?” Chu Jin said softly.

“Yes,” Du Zhengyi said.

"I only learned about this by chance from Liu Li much later. Once I knew about it, many mysteries were solved," Chu Jin said.

She continued, "The turning point happened that day. Luo Rui'an was urgently summoned by Pei Shu to deal with the emergency in Qionglin... no, it should be said that it was an emergency at Gushan. The emergency Luo Rui'an went to deal with was to rescue you. You suffered a severe attack of mental magic that day. Pei Shu is a great mental mage, but he is not a specialist in healing, while Luo Rui'an is a genius in this area. When he was rescuing you, he came into close contact with the damage to your head, and he must have found that the damage... very familiar. I think he must have been very frightened at that time. He knows very little about anything other than mental magic. During that time, he tried to pull me out of the project team and asked me a lot of questions about time magic."

Du Zheng lowered his head, picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. His breathing and pulse remained unchanged. When he looked up at Chu Jin again, his gaze was still gentle.

"You already knew?" Chu Jin asked.

"Know what?" Du Zheng asked in return.

“You know I’m a calculator, I’m skilled in calculation, but calculation encompasses so much; all important magic is related to calculation. Time and space are two of the most important types of magic. I know you’re skilled in spatial manipulation, but perhaps you also know a little about the magic of time. When time cannot be directly observed, it can be inferred through calculation. Sometimes, problems related to time are counterintuitive, but calculation can explain the truth. One of the principles of time is that time tries its best to eliminate paradoxes caused by going back in time. So, when calculating, if certain observable phenomena and the results produced by the calculation model show short-term discrepancies, it means that someone has gone back in time, either upstream or downstream,” Chu Jin said.

“The first law of time, the principle of time correction,” Du Zhengyi said, his voice steady. “Time will automatically eliminate the paradoxes caused by going back or down time. Spacetime paradoxes will cause oscillations, but the oscillations will tend to return to the original timeline.”

“Yes. So you know, the person who killed you was Luo Qi,” Chu Jin said, looking directly into the eyes of the Lonely Mountain guard. “I’m not dead yet,” Du Zhengyi said.

Chu Jin remained silent.

“Indeed, I will die from the mental damage Roach inflicts on me in the near future. But in the previous timeline, I died the first time I met Roach. In this timeline, that Roach says he didn't kill me last time; a group of mental mages killed me together. I believe him because when we met this time, a group of mental mages did indeed break into Lonely Mountain. They linked together in a strange way to attack me. They were useless this time because the Roach from the past destroyed their link. Then, wanting to seize control of Lonely Mountain, he attacked my mind again.” Du Zhengyi said, head bowed, as if recounting someone's cause of death at their funeral. “I died last time, and time will correct the spacetime paradox caused by my survival this time. I will live a little longer, but an early death is inevitable. Time will kill me with Roach's hand. I have never blamed Roach; it has nothing to do with him, no matter which Roach it is.”

Chu Jin stared at him for a long time. Her nose was a little red, and her breathing was a little heavy. She didn't shed any tears, but she couldn't speak for a long time.

"Do you know this Luo Qi?" Chu Jin asked.

“He doesn’t know. He’d better never know,” Du Zhengyi said.

"Oh, so you're starting to empathize with his father, wanting to hide the cruelest truth of the world from Roach just like he did," she joked.

Du Zheng smiled.

Chu Jin said, "I discovered that someone traveled back in time. Specifically, I discovered that Roach traveled back in time. Rorian also discovered it; of course, he could recognize the traces of his own son's thoughts. This terrified him; it's more terrifying than any future we could have imagined. We also vaguely understand one thing: the future we arranged for Roach has actually deeply hurt him. Roach has activated the greatest taboo in our world. This is quite remarkable; I'm even a little proud of my nephew. I destroyed all the related calculations in the Computing Institute, covering up the digital traces left by Roach's time travel. That ostrich Rorian only thinks this Roach is his son; the other one..." The thugs had nothing to do with him. He chose a more conservative approach; he only wanted to protect Roach, he wanted Roach to never know he was a telekinetic sorcerer, and he wanted to keep Roach far away in the human world. As for whether Roach would face more serious problems due to the dam breaking too late, he chose to take a gamble. But you know, the worst-case scenario for Roach is a dam breaking under some dangerous circumstances. If he awakens his abilities far from the magical world, with no one to help him, he will be drowned by his own will; he will become a madman, a lost soul in the hell he created, and you will need to clean him up as a high-level anti-magic sorcerer.”

Du Zhengyi understood why she was Liu Li's good friend; she was as wise and courageous as Liu Li. Luo Qi's extraordinary courage might also be inherited from his mother's family. Du Zhengyi agreed with her assessment; when he first met Luo Qi, Luo Qi's defenses were already crumbling. He was already able to see through Pei Shu's mental disguises; in the deepest prison beneath Qionglin, he could see through the collective works of the ancient mental sorcerers.

He suddenly remembered what Roach had been chattering about—a cartoon character on the prison wall. Why would there be a human cartoon character? Why did that cartoon character lead him out of the prison? He recognized it, of course; it was the mark he had left for himself.

He pulled himself out of his chaotic thoughts and thought about Chu Jin's move; she was an even less conspicuous player.

She said, “Based on the first law of time, it’s easy to make a simple deduction: since Roach accepted his fate and became a mind mage in another timeline, then this Roach will too. I disagree with his parents. Rather than letting Roach suffer in his self-exploration, I’d rather push things along. After calculation, I believe that moving your position is the minimum set that will produce the greatest positive impact. I’m sorry, but I still have to apologize to you. Even a fortune teller has his own biases, or to put it bluntly, selfishness. I can’t help but help my youngest child, even if it’s cruel to you.”

“No need to apologize,” Du Zhengyi said calmly. “Actually, I should have died again half a month ago, but Luo Qi intervened, so I can still sit here.”

Chu Jin pondered for a moment, “It seems that the vortex caused by Luo Qi is like a spacetime malfunction. Perhaps because his birth was originally a mutation of a life form, a malfunction of the Primordial Mage’s life magic. The First Lord—the current one is Pei Shu—is responsible for eliminating the malfunctions in the Primordial Mage’s magic and ensuring that everything can continue to operate smoothly. Hopefully, he will not be able to eliminate this malfunction this time.”

“I originally thought that if Luo Qi was within Qiong Lin’s sequence, it wouldn’t be a malfunction. But once it’s discovered that there are two Luo Qi in this world, Qiong Lin’s attitude toward getting rid of Luo Qi will become resolute. What I’m a little confused about now is that Luo Qi himself doesn’t know that there are two of him in this world, but half a month ago he came to the conclusion that he needs to hide and can no longer see Pei Shu. Does Master Chu have any clue about this?”

Chu Jin frowned, pondered for a moment, and finally shook her head.

Du Zhengyi suddenly realized that Chu Jin wasn't even curious about his question. This question itself implied that the two of them had recently lost contact. Chu Jin wasn't in a hurry, which meant that the person who broke into the fortune teller's workplace today was probably Luo Qi. This Luo Qi.

For those experiencing a reading slump, you can also take a look at my new book, "Uncaged," where I'm trying to explore new styles and themes in storytelling.