The musty smell in the attic was like a swarm of microscopic beetles, trying to burrow into every pore of Su Yaoguang's skin. She sat stiffly on the creaking folding bed, the 'On Sale' sticker on her forehead gleaming with an almost absurd dark light in the dim afterglow of the checkout counter. The feeling was strange, like a god who had once stood at the top of a pyramid overlooking all living beings, suddenly being thrown into the clearance bin of a cheap wholesale market, and her most prized S-class logical armament was now subdued like a defunct robotic vacuum cleaner under the suppression of that sticker.
Su Yaoguang raised her right hand. Her right arm, which was originally composed of ink, had now completely turned into a disaster. The Landslide's ouroboros emblem had shattered into a pile of meaningless geometric figures, and the blood-red eye was slowly squeezing out from deep within her skin. It was not only rotating, but even blinking. Each time it blinked, Su Yaoguang could hear a kind of noisy static electricity, similar to that of a TV losing signal, jumping wildly in her bone marrow.
"So this is what they call... surveillance?" Su Yaoguang raised the corner of her mouth in self-mockery.
That old fox, Lu Chen, what he sent wasn't a secret order at all, but a location beacon. This eye is watching her, and also watching Chu Lin through her. Or rather, it's waiting for her to completely rot, so that the most intense poisonous flower can bloom beside Chu Lin, this 'ultimate urban legend'.
Just then, a dull metallic crash came from the direction of the bathroom, followed by the hissing sound of water gushing out wildly.
Su Yaoguang suddenly stood up. The instinct of an S-class Investigator instantly put her into a battle stance. Even though her power was weakened, the inertia of 'violence can solve 99% of problems' still dominated her body. She rushed towards the narrow shared bathroom in the attic, taking three steps at a time. The moment she pushed the door open, a burst of cold water with a rusty smell splashed directly onto her face.
The old water pipe in the bathroom had burst. The section of rusty iron pipe looked like a writhing dead snake, spewing out gray-black liquid from the cracks in the wall.
"Damn logic coupling..." Su Yaoguang cursed in a low voice. In the Semantic Slums, a burst water pipe is never just a physical malfunction, it means that some kind of 'emotion' is overflowing.
She reached out with her left hand, trying to forcibly twist off the valve with brute force. Her fingertips pressed against the cold iron pipe, and a piercing friction sound filled the air, the sound of Su Yaoguang's S-class logic trying to take over physical reality. But at this moment, reality's logic showed surprising stubbornness—in Chu Lin's space, ordinary violence seemed to lose its effectiveness.
"Miss Su, I must remind you, that's an antique from the last century, it doesn't like being treated roughly."
Chu Lin's voice came faintly from outside the door. He had somehow come upstairs, holding a pink plunger in his hand, his dark gray trench coat still wrinkled, looking like a just-awakened sanitation worker.
"The water pipe burst, I'm fixing it." Su Yaoguang didn't turn her head, the red eye on her right arm rotated violently due to emotional fluctuations, bringing with it bursts of ear-piercing electrical sounds.
"You call that fixing? You call that murder." Chu Lin slowly walked into the narrow bathroom, looked at the iron pipe deformed by Su Yaoguang's grip, and clicked his tongue in distress. "Do you know how much it costs to replace a section of this kind of 'vintage' water pipe? You'd have to sell three thousand packs of spicy strips to earn that back."
"Is this the time to talk about money?" Su Yaoguang turned her head angrily, water droplets dripping from her hair, making her look both disheveled and sharp. "This water carries the semantic of 'sadness'. If it fills the entire room, when you wake up tomorrow morning, your bed will turn into a swamp!"
"A swamp? That would save on air conditioning costs." Chu Lin shrugged and then took out a half-bald ballpoint pen from his trench coat pocket.
He ignored Su Yaoguang's anger, bent down, and casually drew a circle around the crack that was spraying water madly.
Su Yaoguang was stunned. She saw Chu Lin lightly write a line in the circle of water: [Gravity logic modified here: Water flows upwards and has a fear of heights.]
The movement was slow, even with a lazy sense of rhythm. But the moment the handwriting was completed, the sensory dimensions in the bathroom underwent a terrifying shift.
The gray-black stagnant water, which had been gushing out crazily and splattering all over the floor, was suddenly grabbed by some invisible force. They no longer flowed downward, but climbed back up the wall in defiance of physical constants. The water droplets trembled on the wall, as if those few centimeters of height were a bottomless abyss to them.
An even more absurd scene occurred: at the burst pipe, the water that had not yet had time to spray out began to shrink frantically. They were like frightened fish, desperately drilling into the depths of the pipe, even emitting screams similar to begging for mercy because they were too crowded.
In less than three seconds, there was not a drop of water in the bathroom. The water that had originally accumulated on the ground was sticking to the ceiling, forming a huge, translucent blue water ball, which, due to the influence of "acrophobia," kept wriggling and shrinking on the ceiling, not daring to drop even a trace of water.
Su Yaoguang, due to inertia, was still maintaining the posture of twisting the water pipe, standing there dumbfounded.
Her worldview experienced a severe pixelation at this moment. She heard the water droplets stuck to the ceiling whispering, discussing "vertigo from heights." She could even feel the spatial sense of the entire bathroom being infinitely stretched, with microscopic logic patches forcibly overriding macroscopic physical common sense.
"You..." Su Yaoguang opened her mouth with difficulty, her voice a little dry, "You defined them as... creatures afraid of heights?"
"That way they won't just fall down and wet my floor tiles, will they?" Chu Lin put away his ballpoint pen and looked at the "anti-gravity aquarium" on the ceiling with satisfaction. "Miss Su, in my territory, brute force repair is the least efficient behavior. What we need is communication, is reasoning. Look, how well-behaved they are now."
Su Yaoguang looked at the trembling water ball above her head, and then at Chu Lin's matter-of-course face. She felt that the logic algorithms in her body were frantically reporting errors, and the dizziness caused by that cognitive dissonance was even stronger than that red eye.
"Okay, the plumbing issue is resolved. Now, let's talk about your 'cohabitation rules'." Chu Lin leaned against the doorframe, playing with the pink plunger in his hand. "First, don't try to perform 'hand-ripping iron pipes' in my bathroom, it will increase my maintenance costs. Second, given that you are now a 'nearly expired special offer,' you have no independent washing rights. Unless you finish stocking the shelves, you can only negotiate with that acrophobic water stain about washing your face."
"Chu Lin!" Su Yaoguang gritted her teeth, approaching step by step, "Do you even know what you're doing? Lu Chen is monitoring you, the Red Umbrella is closing in, and the logic of the entire city is collapsing like dominoes! And you're here discussing pipes and shelves with me?"
The distance between the two was less than ten centimeters.
Chu Lin lowered his head slightly, the TV static-like patterns in his dead fish eyes were clearly visible. Su Yaoguang could smell the faint, mixed scent of old paper and soy sauce on him. This smell was not unpleasant, and even to some extent, it miraculously smoothed out the almost insane anxiety in her heart.
"Miss Su, the 'apocalypse' you speak of is, in my cash register, merely a large-scale logic overflow." Chu Lin's voice lowered, carrying an unquestionable asymmetric sense of oppression. "You think Lu Chen is monitoring me? No, he's just using you to confirm whether he's still alive. As for the red umbrella..."
Chu Lin paused, a barely perceptible arc appearing at the corner of his mouth.
"Do you think it's here to kill me, or to... apply for a job?"
This sentence was like a bolt of lightning, cleaving through Su Yaoguang's understanding. The subtext behind the pun sent a chill up her spine. Apply for a job? That high-dimensional myth that could instantly erase a street and make even S-class investigators tremble, in Chu Lin's eyes, was just a potential employee?
"Don't look at me with that monster-like gaze." Chu Lin straightened up, and the power dynamic shifted subtly at that moment. Su Yaoguang, who originally held the power, now seemed more like a lost child, while the salted-fish clerk had become the only fulcrum in this chaotic order.
"Go downstairs to eat. As a reward for stocking the shelves, we'll add an egg tonight." Chu Lin turned and walked downstairs, his lazy voice floating up, "Oh right, remember to be gentle with the ceiling when you wash your face, that water is quite introverted."
Su Yaoguang stood in the center of the bathroom, looking up at the cluster of water stains on the ceiling that were still struggling to climb higher, shrinking into a ball. She suddenly realized that the cold, efficient, and rational investigator image she had built up in her life was collapsing at an unstoppable rate in this convenience store.
As she walked down the stairs, the lights in the convenience store seemed to dim a little more.
Chu Lin sat behind the cash register, with two bowls of steaming noodles on the table. The color of the noodles was a bit strange, with a faint purple tinge, but in this chaotic semantic environment, Su Yaoguang no longer intended to explore the physical components behind it.
"Eat." Chu Lin pushed a bowl over, and handed her a pair of disposable chopsticks.
Su Yaoguang sat down in silence. She noticed that there was no egg in Chu Lin's bowl, but hers had a slightly browned fried egg lying quietly in it. The edge of the fried egg glowed with a golden sheen, appearing particularly real in the dimly lit store.
"Why did you add an egg for me?" Su Yaoguang held the chopsticks, but didn't move.
"Because you are a 'free gift'. In logic, a free gift must appear more attractive than the original item, so that the customer won't return it." Chu Lin answered, stuffing noodles into his mouth, his words muffled.
"Lu Chen won't return it." Su Yaoguang looked at the noodles, "He will only completely erase me."
"He can't erase you." Chu Lin put down his chopsticks, his dead fish eyes staring straight at the red eye on Su Yaoguang's right arm, "Because I've already entered you into the system. In the 'Midnight 24' convenience store, as long as a product is entered into the system, unless I personally report it as damaged, even if a higher-dimensional life descends, it will have to obediently line up and wait to check out."
Su Yaoguang's heart skipped a beat.
It was a sense of security she had never felt before, although it was built on an extremely absurd logic. She lowered her head and began to eat the egg in small bites. The egg tasted surprisingly good, with a pure, unadulterated aroma, as if it were the only thing in the world that had not been contaminated by logic.
"Chu Lin." Su Yaoguang suddenly spoke, her voice very soft, "On your notebook... why is my name on it?"
Chu Lin stopped eating his noodles.
The cash register suddenly made a "ding" sound and popped open automatically. In the empty cash drawer, the original nine hundred yuan in cash began to emit a faint white smoke.
"That's an advance payment." Chu Lin didn't look at her, but stared at the darkness outside the convenience store. "Seventeen years ago, someone paid me this nine hundred yuan to pull you out of that great collapse. I waited seventeen years for you to come to work. Do you think this egg should be added for you?"
Su Yaoguang froze. The noodles at the tip of her chopsticks slipped back into the bowl, splashing a few drops of purple soup.
Seventeen years ago?
In that "Great Logic Collapse" that led to the death of her parents, made her an orphan, and ultimately led to her adoption by the Investigation Bureau, Chu Lin was actually involved? And she was just a long-term worker for whom nine hundred yuan in wages had been prepaid?
"So, Lu Chen knows about this?" Su Yaoguang's voice trembled.
"Of course he knows. He even wanted to raise the price, but I refused. I don't like disrupting market prices." Chu Lin stood up and walked towards the door of the convenience store.
At the same time, the street outside changed.
Su Yaoguang heard a sound. It was no longer the sound of rain, but the sound of some heavy, huge fabric rubbing against the air.
The originally dark street was dyed a bizarre dark red at this moment. Those black umbrellas floating in the air seemed to sense the pressure of some superior being and began to shrink and descend. They were like a flock of startled crows, burying themselves in the shadows of the street.
The macroscopic visual perspective began to twist violently.
In Su Yaoguang's vision, the entire street seemed to turn into a crumpled red wrapping paper. The telephone poles in the distance bent into strange arcs, like pairs of withered arms reaching towards the sky. And in the center of the street, that red dot was rapidly enlarging.
It was a red umbrella.
It was moving slowly, and with every centimeter it moved, the surrounding space would emit a teeth-aching cracking sound. The canopy was uncommonly large, the raised part covering half the sky, red as dripping blood, red as despair.
Su Yaoguang felt the severe pain in her right arm explode instantly. That blood-red eye was about to burst through her skin, screaming madly, cheering, calling for the arrival of that fellow.
"It's coming..." Su Yaoguang dropped her chopsticks and stood up abruptly, the pressure from the red umbrella making it almost impossible for her to breathe. That high-dimensional logical oppression felt like a Mount Tai, slowly pressing down on every cell in her body.
Chu Lin, however, calmly took out the old mop stained with unknown viscous liquid from behind the counter.
He even straightened his collar and adjusted the employee number tag that read "Clerk."
"Miss Su, go and open the rolling shutter halfway," Chu Lin instructed.
"Are you crazy? That's the Red Umbrella! A bizarre tale that can devour an entire city!" Su Yaoguang screamed.
"I know. That's why I asked you to open it halfway, so it has to lower its head when it comes in. In my store, no matter how big the business, you have to learn to bow your head." Chu Lin hefted the mop in his hand, a mercenary and indifferent smile on his lips.
Su Yaoguang walked towards the rolling shutter with trembling hands.
Each step she took felt like stepping on the edge of a knife. The illusion of "hearing the weight of sunlight" struck again, but this time, the sunlight had turned into blood-colored pressure. She heard the sound of the Red Umbrella moving, which was no longer a rubbing sound, but a dull breathing belonging to some behemoth.
Ka-chak.
The rolling door was pulled open a crack.
Instantly, an intense, almost suffocating, bloody smell mixed with a rotten sweetness rushed into the convenience store. Su Yaoguang was pushed back several steps by the smell, knocking over the neatly arranged potato chip rack.
A pair of huge feet wearing red embroidered shoes stopped at the entrance of the convenience store.
The feet were pale and bloodless, and the skin was covered with dense text. The text flowed and reorganized continuously, writing one desperate story after another.
And above those feet, the red umbrella cover slowly tilted.
A face with no facial features, only a huge mouth, probed in through the crack in the rolling door. The corners of its mouth were split all the way to the ears, revealing countless teeth made of shattered logic chips inside.
"Chu... Lin..." The voice was no longer a whisper, but a chorus of countless screams.
Su Yaoguang huddled in the corner, watching the terrifying avatar. She found that her senses were being deprived, her vision was turning red, her hearing was shattering, and even the sense of "self" began to dissipate at this moment.
Just as she was about to completely collapse, Chu Lin moved.
He carried the broken mop and strode over like he was shooing away a homeless man spitting on the doorstep of a shop.
"What's all the shouting? It's the middle of the night, can you afford to compensate the neighbors for disturbing their rest?"
Chu Lin's voice seemed particularly abrupt in the air filled with the whispers of urban legends, even carrying a strange sense of healing.
He walked up to that huge mouth, and before the other party could react, he directly stuffed the mop head, covered in unknown liquid, into the other party's mouth.
"Woo—!"
The red umbrella made a deafening muffled sound.
"Woo what woo? Didn't you see the sign hanging at the door that says 'No Noise'?" Chu Lin stirred the mop violently, his tone becoming extremely impatient. "Also, the quality of your clothes is too old, semantically belonging to 'outdated fear'. This kind of stuff can't even get into the second-hand logic market now."
Su Yaoguang watched this scene in stunned silence.
In her mind, this should have been an earth-shattering final battle. Su Yaoguang had already prepared to sacrifice herself and perish together with the Red Umbrella. But the reality was that the ultimate urban legend that had stumped investigation bureaus around the world was now being poked backwards by Chu Lin with a broken mop.
An even weirder thing happened.
The red umbrella, after being poked by the mop, actually began to rapidly fade in color from its original blood-dripping hue. The flowing words were like they encountered a strong acid, melting and disappearing one after another.
"Miss Su, don't stand there, get a bag over here." Chu Lin shouted back, "And by the way, switch the cash register to 'scrap recycling' mode."
Su Yaoguang mechanically stood up, using both hands and feet to pull out an extra-large black plastic bag from under the counter.
"What is this for?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"Since it's unwilling to be an employee, then it can only be disposed of as garbage." Chu Lin snorted coldly, and the mop in his hand suddenly pressed down.
At this moment, that huge red figure actually began to shrink rapidly. From a giant umbrella that blotted out the sky, it shrank to the size of a normal umbrella, and finally turned into a tattered red rag.
Chu Lin casually reached out, grabbed the red rag, and stuffed it into the plastic bag in Su Yaoguang's hand, then tied a tight knot.
"Done. Although the quality is a bit poor, it can still be used as a floor mat."
Chu Lin clapped his hands, turned around, and looked at Su Yaoguang, whose face was full of "Who am I, where am I, what am I doing."
The dark red outside the convenience store disappeared instantly, and the sky returned to its old newspaper-like gray-yellow color. The black umbrella swarm, which had been huddled in the shadows, now fled into the depths of the old city like remnants of an army that had lost its commander.
"Chu Lin..." Su Yaoguang tightly grasped the plastic bag containing the remains of the red umbrella, her fingertips turning white from the force.
"What's wrong, can't bear to part with it? If you can't, you can take it back to sleep with." Chu Lin sat back at the counter and picked up the bowl of noodles that had cooled down.
"It's not that..." Su Yaoguang swallowed, pointing to the red eye and lines rapidly disappearing on her right arm, "It... was just solved by you like that?"
"Solved? Miss Su, your understanding of business logic is too one-sided." Chu Lin took a bite of noodles, a sly glint flashing in his dead fish eyes.
"This is called 'resource integration'. Since Lu Chen wants to use it to test me, then I will use it to strengthen my foundation. From today onwards, the semantic firewall of this convenience store will be made up of the remains of the Red Umbrella."
Chu Lin put down his chopsticks and pointed at Su Yaoguang.
"And you, as the person who handled it, your 'shelf life' has been officially extended."
Su Yaoguang looked at Chu Lin. At this moment, she finally understood that Lu Chen was wrong about one thing.
Chu Lin isn't the scariest urban legend.
He is a... rule maker who is more greedy, more indifferent, and more invincible than urban legends.
Just as Su Yaoguang was about to breathe a sigh of relief and re-examine her cohabitation life, Chu Lin suddenly raised his head and looked at the convenience store's yellowed small refrigerator.
The refrigerator door, without anyone touching it, clicked open slowly.
An aura a hundred times colder than the Red Umbrella overflowed from the refrigerator's cooling compartment.
"Chu Lin." A clear, innocent voice came from the refrigerator.
"I want to eat that egg."
Su Yaoguang's body froze instantly. That voice was exactly the same as the "her own voice" she had heard in the bathroom just now.
Chu Lin sighed, finished the last mouthful of noodle soup, his tone full of helplessness.
"Miss Su, it seems I miscalculated."
He put down the bowl and looked at the miniature "Su Yaoguang" slowly crawling out of the refrigerator.
"What Lu Chen sent wasn't a free gift, he sent a... nested recursion."
"The current you is actually the 'real deal' that died seventeen years ago. And the one who was just sorting the goods with me..."
Chu Lin pointed at Su Yaoguang, his eyes revealing an unprecedented solemnity.
"You are the 'packaging box' that the Red Umbrella specially customized seventeen years later in order to escape into this store."
The black plastic bag in Su Yaoguang's hand fell to the ground with a thud.
Inside the bag, the remains of the Red Umbrella were jumping wildly, emitting a violent vibration similar to human laughter.
On the street outside the convenience store, the group of black umbrellas that had originally scattered turned around in unison at this moment, and on each umbrella surface, Su Yaoguang's desperate face emerged.
Welcome to the repository, Miss Packaging Box.