Chapter 492: Yao Qing

As soon as he said this, the entire Su Mansion went quiet.

Chen Ling looked at Su Zhiwei expressionlessly: "You know him?"

"Yes, our families were old friends, and I basically watched him grow up." Su Zhiwei’s expression was subtle. "Although their family moved away later, we kept in touch. He heard I was back in my hometown for vacation and said he would come to see me... I didn't expect it to be today."

Yao Qing looked at Chen Ling carefully, his gaze darting between those cold eyes and the boning knife in his palm, his expression suspicious and uncertain.

Su Zhiwei was about to step forward to help Yao Qing up, but was stopped by Chen Ling.

"Just to be safe, let me confirm one more thing."

A familiar face doesn't necessarily mean anything; "Master of Disguise" Chen Ling knows this better than anyone. He doesn't know how many enemies have died at his hands because of this very fact. Although he feels it should be extremely difficult for a "Path of the Drama God" to appear in this era, it never hurts to be cautious when someone shows up at such a critical juncture.

Chen Ling gripped his boning knife and walked straight toward Yao Qing, who was sitting on the ground. As he approached, vigilance and terror surfaced in the young man's eyes, and he kept kicking his legs, scrambling backward.

"What... what are you doing?! I'm warning you, this is a society governed by law, you..."

Before Yao Qing could finish, Chen Ling grabbed him by the collar, and an apricot-red hue slowly emerged at the corners of his eyes...

[Vermilion Face]!

A mysterious red glint flashed in Chen Ling's pupils. This was a brand-new ocular technique he had acquired after Chen Yan painted the corners of his eyes for him, and now, Chen Ling activated it!

Yao Qing only felt a sharp pain in his mind, and a brief moment of daze appeared in his eyes!

A fragmented "play" surfaced before Chen Ling's eyes.

……

"Sissy!"

"Yao the Sissy!"

"Hahahaha, look at you guys, he even has a little bird embroidered on his school uniform~ Only girls would wear clothes like this, right?"

"I even saw him secretly embroidering at school last time!"

"Don't you guys know? Yao Qing's whole family does embroidery! Look at his hands, they're all calloused from holding needles and thread every day."

"Even girls don't embroider nowadays, right? Yao Qing is so girly! Yao the Sissy! Hahahaha..."

“……”

Bursts of a young boy's mocking laughter reached Chen Ling's ears. His eyelashes trembled slightly, and he slowly opened his eyes.

What came into view was a dirty street corner. Several boys in school uniforms, looking like middle schoolers, were gathered together, laughing loudly... In their center, a boy with a small braid lay on the ground, covered in dust and footprints.

"So this is the power of these eyes..." Chen Ling rubbed the apricot-red at the corners of his eyes, muttering to himself.

After activating "Vermilion Face," Chen Ling can use his ocular technique to peer into the most memorable fragments of the target's life experience, using their eyes as a medium.

If everyone's life is a play performed by themselves, then Chen Ling's eyes possess the authority to browse through these "life plays."

It's like the eyes of an "audience member."

Chen Ling looked around. Only this street corner was clear; everything else was hazy, like mist...

"Because it's inside a memory, it only renders the place that left the deepest impression?"

Chen Ling tried to touch one of the boys with his hand, but his fingertips passed through as if there were nothing there. No one noticed him; he was like a void ghost.

Sure enough, no matter what happened here, he could only be an "audience member."

Chen Ling stopped exploring the surroundings and focused his gaze on the disheveled boy beaten to the ground. Judging by his appearance, it was indeed the Yao Qing he had just seen at the entrance of the Su residence.

"I'm not a sissy!!" Yao Qing tried to crawl up from the ground in anger, but was forcefully stomped back down by the others.

"An embroiderer saying he's not a sissy?"

"So what if I embroider?! That's a craft passed down from my ancestors! I'm not a sissy!"

"Embroidery is just embroidery, something only little girls play with, yet you can't put it down, hahahaha..."

Amidst a burst of uproarious laughter, the boy struggled to crawl up from the ground again, only to be stepped on again and again. His face and body were covered in mud, looking utterly wretched.

Just then, a cold voice came from the side:

"What are you doing?"

The boys and Chen Ling turned to look at the same time. They saw the end of the alley, which had been blurry, suddenly roll into clarity. A young girl wearing a beige hoodie with a crossbody bag stood there, frowning as she looked at them.

Su Zhiwei?

Chen Ling's eyebrows raised slightly when he saw that face. At this time, Su Zhiwei looked to be about twenty years old, like a college student who had just returned from a holiday away. Although there was still a hint of youthfulness on her face, she already possessed a unique, rational temperament.

Yao Qing, lying on the ground covered in dust, was stunned when he heard the voice. As he looked up at Su Zhiwei, a faint mist of grievance rose in his eyes...

"Who is she?"

"I've seen her at my brother's school, she seems to be the young lady from some wealthy family..."

"Is she a college student?"

"A college student?"

“……”

The few middle school boys, seeing Su Zhiwei walking toward them with a cold face, began to lose their nerve. And when Su Zhiwei casually picked up a brick from the ground, her eyes narrowing and becoming increasingly sharp, they exchanged a glance and hurriedly turned to run away.

Su Zhiwei walked to Yao Qing's side. Seeing the boys run off, she threw the brick into a corner and reached out to pull the filthy Yao Qing up.

"Sister Zhiwei..."

Middle school boys hadn't fully developed yet, and his height was quite a bit shorter than Su Zhiwei's; even standing up, he only reached her chest. Plus, with Yao Qing keeping his head lowered, not daring to look at Su Zhiwei, he seemed to have shrunk into the ground.

"I haven't been back for a year, and you've grown taller again." Su Zhiwei's voice softened.

"...How am I tall? When we line up at school, I can only stand in the third spot."

"You'll keep growing."

Su Zhiwei raised her hand to measure his head, then lifted it to a position higher than her own. "You'll grow taller than your sister and become a real man who stands tall."

"...But they all say I'm a sissy." Yao Qing bit his lips, gathered his courage, and looked up to meet Su Zhiwei's eyes.

"Sister Zhiwei... is what I embroider really that sissy?"

The boy's eyes were filled with confusion and struggle. He stood in the center of the misty fog, with countless figures behind him pointing and laughing, like a painful lost soul.

Su Zhiwei looked at him, a touch of tenderness appearing in her eyes. She took the boy's hand and lifted it; his slender fingertips were covered in puncture wounds and thick calluses, not like the hands of a twelve or thirteen-year-old boy, but rather as rough as the palms of a middle-aged person who had done farm work for years.

"Whether something is 'sissy' or not isn't about what you do, but whether you show will and courage while doing it."

Su Zhiwei looked at those scarred hands, a faint smile appearing on her face.

"Don't worry about what others think; they won't understand the effort you put in behind the scenes... And they won't understand that someone with hands like these could never be a sissy."