Chapter 56: Chu Zihang's Disappeared Father
After saying goodbye to Liu Miaomiao and the others, Lu Mingfei and Su Xiaoqiang took a taxi together.

Su Xiaoqiang gave the name of a residential area, and then asked the driver to go around the Hanting Hotel bus stop on Wuliqiao Road and drop Lu Mingfei off.

As the taxi circled up along the viaduct, Lu Mingfei was still a little nervous, recalling the day when Typhoon Dandelion landed and he, Brother Chu, and his father mistakenly entered Nibelungen. The cold and solemnity of the rainy night seemed to come back to him.

Fortunately, these were just his frightened birds. The taxi drove smoothly into the Punan Bridge, and the surrounding vehicles rushed forward and backward, constantly passing by.

So if you stay in a city for a long time, it actually becomes very small, and everywhere is filled with your memories.

Lu Mingfei looked out the window, and Su Xiaoqiang looked at Lu Mingfei.

Because of her appearance, Su Xiaoqiang had been around a lot of boys. Since kindergarten, there were already boys vying for her. When she reached middle school, the situation became even worse when the hormones of the people around her started to stir.

Many people think that Su Xiaoqiang is very charming, and one of the sources of this charm is that Su Xiaoqiang is very mature, much more mature than girls of the same age.

This maturity is not only physical, but also psychological. Her style of doing things is always flamboyant and domineering, which is inconsistent with her age.

Only Su Xiaoqiang himself knows that he is not mature at all, and is even childish to death. They are all at the age of middle school syndrome, but everyone's middle school syndrome is in a different direction.

She is a bit withdrawn and lonely, so many people think she is independent and self-centered, which is really cool.

But isn’t a lonely middle school student still a middle school student?
In fact, the introverted middle school student is even more childish.

So when she met Lu Mingfei in the Internet cafe, although he looked silly and seemed to be able to talk to everyone, he gave her a feeling of loneliness.

She thought she had found someone of her kind, Lu Mingfei, a lonely and eccentric middle school student like her.

But just now, when Lu Mingfei looked out the window, she seemed to feel real loneliness from him.

Su Xiaoqiang suddenly felt a little at a loss, so he stretched out his foot and kissed Lu Mingfei's calf with his toes.

"Fuck, what are you doing?" Lu Mingfei turned around abruptly after being kicked by the little goddess.

"Why are you pretending to be so melancholy?" Su Xiaoqiang crossed his legs, tapped his knees with his elbows, and held his chin with one hand, sneering at him, "It doesn't fit your personality."

"So what kind of persona should I be?"

"You get free food and drinks by helping others play games in the Internet cafe?"

Lu Mingfei thought about it and realized that this was indeed his character in his previous life.

"Hey, let me ask you," Su Xiaoqiang said, "Why do you buy e-sports lottery tickets? To make money?"

"The main purpose is to support CN e-sports, and the secondary purpose is to make some money." Lu Mingfei never forgets his original intention.

"What are you going to do with the money you make?"

"There are a lot of things to do." Lu Mingfei shrugged.

"for example?"

"Don't tell you."

Su Xiaoqiang curled his lips and thought that boys of this age would only want to buy a new phone or gaming equipment, what else?
“I actually really want to go to Neon.”

Lu Mingfei looked at the sky outside the window and suddenly murmured.

……

CBD center, skyscrapers.

Lao Lei carried his briefcase and found the hotel where Jiude Mai was staying according to the message she sent him.

As a landmark building in the city's CBD center, this skyscraper has 88 floors, of which floors 53 to 87 belong to a five-star hotel called Prince InterContinental, and the top 88th floor is a bar called FOX.

In such a high-end occasion, it was obviously not appropriate for Lao Lei to wear his black work shirt that had been washed to a pale color.

For this purpose, he even took out a black Armani suit from his closet that he had bought when he was in school.

Although it's a little wrinkled because it hasn't been ironed, at least the buttons can still be fastened.

He pushed the door open and, according to Jude Mai's text message, took the elevator to the bathhouse on the 52nd floor.

In room 5214, through the Japanese-style bamboo door, he could vaguely hear laughter coming from inside.

He took a deep breath and knocked gently on the door.

The laughter stopped abruptly, and after a moment, a voice came from inside: "Wait a moment."

Then there was a series of ping-pong sounds. After a minute or two, the bamboo door was pushed open, and a hazy mist floated out. A group of young women wearing "Muntangwu" work clothes walked out of the mist, carrying items such as buckets, bath towels, and brushes.

When he passed by Lao Lei, he nodded to him. Lao Lei also nodded in return.

Only after no one else came out of the fog and a sweet, lazy voice of "You can come in" was heard from the room did Lao Lei walk in and close the door behind him.

"You come to the bathhouse dressed like you're selling insurance. Is this the style of work for everyone at Kassel Academy?" Jiude Mai sneered and joked.

She sat on a wooden bench, wearing a yukata specially used for bathing, which simply hid her exquisite figure. Her waist was tied with only a half belt, and a pair of charming legs were exposed under the yukata.

He was wearing a pair of wooden clogs. Maybe he had just soaked his feet, so there were still water droplets on his feet. His toenails were painted with dark purple nail polish, which formed a sharp contrast with the snow-white instep and the faintly visible blue veins on the instep.

I don’t know if it’s because she soaked her feet for too long, but her face looked a little flushed.

Lao Lei took a look at his outfit and found it was indeed out of place with the environment. "I can't help it. We Chinese people wear big shorts when we take a bath. You can't let me come to see you shirtless, right?"

"It doesn't matter, as long as you have the courage."

Lao Lei shrugged, Jiude Mai moved to make room for a wooden chair, and Lao Lei sat down at one end of the wooden chair, half a meter away from Jiude Mai.

"You said you had some insights on the phone call and wanted to see me." Jiude Mai crossed her legs, "I hope you won't let me down."

Lao Lei patted his small briefcase and said, "Don't worry, everything is in there."

As he spoke, he placed the briefcase between the two of them on the wooden chair, turned the combination on the digital roller, and with a "click", the lock popped open.

Jiude Mai leaned forward with great anticipation, but only saw a few strange little notebooks and a few test papers.

"What is this?" Jiude Mai was confused.

"I don't know if you have this thing in Japan, but in China it's called the Elementary School Student Quality Report Handbook. We give you one every year, and it records your grades for each test that year, as well as the comments from your teachers and parents. You'll also be asked to write a self-evaluation."

Lao Lei picked up a random book and opened the first page with his name on it. "It belongs to Chu Zihang. I stole it from his elementary school's archives with great effort."

"No, but there are similar ones." Jiude Mai shook her head. "What's the use of this manual?"

"Look here." Lao Lei turned to a page in the middle, unfolded it, and handed it to Jiude Mai.

Jiude Mai took a look and found it was the comment page of the handbook. The teacher's comments were densely written at the bottom. The praise for Chu Zihang was so evident that he wanted to write the word "excellent" between the words.

But there was something else that was very strange.

"The column for parent comments is blank." Jiude Mai pointed out the problem.

"That's right." Lao Lei nodded, and took out several other manuals, turning all to the comments page. Some had parents' comments written on them, but some did not.

"The parent comments are all signed by Su Xiaoyan, Chu Zihang's mother."

Lao Lei said, "But none of the manuals have Chu Zihang's father's signature. The report manuals either only have Chu Zihang's mother's comments or are blank. Including these test papers that Chu Zihang sealed, there is only his mother's signature..."

Jiude Mai continued, "So you suspect that these blank spaces should have been the comments written by Chu Zihang's father, but they disappeared for some unknown reason."

"That's right." Lao Lei said. "The parent's comments were stamped, so there should be comments written on them, but it's really empty. Only the comments were erased, but the stamp was left on it. I don't know what method was used..."

"It's as if this person's existence has been wiped out from this world." Jiude Mai whispered.

The two people fell into silence at the same time. They couldn't imagine how much energy was needed to directly erase a person's existence.

This is simply... a power that can only be mastered by those of the first generation and above.

"What else have you discovered?" asked Jiude Mai.

"That's all for now. I've looked in all the possible places for clues." Lao Lei spread his hands. "But the more coincidences there are, the more it proves that this Chu Tianjiao you mentioned may have existed, but he disappeared for some unknown reason."

"Do I need you to tell me that Chu Tianjiao existed?" Jiude Mai crossed her arms over her chest, "So, you came to me just to tell me something I already knew?"

"Don't worry, I haven't finished talking yet." Lao Lei said, "Although I have searched everywhere I can, there is still one place I haven't looked for yet."

Jude Mai is a smart person: "Norma's database?"

"Bingo!" Lao Lei said, "It's just that although I participated in Norma's construction plan, there is someone else at the helm of this plan. If I want to retrieve someone's file from Norma's deepest database, I have to get his help."

"Can you contact him?"

"I can try." Lao Lei made a "rubbing money" gesture with his hands, "This is it..."

Jiude Mai rolled her eyes and said unhappily, "The money will be transferred to your Shirui Bank account later. A deposit of 100,000 US dollars will be made first, and the rest of the payment will depend on your results."

"Very good, very good." He laughed embarrassedly, "But it's not that I want the money, it's just that I need some money to pave the way for this link, there's nothing I can do about it."

Jiude Mai waved her hands, indicating that she didn't want to hear him continue.

"But, speaking of that," Jiude Mai suddenly said, "since Chu Tianjiao's existence has been erased even from the Elementary School Student Quality Report Handbook, is there still a file on him in Norma's database?"

"I studied hacking. Once the data on a computer hard drive is formatted and then overwritten with other data, the original data will be completely erased and cannot be recovered by any technical means."

Lao Lei shrugged, "But the earth is not a computer, and the laws of physics are not the command symbols of a computer. The universe is huge and infinite, and it is +∞ times more precise than a computer.

I believe that no one can make a person's existence disappear completely. As long as he really existed, there will always be some clues left.

I even think that we only need to ask Chu Zihang himself to find out whether he has a father named Chu Tianjiao. I don’t know why we have to go around in circles.”

"We do this for a reason."

Jiude Mai suddenly seemed to have been sitting for too long and stretched out as if she was a little sleepy, and the clogs on her feet swayed slightly.

"If you can find Chu Tianjiao's file, you just need to bring his file and give it to me."

Lao Lei realized that this was an order to expel him, and he stood up from his chair: "Okay, I will contact you after I get the result."

Jiude Mai held her face and smiled: "Waiting for your good news."

(End of this chapter)