Chapter Ten

Sheets of smoke blanketed the sky. The brilliant blue sky grew to become a moderate gray. people ran past the two, normally in a panic. Several firefighters and police brushed past the two and headed towards the destruction that Bai Mo left behind.

Boss Lu continued to laze on the man's shoulder. His arms dangled and swayed along with Bai Mo's pase. His head began to feel woozy as it filled with his blood. "Heya," He called out to the man holding him. "I'm starting to feel a little sick here, can you set me down?" Bai Mo didn't turn his head, nor give Boss Lu any of his attention. He continued to stare straight towards his desired destination.

Or at least that's what Boss Lu thought, for Bai Mo didn't have any destination planned. He just continued to walk straight. Going the opposite direction of the people.

"Do you even have anywhere to go? Do you know where you're taking me?" Boss Lu did his best to move his head facing an angle where he could see something else besides Bai Mo's back. When Bai Mo continued to be silent, Boss Lu said, "If you don't have anywhere you need to go, let's stop at the hospital. I've got something to do and we can talk there."

This caught Bai Mo's attention as he replayed back. "What do you have to do?"

Boss Lu made a little sound, "Oh? Now you're talking to me? Well too bad, I don't plan on telling. It's a secret." Boss Lu gave out a little chuckle when he felt the annoyance coming from the man carrying him.

"Hey, but I have a question. What did you do to that system? I've never seen that before. It like, turned into mist and stuff and went up your nose! Nasty! Does that mean that you snorted it? Is that your own way of getting high? Or is it like, living in your nose now?"

Bai Mo stayed silent for a bit, and Boss Lu thought that he wouldn't answer until he heard Bai mo say quietly, "You want to know the answer?"

"Huh? Yah, tell me."

"Well too bad, I don't plan on telling. It's a secret."

"..."

Okay, he kind of deserved that one.

-

Bai Mo let him fall to the ground. Boss Lu watched the floor rush towards his face and turned his body to land on his back. He landed with an 'oof'. "Hey! Care to give me a warning next time!" He yelled.

"We're here." Was all Bai Mo said.

"..." Aish, this guy was getting on his nerves.

Boss Lu turned his head around and looked at their surroundings. "Hey, how did we? How did we get here so fast? Weren't we just on the street?" They were on the street for one second and then outside Leng Zheng's hospital door the next!? "I don't know." He heard Bai Mo say.

Boss Lu gave him a look of doubt. "What do you mean 'I don't know' how could yo-" Boss Lu stopped mid-sentence when he got a good look at the man. Bai Mo wasn't facing the man below him and instead was looking into the door window to Leng Zheng's. His face was solemn and quiet as the light from the window highlighted his attractive features. "I don't know, it's something that I'm just able to do."

Oh yeah... Thought Boss Lu. The scene from before came back to mind. Bai Mo's frustrated face as he argued with the system. "Why is this happening? This is something you can't do, isn't it?" Those words went through his head.

Boss Lu looked at the dried blood-stained to his forehead and the scar that already looks like it had been healing for years. 'This guy... he really doesn't know.'

Boss Lu pushed himself off of the floor and stood face to face with Bai Mo. "Oi." He said as he grabbed Bai Mo's face and turned it towards him. Bai Mo's eyes widened when he looked into Boss Lu's eyes. He wasn't expecting the two of them to be so close and tried to move his head back. "Hey, stop it and let me see." Boss Lu tightened his hold on the man's face and lowered Bai Mo's head so he could get a good look at his forehead. He used his other hand to brush the hair back and looked at the scar.

Bai Mo froze at the close proximity of the man and was angered by the man's touches. But he didn't struggle anymore and looked at Boss Lu's neck like he wanted to rip at it like a lion and kill the man.

After looking closely at the already healed injury, Boss Lu let go of the man. "Ha, what the heck man? You got all riled up from this small kitten scratch?" Boss Lu ignored the man's enraged expression and flicked his forehead with a mocking cat-like smile. "Sit here and wait, you big baby. I'll be right back, we'll talk after you've cooled down." And with that, Boss Lu ruffled the infuriated man's hair and skipped into the room.

Bai Mo watched the door close and leaned against the wall. He grabbed his head and felt his arms trembling. His head pounded and his anger made him grind his teeth together. Breathe. He told himself. He forced a shaky inhale and did his best to exhale. He felt unfamiliar wetness on his hands, grabbing his head as he noticed that water was coming out of his eyes.

Yet he didn't know what caused it.

Boss Lu's smile disappeared when the door closed behind him. His eyes became solemn as he looked at the comatose friend laying on the bed. He walked towards the edge of the bed and sat on a chair.

"Leng Zhang, what do I do now?" He said as he looked at him. "They said you're not gonna make it. I don't want you to die." He knew that he wasn't going to be in this world forever, but he wouldn't want someone like Leng Zhang to leave before him. He would rather leave now that he would live on.

"But I guess that wouldn't work out anyways... who knows what they would do to this world after I leave." Zombie apocalypse, maybe? It's a fan favorite after all.

"Damn," He grimaced as he leaned his face into his hand. "Haha, I really am terrible at planning ahead, aren't I."

'Maybe I'm being selfish?'

Those thoughts have crossed his mind several times before. But he dismissed them with more selfish thoughts. He was a person that does his best going with the flow. He was bad at planning ahead and sorting out large issues. He had an irrational character that would do things without thinking ahead. Perhaps that was the protagonist inside of him. But at those times, Boss Lu would think about the reason he started all of this. His mind would flashback to when he first developed that error in his coding.

And now Boss Lu thought about the man outside of the door. He wanted to laugh at himself again. When he was still here, after years of going on and dealing with this, what was he doing? Going from world to world, same as him, and dealing with inconveniences. How do you even deal with those characters? Manipulation? Mind control? He assumed it was close to the same as he did to him. Bai Mo was probably the one who killed Ms. Sung's father and planted the evidence. But what happened? What went wrong? It was abnormal that systems would actually do the work themselves and from what happened in the courtroom it was obvious that they fought.

I wonder what happened after we left... He wondered. After Bai Mo carried him out the system was left alone with the damage. He doesn't know what happened afterward. Boss Lu reached into his pocket for his phone, only for him to realize that it was empty. "Huh? Where did I?" And then he remembered when he shut off his phone from before, and then he got into an accident, then the police station, and then the courthouse. "Damn, I lost my phone."

So instead, Boss Lu used his comatose friend's phone.

He swiped the phone off the countertop and powered it on. The bright light shone in his eyes and he was faced with a large number of notifications and missed calls. With a huff, Boss Lu deleted all of them.

"Geez, what a lame home screen. Makes you look like a loser." Of course, Leng Zheng wouldn't personalize his phone, he doesn't even have any girl's numbers, only business partners "How boring, yet it fits you."

An idea came to him and he opened up the camera. "Hm, might as well help you. After all, I'm such a good friend. It's only natural." And so he took a photo of him and the sleeping person. Leng Zheng's face was pale and looked extremely bloated because of the angle. Yet next to him, Boss Lu stayed close and had a wide beautiful smile on his face. The difference between the two made it comical. "You look so dumb. Man, the look on your face when you see this is gonna be so hilarious. Ah...." The phone in his hand lowered slightly and his shoulders slumped. "That's right, you wouldn't be able to see it...." He laughed. "Dumb Leng Zheng. If you wanna see it then you gotta wake up. Not my fault."

He held the phone closer to his face and toughened his expression. "Right! Don't get distracted!" He turned the phone back on and opened social media. And immediately, the top trending made him want to toss the phone. "What the? She already has a new lover?"

"'Famous actress, Jia Sung, reveals her hidden lover. "I want to live without regret, so I want to love openly." she says!' What the? Has he already forgotten me?" When the news announced the death of Mr. Sung, they never connected Jia Sung and him, they only said that it was his girlfriend's father, so technically their relationship wasn't revealed to the public.

"But how did this happen?" The two of them were the male and female protagonists. They, at no matter the cost, should end up together. Or else it would be a completely different plot. But when Boss Lu looked at the two of them. Ms. Sung, smiling as she hugged the arm of the other man, who was looking down on her with a warm smile. "Wait a second, I know that guy!" He was another CEO of a large business just like him. Another cold-hearted man melted for the female protagonist.

"No way." Boss Lu scrolled for other news and froze when he saw another surprising headline. "'Earthquake causes whole courtroom to collapse. Guilty murder suspect, Lu Jiang, and many innocent lives were taken.' Huh? They said I'm dead." He turned his head towards the empty side of the room.

"Hey... Hey, system. I know you're here! Come out!"

A familiar warping effect showed up in front of him and he felt the air go stale. The small ball of glowing gas came out of it. "Yeah, I'm here." Said the floating ball.

"Hey system, if you're so all-knowing tell me what this is!" Boss Lu showed the phone to the system and pointed at the so-called 'lovely couple'. "What's with this? Why is she suddenly with someone else? Wasn't she supposed to end up with me?"

The system's body flickered somewhat, "So what? Did you want to end up with her? Are you jealous?"

"What? No, just what happened to the plot? Wasn't she supposed to end up with me?"

If the system, it would have been looking at him like he was a fool. "Are you dumb? The plot has changed of course. You were causing too much trouble and a situation got out of the head system's control. We weren't able to fix it so they cut it off and changed it. All in all, that means you've been abandoned. Congratulations."

Boss Lu was still confused. "What then, what about this guy?" He pointed towards the other well-known businessman. "Isn't he just a side character? Why is he suddenly the protagonist?"

"That's because that isn't the side character anymore."

Boss Lu's eyes widened in realization. "You mean, he's a transmigrator?"

"That's right. You were able to break your plot. You are now the protagonist of a different story, one that you can create on your own. That's why I'm congratulating you. Again, Congratulations. You took something that was supposed to be impossible and made it look easy. " Although the system was giving congratulations, it didn't seem sincere at all.

Those words hit Boss Lu in a way that he wouldn't have expected. He wanted to smile and jump with joy. Yet right as he tasted the exhilaration, he noticed the system's mood. The trill seemed to go down the drain immediately. This was a time that he was waiting for for so long, yet he didn't feel good about it at all.

Boss Lu eyed the ball and carelessly called out, "You really are still following me. I didn't expect that, I thought you would have run back to your base ages ago. Were you watching the scene from before? At the courthouse?"

"Of course I'm still here. It's not like I have anywhere else to go. Who knows what would happen to me if I went back. I'll get tossed into the recycling straight away, no doubt." The ball moved closer to the bed and flouted parallel to Boss Lu so that they stood side by side. "And yeah, I watched." A sound similar to what Boss Lu would call a laugh came out of the system. It was strange and muddled. And covered in a hidden sorrow and regret that he had no experience to understand. "Thought you were going to die for a moment back there."

Boss Lu chuckled. "Did you have your imaginary little fingers crossed?"

The system didn't hesitate to reply. "Sure did. I hoped that the debris crushed you into jam. But I guess that other guy thought differently."

Boss Lu was affected by the system's harsh words, he was used to them and found them somewhat cute coming from such a small creature. "Nah, that guy was properly hoping the same. You were watching, you should know how crazy that guy has got."

"I disagree, he's just as crazy as he was back then."

Boss Lu laughed at the system's words and leaned back in his chair. "Guess you would know more than me. After all, you are part of the all-knowing system, right?" He covered his face with the back of his hand so that all that the system could see was the smile on his face.

It was wide and bright. Completely unnatural in this situation. Intense and mocking. Mocking something that the system wouldn't be able to understand. Perhaps he was looking down on the system. It was expecting that. Wouldn't anyone in this situation be at war with it? Hate it? Mock it? Loathe it with a passion? Or else why would this broken protagonist do any of this? Spend all of its time doing something so reckless. At first, the system called it a fool. It still does think of it as one. But that fool was able to go against something that the system could have never dreamed of going against. And for that, the system looked at Boss Lu in a different light.

"Hey, system." Said Boss Lu. "Do you still want a body? You don't have a good chance at getting one now, do you? Sorry about that. That one was my fault."

The system wouldn't ever be able to understand Boss Lu. The time they had spent with each other. The worlds that they traveled through. During all that, the system was the guide of this protagonist. He was more experienced and knowledgeable. But in no way did the system have wisdom. He did not have the ability to apply that knowledge. He was a guide. But as a guide, he stood in front of the guidee. He did not look back, nor did he even try to understand.

And that's what made this situation strange. The guide was standing side by side with its guidee. Because it had nowhere left to bring him.

But as Boss Lu moved the hand off of his face and revealed his expressioned eyes to the system. It was able to understand one thing.

"So how about I make it up to you. I can give you a different body and you can do some things for me. It'll be a win-win for both of us. I promise."

And that was that Boss Lu wasn't mocking the system. But Boss Lu himself.