The Root of Chai Si and Jin Xueli's Confusion

Chai Si sat on a park bench, staring straight ahead with unfocused eyes.

His elbows rested on his knees, his body bent halfway forward; his large hands hung loosely, and a T-shaped bar was still tucked into the back of his waistband.

Everyone who passed along the path in front of him tried to step away as inconspicuously as possible and give him a wide berth; the space for several meters around Chai Si was empty.

Two young women had just approached from a distance, repeatedly looking at him as they walked and whispering and laughing together. But when they drew close, their expressions changed, and they quickened their steps, eyes fixed straight ahead.

Everyone reacted much the same way when they saw a madman: they stole sidelong glances to check where he was, what he was doing, and how far away he was, while keeping their faces blank, pretending not to see him, and swiftly putting distance between them.

In fact, this was not the first time in Chai Si's life that people had thought he was crazy. He had even been called that to his face plenty of times.

But previously, it had always been because he acted viciously and brutally, striking hard enough to kill; never once had it been for a reason like today's.

He had left the subway station more than ten minutes ago.

Normally, he should have returned to the Kai Family immediately, handed the "Rumor" Phantasm over to Uncle Kai, then contacted Huang Li and picked her up from the police-but before he could even get a taxi, Chai Si had been forced to abandon his original plan and find a small park first.

...Because the "Rumor" Phantasm was using his lips, teeth, throat, and tongue to speak in his voice, sentence after unending sentence.

He had lost control of his own tongue. No matter how hard he tried to press it down, it sprang back up and formed new words inside his mouth.

He did not know whether struggling against the Phantasm had distorted his face, but combined with his uncontrollable talking to himself, everyone along the way had stared at him and scrambled to avoid him.

Chai Si did not care about the strange looks.

But the Phantasm spoke extremely quickly. A single honk on the road or a burst of drilling from a construction site could make him miss what it said-even though the words were coming out of his own mouth, Chai Si himself had no idea what they would be until he heard them.

He could have handed it over to Uncle Kai any moment now, yet he had to suppress that urgency and patiently listen to every word the Phantasm said, hoping to understand as much as possible about how it operated and its hidden risks.

Because he had to ensure that every Phantasm he handed to Uncle Kai was, at the very least, safe.

"After you create a rumor and spread it, what happens next?" he had asked as he walked out of the subway station.

Who could have imagined that the "Rumor" Phantasm was such a chatterbox?

Just one question seemed to have opened the floodgates.

The subway driver must never have asked his own mouth this question and activated the Phantasm, so he had never known this could happen: the Phantasm could not say so much in one go, so it had commandeered Chai Si's tongue and kept talking nonstop until now, with no sign of finishing.

Its intelligence might have been limited, but the amount of information it contained certainly was not.

"...Can be divided into four aspects. One, the creation of a rumor; two, the spread of a rumor; three, changes in a rumor's credibility; four, the consequences of a rumor. Each aspect is further divided into several subcategories based on different circumstances. I will now begin with the first aspect..."

How could he describe the sensation?

It was like someone looking at a several-hundred-page PDF that should have been printed out as reference material and reading it to you at tremendous speed-using your mouth, no less. It felt strange, the volume of information was immense, the slightest distraction made you forget what had been said, and you could not ask for anything to be repeated because your mouth had been commandeered.

And so Chai Si sat on the park bench, the upper half of his face blank, the lower half very busy.

"...Under ideal circumstances, a rumor that incorporates true information as its material can spread rapidly within an environment and a group suited to its dissemination. However, note that although the rumor may spread at this stage, that does not mean everyone will necessarily believe it. At this point, everyone knows it is only a rumor and could potentially be disproven.

"The shorter a rumor is, the less distortion it undergoes during transmission. Once it reaches enough people in its original form-that is, the first variable-the rumor acquires a certain degree of credibility... We can regard the environment in which the rumor exists as a system. After its credibility reaches the second variable, the rumor, as a 'macroscopic theme' within the system, produces quantum responses with multiple 'butterfly factors.'"

Chai Si really wished he could tell it to speak plain English, but he could not say anything himself.

"Let us take an example," the Phantasm finally said through Chai Si's mouth, uttering the words he had been waiting for.

"Suppose you release a rumor that says, 'Xiaoming at the Nest Elementary School gets diarrhea when he eats people.'

"Assume that the true material constituting this rumor includes: one, a student named Xiaoming does exist; two, residents of the Nest eat people from time to time; three, Xiaoming sometimes gets diarrhea."

...Right. Remind the family's Hunters to bathe regularly when I get back.

"...The rumor is relatively short, and the Nest is also a suitable environment for its spread... Let us assume it successfully reaches both variables, 'number of people reached' and 'credibility.' What happens next?

"Multiple seemingly unrelated factors that already exist within the Nest become 'butterfly factors' at this point. What are 'butterfly factors'? They are precisely the initial conditions that cause changes in a chaotic system in the 'butterfly effect.'

"For example, Xiaoming has a younger sister, Xiaomei. Xiaomei originally ate Xiaoming every Wednesday evening, but after hearing the rumor, she feels that Xiaoming is not particularly clean, so she does not eat him this Wednesday."

...Never mind the passersby-even Chai Si felt he sounded crazy as he listened to the voice coming out of his own mouth.

"'Hungry Xiaomei' thus becomes the first 'butterfly factor.'

"For the second 'butterfly factor,' let us suppose there is a captured Hunter. The Hunter suggests that the resident who captured him refrain from killing him; in exchange, he designs a battle royale arena for that resident."

Chai Si's mouth and tongue were dry, but the Phantasm paid that no mind.

"Since this is only an example, let us use just two 'butterfly factors' for simplicity's sake.

"Hungry Xiaomei comes out to look for food and eats one of the arena's contestants. To compensate the arena's owner, she hands Xiaoming over to them.

"The arena's owner hopes to select the most outstanding children and, inspired by the recent rumor, names the arena 'the Nest Elementary School'... Thus, the result of this rumor is that a 'Nest Elementary School' really does appear in the Nest."

Chai Si froze for a moment.

He had originally assumed the consequence of the rumor would be that "Xiaoming gets diarrhea when he eats people" became true-it felt as though his foot had suddenly found empty air.

"You see, the part of this rumor that comes true could be 'Xiaoming gets diarrhea when he eats people,' or 'Xiaoming eats people,' or even 'the Nest Elementary School exists'... The final outcome occurred because the 'butterfly factors' in the Nest's environment steered the result toward 'the Nest Elementary School.'

"If we replace them with other 'butterfly factors,' then the part that comes true could be 'Xiaoming gets diarrhea when he eats people.'"

Sure enough, the Phantasm then rambled through another example.

The result of using different "butterfly factors" was that Xiaoming started getting diarrhea when he ate people.

In short, its operating process was: create a rumor-people hear the rumor-people believe the rumor-"butterfly factors," if any exist, begin interacting with the rumor-finally, the rumor either comes true or does not.

...So to make a rumor come true in the way you want, you have to narrow down its possible outcomes, right?

By the time Chai Si reached this conclusion, his mouth had already finished several more sentences.

If, before spreading a rumor, I first planted suitable "butterfly factors" in the environment, like laying groundwork in a story, perhaps that could help steer the rumor toward an outcome I wanted...

He had only thought for a few seconds, yet his busy mouth had already shifted the subject in another direction, moving from theoretical effects to practical application. Chai Si hurriedly brought his attention back and listened for a while longer, only to hear himself suddenly say, "...Then the rumors created by each of 'Rumor's' previous hosts can serve as operational references for its new host."

...Wait. Did it mean he could look up the rumors Wei Xilai had created before?

"As long as the host does not delete them, every rumor is recorded for future retrieval."

At this point, the Phantasm finally paused for the first time, as though waiting for Chai Si's response.

"Tell me."

Chai Si could finally speak with his own lips and tongue. "What was the last rumor before the 'Subway Serial Killer'?"

Given an instruction, the Phantasm answered so quickly that he nearly bit his tongue.

"'Vulture' in the Nest can copy its target human to become a second version of them and use their Pathway to enter the human world."

Chai Si's hands abruptly twisted together.

Another resident trying to enter the human world...

No, no, that was not the point.

The point was, why create this rumor? Even if it came completely true, what would it accomplish?

"Who created this rumor?" Chai Si confirmed during another pause from the Phantasm.

"Wei Xilai."

It appeared Wei Xilai had wanted to create, out of thin air, a resident capable of entering the human world. What was his purpose?

"What was the creation date?"

The date the Phantasm gave was more than three months before today.

Considering that every rumor had to run its course and reach its conclusion before the next rumor could be created, this was very likely the last rumor Wei Xilai had created before his death.

A rumor could end in only two ways: either it came true, or it faded away without coming to anything.

"Did this rumor come true?" Chai Si asked again.

"It just came true on November 17," the Phantasm replied.

That was... the day after Wei Xilai's death.

The reason I said earlier that writing this story from an ensemble perspective excited me is that I love this feeling of storylines influencing and intertwining with one another...

Don't you think that if I had continued solely from Jin Xueli's perspective, discovering the content of the rumor would have been less interesting than this? (It would also have been hard for her to discover it. How would a Hunter working alone learn the contents of the Kai Family's Phantasm?)

(End of chapter)