Before Director Jin entered the conference room, his face was as dark as the bottom of a wok.
Not long after Captain Zheng and Liu Lei went in, Zhu Zeyu heard the sound of a fist slamming hard against the table.
Even through the thick door, it still startled him.
Good grief, that scared the life out of him.
He really had no idea what was wrong with Director Jin!
“Try this.”
Yang Zhanbai hurried over and stuffed a small packet of nougat into Zhu Yan’s hand.
“This is practically a rare delicacy!” he whispered. “In a little while, you won’t be able to get this stuff anymore.”
He stood beside Zhu Yan and pretended to stand guard, lowering his voice as he excitedly began gossiping.
“Did you see that video the Hunter posted?”
“The one where… Captain Jin was babbling away…”
Yes, Zhu Yan had followed through without hesitation and released the video.
He had more than two thousand followers, but he hadn’t logged into the Player Forum, so he had no idea how many people had seen it.
“I saw it.” Zhu Zeyu sighed. Yang Zhanbai had really touched a sore spot. “Wasn’t Captain Jin your idol?”
Yang Zhanbai urged him to eat the candy, then began chuckling under his breath, clearly delighted by someone else’s misfortune.
After laughing for a while, he struggled to clamp his mouth shut. His entire face had turned bright red.
“He used to be. But ever since I realized how obsessed he is with high-level weapons, he stopped being my idol.”
“Though I hate the Hunter, I have to admit, the dirt on Captain Jin this time is explosive.”
Zhu Zeyu stared speechlessly at Yang Zhanbai’s utterly self-righteous expression.
The nougat was delicious, its rich, sweet milky flavor spreading across his tongue.
Zhu Zeyu savored it for a while. Only after swallowing the candy did he lazily ask, “So where do things stand now? How many people have watched the video?”
“What do you think?” Yang Zhanbai grinned. “They even called me over to guard the door. Why do you think that is? Because everyone important is inside having a meeting.”
“And Guan En was called back, too.”
Yang Zhanbai could barely keep his voice down.
“Zeyu, do you know what they sent Guan En to do? Take people to find the connectors the Hunter left behind!”
“It’s blown up outside. A huge number of players are discussing Captain Jin pulling strings… Though the public opinion was suppressed pretty quickly.”
If there weren’t surveillance cameras here, Zhu Yan strongly suspected that Yang Zhanbai would have started dancing on the spot.
“Can you stand guard properly?” Zhu Zeyu lowered his voice. “Aren’t you the one who hates the Hunter most? How can you be this happy?”
“It’s precisely because the threat is gone that I’m happy,” Yang Zhanbai replied as though it were perfectly obvious.
“Think about it, Zeyu. The Hunter has escaped one after another. What does that tell us? It means the shelter is safe, at least for now. There aren’t any accomplices of the Hunter inside!”
Yang Zhanbai sounded utterly certain. “That’s what people in the Strategic Analysis Department have concluded, and it’s what the players are guessing, too.”
“Besides, I heard they’ve upgraded the procedures for entering the shelter again. If the Hunter wants to get back in, it’ll actually be very difficult.”
Zhu Yan had heard some of what Yang Zhanbai was saying.
But the problem was that the Hunter had never escaped at all.
The information obtained by the Strategic Analysis Department was most likely misinformation he had deliberately left behind to mislead Director Jin and the others.
As for Guan En…
Zhu Yan thought of several places where he had hidden fake connectors.
Just imagining Guan En finding those useless rings made him want to laugh.
“One of the Hunters was injured,” Yang Zhanbai began with a sneer. “And another one—I heard he admitted that he had powerful connections. Zeyu, you were there at the time. I wanted to ask you about it.”
“You know me. I love watching dogs turn on each other!”
Zhu Yan deliberately let out a troubled sigh.
His performance had apparently been extraordinarily successful. After the follow-up video was released, everyone had panicked.
Jin Rongxu hadn’t even come to read “Zhu Zeyu’s” thoughts, and no one else had come to search his memories either.
Everyone was busy with their own affairs. At present, his only assigned task was standing guard.
After Director Jin’s meeting ended, he planned to suggest to Captain Zheng that he be assigned to guard the central control room or patrol the residential area.
“Let’s not talk about the leaders’ affairs.”
Zhu Zeyu gently shook his head at Yang Zhanbai, then nodded toward the door.
“That person seems to have some pretty powerful connections, but who knows?”
“Instead of asking me, why don’t we keep quiet and listen to what they’re saying inside…”
He was simply too curious.
Unfortunately, with Yang Zhanbai chattering beside him, he couldn’t hear a single word Director Jin was saying.
As soon as Yang Zhanbai heard that, he immediately fell silent.
The two of them stood ramrod straight with their ears pressed against the conference-room door. Zhu Yan held his breath and concentrated. At last, he managed to catch a few fragments of conversation.
…
Inside the conference room.
“Reporting to you, Director, we found nothing suspicious on Qiu Lingxiao.”
A middle-aged man gave his report in a stiff, proper manner, not daring to raise his head and look at Director Jin.
“We don’t have permission to investigate his father. All we know is that one of his brothers is dead, while the other is acting normally. According to eyewitnesses, the other brother was still in the shelter in his assigned city this morning. No one saw him leave.”
Director Jin’s expression was grim.
Although he had arranged public-relations damage control for the video immediately, the internet was now full of all kinds of speculation.
Even though he hadn’t received any notice, this matter had most likely already alarmed his superiors.
If he failed to handle it properly, he would be in serious trouble.
“For now, don’t alert Qiu Lingxiao or his family. Since Jin Rongxu has confirmed that his father and brother are both Hunters, it’s better to kill an innocent than let a threat slip through.”
After pondering for a moment, he continued, “Place him under house arrest and keep him under observation. If anything seems wrong, act immediately!”
“Yes, sir.” The middle-aged man responded at once.
He glanced at the red characters in front of him and continued his measured report.
“Director, Deputy Captain Guan has already destroyed and removed four pieces of equipment installed by the Hunter.”
“After studying them, we confirmed that the equipment does contain a faint spatial force. We believe it functions more like a lever, using a minimal amount of energy to pry open a spatial passage and connect the real world with a dungeon.”
“In addition, the equipment appears to be single-use and doesn’t possess any other—”
Director Jin raised one hand, cutting him off.
Pressed against the door, Zhu Yan listened carefully. At last, he heard the part he had been waiting for.
“Where did Deputy Captain Guan find those things? Did the locations match the ones mentioned by the Seer?”
There was several seconds of silence.
Then the middle-aged man answered with characteristic precision.
“Director, two were found in the central control room. Those locations match.”
“We also found one near a router, but the location differed from what the Seer said.”
“The equipment wasn’t beside the router near the communal sleeping quarters. It was beside the router in the reception hall!”
ver to a world of cultivation and returned invincible. Modern medicine is child's play compared to elixirs; technological might crumbles before true cultivation. My name is Qin Ning, Earth's sole cultivator!
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
