Chapter 33: Twenty Times!

“How’s the situation?” Gu Cheng asked Chi Shuai the moment he walked back in carrying a bag of Orleans roast chicken. “Did the results come out?”

Chi Shuai slurped his instant noodles. Over the entire day, he’d only eaten some snacks and had a can of cola. When the boss jokingly called it field training, it really turned out to be an intense drill.

Maybe the boss had a special talent for jinxing things!

Chi Shuai picked through the minced beef in his instant noodles while answering, “They’re out. She…”

“What about her?”

“Her mental fluctuation readings are normal.” That girl was seriously tough. She had been locked up for twenty-seven or twenty-eight days without any outlet to vent her emotions, yet her emotional state was still remarkably stable when she was rescued.

She hadn’t broken down, hadn’t cried, and even made demands of them right away.

Chi Shuai glanced at the Orleans roast chicken in Gu Cheng’s hand. Gu Cheng smiled and tossed him a bag. “Got some for you. Stop eating that junk, there’s no nutrition in it.”

Chi Shuai caught it with a grin, tearing off a drumstick and taking a bite first. “Right, this counts as a major achievement for us, doesn’t it? Are we getting a bonus?”

Chi Shuai fantasized about how to spend the bonus. First, he’d whale on all the gear in his game. His luck had been so rotten he only pulled scrap metal every day, so he’d buy himself a top-tier luck buff…

“Boss, the suspect was taken away,” a team member reported with a solemn face.

The higher-ups took over the case, and the woman in red was taken directly from the hospital.

“What the hell?” Chi Shuai tossed the chicken aside. “Who took her? This is our case!” Besides, judging by the woman in red’s condition when she was loaded into the vehicle, it definitely belonged to the Special Investigation Department.

Gu Cheng’s face darkened. “Did you follow them?”

The team member nodded slightly and leaned in close to Gu Cheng’s ear. “Followed them in secret. They took her into the Ninth Research Institute.”

Chi Shuai didn’t hear a thing and yelled in dissatisfaction, “What did you say? What are you guys saying? I want to know too! Lao Ma!”

Lao Ma stepped back and spoke at a volume Chi Shuai could hear. “We moved quickly and interrogated her beforehand, but we didn’t get much useful information.”

“You at least found the woman’s profile, right?”

“Found it.”

Lao Ma handed the file to Gu Cheng. Gu Cheng opened it, and the first thing that caught his eye was the woman’s photo, which showed an entirely different face from her current one.

He raised an eyebrow. “She had plastic surgery?”

“No medical records were found at any hospital, but it could have been done at a small clinic.”

“She’s an ordinary person without a spiritual root.”

“Yes.”

Yet there were spiritual energy fluctuations on her body. In the medical vehicle, Gu Cheng had examined her injuries, and the medical cultivators had also inspected her wounds. Her body showed symptoms of excessive blood loss, but given the size of the wound, she shouldn’t have lost that much blood.

On top of that, her arm looked as if the moisture in a piece of wood had been rapidly sucked dry, leaving that entire section completely “withered.”

“What about the rest of them?”

“We checked their wounds. Every single one was struck in a vital spot in a single blow, instantly incapacitating them.” Lao Ma gestured with his hands. “From my visual estimate, the wound depth should be identical.”

Gu Cheng glanced at Lao Ma. If Lao Ma’s eyes had “measured” it, then it wasn’t “should be identical,” but completely identical.

“Their confessions were mostly the same. They’re all ordinary people who wanted to become cultivators.” The woman named Sister Lian told them that as long as they joined her team, they could all use spiritual energy.

Among them, someone had even taken a kind of pill before, and while the drug took effect, they genuinely could use spiritual energy for a brief period.

That person described the sensation: “For those few minutes, I felt like a superhero.”

According to him, his ability was also fire control, throwing fireballs and setting objects ablaze, but his power wasn’t as strong as Sister Lian’s, and it wore off in just a few minutes.

“Sister Lian has definitely been taking the pills long-term.”

The others witnessed this “miracle” and willingly joined Sister Lian, luring and capturing cultivators to lock them away for experiments.

“What about the experiments?”

“They don’t know. Every time they gathered seven people, two men would arrive with supplies. Sister Lian treated them with great respect and said they were company superiors.”

“It was the first time any of them had come to Jiangcheng.”

As for the captured cultivators, they had all taken D-rank quests to find lost pets. As soon as they arrived at the location, their spiritual energy vanished completely, and they were stuffed into burlap sacks and locked in the basement.

They had all been forced to undergo physical examinations, and their blood was drawn every few days. Supposedly, they had already rounded up seven people, but one of them failed to meet the health standards.

“Didn’t meet the standards?”

“Apparently, it was because that person had the three highs^[1]. Over the twenty-odd days Qian Jingjing was in charge of cooking, she really had been preparing healthy meals for them.”

Having vented his anger, Chi Shuai picked the drumstick back up to eat. “That person…” Was he still alive?

“The team members remaining at the scene are looking for him.” He certainly wouldn’t still be alive; they were searching for his body.

“What about that person? Did they find out anything?” Gu Cheng was referring to F.

“They all believe that mysterious person was from the military.” When the mysterious person arrived in the basement, the electrical circuit had already burned out, leaving the basement lit only by burning debris from the explosion. All they saw was a blurry black silhouette.

The suspects did describe what the mysterious person looked like, however.

Dressed in black, very thin, around 1.7 meters tall or more.

“Anything else? Nothing more?”

“They were knocked down before they could get a closer look.”

Gu Cheng’s brows furrowed slightly. Did the higher-ups know about this person’s existence? Would they assume it was someone from the military?

“There was one more thing.”

“What was it?”

“He said he was a sword cultivator.”

Chi Shuai held the chicken bucket and spat out a chicken bone. “A sword cultivator?” No wonder this person could knock down so many people in a place where spiritual energy was blocked.

There weren’t many sword cultivators in this world. The only one Chi Shuai could think of with that kind of combat prowess was Ye Yiqing.

“Ye Yiqing fighting his way back from the capital to Jiangcheng, taking down a mysterious organization, leaving behind a burned-down house…”

Gu Cheng didn’t even look at him. “Just eat your chicken.”

“What about Qian Jingjing? Did they take her too?”

“No, they tested and questioned Qian Jingjing as well, but she was left with us.” In other words, they felt Qian Jingjing wasn’t worth taking.

“She’s still claiming that this organization was planning to eat human hearts to gain spiritual energy.”

That was why those people hadn’t taken her away. She lacked even the most basic knowledge of spiritual energy; human organs did not contain spiritual energy, according to current research findings.

Whether one ate a heart, consumed a liver, or made soup from a cultivator’s lungs, none of it would grant another’s spiritual energy.

If… one could gain spiritual energy just by eating people…

Gu Cheng let out a breath, picked up the bucket of Orleans roast chicken, and went to find Qian Jingjing.

When Qian Jingjing received the bucket of roast chicken, she first blotted the oil with a paper towel, peeled off the skin, shredded the meat inside, and blew on it to cool it down before bringing it to her cat’s mouth.

The beautiful, long-haired white cat seemed accustomed to being waited on like this by its owner, purring as it waited for her to tear off chicken meat for it.

Tilting its head, it took the shredded chicken from its owner’s hand, eating delicately in tiny bites.

“The person who saved you, do you know his background or name?”

Qian Jingjing tore off another piece of chicken. “Isn’t he one of yours?” As she spoke, she reached out to stroke the cat’s head. “Poor Xiaobao, how did our little Xiaobao wander all that way to find Mama?”

Xiaobao raised its head and gave a soft “meow.”

“Did he say he was with the military?”

“He said he was here to save people.”

The phone in Gu Cheng’s pocket vibrated. He glanced at Qian Jingjing. “Eat first. Once you’re done, draw that person. You studied art, so drawing a person shouldn’t be hard, right?” With that, he stood up and stepped outside. “Get her paper and a pen.”

Gu Cheng closed the door and answered the call. The person on the other end asked him, “How are things?”

Nearly an entire day had passed, yet there was still no news whatsoever.

Gu Cheng fell silent for a moment. “The evening news, or the morning news, you’ll know soon enough.”

The explosion had caused too big a commotion. Even though it was an unoccupied villa district, news vans had rushed over. They had cleaned up half the traces, and the research institute would cover up the remaining half.

The higher-ups would definitely release a news report as soon as possible.

The voice on the other end carried anger. “Is there any truth in the news? I want the truth!”

“The truth is that you guessed right, but the case is no longer in my hands. Otherwise, I really could have given you a Good Citizen Award. You really…” For a case like this, the reward would be at least twenty thousand Yuan.

Before he could finish speaking, the other side hung up.

Gu Cheng looked at his darkened phone screen. There was still one sentence he hadn’t said: …are truly your father’s son.

Hanging up the phone, Yi Ang still turned on the TV. The evening news was just halfway through its broadcast.

“…An explosion occurred at a mountain villa due to improper electrical usage, affecting an area of… Citizens are reminded to pay attention to electrical safety during the summer… Try to…”

Fake news, just as expected.

Yi Ang opened 【Mission Group One】 again.

The group was still filled with boring idle chatter. After most of the day, these people’s attention had shifted from “chipping in a point” to whether there were any girls in the same city.

And then to whether they should take on a group mission together.

“If our solo points aren’t enough, we can take a group mission! As long as our points exceed two hundred, we can participate in a group mission.”

“Read the conditions carefully!”

“It’s capped at a maximum of five people. Which five people in this group have points that add up to two hundred?”

Yi Ang continuously refreshed the mission leaderboard. If a mission failed or was fraudulent, the mission tab would display it as a fake mission and give the person who took the mission some compensation.

“Let me see… Does the highest in our group even have a hundred?”

“Everyone who reached a hundred already went to Group Two.”

“Couldn’t score any points again today.”

“If I’d known, I would’ve claimed that 【Find Cat】 mission. That was worth at least ten points.”

“By the way, did F and Taiyang meet up yet?”

“Should we chip in a point?”

Just as Yi Ang was about to close the group chat and keep trying to contact F, the group member checking the leaderboard sent a long string of “HOLY SHIT!”

“What gives?”

“Fuck, are you guys blind?! Quick, look at the leaderboard!!!”

Yi Ang tapped open the leaderboard.

He saw F’s name shoot straight from the bottom rows all the way to first place with 305 points.

“What’s going on?”

“Didn’t F only take three missions?”

Indeed, the completed mission count next to F’s name was 3.

D-Rank Missions: 2

C-Rank Missions: 0

B-Rank Missions: 1

A-Rank Missions: 0

S-Rank Missions: 0

“What the hell??? What B-rank mission?”

“B-rank missions involve combat, right? If I remember correctly…”

“Where’s the announcement? Is it out yet?”

The moment that person spoke, a group announcement pinned itself at the very top.

【D-Rank Mission “Find Cat” contained a hidden difficulty. The system has evaluated the mission difficulty as B+. F completed the mission with a Perfect rating. Awarding 200 mission points, 100 bonus points, and 10,000 spirit stones.】

Following this announcement, the chat fell silent for an instant, then erupted like a boiling pot.

Someone even sent a voice message.

“Holy shit! What kind of mission was that?! Does anyone know?!”

“A hidden difficulty jump like that? Isn’t that just a death trap?!”

“Is F a new god-tier master?”

“Don’t just talk! Can someone spend points to buy it so we can see?”

“Easy for you to say! Doubled, it’s four hundred points. Even crowdfunding wouldn’t be enough.”

“Wait a second, didn’t Taiyang buy it?”

Earlier today, Taiyang had spent twenty points to buy the mission content that now cost four hundred points to view.

Yi Ang froze. Only when his phone began vibrating non-stop did he snap back to his senses.

Group members were incessantly @mentioning him, begging him to share the mission details.

“I’m willing to pay five points just for a look!”

“I’ll pay ten points! Please share! Blessings to kind souls everywhere^[2]!”

“Will I ever have the luck to pull a mission blind box like this in my lifetime?”

“Not a chance. If you opened one, you’d be dead.”

“Where’s F? Is F in the chat right now? Ascended Boss! Quick, come out and accept my bow!”

The “Ascended Boss” Ding Ling had no idea that her mission rewards had multiplied twentyfold.

At that moment, she was trudging slowly down the mountain road. Her stamina was completely drained, her phone battery was dead, and there was nothing to eat in her bag. Relying on two legs alone, she probably wouldn’t make it back to the city until daylight.

She reached out to touch her stomach and let out a long sigh. It was as though thunder were rumbling in her taicang.