Chapter 31: Taking Revenge on a Romantic Rival

by cnwebnovels

The Zhuo Group was a major financial conglomerate in every sense of the word. Its portfolio included investments in as many as a hundred nationally known companies. Zhuo Weidong, son of the head of the Zhuo Group, was a famous playboy. Admirers clustered around him like stars circling the moon, and for a time he was wildly popular.

As a super-rich second-generation heir, he had beautiful women throwing themselves at him in droves. Online gossip about him never stopped.

What no one expected was that after picking and choosing through all his options, Zhuo Weidong set his sights on Du Xinlang. Whenever he had nothing better to do, he sent people over with flowers. At all kinds of gatherings, he declared Du Xinlang his fatal weakness.

I didn’t know whether wealth, once it reached a certain level, inflated a person’s confidence to the point where he thought he could do whatever he wanted. If so, Zhuo Weidong was the perfect example.

Du Xinlang despised Zhuo Weidong from the bottom of her heart—not entirely because he lived in dissipation and made money lying down. The key problem was that he simply did not look good: short, fat, and especially self-assured.

A rich girl like Du Xinlang was never ordinary to begin with. Zhuo Weidong’s little tricks for conquering women didn’t work on her at all.

I felt he posed no threat to me whatsoever, so I never took him seriously. The Du family, for business reasons, couldn’t easily offend him either, so they merely declined politely each time.

The Du family’s forbearance made Zhuo Weidong think there was an opening. He launched wave after wave of attacks: custom-edition luxury cars, expensive gifts of every kind, whatever he could think of to send. He even had people tail me, probably hoping to find some way to break us up.

I had always ignored Zhuo Weidong’s behavior.

Before long, though, rumors appeared online claiming that I, as a Great Dharma Master, had secretly married six women and fathered seven illegitimate children. There were even pictures—proof, supposedly.

The monks at Tansong Temple were furious. I stopped them.

Let him talk. Words don’t kill.

The Buddhist Association even formed a special investigation team. The result, of course, was nothing. I didn’t take the matter seriously either.

But then the rumors targeting me, the Du family, and Lin Liangming intensified, and I couldn’t help getting angry.

The rumors said I had planted a gu in Du Changfeng to scheme for the Du family’s fortune and had taken control of him. Shortly after Du Changfeng was hospitalized last time, the police had arrested me. Du Xinlang, desperate to save her father, had no choice but to submit to me—hence the whole hospital scene of saving Du Changfeng.

And Lin Liangming was supposedly my real secret lover and criminal accomplice, who had already secretly borne me two children.

The Zhuo Group was a nationally famous investment conglomerate. With its backing, the rumors had considerable reach and impact.

Facing the Zhuo Group’s slander, I had originally grounded myself in the virtue of the Dharma and held to the four non-attachments: do not contend, do not hate, do not spread, do not cling.

The truth would remain. I would prove my innocence through action.

But there was one thing I couldn’t stop worrying about.

Lin Liangming was still an unmarried young woman. I didn’t want her lifelong good name destroyed because of me.

Lin Liangming was an orphan from the western Sichuan earthquake. She shared a fellow-hometown bond with Xuanhong—though Xuanhong didn’t really have a hometown, his genes and memories defined him that way.

When the Du Group’s disaster-relief team entered the deep mountains for rescue work, they discovered her and fully funded her education all the way through her doctorate. Because of that, Lin Liangming had always been grateful to the Du Group and worked with care and diligence.

When Xuanhong first joined the company, the two of them were in the same department and grew close. Lin Liangming was gentle by nature, didn’t speak much, but thought deeply. She was also slim and beautiful, admired by Xuanhong and other men.

I could ignore Zhuo Weidong’s malicious rumors against me. But when the Zhuo Group dragged in a kind, innocent person, I couldn’t tolerate it.

Xuanhong was an enlightened monk who had attained the Way, his heart like a clear mirror, able to transform circumstances through the mind.

But I, Xuanchen, was not.

I was a mortal with flesh eyes. If someone climbed on my head, I could endure it. But if they dared bully a woman Xuanhong had deeply loved, I couldn’t endure that.

The Mahayana Bodhisattva Precepts also emphasize benefiting sentient beings and practicing the gathering of wholesome dharmas.

Crippling this scoundrel would mean nothing. If I wanted him never to bully anyone again, I had to smash the capital backing he depended on.

Investment conglomerates built on finance all have one innate weakness: financial borrowing and payment cycles.

To understand my rival’s background and the holes in his capital structure, I began searching online. But public information wasn’t nearly enough. All my superpowers were close-range. I didn’t have long-range abilities yet. So I wondered whether I should explore and develop abilities in that direction.

The Sweepers, though my enemies, were also my lucky stars. Three months of Sweeper detention had completely transformed my abilities and given me a new understanding of my own potential. So I immediately thought of the Sweepers.

As beings beyond ordinary people, the Sweepers should not make it difficult for me to find the ability I wanted.

The Sweepers’ Qiankun Department—Zhu Zhaojie’s department—specialized in intelligence and information. Though I couldn’t contact Zhu Zhaojie, I knew the operatives in her department were linked by mental networking. Their department had a core supercomputer with extremely powerful remote reconnaissance capabilities. It could intercept any radio wave and analyze useful information from it.

I drove to the incapacitated people’s base and found Yellow Hair Zhang Yu. His younger sister had fully recovered from her lung disease thanks to my funding, so he was very grateful.

I gave him the microelectronic intelligent-brain module I’d gotten from the killer old man in the detention center. Street Chief Lu Linfeng had once said Yellow Hair was secretly in this line of business.

When Yellow Hair saw the module, he was beside himself with excitement. He told me it was extremely precious. He couldn’t afford it right now, but promised that once he sold it, he’d definitely transfer the money to me. I said there was no need—the thing was useless to me. I was giving it to him.

I asked Yellow Hair to help me find the Qiankun Department’s information transceiver node. I told him I wanted to intercept some information. Yellow Hair was clearly very skilled in this business. He understood immediately and took me to a place at once.

It was an unremarkable building in the core district of Pingdu City. At all four corners of the rooftop were 8G omnidirectional wireless networks. Yellow Hair told me this network was connected to the Qiankun Department’s information network, and the signal was strongest here. It was the core station for all of Pingdu City.

Yellow Hair pulled out a small device he carried with him. It looked crude, but after he adjusted it, I discovered the signal was especially strong.

Yellow Hair told me the device was an information intelligent processor, given to him before death by a mysterious person in the incapacitated people’s base. He relied on this device to secretly collect and sell information for a living.

Following Yellow Hair’s instructions, I pulled the headgear over my head and immediately received a clear signal.

I didn’t tell Yellow Hair that I didn’t actually care about the information itself. What I wanted was to replicate the ability to send and receive wireless electromagnetic waves.

Ever since merging with Xuanhong, I’d possessed the ability to replicate micro-electrical waves. This was my secret—an ability even I couldn’t fully explain.

I closed my eyes and slowly sensed the radio waves, connecting with the Qiankun Network inside the 8G wireless network.

Through the Qiankun Network, my consciousness seemed to turn into flowing liquid, tracing back to the source. Very quickly, it entered a huge device—an intelligent brain connected to countless information nodes.

I understood.

This was the Qiankun Department’s core supercomputer.

I slowly pushed my consciousness into the supercomputer, searched all the way to its intelligent core, then tried to merge with its information transmission and reception ability.

Gradually, I discovered a structure forming in my mind. Through that structure, I seemed to enter a hidden world filled with countless electromagnetic waves. All I had to do was find the one I wanted among those individually visualized waves, unfold it, connect to it, and obtain the information there.

What a magical experience.

It was transcendent—formless and shapeless, outside time and space—as if my soul were swimming through a jungle dense with the texture of information. I could search for and select textured information, then unfold and receive it.

I became almost intoxicated by that wondrous experience, nearly forgetting myself.

By replicating the electromagnetic-wave processing structure inside the intelligent core, I discovered how convenient it was for the Qiankun Department to master information from all aspects of society.

For ordinary people, whether you were hiding at home or walking down the street, as long as you used a device with micro-electrical waves, or there were electromagnetic-wave devices around you, the intelligent brain could easily intercept the information it wanted. Ordinary people would never notice.

Terrifying.

Of course, the fact that I could replicate this ability so easily, I suspected, had something to do with my newly acquired micro-electrical wave modulation ability. After all, micro-electrical wave modulation itself had communication functions.

I tested it. Without the Qiankun Department’s core supercomputer, my own detection range was only about five hundred meters. But if I borrowed the Qiankun Department’s core supercomputer, it was equivalent to borrowing the Qiankun Department’s information network—nothing stood in my way at any distance.

The discrepancy came down to computing power. Though my brain was far stronger than an ordinary person’s, it was still nowhere near as powerful as a computer. Information that was too complex was simply beyond my brain’s ability to process.

Even so, this ability was already enough for me.

I didn’t know how long had passed. When I withdrew, Yellow Hair had almost fallen asleep.

After sending Yellow Hair Zhang Yu away, I drove to the headquarters of the Zhuo Group. Sitting in the car, I tried using the information transmission and reception ability I’d just replicated to secretly send my consciousness into the Zhuo Group Finance Department’s equipment and investigate their financial information.

I could have searched from the station Zhang Yu had taken me to, but there was too much information there—like entering a jungle full of bar codes. Processing it would have taken forever.

Here was much simpler.

The Zhuo Group was a large investment conglomerate managing more than a hundred companies nationwide. Its business spanned trade, services, technology, and many other industries. All its management and settlement data gathered at the Finance Department’s central data point. As an architect, what I was best at was clarifying technical details within a system architecture.

By sorting through the information, I quickly discovered evidence of the Zhuo Group’s financial crimes: massive tax evasion, false contracts, fraud, and severe data falsification.

But none of that was the most serious part.

Those financial crimes could send Zhuo executives to prison, but in the end they were still management problems. If one truly wanted to pursue the responsible parties, there would inevitably be plenty of buck-passing and excuses.

What I wanted to do was knock it down in one blow.