Chapter 87: The Lotus-Shaped Green Jade Disk

Chapter 87: The Lotus-Shaped Green Jade Disk

Picking up where the last chapter left off: after Du Xiaoran and I had talked for a while about the virtual Future World, we went our separate ways home.

After all, walls have ears.

The Elite World’s surveillance technology was far more advanced than anything the Mundane World possessed. In the Elite World, everyone’s movements and conversations—no matter where you were—ended up recorded in vast databases.

So for anything that truly mattered, Du Xiaoran and I could only speak mind to mind.

Consciousness-to-consciousness exchanges couldn’t be intercepted by the Elite World’s surveillance organs. But that kind of talk bore little resemblance to ordinary speech. It lacked human expression, human presence—it felt dry, colorless, a bare transmission of information. People resorted to it only when the matter was truly secret.

After parting from Du Xiaoran, I returned to Uncle’s base.

Mother and Uncle had already heard from the scouts how my battle had gone after I left seclusion, and both were astonished. Uncle especially, like everyone else at the base, could barely contain his excitement.

Because, just as Du Xiaoran had said, the resistance simply didn’t have that kind of strength. They had never once defeated anyone on Xiang Bianfeng’s level.

More to the point, as Minister of the Shadow Pavilion’s Legal Affairs Department, Xiang Bianfeng was a high-ranking Shadow Pavilion figure whose entire portfolio was the resistance. Nearly every crackdown, every arrest, fell to the Legal Affairs Department under his command—not to Pu Liuqian. When a resistance leader of any real weight was taken, it was usually Xiang Bianfeng himself who came for them.

So toward Xiang Bianfeng, the resistance felt both hatred and fear.

Pu Liuqian was a major figure in the Shadow Pavilion too, but that owed more to her father, Pu Xuande, than to any post of her own. The Shadow Pavilion had never given her a formal title.

The upper ranks of the Shadow Pavilion deferred to her for two reasons: her mind arts were genuinely formidable, more than most men could withstand, and no one wanted to offend Pu Xuande. So while Pu Liuqian appeared to have a hand in everything, in truth she governed nothing. Across the Elite World’s management circles, people simply called her Miss Pu and indulged her at every turn.

Xiang Bianfeng was another matter entirely. Hunting the resistance was his actual job. If his methods hadn’t been so ruthless, the resistance wouldn’t be hiding underground at all.

Besides Mother and Uncle, Engineer Lin and several other key people from the base came to see me, wanting to hear exactly what had happened. So I gave everyone a rough account—how I’d fought Pu Liuqian and Xiang Bianfeng, plus a few choice details from the brawl at the casino.

The engineers were thrilled. At last someone had settled a score on their behalf, and it gave them a fresh taste of hope.

The secret matters, though—the old woman at the Gu Chenxing Former Residence Memorial, the cultivation room, my exploration of force of consciousness in the deep cosmos—I saved those for Mother and Uncle alone, once everyone else had gone. I told no one else.

Mother took the fourth green jade token from me, and something in her face turned sorrowful. It was, after all, a relic of my father’s. Uncle saw it differently—to him this was tremendous good fortune. Who would have guessed that my father’s remnant shadow inside the Shadow Pavilion could leave me an inheritance of this magnitude? It might prove decisive for how far my abilities could grow. If I managed to collect all six tokens, perhaps the whole situation could be turned around.

Mother offered no opinion on Uncle’s idea. She only stroked the fourth green jade token and said, with grave earnestness,

“This token is one piece of the lotus-shaped green jade disk. The disk isn’t a product of Earth’s civilization. Where exactly it came from, even Beichen’s father and I were…