Chapter 91

Ji Qing suddenly realized a crucial problem.

It seemed he had never once stopped to think about how long he had stayed in the wasteland world. Perhaps a year. Five years. Ten years. More than ten... As Ji Qing stared at his chat records with White Night, a faint sense of unease welled up inside him.

It had been fifteen days since his first contact with White Night, and eleven days since his first contact with White Night’s owl.

Ji Qing discovered that the Dawn Society truly had no idea what Raven looked like, including the two Dawn Society cadres who had been in contact with him. Although that made it very convenient for Ji Qing to act under Li Yuan’s identity, the situation also put him on guard...

The Dawn Society had been founded thirteen years ago, and Raven’s earliest recorded activity dated back eleven years.

The Dawn Society also had no tradition of inheriting codenames. In other words, had he really been active under the identity of “Raven” eleven years ago? Did that even make sense? Just how long had he stayed in the wasteland world?

Afterward, Ji Qing had also asked White Night why he knew that Ji Qing had helped Cui City seven years ago.

White Night’s answer had been surprisingly simple.

The Dawn Society kept records of changes among its upper ranks as well as mission archives. When White Night had been promoted to cadre five years ago, the leader had granted him access. That was when he discovered that the person who had submitted the Cui City mission report seven years ago was Raven.

Ji Qing fell silent after hearing that.

It sounded like something he, as the boss, would have done. And yet he had absolutely no memory of it. Once again, Ji Qing had walked into a dead end.

But life had to go on.

Because Ji Qing himself was so strong, he had not actually run into much trouble during Dawn Society missions. On the contrary, he had managed to see quite a few Infected living at the very bottom of Federation society. As for the missions he had to carry out, they were nothing more than dealing with Infected other members could not handle, hunting down forces hostile to the Dawn Society, and occasionally exploring the Danger Zones outside the city...

The only thing that gave Ji Qing a headache was this: White Night’s owl kept showing up whenever he was resting.

He did not want to wear the Masquerade Mask all day long.

So after giving White Night a stern scolding, Ji Qing successfully forced him to back down a few steps and even managed to pry out White Night’s talent. White Night’s talent was very simple. Its effect was similar to item tracking: based on an item or energy fluctuation that he had marked, he could track the owner for a set period of time.

A very convenient talent, but not a friendly one where Ji Qing was concerned.

After discussing countermeasures with the system all night long, Ji Qing finally decided to bring out items from the Popularity Value Shop:

【Item: Anti-Tracking Tool, 200 Popularity Value/use】

【Item Description: Can detect and remove tracking items placed on oneself or within a certain area.】

【Item: Proximity Alarm, 50 Popularity Value/use】

【Item Description: Can mark a certain person or item and issue a warning when it enters a preset distance.】

Damn it. Ji Qing gritted his teeth inwardly.

Still, this was partly his own fault. If he had not wanted to sever the connection between “Ji Qing” and “Li Yuan,” he would not have gone out of his way to avoid meeting White Night. Ji Qing thought weakly: You could call this a roundabout form of reaping what you’ve sown.

Maybe he could find a chance to go meet White Night?

A restless urge suddenly stirred in Ji Qing’s heart.

After taking such a huge loss at White Night’s hands, it felt like a waste not to at least go see what he looked like. But if he did go see him, it would not quite fit Li Yuan’s character. Li Yuan was not the sort of person who would go meet someone just because “it would be a waste not to.”

Besides... it was too far away.

Ji Qing stared at Cui City’s location on the Terminal map and fell into a long silence.

Cui City was the city one stop before Aurora City, meaning it was the second city closest to the Federation’s northern border. Its name came from the local jadeite veins, and nearly all the jadeite crafts circulating within the Federation were made by artisans from Cui City.

Ji Qing had even gone to investigate the Cui City incident White Night had mentioned from seven years ago.

Seven years earlier, Cui City had suffered an earthquake. The quake had caused the mineral veins to collapse, disturbing a migrating Aberrant population nearby that was moving south. Although the earthquake had not triggered a Black Tide, it had still left most of the residents dead or badly injured, and the number of living beings that had become infected was beyond counting.

Ji Qing could not find any trace of himself in the Federation’s written reports, yet White Night had been certain that someone had helped Cui City even before seeing the archives.

He truly had no idea why.

Perhaps it was because White Night himself had been a witness to that earthquake? If he followed that timeline, Ji Qing felt that White Night had probably been infected during the Cui City earthquake seven years ago.

Ji Qing lowered his lashes quietly and casually shut off the Terminal.

Although Ji Qing desperately wanted to learn more about himself, he also knew that information like this was of no use to him. What he needed were mission archives tied to the Dawn Society’s actual operating doctrine, not records of ordinary incidents in which he himself had once taken part.

Red Heart arrived safely at the Dawn Society’s Base of Operations.

His inability to keep his mouth shut did provide Ji Qing with quite a bit of useful information, such as “The Base of Operations was built near an S-rank Danger Zone, in a fallen town,” and “I really, really want to see Emerald, so why won’t Emerald show up already aaahhh”...

Ji Qing listened expressionlessly and replied now and then.

Although Red Heart spilled a mountain of thoughts, almost all of it was nonsense aside from the location of the Dawn Society’s Base of Operations. Still... Ji Qing tapped at the Terminal’s light screen with his fingertips, and a playful smile suddenly curved his lips.

Things had gotten a lot more interesting lately.

Because of the torment of his mutation, his foul temper, and other reasons, Red Heart had directly treated the Infected tasked with looking after him at the Base of Operations like a carrot and started gnawing on him. After that Infected’s mother rushed forward, he bit her arm too.

Ji Qing did not know whether to laugh or cry after reading that.

Had Red Heart been infected by a rabbit or something? This sounded far too much like a rabbit with rabies.

On the Terminal, Red Heart was still typing excitedly: 【Hehehe, and do you know what happened next? That annoying Emerald finally showed up, but he smelled so good, seriously way too good. I couldn’t resist trying to go take a bite out of him, and then he tied me up...】

Red Heart: 【No, no, next time I see him I absolutely have to bite him first.】

Raven: 【? Weren’t you trying to get a look at what Emerald looked like? Do you have any impression of his appearance?】

Red Heart: 【No QAQ】

Red Heart: 【Main thing is, he really smells way too good. He was definitely infected by plants. Raven, you have no idea. His whole body smelled like that kind of sweet-and-sour fruit that goes crisp when you bite into it and bursts with juice when you squeeze it in your hand... The smell was so good it was making me dizzy.】

Red Heart: 【I absolutely have to take a few bites out of him (serious.jpg)】

Raven: 【...?】

Raven: 【I don’t even want to comment on you.】

Ji Qing held back his laughter while replying helplessly to Red Heart. After several days of interaction, he had basically figured out Red Heart’s temperament. Compared with the classmates Ji Qing had known, Red Heart’s manner and conduct always carried a trace of childish cruelty.

Within the three days after Ji Qing left Huicheng, Red Heart arrived there and took away the World Book.

Ji Qing had thought he would act more discreetly, but he had not expected Huicheng to erupt in an Infected disturbance the moment he left. Red Heart, who had absolutely no sense of stealth and had been starving, successfully spent the dead of night chasing people around and trying to bite them.

Just what exactly was his mutation supposed to be?

Ji Qing stared in astonishment, yet he could not help finding it deeply amusing.

Although it seemed to have caused quite a few casualties, what surprised Ji Qing was that he did not feel particularly sad about it. Perhaps that was because, even now, Ji Qing had never truly accepted that he was one of the wasteland’s people...

Time passed slowly, and Ji Qing’s winter break passed just as slowly.

Twenty days after he first came into contact with White Night, Ji Qing had gradually adapted to his identity. The Dawn Society’s work was like the bounty missions that refreshed occasionally each week in a game, and under normal circumstances, Ji Qing could arrange his schedule freely.

The Proximity Alarm was remarkably reliable.

Every time the owl came over, Ji Qing would be warned right on time. Then he would happily strike a cool pose and wait for White Night (owl version), polite and adorable as ever, to shower him with praise for being so uncannily farsighted.

So this was the joy of acting cool?

Blushing a little from all the praise, Ji Qing sheepishly abandoned his plan. He thought: Having a polite, obedient, well-behaved junior in the workplace really is the delight of being a senior. This was just too delightful. How could he possibly have such an adorable junior?

“Cough, cough, cough...” Ji Qing hurriedly cut off his own train of thought.

Even so, his recent life had indeed made him a little light-headed. Before successfully taking part in the Dawn Society’s internal activities, Ji Qing had never expected that he would get along so amicably with two cadres. If the system had not kept nagging in his ear, Ji Qing might have forgotten all about the manga.

So this was the joy of a college student returning home? It was almost too blissful.

Thus Ji Qing dawdled his way to the computer in the Pure White Space and tried to see how Xie Chang’an’s winter break was going.

After leaving school, Xie Chang’an returned without pause to the Orphanage where he had grown up. Because of the cult emblem discovered at school, he was highly wary of the Orphanage, but before investigating, he still chose to give his team match prize money to the orphanage director he called Grandma.

It was not easy running the Orphanage. Now he was finally capable of sharing a bit of that burden. Xie Chang’an thought.

While chatting with Grandma, the two of them also brought up the patterns on the Orphanage walls. The kindly old director turned back to glance at the pattern and then said gently, “Strictly speaking, I don’t really know either. I only took over this Orphanage from someone else, and many of the rules here were passed down from the previous director.”

“I was a Christian to begin with, so I didn’t ask too many questions at the time.”

Xie Chang’an fell silent after hearing that. “Then, Grandma, do you still remember the Orphanage from before?”

“Not very clearly anymore.” Seeing his reaction, Grandma’s tone turned worried. “Why are you suddenly asking about that? Did it make you think of something bad from the past?”

“...”

Xie Chang’an suddenly felt a pang in his heart.

Because of Grandma’s gentle inquiry, he genuinely had the urge to pour out all of his troubles to her. The past half year at school had not gone very well for him. He was always making mistakes, his classmates had isolated him, and the outside world felt so oppressive.

But just before the words left his mouth, Xie Chang’an suddenly froze. “When you say ‘something bad from the past’... what do you mean?”

“Ah, yes...” Grandma said, puzzled, resting one hand against her face. “I don’t know what happened in the Orphanage before that, but I received you from the former director. Before he left, he took a group of children with him. I remember your friend was taken away by them too, and you cried for a very long time back then...”

“I wonder how those children are doing now...” the director murmured wistfully.

As Grandma’s words continued, Xie Chang’an’s heart went cold, inch by inch. His only memory of Song Xiaoran was this: one day, Song Xiaoran was suddenly taken away, and afterward the nuns comforted him by saying, “Song Xiaoran was adopted.”

But he had never expected that he had not been adopted at all. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: he should have suspected all of this long ago.

Childhood memories were always easy to beautify.

When Ji Qing saw this, he already had a rough conclusion in his heart regarding Xie Chang’an’s trip back to the Orphanage. The director knew nothing about the fact that this Orphanage had once been a cult’s former site, while Song Xiaoran had clearly been taken away by cultists from back then.

They took away the gifted children and left the mediocre ones behind.

Ji Qing found it hard to imagine what the young Song Xiaoran had felt at the time. He had always been far more sensitive and cautious than Xie Chang’an. Perhaps he had known what awaited him afterward. But dwelling on the past now was useless...

After that, the focus of volume five of the manga shifted once more.

Xie Chang’an met Gu Lingxue again. Compared with the urgency of volume one, the two of them were much more mature now after spending half a year at a high school for ability users, and along the way they also helped Spring City police crack a case involving an ability user.

That counted as a good thing too, Ji Qing thought.

And twenty-five days after first making contact with White Night, Ji Qing successfully obtained access from White Night to the Dawn Society internal archives he had once possessed. The reason, naturally, was that he wanted to see how well White Night wrote his mission reports—

Meanwhile, the conflict between Red Heart and Emerald was still ongoing.

Emerald seemed quite troubled by Red Heart’s existence and had recently escalated his attitude into one of “avoid him whenever possible.” Over the past few days, Ji Qing had also come to understand Emerald’s position within the Dawn Society: if nothing unexpected happened, the one handling the boss’s official duties in his place was Emerald.

“The relationship looks pretty good.”

Staring at the nearly empty chat window between himself and Emerald, Ji Qing muttered inwardly.

Aside from the fact that Emerald was just too much of a mute, Ji Qing could not find any fault with him. Who would reject someone willing to go to work and handle their duties for them? But it was also time to move on to the next step of the plan.

Ji Qing typed quietly: 【Let’s find a chance to meet.】

Emerald: 【Okay.】

As terse as expected. But this time, Ji Qing felt only calm, because he already knew that Emerald stood on his side. Before the two of them met, however, Ji Qing planned to return to school first and finish his registration for the new semester.

Winter break was over.