Volume 3, Chapter 85 – Hidden Peril (Two-in-One)

The girl in the wheelchair was very thin and frail. She had the deep-set eyes and high nose bridge typical of the Federations’ people, but on her, the proportions looked refined instead of harsh. Her big, watery light-blue eyes paired with her slightly pale, cool-toned skin made her look like an oversized doll. Most people, at first sight, would feel nothing but pity and affection for her.

Aurora was very confident in her own charm. She had assumed that once Bai Xiang met her face-to-face, she too would inevitably be affected by that charm.

But she wasn’t.

From what Aurora could see, those golden eyes of Bai Xiang’s were the same as before—no difference at all from how they had been when they first met.

That was quite the mystery…

Aurora felt a faint shock in her heart. Hardly anyone knew this, but she was also an “ability user.”

The concept had been around for many years now. Many people thought it was just an urban legend, but Aurora knew that in this world there really were some people—a very small number—who, through certain mutations and experiments, could grasp special powers.

People like her.

Her power had been awakened by her radiation sickness. From the first day she developed self-awareness, she discovered she could, to a certain extent, control the pheromones she released. It made it easy for her to win others’ favor, and it worked regardless of gender.

Humans were affected by pheromones too. The hormonal scent that young men and women in puberty gave off also fell into this category. Scientific research showed that many cases of so-called “love at first sight” were actually people’s wills being influenced in this way.

Why were some couples particularly in sync?

Why did some couples, for a stretch of time, find each other so especially pleasing to the eye?

At its core, it was a form of control.

That line of research also explained why most love burned intensely at the start, then faded away—because that was exactly when the pheromones’ effectiveness expired. Once they sobered up, the feeling of “being in love” vanished.

“I really do need a hostage.” Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes and swept her gaze over Aurora’s face. “But judging from what you’re saying, you believe you’re qualified for the role.”

Most of the time, Bai Xiang didn’t need to care about threats like space-based weapons or nuclear warheads, because her main path still lay in the cities.

The Federal Union was not truly a single whole. Their similar systems led countries like the Sami Federation, the Ruffen Federation, the Ximu Federation, the Inbu Federation… and so on to all call themselves “Federations,” but their sovereignty was separate and independent, and of course, their interests were calculated separately as well.

So long as she didn’t go looking for trouble by walking into those lower-city hellholes where people weren’t treated as people, the other side would have to think twice before using taboo weapons. They would have to weigh the interests of many parties.

But her primary goal on this trip was the Through-Meridians Method. That thing was hidden in an Illusory Realm of the Demon Kingdom out in the wilderness. If she didn’t want to get hit by a chain of nuclear strikes the moment she dropped into the wilds, then the best way was to force them, at this stage as well, to think twice.

“Starwater’s parent company is the Star Tower Group. The one who controls Star Tower Group is ‘Lori-Aurora.’” The blonde girl spoke calmly. “‘Lori-Aurora’ is my father.”

She had thought that explaining things to this extent would be enough, but after listening, Bai Xiang merely shook her head. “How am I supposed to know how many children he has?”

For fooling your average person from Great Yu, that line would have been more than enough. But Aurora was more experienced. She knew that the bigger a tycoon family was, the more they loved to spread their branches and leaves. By the third generation, it wouldn’t be surprising if the number of grandsons broke three digits. Under those circumstances, children and such weren’t things they cared about all that much.

“He has eleven children. I’m the only girl among them.” Aurora frowned slightly. “I was born with inherited radiation sickness… They used every possible method to kill my mother, but he still did everything he could to treat me… Do you think a bargaining chip like that is enough?”

Bai Xiang stared into her eyes. “You want to trade being taken hostage yourself for me not destroying this place.”

Aurora nodded. “Yes.”

“Can I know your reason?”

“Of course I’m doing it for myself.” Aurora nodded. “The reason I was sent to Diming City was precisely because the research institute here has a lot of experience in treating radiation sickness. Naturally, I don’t want this place destroyed.”

Bai Xiang didn’t speak, so Aurora added, “Diming City sits on the border between two countries. Every year a large number of illegal immigrants from three different directions converge here, so there’s never a shortage of lower-class ‘material.’”

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“You’ve seen the results of the Tyrant Project as well. The team here should have mature experience in the radiation field. They’re indispensable to me.”

“You’re very cold-blooded.” Bai Xiang commented, lifting her head to glance at the surrounding cameras.

She understood perfectly what Aurora was implying.

Those piles of flesh and bone in Ena’s chest cavity…

Perhaps the Red Jade was the true source of that monster’s power, but speaking just of the biological reactor’s structure, without tens of thousands of corpses laid as the foundation for experiments and consumption, that thing could never have been built.

“Being cold-blooded is better than being hypocritical.” The girl smiled. “You’ve seen Diming City in peacetime, Dao Lord Bai. You had to pass through most of the city to get from the airport to the upper districts. How did you find the atmosphere of this city?”

“Not bad.” Bai Xiang nodded. “Especially in terms of how well they’ve handled integration between demonfolk and pure-blood humans.”

“So we never force them to do anything.” Aurora lifted her chin proudly. “We lay out the terms… they sign… and by selling off their ‘right to be experimented on,’ they trade for what they want. At the very least, we keep our word.”

“That’s true.” Bai Xiang nodded again. “But the truth is, they don’t actually have a choice.”

And she didn’t believe a word of that “we keep our word.”

That was a lie, one hundred percent.

“The weak are always short on the right to choose.” Aurora arched a brow. “The Aurora family wasn’t standing at this height from the very start. Especially for someone like you, Dao Lord Bai—for a strong person like you, you probably understand better than I do what the world is really like.”

“The superior thrive, the inferior are weeded out; nature selects the fittest. To submit to the strong is the weak’s duty.”

“Just like you and me, right now.”

“Please forgive me for putting it this way… but if it weren’t for my legs, I should, by rights, be on my knees before you.”

Bai Xiang drew back her gaze and met Aurora’s eyes again.

Dando-Aurora.

A textbook example of a sharp, clever aristocratic heiress, bone-deep arrogant and cold-blooded.

Calling her an “heiress” was almost an insult. She was more like a pure-bred merchant, someone who could sell even her own noose for profit.

Staring at her, Bai Xiang couldn’t shake the faint feeling of a familiar kind of disgust.

Very faint, but real, hidden somewhere deeper down.

Was Aurora herself unaware of it?

Bai Xiang shifted her gaze, glancing at the golden hair behind Aurora’s left ear. Then she took out her phone, used the satellite access her “cheap Master” had given her to get online, and searched for the family relations of “Lori-Aurora.”

She quickly found photos and videos of the blonde girl from various stages of her life.

Because this was no longer Great Yu. The information controls on Great Yu’s internal net did not exist out here in the “Grey Zone.”

In short, this “Dando-Aurora”… she had radiation sickness, mobility issues, was diagnosed as permanently disabled and unlikely to live past seven. Even if she somehow survived, she’d supposedly spend the rest of her life needing others to care for her.

But she was brilliant.

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Her intelligence was exceptional. She’d participated in several math competitions and taken first place without exception. Rumor had it she was the Star Tower Group’s “dark princess,” and that part of the company’s decision-making passed through her hands.

“I’ve done some work for my father.” Aurora continued to pitch herself. “I know quite a few of the Group’s secrets.”

No one wanted to die.

The research institute and research team in Diming City were her only hope of staying alive. If she couldn’t stop Bai Xiang from destroying this place, she might as well be dead already.

Precisely because she had felt that childhood fear of death so keenly, she would do anything to keep living.

“You’ll do.” Bai Xiang put down her phone and nodded.

Her opponent’s weak points were many.

Before she squeezed all of Aurora’s value dry, she was willing to sign a temporary truce.

“Thank you for your mercy!”

The girl finally let out a breath of relief, a sickly flush rising on her cheeks.

She coughed a few times as she searched the pockets of her dress, pulled out a special-made medicine vial, put the mouthpiece between her lips, and inhaled a dose. Only then did her condition improve a little.

To show her sincerity, she immediately pressed a button on the armrest of her wheelchair, used the pop-up screen to remotely control various branch teams, and ordered them to “take care of” the Fire Serpents gang boss Xibo, as well as the warlord General Walker.

“To soothe your anger, we are willing to pay any price.” Aurora said solemnly to Bai Xiang.

Then she tried, half-jokingly, “Of course… you’ll have to make sure that team, and my life, are both spared.”

Phew…

Bai Xiang’s response was to lift Feixiang Heaven and slash toward the left side of Aurora’s face.

Aurora’s face instantly went white.

It felt like she just blinked. A chill brushed past the left side of her head, and then came a sharp “screee” sound, like a tiny mouse or insect squealing.

Bai Xiang sheathed her sword and raised what she’d hooked to show Aurora.

…It was a long, threadlike worm about fifteen centimeters in length, outwardly indistinguishable from a strand of golden hair. Bai Xiang had it pinned flat to the blade with her Qi-Origin, and it was still trying to twist and struggle.

“This—how exactly were you planning to explain this to me?”

“!?” Aurora was stunned at first, then her expression turned faintly angry.

She took another pull from her inhaler, then used the comms to connect to the senior-executive channel. “Get Councilor Ramon on the line, now!”

[Miss… we were just about to report to you… Councilor Ramon has had an incident!]

“!? What happened?”

[…He was just talking with the other directors, but suddenly he said something like ‘time’s up,’ pulled out a gun and shot ‘Mr. Ethan’ and ‘Ms. Feilin,’ then put the gun in his own mouth, and—]

“I see.” Aurora drew a breath. “From now on, recall every member of the core team and run full physicals on them, one by one.”

[Miss…?]

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“And Ramon’s body… as well as those two’s bodies, must be immediately sealed and preserved.”

“Assign people to keep eyes on the corpses. They are not to be out of surveillance for even a moment.”

Only after issuing all those orders did Aurora turn back to Bai Xiang to apologize.

“I’m sorry you had to see such a farce… but I really am curious—how did you manage something like that?”

“What are you referring to?”

“This.” The girl pointed to the long worm on the sword. “We call it a ‘puppet worm.’”

“The earliest discovery records we have date back to three years ago. My father found out someone was secretly stealing classified files from our company’s storage. After they caught him, they found this in his head.”

“…He believes it’s a demonic creature that leaked out from one of Great Yu’s perilous zones, and he’s even speculated they might possess human-like intelligence.”

Puppet worms could slip into the human body without anyone noticing, replace the original spiritual will, and turn that person into a complete puppet.

Aurora’s feelings were extremely complicated right now. She had no idea when she’d been parasitized by a puppet worm, and she couldn’t even imagine how long she had been “sharing a pillow” with it.

Thinking it over carefully, she concluded that Ramon was the most suspicious. He was one of the few people stationed at this branch who knew about her condition, and he was supposedly one of her most trusted subordinates.

Bai Xiang looked into her eyes. “You people already knew these things existed?”

“Of course.” Aurora frowned. “We haven’t known about them for very long, but we’ve already put a system in place to detect and guard against them.”

“I just don’t know how one still slipped in… In any case, I have to thank you again.”

“You’ve basically given me two lives.”

She was very smart. Since Bai Xiang wasn’t answering, Aurora didn’t push. She let the earlier question drop as if she’d never asked.

Crushing the long, threadlike worm, Bai Xiang frowned, a hint of unease stirring in her chest.

In her eyes, “puppet worms” were simply Divine-Vein Demons.

Before she left Great Yu, she had thought about it. If she herself were a Divine-Vein Demon, then the most convenient place for this demon race faction—so intent on resurrecting “ancient demons”—to hide would definitely be overseas.

Those Federation countries boasted about this high technology and that high technology, and even rolled out projects like the Augu Project and the Tyrant Project. She had originally hoped that if these people could use technological means to detect traces of Divine-Vein Demons, it would eliminate a lot of hidden dangers.

But reality?

She had barely left the country. In the very first city she landed in after getting off the plane, the one where Starwater Company’s high-level executives were hailed as “the kings of the underworld,” three of them were suspected of being parasitized by Divine-Vein Demons. And on top of that, there was a core member of the Aurora family who hadn’t yet had time to be parasitized. You could say that added up to three and a half.

She honestly didn’t know what things were like in other countries.

Or what the Star Tower Group’s headquarters was like.

In that case, Aurora might serve as a “wedge.”

Bai Xiang fixed her gaze on the blonde girl.

Being stuck in Great Yu all the time wasn’t her way of doing things. Even those local noble clans understood you couldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Maozhou… Besides Maozhou, she also had to find other fallback routes for the Bai family.

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“I’ll probably be staying in Luohou for about a week.” Bai Xiang asked, “Can your medicine and your body hold out?”

“Yes!” Aurora perked up. “A week is no problem at all… Shall we leave now?”

“If you’re willing, then we’ll go now.”

“I’ll download the data you want first…” Aurora began operating the controls on her armrest. As she worked, she probed, “We really don’t have to be enemies. The Aurora family has accomplishments not only in munitions and machinery, but also very high ambitions in the biological field.”

“I can see that.” Bai Xiang’s gaze held a hint of mockery.

Aurora acted as if she hadn’t noticed and continued, “I know most cultivators from Great Yu struggle to live out a peaceful old age.”

“In that area, we could cooperate. Don’t you want to become stronger?”

She kept trying to tempt Bai Xiang from different angles, but Bai Xiang remained utterly unmoved.

By the end, Aurora’s mouth was dry, and there was a bit of sulky defiance in her tone. “What more do you want, then?”

“Besides this data, I can provide you with other services as well.”

As she said this, she changed the look in her eyes and met Bai Xiang’s golden gaze, a faint blush blooming on her face.

“I… I’m actually a rather conservative person.”

“But if it’s with you, I wouldn’t be opposed…”

Bai Xiang’s assessment of her was dead-on.

If she could grow closer to Bai Xiang, or even obtain some of Bai Xiang’s biological tissue through certain means, Aurora didn’t feel she needed to care about moral shame.

“I’ll pass.”

Bai Xiang simply took the storage chip with the freshly downloaded data from her hand and walked out without even looking at her.

The girl’s little schemes were far too easy to read.

Even if, no matter how you calculated it, Bai Xiang wouldn’t be the one losing out, she loathed that kind of development.

For one simple reason—Aurora’s very existence was built on the flesh and bones of the countless victims sacrificed in the Tyrant Project. With someone like her, at most Bai Xiang would do some business, or treat her as a chess piece.

Anything beyond that?

She would only feel repulsed by the heavy stench of blood.

It might sound cruel, but this was exactly the kind of person Bai Xiang was. She would never change her view of the world because of anyone’s outward appearance.

Bai Zhuqing’s “exception” had been a complete outlier—Bai Zhuqing had simply started with the advantage of family ties that allowed her to get close, and later on, she’d been able to help Bai Xiang’s cultivation, which was why things progressed further.

Other people couldn’t even get close.

They would never have even the slightest chance.