Volume 2, Chapter 20 – Cutting In

Back in her own room, Bai Xiang casually set a small glass vial on the table, unfastened Feixiang Heaven and stripped off her clothes, then went to the back to take a shower.

When she was done, she changed into a deep-black long robe for sleep, wrapped a towel around her head to press down her hair, sat back down, and picked up the little bottle to study it carefully.

Its name was “Olikon.” It was used to treat all kinds of inflammation, and it also had a painkilling effect.

The bottle’s packaging was already very close to the medications in Bai Xiang’s memories. At least the label was fairly detailed. From it, she learned that the manufacturer was “Great Yu Chilong Qingyun Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.”

Scrolling the internet on her “Nokia” while holding the bottle, Bai Xiang wondered if she ought to buy a computer.

This search didn’t touch any forbidden topics, so after a short wait the results she wanted popped up.

The pinned top result explained that the company was a joint venture. One side was Chilong’s local “Qingyun Pharmaceuticals,” and the other was a pharmaceutical company from the Sami Union called “Cross-Sea Pharmaceuticals.”

Below that was a map with most of it blurred out. Only a protruding panel on the far left was clear. There were no markings for terrain, routes, or cities—just the four large characters “Sami Union.”

Bai Xiang was not surprised.

In Great Yu today, maps were extremely expensive paid data.

Even in secondary schools, you wouldn’t see the most detailed maps. You had to get into a top university, to the more open-minded environment of the college classroom, before you had a chance to be taught with them.

The other way was to learn from foreign-language books—but those were regulated items. Possessing them without papers could get you up to ten years in the Black Prison.

The Black Prison meant mining and digging coal on top of the sentence; ten years in there would probably take twenty years off a normal person’s life. It was a very heavy punishment.

This thing…

Frowning, Bai Xiang turned the small bottle in her fingers, deep in thought.

She suspected that Bai Shengju’s illness came from this, and she also had a notion that was extremely subversive in the current society: this stuff might be addictive.

It wasn’t that her thoughts were jumping way ahead or that she’d leapt there in one bound. It was that ten years lying still in her previous life had already shown her through human nature.

Was there profit in doing something like this?

Yes—and enormous profit.

Did you really need any other reason? Bai Xiang felt you didn’t.

Different world, different backdrop—but the underlying nature was the same.

She flagged this as a key suspect. Before bed, she fed Feixiang Heaven another Demon-Transforming Pill, then lay down and closed her eyes.

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The next day, she was busy again.

First, as usual, she got up early, finished her own cultivation routine, then picked up tools to start cleaning the dojo.

Xu Shu was up even earlier than she was, already wiping the wooden floor with a rag. When he saw Bai Xiang come in with a bucket and mop, his mouth tipped open slightly. Clearly he hadn’t expected that even after “success and fame,” she still had the mind to do chores like this.

So this is the real gap between Senior Sister and me?

Staring blankly at Bai Xiang for a long moment, Xu Shu finally snapped out of it and worked even harder.

Because they were up early and there hadn’t been many people at the hall these days, the cleaning went very quickly. When they finished, the rest of the Bai family were still asleep. Bai Xiang found a place to sit, took out her phone, and began sorting through her missed calls.

She ignored all unfamiliar numbers and replied briefly to those with notes.

She mainly replied to Fang Xiaochun, Cao Chuan, and Huang Qian, and secondarily to Zhang Daoming, Xu Xi, Zhang Longze, and others.

Those people were sensible. Not one of them had called; they’d all sent text messages. Most were thanks and congratulations on her victory in the duel. Only Zhang Longze had written more, cautiously asking if No. 1 High could hang a banner with her name.

Her full name was already out there; what was there to be shy about over a banner?

With Zhang Longze’s features appearing in her mind, Bai Xiang replied with permission—but added a condition.

[Principal Zhang can do as you see fit. My only concern is that in the future it may not be convenient for me to keep coming to school.]

From the moment she arrived and merged with “Bai Xiang,” she was no longer on the same mental level as her peers.

Even without today’s fame, she would have raised this. She’d had enough of being confined to a fixed place. The knowledge taught in class was already of little use to her.

Zhang Longze replied at once:

[All right! Thank you, Student Bai! No. 1 High will always be proud of you!]

Then another:

[Not coming to school is fine, but I need to ask—do you want the school to help apply for a recommendation spot for you?]

Afraid she might not know what that meant, he simply called. Over the phone, he carefully explained the school’s recommendation channels.

Those channels were directly tied to how many good universities there were locally, and to the personal connections between school leaders. Each school had different resources. But basically, any decent high school had quota to recommend students to local top universities.

“We’re locked in on our side—we can only recommend you to Qizhou University,” Zhang Longze admitted. “That was fixed in writing from the start; it can’t be changed.”

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“I’d like to ask Principal Zhang something,” Bai Xiang said.

“Go ahead.”

“Do most students who break the mold choose to go through the recommendation route?”

There was a short silence before he answered. “…Yes.”

“It wasn’t like that at first, but people got more open-minded later. Some in the administration suggested that those at the top already had good family conditions and plenty of resources. They could give up some slots for civilian students who really wanted to compete for Big Exam rankings.”

In other words, if you had the ability and the background to get in anyway, you didn’t need titles like top scorer or runner-up. So don’t drop down into the pool and fight poor kids for resources—that’d look ugly.

Oh…

Now Bai Xiang understood.

No wonder someone at Chai Xuan’s level could become top scorer.

If she remembered right, it wasn’t even purely on the martial track; her Liberal-Arts Exam score had been counted in as well?

She couldn’t recall the details clearly, and such minutiae didn’t matter anymore.

She told Zhang Longze she didn’t need to apply for recommendation for now, and he said he understood.

“The deadline for recommendation applications is one month before the Big Exam each year. You really don’t need to rush.”

He checked the time, then congratulated her again. They parted on very courteous terms.

“Who are you talking to? So early in the morning?”

Leaning against the headboard, grinning at his phone, Zhang Longze looked up to see his wife walk in with a cup of water, frowning at him.

“You don’t understand!” Zhang Longze’s face straightened instantly.

“Where’s that Dingbo Sword I brought home last time?”

“Hurry up and get it out—we’re hanging it in the outer hall!”

Back on her side, Bai Xiang had moved on to chatting with Zhang Daoming.

As per procedure, he first congratulated her on the victory, then changed tone and obliquely reminded her that the southern area was still under the Chilong Army’s control. He was only Chief Inspector for Circuit City and had no jurisdiction or say over the wilderness.

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He thought she’d called to ask about that. There really wasn’t much else serious to talk about.

“Rest easy, Chief Inspector. It’s not about that.”

“Then…?”

“I wanted to ask—any progress on hunting down the Demon-Immortal Dao remnants?”

Why was she suddenly interested in that?

Zhang Daoming was surprised.

Given the wave she’d made, it was normal to worry about retaliation. But bringing this up so quickly—wasn’t that like doubting the Inspectorate’s competence?

“I want to know,” Bai Xiang clarified further, “whether you’ve figured out the background and origin of the Demon Pool ‘Shenli.’”

“I’ve heard that similar incidents haven’t only happened in Chilong. There are still pharmaceutical company bounties up even now. I got curious and hoped Chief Inspector could enlighten me.”

Just simple curiosity?

Thinking of the Bai family’s ties to the Yujing Circuit more than ten years ago, Zhang Daoming frowned. After weighing his words, he finally said, “There is progress… but not much.”

“You know that the Demon-Immortal Dao’s southern forces are basically stuck on that patch of land. The so-called remnants are only peripheral members who haven’t even begun the Stain-the-Body Stage of demonic aura. It’s very hard to distinguish targets.”

Without starting demonic Stain-the-Body, they were indistinguishable from ordinary people, inside and out.

If they didn’t use phones and stuck to calling cards, face-to-face meets, and other means to pass information, catching them was really hard.

“Our only breakthrough was tracking the cover identity of a full member and finding the inn they’d stayed at.”

He paused.

“The innkeeper’s family has been silenced.”

“The full member was the one you took out on the pedestrian street before—one bull demon and one fish demon.”

Bai Xiang pressed for details and learned the place was called Shenhuai Inn, right at the mouth of the lane across from No. 1 High.

With so many people who knew anything already silenced by the Demon-Immortal Dao, the trail broke off there. It was giving Zhang Daoming a headache.

An incident of this magnitude in demonic upheaval—if you got into the fine details, it was his responsibility too.

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After hanging up, Bai Xiang didn’t stop. She called Huang Qian and Cao Chuan one after another, asking for more specifics on the Demon-Immortal Dao remnants.

Like Zhang Daoming, Huang Qian assumed she was calling about that patch of land. He first told her the paperwork was in progress but that the real authorization came from a certain person at court, and they’d have to wait for the documents to go back and forth. That could take a month or so.

Only after she explained her real purpose did he grunt in surprise. “What are you asking about that for?”

The Demon Pool “Shenli” was extremely dangerous. Until they found its source and eradicated it, no one would feel fully at ease.

But that was something for Zhang Daoming’s side to worry about. She hadn’t even started university, hadn’t taken the Swordsman’s License exam—strictly speaking, she was still just a Sword-Track student—and she was already this keen on “caring for the nation and the people”?

With the trust between her and Huang Qian already in place, Bai Xiang spoke plainly. “I suspect a pharmaceutical company is involved behind it.”

“You…”

Huang Qian was at the camp. He shot to his feet at that, pacing uneasily. “Watch your words, Bai Xiang!”

“I asked Chief Inspector Zhang about it. ‘Shenli’ is a Demon Pool that has never appeared before—there’s a high chance it was cultivated deliberately,” Bai Xiang said, eyes narrowing. “How many labs in each Circuit City have the capacity for that kind of research?”

“All right, all right…” Huang Qian glanced toward the tent entrance, covering his mouth. “Don’t worry about this stuff. You’re a storm figure now—mind what you say and do. Just keep your head down and train for the next few months!”

“Beep!”

He actually hung up on her.

Interesting.

Bai Xiang stared coldly at her phone.

It seemed that some lines of thought weren’t beyond people’s imagination—they just didn’t dare think them, much less investigate.

She’d originally wanted to directly ask about the anti-inflammatory medicine, but she was afraid those old foxes in officialdom would sense something and deliberately withhold crucial information. That was why she’d used the Demon Pool “Shenli” as her entry point.

But now it seemed there were suspicious points everywhere.

Turning it over slowly in her mind, she suddenly felt every hair on her body stand on end; even her hair lifted, as she jerked her head up.

She didn’t know when it had happened, but someone was already standing a mere foot in front of her.

Graceful and composed—it was Xiang Xian.