Chapter 125: Sentinel & Guide (II)

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Chapter 125: Sentinel & Guide (II)

Thanks to Shang Ke’s intelligence, the Sentinels’ rescue operation went extremely smoothly. They brought the situation under control before the terrorists even had a chance to resist. In the original timeline, they had also successfully subdued the terrorists, but dozens of people were injured or killed during the operation. This time, they completed the mission without a single casualty.

Yonis stood at a high vantage point, rapidly scanning the crowded, noisy mass below in an attempt to find the Guide who had supplied him with intelligence. But the surrounding noise and unpleasant smells were almost unbearable torture for a Sentinel. If a Guide deliberately concealed his spirit animal, it was extremely difficult for a Sentinel to track him in an environment like this.

“Sir, the mission is complete. Shall we withdraw?” one Sentinel came forward to ask. Wave after wave of noise battered his senses, leaving his nerves stretched taut and making him profoundly uncomfortable.

“Withdraw.” After searching for so long without success, Yonis had no desire to remain here either. As long as the man was still in Biya City, he would find him sooner or later.

Just as he turned away, the corner of his eye caught sight of a figure following the crowd out of the mall. Yonis moved in a blur, closing the distance with several powerful leaps. Yet by the time he reached the outside of the mall, the man had vanished without a trace…

Shang Ke couldn’t stay. He still had a detonator on him and needed to dispose of it as quickly as possible. As for the bombs planted throughout the mall, he would leave those to the professionals to dismantle.

This type of detonator relied on signal transmission. Once it left the signal’s effective range, the connection between the detonator and the bombs would be severed. Shang Ke picked a direction at random and kept moving straight ahead until the indicator light went dark. Only then did he walk onto a bridge and throw the detonator into the river.

Next, Shang Ke would have to face the Anti-Government Alliance’s furious retaliation. They would never show mercy to a traitor, especially one who possessed as many of the Alliance’s secrets as the original owner did.

Shang Ke’s first priority was to create a new identity for himself, then conceal his whereabouts as thoroughly as possible.

He avoided the surveillance cameras and quickly ducked into an alley. After confirming that no one was nearby, Shang Ke pulled several cards from his pocket. He had stolen them from other people amid the earlier chaos. The method was hardly respectable, but survival came first. All he could do was apologize and consider them payment for saving their lives.

Shang Ke carefully examined the cards. There were identity cards, credit cards, anonymous shopping cards, and a network access card. The identity and credit cards required fingerprint and password verification, so they were of little use to him, but the anonymous shopping card and network access card could solve his immediate problems. Before their owners reported them missing, he could use the shopping card to buy goods from unmanned stores and the access card to connect to the network from any public terminal.

Assuming, of course, that the shopping card and network access card contained enough credits.

Shang Ke was fairly lucky. Both cards had balances exceeding 300,000 credits. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, since he had deliberately targeted people dressed in obviously expensive clothing. People like that usually carried several no-verification spending cards, both for quick, convenient purchases and to casually hand out as “tips.”

Judging by the balances, Shang Ke estimated that their owners probably wouldn’t care about losing one or two shopping cards or access cards.

Shang Ke first found a shady inn that didn’t require identification, then went to an unmanned store to buy some basic necessities. Once back at his room, he cut and dyed his hair, shaped his eyebrows, and began transforming his appearance.

The original owner had already been fairly good-looking, and after Shang Ke took over the body, his appearance improved by several levels. Once he finished carefully grooming himself, the previous sickly, dispirited air vanished completely, leaving him energetic and radiant.

Shang Ke took off his clothes, intending to have a proper shower. When he passed the mirror, he noticed just how thin this body was. Scars covered his skin, old and new wounds crisscrossing everywhere. Only someone who had suffered abuse since childhood could have accumulated so many scars.

Shang Ke had no memories of the original owner’s childhood. All he knew was that the boy had joined the Anti-Government Alliance at fifteen, after which his life had become increasingly twisted. From the looks of things, his antisocial tendencies were very likely connected to what he had experienced as a child.

“He was probably a pitiful person too…” Shang Ke murmured, slowly tracing a finger over the scars on his body.

After his shower, Shang Ke changed into clean clothes. By now, his appearance was already vastly different from the original owner’s.

The original owner had short red hair, a gloomy gaze, and a habit of neglecting his appearance. He always dressed in dark colors, giving off an oppressive air. Shang Ke dyed his hair black and carefully styled it, then changed into warm-toned casual clothes. Standing straight and tall, his blue eyes bright and vivid, he looked as dazzling as an ocean bathed in sunlight.

Once he finished his makeover, Shang Ke didn’t rest. He used the network access card to get online, then employed his hacking skills to insert a fabricated identity into the government’s displaced-person registry, through which an identity card would automatically be issued.

Over the past several decades, frequent wars had displaced large numbers of civilians, so the government had established a series of resettlement measures for the homeless. As long as someone’s information passed verification, they could obtain a new lowest-tier identity card and receive free food and lodging for three months.

Shang Ke had little interest in the free food and lodging. As long as he possessed a legitimate identity card, earning money would be easy enough. What he couldn’t be sure of was how long he could remain hidden. Based on what he knew of the Anti-Government Alliance, he estimated they would find him in less than three months.

Appearances could be changed, but fingerprints, DNA, surveillance footage, and similar records could not—unless Shang Ke was reckless enough to hack into the government’s central AI and completely alter every piece of information connected to the original owner. What worried him most was his assumption that the original owner was a Guide. A Guide’s pheromone signature was as unique as DNA. Although the original owner had never registered with the national Guide Association, the Alliance had undoubtedly recorded his Guide pheromones. All Shang Ke could do was conceal his spirit animal as much as possible and avoid being discovered.

In reality, Shang Ke had no need to worry about that at all, because the original owner had never been a Guide. Shang Ke had simply assumed from the start that the Guide abilities belonged to the body he had taken over.

Five days later, the identity card issued by the government arrived in Shang Ke’s hands. He couldn’t help praising, “That’s impressively efficient.”

The lowest-tier identity card was pale gray, with the identity-card emblem on the front and an embedded chip on the back. There were no other images or text; the holder’s personal information could only be accessed with a scanner.

As soon as he received the card, Shang Ke left his temporary lodgings, moved into the city proper, and rented a small apartment. The noisier the environment, the easier it was to hide the identity of a Guide, because a Sentinel’s senses were too acute to sustain a psychic search for long amid heavy sensory interference.

Shang Ke’s choice made life miserable for Yonis, who was searching everywhere for him.

Yonis assumed he was a registered Guide, and registered Guides generally lived in quiet, upscale residential districts. Naturally, those areas became his first search targets—and equally naturally, he found nothing.

Next, Yonis used his privileges to search the records of every unpaired Guide, but still found nothing. In the end, he could only conclude that the other man was probably an unregistered Guide.

There were quite a few Guides like that. Most valued their freedom and refused to let the Guide Association control them or allow a compatibility percentage to determine the course of their entire lives.

Yonis gradually expanded his search radius, patiently checking one district after another.

Ten days later, he finally caught that familiar psychic fluctuation again, no more than ten or fifteen kilometers away.

Yonis immediately drove toward District D. Although his face remained expressionless, inwardly he could hardly wait. Never before had he felt such an intense pull toward someone. They hadn’t even met, yet he already felt an overwhelming certainty that he had to have this Guide.

The hovercar sped through the city as Yonis pushed his heightened senses to their limit, precisely avoiding every obstacle in his path.

Within minutes, Yonis reached the location where the psychic fluctuation had appeared. What greeted him, however, was complete chaos. Debris from an exploded hovercar littered the ground beside a corpse mangled beyond recognition and scattered stains of blood. A crowd of civilians had also gathered nearby to watch.

Yonis’s hands tightened. He swept his psychic power over the corpse, and only after confirming that it wasn’t the person he sought did he relax slightly. He immediately opened a communication channel and contacted the officer responsible for the district, ordering him to report on the incident.

“The incident happened only a few minutes ago and is still under investigation. According to surveillance footage and eyewitness accounts, a ZO-model hovercar suddenly exploded while in motion. The driver died instantly. The passenger jumped out at the last possible moment and was blasted across the road by the shock wave. Immediately afterward, that passenger came under sniper fire. The surveillance footage didn’t capture the sniper, but the passenger was clearly badly injured. He left a trail of blood all the way to Leftbank River, where it disappeared. I suspect he jumped into the river, but we don’t yet know whether he escaped successfully.”

Yonis’s expression turned cold. “Send me the surveillance footage. Begin a full investigation immediately and report directly to me tomorrow.”

After ending the call, Yonis followed the blood trail to Leftbank River. He released his psychic power and began searching across a wide area. Late at night, the river was dark and bitterly cold. Imagining a weakened Guide struggling for survival in the freezing water filled Yonis with an inexplicable sense of oppression.

What kind of trouble had he gotten himself into? Why was someone trying to kill him? And who exactly was attacking him?

Yonis realized that the Guide he had chosen was probably no ordinary person…

Shang Ke hadn’t expected the attack to come this quickly. Under normal circumstances, he should have died, but the instant he entered the vehicle, his spirit animal, Wave, suddenly appeared and warned him. Shang Ke immediately threw himself out of the car, narrowly escaping the explosion.

Ignoring the pain from his injuries, Shang Ke used every available obstacle as cover and desperately sprinted toward Leftbank River. At the critical moment, he plunged headfirst into the rushing water.

He had no idea how long he swam beneath the surface. Only when he was utterly exhausted did Shang Ke finally struggle ashore.

His body was covered in injuries, with the gunshot wound in his left shoulder being especially severe. Combined with the heavy blood loss, dizziness blurred his vision, but the extraordinary willpower he had honed across several worlds allowed him to endure. Dragging his exhausted body onward, Shang Ke found a relatively secluded hiding place before dawn.

Leaning against a stone wall, Shang Ke bandaged his injuries while trying to work out exactly how his location had been exposed.

A moment later, realization struck him. Fingerprints! It had to be his fingerprints.

Taking a hired car required fingerprint verification to ensure the driver wasn’t transporting a wanted criminal or someone without legal status. These fingerprint records were wiped every two days. Today had been Shang Ke’s first time calling a car, yet within only a few dozen minutes, the Alliance had already pinpointed his location and launched an assassination attempt. Their speed and efficiency were almost unbelievable.

Fortunately, Shang Ke disguised himself whenever he went out. The Alliance probably still didn’t know his current identity or appearance, because fingerprint data attached to identity cards was absolutely confidential unless the Alliance could hack into the government’s central AI. They had acted immediately precisely because they wanted to kill him in a single strike and end the matter quickly. They clearly hadn’t expected him to escape.

Looks like I can’t do anything requiring fingerprint verification from now on. Shang Ke silently sighed.

【Congratulations, Host, on surviving one assassination attempt. Please keep up the good work.】

At this moment, Shang Ke still didn’t know that his disguises and avoidance of fingerprint verification were not only creating obstacles for the people trying to kill him, but also making Yonis suffer. Yonis had finally managed to extract Shang Ke’s fingerprints from the hired-car system, only for the trail to go completely cold afterward…

#Why was his Guide so damn hard to find?!#

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