Early the next morning, Yan Rou told me that R9 wanted to see me.
Yan Rou had already relayed my words to R9 last night. She said R9 had actually asked to speak with me in person that very night, but Yan Rou had refused on the grounds that it was too late and I might already be resting.
I knew that some of our conditions were unacceptable to R9. Take his plan to build a base there. To put it bluntly, he wanted more than anything to expand his own strength. But after our intervention, that base would become a base for all of us—his people, our people, and even other outsider factions that we might persuade to cooperate with us.
That made everything he had done meaningless, and it probably felt like he was making wedding clothes for someone else.
There was another point. He had originally only intended to hand over the information on a hundred intelligence agents, but Old Shu's position was clear: information on only a hundred agents was not enough. We had to have information on everyone they had sent to this world.
From Great Xia's standpoint, there was nothing wrong with that.
But it was different from R9's perspective. Perhaps in his eyes, this could no longer be called cooperation. It was more like demanding their surrender. Once they had no more secrets on Great Xia's side and held no advantage at all, their safety would be seriously threatened.
Although I knew Great Xia would not casually do anything to them, that came with a prerequisite: their actions had to remain within the bounds permitted by Great Xia's laws and regulations.
Even if Great Xia could grant them certain privileges, there would still be restrictions on how those privileges could be used. It