Although I felt that Zhuangzi seemed unwilling to tell me all the manor's secrets, what he said did make some sense.
I initiated an emergency recall for Fan Jia, but nearly half an hour passed without any response.
Zhuangzi frowned. "That shouldn't be possible. No matter how far away they are, as long as they're on the island, they should arrive within twenty minutes after an emergency recall."
I asked whether this had happened before. He shook his head and said that emergency recall had never been activated before. This was also the first time for the Ten Heavenly Stems.
But even if it was the first time, there shouldn't have been any accidents.
As he spoke, he turned on a computer. A map of the island appeared on the screen, marked with several red dots. I counted them. There were nine in total, each labeled with a character corresponding to the Ten Heavenly Stems.
One was missing, and the missing red dot should have been labeled "Jia"!
I looked at Zhuangzi. His expression grew grave as well. "How is that possible? How could it have disappeared?"
He performed an operation on the computer, and a window popped up: "The requested unit does not exist!"
He was manually searching for Fan Jia's location, but the system showed that the queried unit did not exist. In other words, Fan Jia no longer existed in this system.
"Something happened to Fan Jia!" I said.
Zhuangzi looked at me without speaking. From his eyes, I could tell that he had no idea what was going on either.
I returned to the living room. Yu Gui was still there, while Liu Lan was talking to him.
When she saw me, Liu Lan asked, "Where's Fan Jia? Has he not arrived yet?"
Zhuangzi looked at