God's Flower

In the rainforest.

"Vrrr...! Vrrr!" The roar of an aging engine echoed through the trees.

A camper van struggled to climb a muddy slope.

Roar!!

With another "angry roar" from its engine, the van finally made it up and continued crawling north along a trail that could hardly be called a road.

Inside the van...

"Fuck!"

Leon, who was driving, slammed a fist against the steering wheel in frustration.

"I'm sorry... Mr. Joseph." Seeing this, the elderly professor in the passenger seat hurriedly said, "Getting myself and my students here took almost all my savings, so I could only offer you that little bit of money to protect us. I'm truly sorry."

Huh?

Leon waved his right hand lightly. "It's nothing to do with you. It's... ah... never mind."

"That's good, that's good." Only then did the professor relax.

The real reason for Leon's irritation did indeed have nothing to do with them, but it was directly connected to money.

From the professor beside him, whose name was Quill Sears, and the four students in the back, he had learned that the High Heel Club was a gathering place for mercenaries, assassins, and smugglers. That was no secret in Luojia.

Furthermore, the somewhat foul-mouthed bartender from earlier had told him everything about the Rebel Army's impending attack on Luojia, along with the information about the disease. After all, none of that information was worth much—two drinks at most.

But...

210!

210 whole dollars!

Honestly, after learning all this, Leon wanted to slap himself.

For this graduation exam, the company had given each of them three thousand dollars in operational funds to spend as they saw fit.

But getting swindled out of over two hundred at Romanee-Conti left Leon feeling terribly guilty. However rich the company was, that was still the company's money...

On top of that, the bartender had pegged him as a rookie at a glance, which had even made Leon start doubting himself.

Fortunately, he was mentally resilient and soon worked through those emotions. A setback was a lesson learned. If he ran into something like this again, he would not hesitate to have a "proper" discussion about the price.

Quill Sears and his group were a history professor and students from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. They had ventured into Africa to search for the so-called "God's Flower."

Based on a journal written by a captain of Portuguese descent, Sears had concluded that a plant capable of curing every disease existed somewhere in Congo.

The journal mainly recounted how the captain and his crew had sailed a warship named Glorious Resurgence, under orders from King Manuel I, to escort a group of explorers into the Congo rainforest to draw maps and mark resources and viable routes, facilitating future colonial development.

It seemed like a fairly ordinary account, but two passages written by that Portuguese captain were enough to make Professor Sears willing to spend his entire savings to come here:

"God bless us. Had we not tried anything we could in our desperation and eaten those red flowers raw, half of us would have died of the pox!"

And:

"Those flowers are miraculous, truly a gift from God! To think that every last one of us could emerge from the rainforest in good health! It was beyond our wildest dreams! Unfortunately, we used them all up. If only we could pick a few and take them home to grow... that will have to wait until next time. I hope we can find that ancient city again."

The pox was, in fact, smallpox, which had ravaged humanity for thousands of years, ever since written records began.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries alone, at least 150 million people in Europe had died of smallpox. Those were only the recorded deaths; the true figure could only have been higher.

The fact that those red flowers could cure smallpox and help the captain and his crew emerge from a primeval rainforest unharmed meant that they truly possessed immense medical and research value.

Unfortunately, the Glorious Resurgence had been pursued by the British Navy while leaving Africa, and the journal's final passage read:

"Hah! Those deceitful, treacherous British! We risked our lives crossing the wilderness. Why should we 'gift' you the maps we drew? I would sooner destroy them! If we fail to return on schedule, it means we have died in a foreign land and can no longer fight for the Empire...

"May Your Majesty soon restore the Empire to its former glory!"

From this, Sears surmised that the captain and entire crew of the Glorious Resurgence had most likely been captured by the British Navy, then executed after negotiations broke down.

Although the Portuguese Empire was the first global empire and the longest-lasting colonial empire, it had been going through a dark period in the late fifteenth century.

There had been royal infighting at home and powerful enemies abroad, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Spain. Not to mention the countless pirates spawned by the Age of Discovery. Far too many factors could have caused the Glorious Resurgence to vanish forever.

As for where Sears had obtained the journal, he had bought it at a privately owned gift shop while visiting Amsterdam in the Netherlands five years earlier.

The shop had also carried numerous journals and letters from sailors and captains dating from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries. But since these were neither famous people's works nor celebrated paintings, and had not been carefully preserved, they were essentially odds and ends in the antiques trade.

As a history professor, Sears naturally could not resist the "temptation," and spent nearly a thousand pounds on more than a dozen volumes.

Only after returning home to read and decipher them, and attempting to restore the missing sections, had he discovered the history of the Glorious Resurgence. With the help of other documents and sources, he had successfully retraced the crew's last stop before their expedition deep into the rainforest: Luojia.

Yet when Sears reported his discovery to the university, hoping to obtain funding to search for "God's Flower" for the benefit of humanity, the response he received was, "Are you joking?"

Not a single person or institution believed that investing money in it would yield any return.

The very existence of "God's Flower" was in doubt. More importantly, Sears had only deduced the crew's route before they entered the rainforest; he knew nothing about their journey afterward.

Send people into the Congo rainforest, an area of roughly two million square kilometers, to look for flowers?

Was this a joke?

Despite meeting rejection at every turn, Sears firmly believed that "God's Flower" existed, and that the goddess of fortune would smile upon him. He therefore sold everything he owned and set foot in Africa with the four students he was proudest of.

After that...

Setbacks continued to plague this absurdly amateur expedition of professor and students.

After hearing Sears and his students' account, Leon connected it with the strange occurrences in Lojia Town. Didn't that indirectly suggest that "God's Flower" really existed?

Something had merely gone wrong along the way, turning a plant capable of curing diseases into something poisonous.

After reporting the information and his own theories, Leon gladly accepted their thousand-dollar payment and set off with them for the village to the north where the infections had first begun.

Just then...

"Mr. Joseph," a female student sitting in the row behind him asked curiously, "why did you become a mercenary?"

"For the money, of course..."

Boom!!

But a sudden explosion cut off what Leon was about to say next.

(End of chapter)