The glaring white light.
Watanabe Motoji could barely keep his eyes open. After a while, he adjusted and realized his predicament: his hands and feet were tightly bound, and a gag had been shoved into his mouth.
His two assistants had been treated the same way.
He nervously studied his surroundings. There were only gray-white walls, cold-toned lights, and chilly air, along with the iron cage they were being held in.
Bastards! Watanabe was furious, but also terrified. As a member of the Eastern Ying United Chamber of Commerce's Commercial Intelligence Center, he had spent years handling commercial intelligence in Southeast Asia and had extensive connections throughout the region. He never imagined he would end up captured here.
To avoid unnecessary complications, he had come to Darte Port quietly this time. Only his superior at the Intelligence Center knew some of the details.
Now all he could do was wait for his kidnappers to appear and hope they would let him live once they got the ransom.
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
Soon, several grim-faced soldiers opened the door to the laboratory's animal holding room and escorted the three Watanabes to the washroom. They stripped off their clothes and blasted them with water guns.
Then they were taken into the operating room.
They underwent Gene Modification and Biochip implantation, after which they were interrogated about everything they knew.
Thanks to improved technology, and because these spy-type soldiers only needed Gene Sterilization and their prefrontal lobes disabled—not physical enhancements—the Gene Modification process had been shortened to five days.
The Biochip implantation procedure had also become more efficient. Li Qingye had performed forty operations, and with several specially trained assistant soldiers to help, he could now manage one implantation every six hours.
Using the laptops and phones confiscated from the three Watanabes, Li Qingye also uncovered information about them.
He first emailed Watanabe's superior to report what was happening.
In his report, he said that Darte Port had recently suffered network outages and he might not be able to make contact promptly. He then added that he could not confirm whether Homo sapiens Company possessed eel-breeding technology and would need about a month to continue investigating in Darte Port.
For now, he would keep the other side busy.
In fact, as soon as the three Watanabes had arrived in Darte Port, Li Qingye had secretly hijacked their phones and computers using hacking techniques. That was why they believed there was a local communications problem.
The modified trio were now being rigorously interrogated in the interrogation room, their every scrap of information being squeezed out of them.
To avoid alerting anyone, the three Watanabes could not die in Darte Port. But this was also a golden opportunity to infiltrate the Eastern Ying United Chamber of Commerce.
The information extracted from Watanabe revealed that the Eastern Ying United Chamber of Commerce was a loose coalition formed by six major conglomerates: Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Fuji, Sanwa, and Kangyin. Its purpose was to act in unison and respond to an increasingly complex international environment.
This so-called Commercial Intelligence Center had originally been the Fuyou Association's intelligence center, which belonged to the Fuji conglomerate. It specialized in investigating and collecting intelligence from around the world, providing support to Japan's major conglomerates.
The three Watanabes belonged to the Luzon Task Force, a Southeast Asia office under the Intelligence Center. The task force had twelve direct employees and 243 local contacts, and was closely connected to both the underworld and legitimate circles throughout Luzon.
That was why Watanabe knew Homo sapiens Company's background so well and had not been wary of Li Qingye's fake identity as Zhang Jack.
He had simply underestimated Li Qingye's decisiveness and had been taken out before he could make a move.
The wealth of information let Li Qingye learn many things he had struggled to investigate before, such as the tangled web of relationships within Luzon. It also made him realize there was an opportunity.
The trio's superior was in Manila. On the surface, he was a Japanese sushi restaurant owner living in Manila, but the restaurant was also an intelligence outpost.
The other full-time employees were scattered across different occupations: one worked at the sushi restaurant; three were on the Luzon Overseas Residents Council; three ran a venture capital firm—which was where the three Watanabes worked; two ran Japanese language schools; one owned a plantation; and one was the Luzon representative for the Kubota Company.
They were clearly spread across various industries and rarely contacted one another. When they did, they used gatherings such as overseas residents' social clubs as cover and spoke at the sushi restaurant.
Li Qingye now had precise information about all of them, and quickly began making plans.
The three Watanabes had brought their families with them to Luzon. Although the computing power of the Biochip 1.2 had improved, reaching an average of 622 trillion operations per second, the soldier program had also been further optimized.
But the soldiers still had obvious weaknesses. For example, they could not handle unexpected situations they had never encountered before. Such situations were rare, but that did not mean they never happened.
Over the course of a human life, all sorts of strange things could happen. It was only a matter of time.
The soldiers were too rigid. Ordinary friends or colleagues might not notice anything, but family members who saw them day in and day out were bound to detect something unusual.
But Li Qingye had no choice. For now, he would have to make the best of it.
Of course, there were ways to address the soldiers' weaknesses.
To solve the problem at its root, he would need to increase the Biochip's storage capacity and computing power as much as possible, expanding the soldier program's database and improving its ability to analyze problems.
But that was difficult with current technology.
Every other method would only treat the symptoms, not the cause.
For instance, the modified soldiers numbered 1 through 40 were instructed not to go home, contact relatives, or take on tasks beyond their assigned scope. This reduced the chances of encountering unforeseen situations.
He could also simply kill all their relatives. That would suppress the risk of intelligence leaks in the short term.
But that would be too cruel. Besides, their relatives had social circles of their own. The more people involved, the more likely something would go wrong over time.
So Li Qingye decided to take several measures at once.
For instance, he could have the soldiers work away from home or put in frequent overtime, reducing the time they spent with their relatives. Or they could use divorce or setting up separate households as a pretext to live apart from their families.
But not everyone required such a complicated solution.
One especially promising target was Takasugi Hei, the superior of Watanabe Motoji and the other two.
A few years ago, he had fallen out with his wife and had been single ever since. Although he had several mistresses in Manila, those relationships would be easy to deal with: he could simply claim he was tired of them and pay them off.
Moreover, Takasugi Hei was the head of the Luzon Task Force. If Li Qingye took him down, with the three Watanabes providing support, he could secretly seize control of the Eastern Ying United Chamber of Commerce's intelligence network in Luzon—and even infiltrate Japan in the opposite direction.
For Li Qingye, who lacked manpower and had few ordinary people he could rely on, using Japanese operatives was an excellent option.
The Japanese intelligence presence in Southeast Asia and East Asia was not to be underestimated. They might seem harmless in everyday life, but their ambitions had never disappeared.
And Li Qingye needed to find the person who had murdered his parents. Relying on his current intelligence network was clearly not enough.
After settling on a plan, he immediately began making arrangements to lure Takasugi Hei to Darte Port. Two other agents with relatively simple personal lives were also on his list of targets.
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