Customers were valuable assets, of course, but only if they could provide a steady stream of abilities to trade, like Liu Shuyue.
Some customers had limited abilities for now but plenty of room to grow. They might gain new abilities later, so it was worth maintaining a good relationship with them too, like Joan of Arc.
The new customer before him fit neither category.
She came from a highly advanced future, yet she had only three abilities in all, and one had already been traded away temporarily. That was disappointing. Chen Xuan had confirmed with the Scanner Gun that she now had only Mind Fortress and Free Will left.
Liu Shuyue judged that she had damaged her body too badly to cultivate anymore, and Lin Qing herself admitted that Cybernetic Bodies would replace abilities. That suggested the two conflicted to some extent. When an armed mech had attacked earlier, she had taken a 30 mm round with her body. In terms of abilities, that would have required something like invulnerability, yet the Scanner Gun had detected nothing of the sort. The Ability Store clearly did not count the advantages of a Cybernetic Body as abilities.
Chen Xuan certainly did not consider himself a cold-blooded businessman who cared only about profit. Even if no deal came of this, they still had a connection. If Lin Qing had nowhere to go, he would have no problem letting her stay in the shop for a month or two free of charge. But she had taken on the burden of saving the world and wanted to drag him into a fight with a mysterious organization he had never even heard of. That was another matter.
If—and he meant if—Mad Judy really belonged to the Dimensional Limit Organization, and that organization could keep all information about ability users under wraps, then the power it wielded behind the scenes could not be underestimated.
Chen Xuan wanted to stay as far away from a force like that as possible, not go looking for trouble with it.
Even if the world really was going to end, that was more than a century away. He might not even be around by then.
Lin Qing did not make a scene when he refused, nor did her face turn cold with disappointment. A faint light flickered in her eyes as she seemed to think at high speed. Her hand, which he had pushed away, closed around his wrist instead and refused to let go, as though she was afraid he might run.
A few seconds later, her eyes lit up. "Found it."
"Found what?" Chen Xuan asked.
"You run an Ability Store, so you must need plenty of abilities. A supermarket has to keep restocking too, right?"
"Mm-hmm." He had no reason to deny that.
"I can help you with some of your stock," Lin Qing said with absolute confidence.
Chen Xuan gave her a skeptical look, but Voice of Trust still gave a favorable reading. "Oh? How?"
She pointed to her head. "My memory holds a lot of declassified Dimensional Limit Organization files, including records of erosion incidents and the ability users involved. You can get your stock from them."
"...Get it from whom?" For a moment, he thought he had misheard.
"From the people connected to the erosion incidents," Lin Qing repeated. "Threaten them, force them—use whatever means you need to take their abilities. Most of them live off the grid and have committed serious crimes. No one would care even if you killed them all. I don't know how you usually obtain abilities, but I'm sure you have a way to 'persuade' them."
This girl could be ruthless.
Chen Xuan suddenly grew curious. "Have you killed anyone?"
"Of course," Lin Qing answered without hesitation. "In my time, the cities were full of lunatics, criminals, and psychopaths. Law and order had long since become a joke. To survive, I had to defend myself by force. All I could do was try not to hurt innocent bystanders when I fought."
None of my customers are easy to handle, are they?
He considered that. "So you were looking through the erosion records just now?"
"That's right. The next erosion will happen in two days, right here in this city. Only one person is involved, and the location is well hidden. It's a good chance to try this out." The girl tapped the air twice. "I've sent the file to your phone."
His phone rang in his pocket.
Chen Xuan took it out in surprise. The text showed "10089" as the sender. "You didn't hack the telecom provider, did you?"
"No. I used a signal override to send you a message on that frequency," Lin Qing explained, sounding a little proud. "Personal electronic data is still poorly protected in this era. There's no need to go to the trouble of hacking the provider. Oh, and if you want to call me, just dial this number and add a hash sign."
"Was it your Cybernetic Body that stopped that bullet too?"
"Yeah. Military-grade subdermal armor. Pretty expensive equipment. Most people can only get flexible carbon-film armor implanted, and that can stop handgun rounds at best."
A Cybernetic Body really is convenient... You just pay to have it implanted.
Chen Xuan stared at Lin Qing for a long while.
She drew back uneasily. "Installing these things requires a specialized operating room, and there are immune-compatibility issues. Even if you took mine out, no one else could use them."
"If I wanted them, I'd have taken them while you were unconscious." Chen Xuan waved a hand and opened the file she had provided. A headshot of a striking woman appeared on the screen, with her name below it: Fei Wuniang, SC-104-C1, deceased.
Chen Xuan recognized the location where she had appeared.
It was an abandoned building outside the Third Ring Road. It had once been a wildly popular club, if he remembered right.
"If you can catch her, that'll prove I'm telling the truth," Lin Qing pressed on, seeing that he had not rejected her outright this time. "Mr. Shopkeeper, everything you've experienced is the past of that destroyed world. Nanoworm Technology is only about thirty years away. Once it gets out of control, it'll be too late to change anything. Billions of people will die! Please help me once more so humanity doesn't repeat the same mistake. In return, you can have those intruders' abilities!"
Two days later, Chen Xuan took a taxi to the abandoned building, using the photo Lin Qing had given him.
"You here to explore too?" the taxi driver asked, turning around. "That'll be eighty-five yuan."
So expensive. Going from inside the First Ring Road to beyond the Third really costs a fortune. Chen Xuan scanned the payment code. "Yeah. Do a lot of people come here?"
"More did a couple of years ago. Most people who take this highway exit are headed there. They say it's haunted. Some even come in groups and spend the night." The driver smiled. "Not many come alone like you."
That was hardly surprising. There were exploration videos of the place all over the internet.
After the taxi left, Chen Xuan turned his gaze to the abandoned building nearby.
It stood four stories tall beside a stretch of farmland. Its square, imposing design looked rather dignified—if you didn't know it had once been called Lushui Club.
Anyone could guess what a club in such a remote place had been for. Chen Xuan had still been in college during its heyday. Unfortunately, by the time he graduated, found work, and had money to spare, the club had closed for good.
Lin Qing had not come with him.
It was not that she did not want to. She could not.
The damage to her body was worse than she had expected. Even after days of recovery, she could manage a walk around the neighborhood, but fighting as she had before was out of the question. She had taken his advice and stayed behind, providing intelligence through his earpiece instead.
"It really is exactly the same..."
Chen Xuan compared the building with the photo. The damage was almost identical, down to the angle of the Lushui Club sign that hung crookedly above the entrance, ready to fall.
The photo had to have been taken recently.
Could everything Lin Qing said be true? Was the world where the Crystal Palace fell... this world's future?
He crossed the parking lot to the entrance. A chain bound the door handles together, and a sign hanging from it read, "Closed premises. Do not enter." But that would not stop anyone determined to explore. Chen Xuan could see that the floor-to-ceiling window beside the door had been smashed, leaving a hole wide enough for a person to pass through.
"I'm going in."
"Okay," Lin Qing said through his earpiece. "The Erosion Point is on the second floor. Be careful, though. The capture record only lists where Fei Wuniang crossed over and when she died. It doesn't mean she entered the club at that exact time."
"Did she die because the Dimensional Limit Organization tried to capture her?"
"Yes." There was a pause on the other end. "But I need to explain something. Fei Wuniang really did have dozens of lives on her hands. Her crimes were unforgivable. Even so, the organization's primary goal is containment, not elimination. Its teams prioritize taking targets alive, even murderers. The Dimensional Limit Organization isn't a law-enforcement body, and it doesn't claim to dispense justice... Of course, its mission to maintain the world's stability inevitably attracts people who believe in justice, or at least believe themselves to be just."
Chen Xuan stepped over the window frame and walked into the lobby across a floor strewn with broken glass. "Either way, she died."
"That's how combat goes. If the target is determined to resist or uses particularly vicious methods, casualties can be unavoidable. The same applies to both sides."
To be honest, Chen Xuan was willing to believe that much.
When he had encountered Mad Judy in the castle dungeon, the first round she fired at him had been an injection dart, not a metal bullet.
Nor was Chen Xuan particularly worried that Fei Wuniang was lying in wait upstairs to ambush him. Before entering the club, he had swept the building with Heavenly Cloud Skill and confirmed that the abandoned building was empty.
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