The video cut off right on Major General Aziza Marlowe's smiling face.
Her gentle smile blended with a face marked by the traces of battle. The ancient prosthetic eye, almost indistinguishable from a real one, glimmered with a blood-red light. She looked utterly murderous.
This wasn't the Big Sis Aziza I knew! For a moment, Yu Lian could hardly recognize her.
The archaeologist-turned-general was always worried she wasn't fulfilling her duties properly. Around both superiors and colleagues, she always seemed a little awkward and ill at ease. She looked more like a scholar trying to figure out how to get funding from the old boys' club.
The sort of scholar who wasn't very famous and whose field of study wasn't taken seriously, so every time she asked for funding, she had to bow and raise her glass, offering a pitiful toast. It was a tragic reminder that even knowledge had to bend before power and money.
That ingratiating smile of hers had become second nature for much the same reason.
Also, that assessment wasn't Yu Lian's. It was Yang Xiyi's.
But now, when she truly believed herself to be a warrior, her whole bearing had become utterly carefree.
Yu Lian even faintly sensed that the Fifth Ring she'd been stuck at for ten years might finally be on the verge of a breakthrough.
...All right, this choppy, blurry video could have been filmed God knew when. And the Ring of Miracles was more than two million light-years away; even from the Eighth Star Gate, it was nearly two thousand light-years away. There was no way Yu Lian should have been able to sense anything. But this was the occult, after all. Intuition mattered.
A psionic's mind sense and the distant resonance between star rings could transcend space and time. There