"Is it about my sister?"
"That's right. Someone stole the most precious thing Xiao Hua had in the Star Alliance. You need to take it back."
"What was it?"
Bai Yuantang spoke slowly. "Snow Li Fief."
"A fief?!"
Bai Xiaowen was startled. He hadn't expected his sister, Bai Xiaohua, to be a lord too.
But it made sense. Their father had trained her from behind the scenes throughout her time as an Awakened. She was smart and capable. It would have been stranger if she weren't a lord.
Bai Yuantang said, "Your sister's path as an Awakened wasn't nearly as public as yours. She never took part in any of Earth's leagues. Under the alias 'Hua Xueli,' she quietly grew into an Evolver lord. Before she advanced, everyone thought she was just an ordinary Awakened."
"Hua Xueli..."
Bai Xiaowen was good at word puzzles, especially when he already had the answer. He quickly saw how she had chosen the alias.
She had used "Hua" as her surname, turned "Bai," meaning white, into "Xue," meaning snow, and taken "Li" from liming, meaning dawn, to stand for "Xiao." That was how Bai Xiaohua had become Hua Xueli.
She hadn't even bothered to come up with a separate name for her fief. She had simply called it Snow Li Fief.
Bai Xiaowen also understood why his father had made "annex a fief" the condition for triggering his first remnant thought.
The first "task" Bai Yuantang wanted him to complete was taking back Snow Li Fief.
If Bai Xiaowen could annex a fief, he would have the strength to annex Snow Li Fief.
This remnant thought of Bai Yuantang's could apparently think for itself to some extent. He looked at Bai Xiaowen and said, "You don't seem to have reached the level of a