Interlude

After Pan Han's arrest, Zhang Qi's residence was moved to the operations command center.

Because the attack on Zhang Qi had been so egregious, and because of the untraceable SIG Sauer P365 found on Pan Han, the police had ample reason to turn the organization known as "Frontiers of Science" inside out.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, the door to Zhang Qi's room was pushed open, and Shi Qiang walked in.

He was holding a slightly crumpled document envelope.

"Here."

After handing the file to Zhang Qi, Shi Qiang casually dropped his butt onto the sofa beside him.

Zhang Qi opened it and began flipping through the pages.

It contained a record of a confrontation that had taken place in a sealed interrogation room.

Pan Han had confessed.

And he had confessed far faster than anyone could have imagined.

The order to assassinate Zhang Qi had come from the "Lord."

The reason was the same as what he had said in the café before: Zhang Qi's existence had become the greatest obstacle to the Lord's arrival on Earth.

Pan Han believed that eliminating Zhang Qi was a necessary act to defend his faith.

Naturally, Zhang Qi had expected this.

Aside from the academic achievements he had published, he had secretly written quite a few hypotheses and research reports concerning the future.

Most of them could not be verified or replicated with humanity's current technological and industrial capabilities—

—but that was not the case for the Trisolarans.

The fact that they had come to assassinate him meant that the Trisolarans had already verified those technologies for him. They were feasible.

Then there was ET0, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization.

Pan Han had revealed part of that as well.

Their goal was to welcome the Lord's arrival and use the immense power