"Did your grandfather never tell you about it? Your Jo family's archenemy?"
"Our family name isn't Jo... Forget it, let's just say it is. The old man never mentioned anything like that to me."
"In that case..."
After Jiang Lianqiu finished explaining the feud between Dio and the first-generation JOJO, Jotaro Kujo's hands had already clenched tightly into fists.
By family hierarchy, the second-generation JOJO, Joseph—the "old man" Jotaro Kujo spoke of—was his grandfather, while the first-generation JOJO was Joseph's grandfather.
That made the first-generation JOJO Jotaro Kujo's great-great-grandfather.
Upon learning that his great-great-grandfather had ultimately perished with Dio at the bottom of the sea, even though he had never heard this story before and had no proof it was true, the destiny in his blood still made Jotaro Kujo ask Jiang Lianqiu almost without hesitation:
"Commander, can you take me with you when you go after Dio?"
"Of course!" Jiang Lianqiu snapped his fingers. "But before that, I think you might need a little combat training at my base—such as how to better use your Stand."
A fox-like smile gleamed in Jiang Lianqiu's eyes.
Once you board my ship, don't even think about getting off again, JOJO.
Star Platinum could stop time. Any ability involving time, if properly developed, would probably bring him enormous surprises.
And beyond Star Platinum, Jiang Lianqiu intended to dig up every secret of Stands.
Although they now had a target, and Von Noymiau claimed that "even in the old era, I was absolutely a top-tier Mech Servant Scientist," research into a rare treasure like the Scales of the Time Worm, something connected to the Time Bug, was still progressing slowly for the red-haired mad scientist.
What was more, that was far from her only task.
Time flew by, and nearly a month passed in the blink of an eye.
Thanks to Jiang Lianqiu's hunting-and-tracking technique, aside from Dio fleeing to another spacetime at the very beginning, every outbreak of contamination on Earth during this period had been sensed by him the instant signs appeared.
Just as their earlier analysis had predicted, after several Ghost Signals—what the Mech Servants still insisted on calling the ripples inadvertently stirred up by Great Old Ones from another universe—swept through the Earth-Moon System, the Sources of Contamination left on Earth manifested in all kinds of bizarre ways.
Not long after the first sign that had erupted due to Dio's resurrection, another report followed: a baobab tree near a tribe in Africa had grown dozens of times larger overnight, and its fruit had turned into actual bread.
And fucking authentic baguettes, at that!
The key was, would you believe those baguettes could talk?
When a Mech Servant general led a team there, a huge crowd of Black folks was gathered around the baobab tree holding a sacrificial ceremony. Amid the talking baguettes on the tree they encircled, one was preaching to them in an authentic old Parisian white-flag accent: "Listen up! God said: those who know three languages are trilingual talents, and those who master two languages are bilingual talents."
"What about those who only know one language?" another baguette beside it promptly played along.
The first baguette coughed. "Those are stupid Brits!"
The Black folks could not understand it, but they were deeply shocked.
If a bread tree that grew talking baguettes had made the Black folks worship it as a god, then a fisherman killing time in the Great Lakes region of West University had his SAN value hit zero and went mad on the spot when the huge, sharp-toothed carp he caught burped, grinned at him, and said, "Oh, my friend, the Great Lakes' industrial wastewater really does raise fine fish! Isn't that right, redneck?"
"Besides that, in Xiangxi, East University, a family was visiting the grave of an elderly man who had recently passed away for the one-month burial rite. The man discovered that his old father had turned into a zombie and crawled out of the grave. He was sitting atop the grave of an elderly woman who had died nearby, wailing his eyes out. Apparently, the two had a tragic romance in their youth. That family basically went insane, but fortunately, we promptly carried out cognitive suppression and memory erasure."
"Still in East University, an elementary school student discovered during an exam that his pen 'had ideas of its own' and actually started answering questions for him. We confiscated the pen and gave the student a piece of candy as compensation. Incidentally, although the answers the pen wrote were lengthy, beautifully written, flowery, and full of quotations from classics, the subject of that exam was mathematics. So the unlucky kid got a zero, had his parents called in, and was beaten horribly by his mother..."
Belfast rattled off a whole string of operation results from this period in one breath, while Jiang Lianqiu, who was listening to the report, had already laughed himself senseless.
"Why does this Evil God contamination feel so off?"
Jiang Lianqiu asked strangely, his shoulders shaking as he listened to Su Shang's silver-bell laughter in his mind.
Before you continue