Xiang Qian found an out-of-the-way spot and dropped onto the ground, his expression and posture equally slack. For various reasons, neither Saber nor Vector came to bother him. They left him alone to quietly—and rather aimlessly—watch the soldiers coming and going around the camp.
Xiang Qian's "Meteor Shower" had completely turned the tide of battle. Most of the armed militants who had been trading blows with the defenders were dead, and most of the rest had surrendered. Only a handful had broken off from the fighting and fled into the distance. A deep, powerful rumble of engines came faintly from the end of the road: the armored units sent to reinforce them had arrived. With the outcome all but decided, the soldiers in the camp gradually relaxed. After emerging from the tense battle, many looked drained—a common effect of their adrenaline wearing off.
With the armored units' support, the command sent some troops to pursue the fleeing militants. It wasn't hard to imagine that the part of the Kuliya police force left behind to hold the defensive perimeter would soon be disarmed under the armored units' watch. A sweeping purge was inevitable. Given the political traditions of countries in the Soviet sphere, such a purge was bound to be brutal and bloody.
But none of that concerned Xiang Qian. He was disappointed that he hadn't managed to get any information about the Mandarin out of Temugin, but he wasn't especially troubled by it.
The Memory Planet held a complete psychological profile of Temugin. The terrorist's pathological sense of honor was deeply ingrained, and his decision to detonate his ring at the last moment proved he would never yield easily. Xiang Qian had expected his attempt to extract information to fail.
Still, I can't help feeling a little frustrated. Temugin was the Mandarin's only son, as far as they knew. In a way, this was the closest anyone had come to the Mandarin in over a decade. How could Xiang Qian accept returning empty-handed?
Xiang Qian opened his palm and examined another prize from this trip: the Ruby Ring he had taken from Temugin. Its design was bizarre, clearly not meant to be decorative. The ruby set in the center of the ring's face was shaped like a capsule, and a fiery red glow seemed to flow faintly within it. On closer inspection, the glow was made up of countless tiny flames moving within the stone.
Under Xiang Qian's gaze, the ring suddenly trembled. At the same time, he sensed the flames at the heart of the ruby speed up sharply. He instinctively pinched the band between his fingers.
The ring's trembling suddenly intensified. Its high-frequency vibration blurred Xiang Qian's vision, and the ruby on its face became little more than a red blur. A tremendous upward force came from the ring, as though it would shoot skyward at any moment, but Xiang Qian held it firmly between his fingertips.
As he felt the force coming from the ring, Xiang Qian's gaze grew clearer and clearer. He knew someone was controlling it from afar. As time passed, he even sensed a trace of anxiety coming from the ruby.
Xiang Qian deftly sank his consciousness into the depths of the ruby. He had tried using his mental power to control the ring before, but only scratched the surface. Now he knew there were more secrets hidden within the stone.
His mental power wrapped around his consciousness and carried it through the ruby. To the outside world, the stone was only the size of a capsule. In the realm of the mind, however, it became an endless void. The fine threads of flame grew vast and heavy, surging until they blotted out the sky and gave off an oppressive sense that they could destroy everything.
Across the places touched by Xiang Qian's mental power, on what seemed to be the inner walls of the ruby, vast networks of complex energy lines appeared. A quick glance was enough to suggest that the lines formed a special energy-generating field, but its workings were entirely unlike anything in Earth's scientific framework. It was far beyond anything he could understand.
Those lines weren't what concerned Xiang Qian right now. From the moment his mental power entered the ruby, an indistinct voice had kept echoing in his ears: "Come back... come back..." At first, it was barely audible. The deeper Xiang Qian went, the clearer it became, until at last it boomed like a bell, reverberating through the ruby's inner space.
At the source of the voice, Xiang Qian saw the target of his trip.
A tall man with long hair, a broad face, and a wide mouth floated in the air, dressed in a long Tang-style robe. He stared hard at Xiang Qian, who had appeared without warning. His expression was solemn, his gaze ruthless.
Xiang Qian studied the man too. He looked like a middle-aged man who wasn't particularly old, with distinct East Asian features and the profile of someone from the highlands—just as the Spear Bureau's files had described. He was of mixed ancestry. The streaks of white in his long hair seemed to suggest that his true age was far greater than his appearance implied.
Xiang Qian stared blankly at him. His voice sounded like both a question and a confirmation. "The Mandarin?"
"You're the one who took my ring?" the Mandarin demanded. Deep, muffled echoes rang out all around them.
A predator's gleam came into Xiang Qian's eyes as he discovered his prey. He sneered. "Not just your ring. Your son, too. If you want them, come and take them."
"Presumptuous!" The Mandarin roared. The flames, which had been drifting slowly around them, suddenly surged and swept toward Xiang Qian like a tidal wave.
Xiang Qian scoffed and casually glanced in their direction. In an instant, the surging flames turned back on themselves. The Mandarin was stunned. He hurriedly thrust both hands outward. Multicolored lights flashed from the fingers of his apparently empty hands, just barely holding back the returning flames.
Xiang Qian looked at the strange lights between his hands and sneered. "Are those your other nine rings?"
The Mandarin didn't answer. He stared at Xiang Qian in utter disbelief. He had never encountered anything like this before: within a ring he had controlled for years, he had been bested in a battle of mental power. From Xiang Qian's calm, unruffled appearance, it was obvious he hadn't even used his full strength.
"I've been looking for you for more than ten years. Today's the first time we've met, though not in person." Xiang Qian's voice was low. "You don't look the way I imagined. I thought a scheming coward like you, always hiding and never daring to show your true face, would be much more repulsive. I guess the old saying is right: judging by appearances leads you astray. A villain's face doesn't have to be as ugly as his heart."
"Foolish, arrogant brat!" the Mandarin roared. His voice boomed like a bell, deafening and commanding, carrying the arrogance and authority of an old martial-world master. But it couldn't stir Xiang Qian in the slightest.
Xiang Qian's overwhelming advantage in strength gave him absolute confidence, as well as room to deal with the Mandarin at his leisure. In the physical world, he was still far behind the strongest fighters on Earth. A close-combat beast like Wolverine Logan could still pose a deadly threat to him. But when it came to the mind and soul, Xiang Qian stood among the most powerful in the world. Shou-Lao of Kunlun and the Sorcerer Supreme of Kamar-Taj had both experienced this firsthand.
"So what if I am?" Before Xiang Qian had even finished speaking, the flames around the Mandarin leaped up, steadily closing in and shrinking his safe space.
The Mandarin was so furious he could barely contain himself. He had lived for more than a hundred years, and his only defeat had come when he faced the Spear Bureau and was forced to retreat from Central Asia. He had never imagined some young upstart would bully him like this. Burning with rage, he was about to fight back with everything he had when he suddenly met Xiang Qian's faintly amused gaze. He froze.
That gaze was deep and distant, as though it could pierce every disguise and cross every barrier of time and space to reach the truth. The Mandarin immediately understood what Xiang Qian was trying to do. He abandoned any thought of counterattacking and instead roared as he drew in the power of his other nine rings, allowing the flames to engulf him completely.
Before Xiang Qian could react, the Mandarin's figure had vanished into the flames.
At the same time, in some unknown place far away, the Mandarin's real body had been half-reclining in an armchair. He jolted upright as if waking from a nightmare, letting out a scream. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and felt the dizziness caused by the injury to his mental power. Still shaken, he muttered, "That was close. What a treacherous brat!"
Meanwhile, Xiang Qian's mental consciousness abruptly withdrew from the ruby's inner space.
"I was so close. Just one step away from finding the Mandarin's location!" He stared at the ring, which had returned to its calm state, and roared in frustration.
A person's mind and soul were closely connected to their physical body. When the Mandarin activated the mental imprint left in the ring in an attempt to retrieve it, he had effectively given Xiang Qian an unmistakable signal. By following the fluctuations in mental power, Xiang Qian—whose strength was overwhelmingly superior—had been quite confident he could find the Mandarin's current location. Unfortunately, the Mandarin's vigilance saved his life at a crucial moment. Xiang Qian had to admire the cunning of the old warlord, too. Without hesitation, he had amputated the limb to save his life, accepting damage to his mental power to sever the connection. He had even been willing to abandon this precious ruby ring.
Xiang Qian's roar drew Vector's attention. Her eyes hadn't left him for even a moment. She walked over, looking concerned. "Xiang Qian..."
"I'm fine." Xiang Qian casually put the ring away, retrieved his tablet, and began drawing.
No one else could have known about the mental battle in the ruby's inner space. Vector watched Xiang Qian's expression change several times in the space of a breath, and he looked nothing like a man who was fine. She didn't know what to say. She glanced back at Saber, who stood far away watching them but made no move to come over.
At that moment, Vector missed her team leader more than ever. Perhaps only she could deal with the mercurial man before them.
Xiang Qian had no idea what Vector was thinking. His entire attention was on his drawing. The computer's graphics system was very advanced: with a few simple lines and the help of automatic coloring, a portrait soon took shape on the screen.
"Vector, as far as I remember, the Spear Bureau has never found any reliable images of the Mandarin, right?" Xiang Qian's question snapped Vector out of her troubled thoughts.
Vector nodded blankly, unsure why he was asking. As one of the Spear Bureau's top targets, the Mandarin had always been elusive. The Bureau had been fighting the Ten Rings for more than half a century and had dealt them heavy blows time and again, but the Mandarin himself had always been heard of, never seen. Even his appearance was known only through accounts given by a handful of captured or surrendered Ten Rings members, and their descriptions differed wildly. For the Spear Bureau, this was undoubtedly a failure.
"We only have a few composite sketches, and we don't even know if any of them are accurate."
"I've seen those sketches. They're all wrong." Xiang Qian turned the tablet toward Vector. "This is what he really looks like!"