Departure

Mid-April.

Xu Wuyi knew it was time for him to leave.

This feeling had not appeared suddenly. It had slowly accumulated over the past month and more.

He sat in the Fourth Squad's office area, looking through his black-and-white mask at the busy team members around him.

He had watched scenes like this for more than three months.

Over those three months, he had handled more than forty cases, come into contact with over a hundred people involved in those cases, and witnessed the Federation's truest internal rules of operation.

Some of those rules were out in the open, while others lurked in the shadows.

The rules in the open were written into the laws; the hidden rules were concealed within the give-and-take of human relationships.

He had seen with his own eyes how privilege was abused, how corruption took root, how order was destroyed—and how order was upheld.

Those things felt far more real than any amount of case files and documents he could have read.

More importantly, his Heart Image power had continued to accumulate throughout those three months. It had not come from deliberate cultivation, but had grown naturally.

With every case he handled, every interrogation he conducted, every hidden truth he saw beneath the surface, he could feel the blue great sun deep within his sea of consciousness tremble faintly, as though it were absorbing something.

Now, that accumulation had reached a critical point.

He could feel that only the final layer of window paper separated him from the Grandmaster realm.

That layer was thin—so thin that it seemed it would tear with a single poke—but he also knew that at a time like this, he could not afford to rush.

He needed quiet. He needed solitude. He needed to fully digest everything he had seen