Director Yang's orders

Another two months passed in the blink of an eye.

The primeval jungle south of Coral City looked especially gloomy in the thin morning mist. Towering trees blotted out the sky, and dense tangles of vines wound between their crowns, cutting the daylight into countless tiny flecks that scattered across the thick humus below.

Deep in the jungle, in a relatively open hollow, a makeshift command tent nestled among the roots of several giant trees. Camouflage netting covered its walls, fine runic circuits embedded in the mesh completely sealing off the presence of the entire encampment.

Red Aunt crouched behind a thorn thicket at the edge of the tent, her gaze passing through gaps in the foliage toward the hideout roughly a mile away.

The hideout lay beneath the root system of a thousand-year-old banyan. Its entrance was so well concealed that even someone standing ten paces away would struggle to spot it.

Today, Red Aunt wore a dark gray tactical uniform with tightly fastened cuffs. A palm-sized copper fire bell hung at her waist: her Scorchsong Bell, cast from fire copper, with seven layers of flame-amplification runes engraved inside.

Zhou Zheng crouched to her right, a specially made encrypted communications terminal hanging against his chest and a dark gray metal case strapped to his back.

Behind them, Qi Shaogong, chief of Coral City's Action Office, hid in the bushes with the action team's core members. He held a specially made runic short blade in each hand.

He Zhou, Coral City's deputy director in charge of oversight, stood farther back, also dressed in a training uniform. His face already looked very old, and he was approaching retirement age.

"Intelligence from multiple sources, corroborated by the soul searches we conducted on several members on the hideout's perimeter, confirms that the leader