When the Iron Eagle returned to Clot City's station with the missing passengers, it caused a sensation, just as expected.
After all these days, everyone had assumed the passengers were probably dead. Yet once Li Wei stepped in, he actually managed to rescue them!
The escape itself was nothing worth dwelling on. Li Wei discovered that those strange creatures feared light, so he switched on all the Iron Dragon's searchlights and charged through the tunnels like an enormous light bulb. The monsters fled on their own.
Then Li Wei opened the door with the key, and the Iron Eagle left the Sanctuary and returned to the real world.
Li Wei hadn't asked the passengers to keep anything secret. He knew they couldn't manage that anyway. Soon, newspapers carried stories about how the Iron Eagle had accidentally entered a mysterious underground world, where the local Barbarians had captured and even murdered its passengers. Naturally, they also described in detail how Li Wei had threatened them with the Iron Dragon and executed the killers who had murdered the Empire's subjects, forcing the tribes to submit.
Incidentally, the investigators who had been the "culprits" behind all this were also found. Li Wei questioned them privately and discovered that they knew no more than he did-less, in fact. They had simply gone to investigate Clot Bank, never expecting anything like this to happen-
Yes, just as I thought.
This confirmed Li Wei's suspicions. The other side hadn't made these people disappear because they had uncovered anything. More likely, Fog City's police had moved faster than expected. Li Wei had also learned from the bank that the gold had been shipped out at noon on the day after the Iron Eagle disappeared. In other words, if the Iron Eagle hadn't vanished, the gold would still