Su Enxi frowned. "We can certainly investigate. A long-distance bus trip is bound to leave all kinds of traces, but if he dared to follow the two of you, he must have prepared thoroughly. I can't guarantee we'll turn up anything useful."
"Get started anyway," Lu Mingfei said. "That's my second order. As for Cassell College, leave them alone for now."
After the meeting, Su Enxi and Shudey May returned to their respective rooms to handle business, while Old Tang ran off to fritter away his time in the lavish gaming room beside the master bedroom.
Zero left the luxury apartment. She had come to the Three Gorges for an internship assignment and taken a few days off on the pretext of visiting relatives. Now she had to return to the Executive Department's diving team.
The difficulty of Cassell College's internships varied wildly. If a dragon happened to awaken, students would be assigned to an operation. If they were unlucky enough not to encounter a dragon awakening, they could only do tomb-raiding work like excavating dragon ruins. And if there really was nothing to arrange-not even a dragon's grave to dig up-volunteering at the Chicago zoo to tend the crocodile pool and study reptilian evolutionary history along the way would do.
Lu Mingfei sat alone on the balcony.
Tempered-glass railings enclosed three sides of the balcony, offering an expansive view. There was a wicker recliner and a tiny round table, facing a stretch of wooded hills with tightly packed buildings beyond them. The rain clouds had nearly dispersed, their remnants drifting apart as sunlight streamed through the gaps in magnificent curtains.
A phone lay on the little round table. Its SIM card had already been replaced.
He had not contacted Angers, because he trusted Angers to reach out himself-and to take all the necessary precautions.
Before long, a call really did come in. It was neither Angers nor any other saved contact. The screen displayed no number or caller location, only a single word: Unknown.
When Lu Mingfei answered, the voice coming through carried a faint hiss of static.
"Hey, is that Mingfei?" Angers's voice had been processed, with a background tone almost like a harmony, but the hearty manner was unmistakably his. "Have you dealt with Norton?"
"Yes," Lu Mingfei told him honestly. "Should I stay out of sight for now?"
"Oh?" Angers sounded mildly puzzled. "You're rather well informed."
"Could you explain what's going on?"
"It's nothing much, really. What happened on the Panhandle Plateau unsettled those paranoid fellows on the Board of Trustees. They're sending an official investigation team to bring charges against me." Angers sounded relaxed, without a hint of anxiety about being removed from office.
But Lu Mingfei knew it was not that easy for him. Su Enxi had said he might not weather this one. "Do you need any help from me?"
"Don't worry. They won't find any substantive evidence on campus. This is just a pressure tactic," Angers said. "You should stay out of sight for the time being, or we'll make Dragon King Norton look incompetent. After a while, though, I may need you to come with me to see the Board of Trustees."
"All right," Lu Mingfei agreed.
"You could also stay hidden indefinitely. As long as I'm still the principal, I can provide you with support from the Executive Department and the Equipment Department."
"No. I'd actually like to see this ancient Council of Elders for myself," Lu Mingfei said evenly.
"It seems you've learned quite a lot lately," Angers said softly. "In my original plans, you wouldn't have needed to know about any of this until much later."
"Do you have enough money? I won't be able to contact you for a while." His tone immediately turned cheerful again. "Norma generated a virtual IP address and number for this call. You can't use them to contact me."
"I'm not short of money," Lu Mingfei said. "Could you send Constantine over to stay with me for a while?"
Angers fell silent for a moment on the other end, apparently wondering whether Lu Mingfei was testing him. "Is this a request from 'Norton'?"
"No. It's mine."
"I'll be tied up with that investigation team for a while. I can't promise when."
"Handle it when you have time," Lu Mingfei said.
"No problem." Angers readily agreed, but then added earnestly, "Mingfei, I hope you haven't misunderstood. I'm a dependable ally, not a shameless blackmailer."
"That wasn't what I meant."
"Perhaps I've spent so long sparring with those fellows on the Board of Trustees that it's gone to my head. Forget I said anything." Angers chuckled faintly.
Chapter 79: Resemblance
The apartment had four floors. The first held the living room, kitchen, and dining room. Along with the master bedroom, the second had a small lounge and a bar. The third consisted entirely of bedrooms, while the fourth housed a storeroom and an enormous operating room.
The operating suite had everything: a little room for changing into surgical gowns, shoes, masks, and caps, a touch-free disinfection area, and an operating room equipped with an anesthesia machine, monitors, an operating table, surgical lights, and a surgical timing system. Functional cabinets lined the walls, containing dressings, gloves, disinfectants, syringes, saline, anesthetic supplies, and more.
As they entered, Shudey May explained that the operating room also had backup power that activated automatically in an emergency.
Lu Mingfei surveyed everything in the room.
"Why put an operating room in an apartment?" he asked.
"The nearest branch of a top-tier hospital is only ten kilometers away. Do you think this is unnecessary?" Instead of answering at once, Shudey May asked him a question.
"I can understand keeping a medical kit for emergencies. An operating room like this needs maintenance. It's far too expensive for what it offers," Lu Mingfei explained.
"If it were for everyday emergencies, it really wouldn't be worth it. But it was prepared for a specific, abnormal situation-one where we'd be isolated and fighting for our lives. A medical kit obviously wouldn't be enough." Shudey May spoke as she prepared to anesthetize Old Tang.
"The hospitals would be unusable? Human society would have completely collapsed?"
"Exactly. Even then, this operating room might not prove useful. But as long as every 'fortress' has one, anyone who needs treatment will be able to use one of them. That's the point," Shudey May said.
"You're convinced the whole world will be engulfed in a war that overturns everything?"
"Yes," Shudey May admitted. "At least, we were before."
Operating on Old Tang had been Lu Mingfei's suggestion, including the type of operation-installing an arterial lock.
Angers had requested Constantine's surgery, but Lu Mingfei had agreed that it was reasonable. Now he believed the same reasoning still applied to Old Tang.
Lu Mingfei had originally intended to do it himself. He had read the material on this procedure and watched Angers perform it, but Old Tang had refused. The coward was willing to believe Lu Mingfei was a powerful mutant warrior, but not that he was a qualified surgeon.
To Old Tang, mutant warriors were an unknown, while surgeons were a real profession. He could imagine a mutant warrior's powerful body and superhuman abilities, but not a college freshman who had undergone rigorous medical training.
Fortunately, Shudey May could perform this minor surgery too, and Old Tang promptly chose to put his faith in her.
The minor operation was soon over. Old Tang sat on the operating table, dazedly pressing hemostatic gauze against the wound. He could not clearly feel anything foreign there, yet a bomb capable of destroying his circulatory system was buried inside.
Lu Mingfei handed him one of the remotes. "If Norton ever tries to take over your body again, press this. He won't give you a second chance to hide."
Old Tang gingerly cradled the black remote, which resembled a car key, as though he held his very life in his hands. He did not even dare close his fingers around it, afraid of pressing it by accident.
"Couldn't a hacker or someone hack this thing?" He felt no sense of security at all and was suspicious of everything. "One press from somewhere far away, and wouldn't I be dead?"
"You've watched too many movies," Shudey May said dryly. "This device uses frequency-modulated communication. The carrier frequency used by the transmitter and receiver changes in discrete steps according to a predetermined pattern. It uses more than seventy-five frequency-hopping signals, with a maximum hopping interval of only four hundred milliseconds. The computing power needed to crack that signal would be ridiculous."
"That's good, then." Only now did Old Tang feel a little safer.
That afternoon.
Everyone was on the top floor, and Su Enxi and Shudey May boarded the helicopter.
The two had finished coordinating with their new boss, Lu Mingfei, so there was no need for them to stay. Between Hybrids and ordinary people, they had several thousand subordinates, and a great deal of work had piled up.
Before leaving, they gave Lu Mingfei a bank card with an eight-figure balance.
Lu Mingfei understood. Managing an enormous organization was exhausting work.
On the helipad.
Lu Mingfei and Old Tang waved goodbye as the Z-8F 100 slowly rose into the air.
Compared with Lu Mingfei's composure, Old Tang seemed rather reluctant to see them go.
"Ah, even if they're human-dragon hybrids, they're still pretty girls," he sighed. "Now it's just us two grown men staring at each other again."
"Get ready," Lu Mingfei said suddenly. "Your 'little brother' will be here in a few days."
"Huh?" Old Tang froze, only to find Lu Mingfei had already turned to leave. He hurried after him. "When did this happen..."
Lu Mingfei had only just received the news from Angers himself.
A week had passed since his last conversation with Angers, who had sent good news-the investigation team had been repelled, and the team consisting of Fingel and Constantine was undertaking another internship assignment, setting out for China.
Angers had kept his promise. He had simply thrown in Fingel as a bonus.
The helicopter roared onward, breaking through low clouds, with Shudey May still at the controls.
Su Enxi sat in the spacious cabin. An LCD monitor mounted on a bracket attached to the airframe hung before her, displaying movements on the New York stock market.
Wearing black plastic-framed glasses, she scribbled rapidly on paper with one hand and held a satellite phone in the other. Her tone was stern. "Raise the bid by 1.5 percent and buy as much stock as you can in the wind energy companies we've selected! I've authorized you to spend five hundred million dollars."
She picked up a potato chip and stuffed it into her mouth. "Don't question my decision! Five minutes ago, a two-hundred-thousand-ton oil tanker struck a reef and sank in the Gulf of Mexico. This oil spill will bring harsh criticism of the oil economy from environmentalists. New energy companies will have enormous potential for gains over the next three months!"
Of the boss's three secretaries, Su Enxi was the busiest. Her Word Spirit was Celestial Calculation, which enhanced her brain's ability to think and compute, allowing her to rapidly construct vast models in her mind, feed hundreds or thousands of numbers or other pieces of information into them, and process them at high speed.
With that ability, she directed operations in the international financial markets. She could be said to make tens of millions of dollars in minutes, and the tens of billions of dollars under her control formed the foundation of the entire team's operations.
That was why she often called herself the bookkeeper or the maid who kept the accounts.
A little later, once the noise in the cabin had stopped, Shudey May struck up a conversation. "Chips girl, are the changes in Lu Mingfei really just his dragon blood awakening?"
"We've been watching him at least as long as Angers has. What other unusual things have happened besides his dragon blood awakening? That stunt Zhao Menghua pulled? To the current Lu Mingfei, that was nothing." Su Enxi ate her chips, unconcerned.
"I know the assessment of him was settled long ago." An indescribable emotion crept into Shudey May's voice. "But after spending time with him up close, the impact of that personality change feels completely different. I can even understand why Chen Motong is a little afraid of him."
"What are you trying to say?" Su Enxi asked, puzzled.
"I teased him because his stern face reminded me of the boss. A chance to tease the boss is something you only get once in a lifetime," Shudey May said quietly. "But later, I didn't dare keep going. Because for one moment, when our eyes met... it felt as though the boss really was watching me."
Chapter 80: Reunion
The moment the doorbell rang, Old Tang rushed to the door. He took a deep breath, his face twitching as he tried to arrange a look of calm, world-weary composure, like those reunion scenes in movies: a grizzled, disheveled middle-aged man whose casually revealed gaze sliced through time like a blade, taking both his old acquaintance and the audience back to his glorious years.
At that thought, he suddenly slapped himself.
Damn it, all I can picture is Lu Mingfei's fucking deadpan face.
Without background music or film editing, striking that pose in real life would be far too stupid-unless he could actually draw a two-meter-long blade like Lu Mingfei.
Old Tang had once glanced from a distance at the curved sword resting on the fishing rod rack and felt an inexplicable sense of foreboding. Even sitting still against the wall, it seemed like a beast sleeping in the dead of night, a cold gleam flowing along its edge, ready to awaken at any moment and devour someone.
Ever since then, he had never gone near that sword again.
"Forget it." Old Tang knew perfectly well that he would probably never become someone that badass. "Even if I look like a comedian, stupid and unreliable, that's still better than turning into something I'm not."
Yet when he pulled the door open, brimming with anticipation, he found himself facing a pair of eyes that gleamed green like a vicious wolf's.
"I'm the special... agent sent by the principal?" Fingel's voice dwindled halfway through his introduction, his eyes gradually widening in horror.
"Fingel?" Old Tang froze too.
"The principal sold us out again!" Fingel immediately cried in grief and indignation. Then he saw Lu Mingfei appear behind Old Tang.
"Come inside first, senior." Lu Mingfei put an end to the noisy greeting.