But now, the Gattuso Family, one of the most powerful Hybrid families, actually had no detailed intelligence on Lu Lincheng and Jovini. This was completely different from what Angers had told him.
And the so-called elders Angers had mentioned actually belonged to another institution within the Secret Party-the Elders' Council, made up of four Hybrid families: the Cadmus Family, the Saint George Family, the Sigurd Family, and the Beowulf Family.
Before the Industrial Revolution, these old families had always ruled the world of Hybrids. But the Industrial Revolution changed the balance of power. Some emerging Hybrid families rose rapidly and gained a voice within the Secret Party. Later, Cassell College was founded, and representatives of the new families formed the Board of Trustees, while honoring the representatives of the old families as elders.
The elders were effectively the old aristocracy of the Hybrids. They did indeed hold secrets that even the trustees had no right to inquire into.
"All right. It isn't really top secret, actually. Everyone here should know something about it, more or less." To everyone's surprise, Angers really did begin explaining at Lu Mingfei's request.
"It was the greatest schism in the Secret Party's history. Its records are accessible only to a handful of core elders, and most of the people who knew about it have already died of old age," Angers said evenly. "Perhaps in another few decades, it will be buried in the elders' graves for good."
Everyone grew attentive, realizing that what Angers was about to tell them was a genuine secret.
"The protagonists of this story were known as the 'Apocalypse Faction,'" Angers continued. "No one really knows the truth of what happened anymore. All that remains are case files that barely record the outline. In short, after a certain incident, some members of the Secret Party came to believe that the apocalypse was imminent, and that humanity either could not or did not deserve to be saved. The world was destined to be destroyed. A new age would come, but it would belong to dragons or high-ranking Hybrids. Those who believed this theory left the Secret Party. To them, 'slaying dragons' was nothing more than a futile sacrifice."
"I know a little about this. Many years ago, the Secret Party conducted a large-scale search operation in Siberia, targeting the Apocalypse Faction," said the old man fingering his prayer beads.
"Correct. They had a base in Siberia." Angers nodded. "They believed that the Dragon Kings had long been hiding among humans and Hybrids, and that humanity had no chance of winning the final battle. So they hid away in a corner of the world, intending to preserve the embers of humanity."
The middle-aged trustee rang his bell. "What do Lu Lincheng and Jovini have to do with the Apocalypse Faction?"
"They're senior members of the Apocalypse Faction," Angers replied.
Everyone else instantly turned toward Lu Mingfei. Coupled with what he had just said, it all looked like... a son taking up his father's mantle.
Instead of the shock or confusion they expected, Lu Mingfei wore an expression that said, "So that's how it is."
"Lu Mingfei, what is your relationship with the Apocalypse Faction?" Frost had lost control of the conversation earlier, but now he recovered and asked coldly, "Do you also intend to hide away and preserve the embers of humanity?"
"No. I'm sharing intelligence on the Dragon King with you because I need you to find this Dragon King... and then kill him." Lu Mingfei's tone was cold and stern. "I'm sitting here precisely because Principal Angers told me you were Dragon Slayers. Otherwise, I wouldn't even need to explain myself to you."
Angers smiled, his eyes full of gratification.
"Remember your place!" The old man fingering his prayer beads rang his bell and snapped, "You're a student of Cassell College. You have no right to speak to the trustees in that tone!"
The girl glanced back and exchanged a look with the butler behind her, then rang her bell. "You're an outstanding young man, but you shouldn't disregard the authority of the Board of Trustees."
"Are you challenging the entire Board of Trustees?" Frost was even more adept at twisting accusations.
Elizabeth rang her bell. "Trustee Frost, you're the one who keeps provoking our hot-blooded young S-Rank by speaking to him as though you're interrogating a criminal."
"S-Rank? He doesn't even have a Word Spirit. Perhaps we should consider his bloodline questionable, then discuss whether he submits to the Secret Party's authority," Frost growled.
Just then, Lu Mingfei suddenly stood up.
Everyone felt a chill rise from the depths of their hearts. A domain expanded silently in the darkness, and a dragon's overwhelming presence poured down over their heads like a surging tide!
As the heads of major Hybrid families, nearly everyone present had an A-Rank or even S-Rank bloodline rating. Now they all instinctively activated their Golden Eyes... because their bodies were afraid.
The candlelight dimmed instantly. Every pair of Golden Eyes shone like spotlights, including those of the butler behind the girl.
There was only one exception: Angers. He had been exempted within this domain.
Lu Mingfei sighed and slowly walked over to Angers. He had not lit up his Golden Eyes, looking like the only ordinary person at a banquet of dragons, yet he was the one who had activated the domain of Time Zero.
Holding a USB drive, he bent down and plugged it into the USB port beside Frost.
Frost's eyes were wide open, his eyeballs turning slowly in their sockets, his expression twisted and furious. He seemed to notice Lu Mingfei behind him. The muscles in one hand swelled and tightened as he raised his cane at an extremely slow pace.
"There's a sword hidden in his cane." Angers leisurely clipped a fresh cigar inside the domain of Time Zero. "A rapier made of Wootz Steel, forged by a master."
Hearing this, Lu Mingfei took the cane from Frost's hand. With its white rattan shaft and bronze-colored rounded handle, it looked like an old piece with some history behind it.
He drew the sword from the cane and casually thrust it into the solid wood of the conference table. Under the immense force, the blade bent, then slowly sprang back.
Frost's fingers clenched around empty air, so hard that they drew beads of blood from his palm. Lu Mingfei took a handkerchief from the old man's breast pocket, considerately wiped away the blood, and tucked it back into the pocket of his expensive tailored suit.
"I thought you'd strip him naked and make him bleed a little..." Angers raised his eyebrows, looking rather surprised. "Shouldn't you at least teach him a lesson?"
"He isn't even the real head of the Gattuso Family. Would teaching him a lesson do any good?" Lu Mingfei said evenly. At the same time, he placed both hands on Frost's shoulders and pressed the old man, who was trying to stand, back into his seat. "The waters are muddy enough already. I don't need to stir them."
"Mingfei, sometimes I can't read you at all." Angers lit his cigar with a candle and spoke quietly. "When you're impulsive, you're like a charging bull no one can rein in. When you're calm, you're like an old monk deep in the mountains."
"You want me to be more overbearing?" Lu Mingfei asked.
"To cow these people, you either need greater power or enough ruthlessness." Angers looked straight into his eyes. "Enough to make them fear you."
"It doesn't matter. There's no need to cow them." Lu Mingfei shook his head. "I just need them to believe the intelligence I provide."
Time resumed.
Every trustee was still shaken. The crushing presence of a dragon had descended in an instant, then abruptly withdrawn. At some point, Lu Mingfei had appeared behind Frost. A rapier from an unknown source struck the conference table at high speed, the force of its passage extinguishing every candle. The young trustee's butler moved in front of her, shielding his family head with his body.
Frost alone was wracked with spasms of pain. Veins bulged on his forehead, and he immediately tried to spring to his feet, but a hand gripped his shoulder and pinned him down, leaving him unable to move.
What truly calmed him was the rapier embedded before him. Its blade had sunk into the solid tabletop, leaving only half exposed, less than thirty centimeters from his head and vibrating rapidly.
"Everyone, please remain calm." Lu Mingfei's voice was remarkably gentle.
Some trustees were angry, others bewildered, but no one spoke. Lu Mingfei had taken everyone's bells along the way.
"Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly, leading to some misunderstandings." He paced slowly around the conference table. "I'm not hostile toward the Board of Trustees. Please believe that. But I dislike all these pointless accusations and suspicions. I have only one goal: to slay dragons."
"Now I'll directly resolve the central question in Mr. Frost's documents." He snapped his fingers, and the screens before everyone changed, playing a blurry recording. "I'm sure you've all heard that I was attacked in an inn in this town the day before yesterday. The inn had no surveillance cameras, but the Gattuso Family thoughtfully placed a hidden camera in the corridor beforehand. That's how we obtained this precious footage."
Chapter 101: The meeting ends (double-length chapter)
At first, the recording had sound. A hotel attendant pushed a cart through the inn's corridor. Then Lu Mingfei fast-forwarded to a certain point, and a noise began drowning out the background audio, as though someone had grabbed a handful of sand and was slowly rubbing it against the microphone.
"The signal was being disrupted," the middle-aged trustee said quietly.
He was the calmest of them all, because he sided with neither the Gattuso Family nor Angers. Nor did he share the elderly monk's particular attachment to dignity and authority that came with age.
Only Lu Mingfei's use of Time Zero had truly frightened him. He was glad Frost had not escalated the conflict further, and that Lu Mingfei had not become any more aggressive.
He was not worried about his own safety, despite possibly standing on the front line. Rather, he dimly foresaw bloodshed among the Hybrid families. The last time the Secret Party had nearly erupted into all-out war was when the Board of Trustees was established. The emerging families had left no seats for the old families, and quite a few people had been certain that the transfer of power would lead to war beyond the negotiating table.
No one knew what had happened. They knew only that, in the end, the old families had chosen to preserve their dignity and peacefully handed the Secret Party's core authority over to the members of the Board of Trustees.
This time, the conflict had once again nearly reached breaking point, yet everyone remained silent.
The middle-aged trustee discreetly glanced at the hunched old man beside Angers-Frost Gattuso. In just a few moments, the man seemed to have aged ten years.
He had already been old. It was worldly power and the strength of dragon blood that had kept nourishing his soul, allowing him to command from the family head's seat like a young man, holding a firm grip on affairs both great and small within the Gattuso Family and even the Secret Party.
Now, a truly young man had caught up with him. Perhaps it really had dealt a blow to this man of power, who had always been as proud as a fighting cock.
In reality, however, the middle-aged trustee was merely projecting his own thoughts onto Gattuso. The pride and anger in Frost's heart had never yielded. He was hunched over because of the pain.
The last time he had struggled, Lu Mingfei had silently crushed one of his bones, then gently smoothed the creases in his expensive hand-tailored suit while speaking to the other trustees.
Frost understood that this was not a threat. It was merely the dignity and face Lu Mingfei had deigned to grant him.
Naturally, Frost would not accept such charity. If he ever bowed and scraped before an enemy while bearing the Gattuso name, it would only be his final preparation before drawing his sword.
He had ultimately remained silent because the trustees' positions had changed.
Angers was still as relaxed as a bystander, while the other trustees wore varied expressions. But Frost had noticed it clearly: when the unsettled trustees heard Lu Mingfei's first words after he emerged from Time Zero, every one of them breathed a sigh of relief. Along with it, the flames in their eyes-the flames of their fighting spirit-went out.
That was also why he had immediately tried to leap up and escalate the conflict. Unfortunately, he had failed. He could only watch as Lu Mingfei "tamed" these supposedly powerful people, while those who had been "tamed" did not even realize it themselves.
Only those determined to fight a war to the bitter end could truly seize the initiative at the negotiating table. Everyone else could only drift with the current.
At this table, only Frost and Lu Mingfei held the initiative.
Mist began to fill the corridor in the recording. The image flickered intermittently, but unexpectedly, the audio became clear again.
The sound of rain filled everything. Water rushed across the roof and through the drainpipes, air caught in the swift flow making strange scraping noises inside the enclosed pipes.
"Do you hear that?" Elizabeth's expression was strange.
"It doesn't sound human." Golden light flared in the eyes of the old man fingering his prayer beads. "Deadpools!"
Whispering voices sounded in the corridor, speaking some ancient language, somewhere between chanting and weeping. Yet the corridor remained empty.
It was as though an invisible gate to hell had opened there, and countless evil spirits had gathered to sniff out the scent of the living.
Their exceptional bloodlines allowed the trustees to make out those voices of the dead from primordial times.
"Blood..."
"Fresh blood!"
"Thirsty!"
"Such mouthwatering fresh flesh..."
"Thirsty for far too long..."
Then Lu Mingfei appeared in the footage, pushing open his door with that absurd two-meter-long weapon in hand and looking warily around the corridor.
The young trustee could not help clutching the hem of her clothes in the darkness. Those eerie voices were not frightening, but when Lu Mingfei appeared, she felt the unease of watching an oblivious horror-movie protagonist wander into a haunted house with a bewildered expression.
At that moment, the image stuttered twice and stopped playing. This time, even the noise was gone. There was only silence.
The final image on the screen was deeply unnerving. Countless faint black shadows stood around Lu Mingfei. Each was translucent, and they were condensing into solid forms.
It was impossible to say whether Lu Mingfei had wandered into hell or the evil spirits had come into the human world.
The timestamp in the corner of the screen began racing forward again. For roughly four hours, the camera failed to resume functioning. Then light suddenly appeared, and the corridor returned to normal. There was no torrential rain, no muttering of Deadpools. Lu Mingfei simply leaned quietly in a corner, his long blade planted before him.
Everything before that seemed like a hallucination.
The recording ended.
"What happened in between? Where was that rain falling?" the elderly monk asked gravely, voicing everyone's confusion. "An illusion?"
"A Nibelungen," Lu Mingfei said evenly.
"That's impossible..." the girl blurted out, but she immediately realized she had lost her composure and hastily schooled her expression.
"Charlotte," Elizabeth said. "Could you explain it to us?"
Because of the confidentiality agreement, the trustees had deliberately avoided revealing their names and surnames after Lu Mingfei entered the conference room. Now, however, Elizabeth Laurent had addressed the girl by name.
Charlotte Göttingen, this sixteen-year-old girl, came from the renowned Göttingen family, the principal lineage that passed down alchemy within the Secret Party.
The Göttingen family was known as the "Flower of the High Court." Its heads throughout the generations had immersed themselves in alchemical research and kept their distance from the other families. But Charlotte had lost her mother at a young age, and Baroness Laurent had cared for her during her childhood. To Charlotte, she was someone between an older sister and a mother.
"One of the easiest mediums to use in alchemy is water. The initial downpour wasn't an illusion. An alchemy space was invading reality! But something like that," Charlotte said quietly, "is the Supreme's exclusive privilege!"
"How was that accomplished? Did the corridor exist in two spaces at once?" the middle-aged trustee asked in confusion. "It wasn't raining in the town in reality."