Gray Serpent's strange behavior filled Sakura with suspicion. From the very beginning, she had known that Gray Serpent was hiding something. She had destroyed every organization he had once established, and the sinister nature this artificial human had displayed had left a deep impression on her. Yet it was not enough to trouble her; before absolute power, conspiracies were merely pebbles blocking the road beneath one's feet.
But now, she had no choice but to be cautious. Gray Serpent might reach her one and only weakness—her dearest family.
Sakura remained silent, staring at the characters on the wall like a statue. Tangled between emotion and reason, she hesitated over whether to tell Gray Serpent about this. She clenched her fists, then slowly loosened them. In the end, she could not bring herself to speak to him.
"Lady Sakura chose not to report the situation to you." Watching through the tiny camera embedded in the wall, the agent assigned to monitor Sakura half-removed his headset. "Just as you expected... but is this really alright? Lady Sakura may be the key to finding them."
"Heh heh..." Gray Serpent chuckled softly, his low laughter sending a chill down his subordinate's spine.
"If this had nothing to do with her sister, I would have been more than happy to tell her everything."
"Other than our master, she is the only Fusion Warrior I understand so well. Lady Sakura is not ordinarily ruled by emotion, and her rationality is something I greatly admire." Gray Serpent removed his monitoring headset, rose from the main seat, and picked up the black umbrella at his feet, which looked as though it had congealed from petroleum.
Gray Serpent looked at the agent with interest. "What kind of person do you think Lady Sakura is?"
The agent thought long and hard but could not come up with any distinctive description. "Powerful..."
Gray Serpent nodded slightly. "That is beyond question."
"I want you to describe the deepest side of her heart..." The deep crimson eyes staring directly at the agent made him feel as though a venomous snake with its tongue flickering was coiled around him.
"...I have never truly met Lady Sakura."
"Then..." Gray Serpent turned around, shifting his unfathomable serpent eyes elsewhere. "A few hints."
"To understand someone, one must first understand her past." Gray Serpent spoke slowly, as if gradually dispersing a mist and exposing a person to countless watching eyes.
"We have no way of knowing Lady Sakura's distant past, or details such as when and where she did what. But at the very least, we can know what she did after joining Fire Moth."
The agent could answer that without hesitation. "Poisoned Cocoon, responsible for purging Honkai energy-infected people."
"That meant she bore the blood of countless people on her hands. This raises our first question—was Lady Sakura a cold-blooded butcher?"
The agent shook his head. "No."
"Of course not! Ling was a lively, cheerful child. How could a killing machine cultivate a flower? Her pride in and attachment to her sister were certainly not false. And I have reason to suspect that such attachment was mutual."
"This..."
"Since Lady Sakura was not a cruel butcher, the routine purges must have placed an immense burden on her mind. Therefore, she needed a reason to kill—"
"And an outlet to relieve psychological pressure." The agent took up Gray Serpent's words. After this chain of reasoning, the image of Sakura in his mind became increasingly clear.
He nodded appreciatively. "I am pleased that you have learned to reason."
Gray Serpent continued, "Lady Sakura poured all her love into her family, and the bond between the sisters would deepen alongside the killings. The more innocents she killed, the more she needed spiritual comfort from her sister."
"If she discovers that we know this matter is related to her sister..."
Gray Serpent abruptly changed tack. "Do not imagine Lady Sakura as some madwoman with a trigger switch because of this. She will absolutely not do anything reckless, but we cannot allow her personal feelings to obstruct our investigation, much less interfere with our master's recognition of me."
Sakura furrowed her brows, staring fixedly at the mysterious string on the wall and trying to make sense of it. At last, she rubbed her forehead and sighed. The pitifully few clues made her abandon the effort, and she instead sent the string on the wall to someone else.
"Eden." Sakura contacted her through the communication device on her wrist. "Please help me find out what this string means." A blue indicator lit up on the device, showing that the other party had received the message.
More than ten minutes later, the device flashed red, and Eden's melodious voice came through the earpiece.
"The first six digits need to be recombined with the date in the middle. Only when arranged in the correct order do they have meaning. The date in the middle only includes the month and day, but after recombination, it can yield the year, month, and day, even units as precise as seconds."
"The final word is merely a simple word-expansion game. In the end, it gives an address. Perhaps you can go take a look."
"Understood." Sakura swiftly left the maze-like sewers and reached the surface beneath the cloud-covered sky. She leaped across walls and roofs, climbing to the top of a building and bounding through the highest reaches of the cold steel forest like an agile cat.
Sakura lightly tapped her wristwatch and contacted Gray Serpent herself. "I found a string of characters and solved the puzzle within it. This is the result." She forwarded him the result Eden had sent her.
After hearing a "Received" through her earpiece, Sakura ended the communication.
At the other end, Gray Serpent gave a soft laugh. "Cunning."
Under the astonished gazes of bystanders, Sakura forcibly smashed open the door to Niazepi's apartment and broke into his home. What met her eyes was utter chaos. The sofa had been torn apart until only an empty frame remained, its cushions slashed with several sharp cuts, while dust-covered stuffing lay scattered everywhere. Every cabinet in the room had been pulled open, and all their contents had been thrown onto the floor. The bed had suffered the same fate as the sofa. Even the wallpaper had been pried off, exposing white plaster walls.
Only the television, wall clock, and personal terminal remained properly placed in their respective spots, though they had clearly been moved as well.
"A wall clock?" Sakura pinched her chin in confusion. She did not believe that a modern young person would keep such a thing at home. It was easy for her to realize that this, too, was a puzzle—and that it had a solution.
She removed the wall clock from the wall, then set its hour and minute hands according to the result of the puzzle she had obtained earlier. But unfortunately, things did not go as smoothly as she had hoped—nothing happened.
Of course it wouldn't be that simple. Sakura thought irritably. She was not good at these puzzle games at all. Then what does this date actually mean?
"It should be related to Niazepi?" The date was only eight days from today—more precisely, eight days, twelve hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-one seconds.
Sakura contacted Gray Serpent again. "Do you know when Niazepi died?"
Gray Serpent answered, "When Niazepi's body was discovered six days ago, he had already been dead for two to three days."
Sakura suddenly understood what the date represented: it was the time of Niazepi's death. But she began to lose heart, because nothing would change anyway. She had no idea where to start, and that wall clock might simply have been an ordinary wall clock.
She began considering once more what the characters in the sewers could represent. Six digits and a date—could the numbers be a password? She opened Niazepi's personal terminal and tried to search for every encrypted file on it. In the end, there was nothing there either.
Time!
Her subconscious mixed together every impossibility and possibility, gathering that chaotic thinking into ordered thought, naming it inspiration, and passing it on to her body.
She changed the time on the personal terminal to Niazepi's time of death. The terminal began downloading something unknown, then generated a folder on the desktop. Someone wanted to tell her something.
Sakura opened it with near-excitement...
"Miss Sakura, this was merely my trap to buy time." Gray Serpent revealed a smile exactly as expected.
Before you continue