The faint glow of spirit patterns slowly spread before his eyes. The moment the personal profile on X Platform finished loading, Chen Fan stared at the screen for a full three seconds, then let out a snort, nearly laughing aloud on the spot.
The ID at the top of the profile was particularly eye-catching-[Purple Yuan Kicks Over the Inspection Wall].
The avatar was a roughly hand-drawn doodle: a girl in a purple dress held a foxtail grass stem between her teeth, one foot planted on a stone wall engraved with the word "Inspectorate," her ponytail flying. The style was both cocky and childish.
Scrolling farther down, Chen Fan found the bio even more eye-opening:
Nothing on the Spirit Network is hard, so long as you dare climb the wall.
The Inspectorate can't catch me, and the Discipline Hall can't touch me.
I'm the wind of freedom, blowing east, west, south, north, and through the center.
A gleaming platform achievement badge hung along the side of the profile: [Flame War Champion]. It recorded a perfect record across twelve hundred debates, with over three hundred opponents shut out.
Chen Fan laughed so hard he slapped the table. Only after finally catching his breath did he tap into the post history with trembling fingers.
Page after page was filled with traces Jiang Qingyuan had left ten years ago. Every line brimmed with youthful defiance and irrepressibility—a Spirit Network troublemaker who feared neither heaven nor earth, through and through.
"Today's battle record: traded insults with a religious fraud from the Freedom Divine Domain for three hundred posts. I went from tearing into holes in his doctrine to demolishing his logic. In the end, he broke down and deleted the thread. So satisfying!"
"Found half a damaged High Antiquity spirit-pattern scroll on the black market. The seller wanted eight thousand; I bargained him down to two hundred. The old man's face turned green. Fam, you've got to bargain hard. Whoever goes soft loses out."
"Was the Discipline Hall's new curfew thought up by a human being? Cutting off the Spirit Network at ten at night—are they terrified students might study for one extra minute? Tomorrow I'm changing the spirit patterns on the noticeboard so it plays tacky spirit songs on repeat."
"Won three bottles of century-old spirit wine off Old Gu in a bet. That bastard actually dared hold out on me. Next time I climb the wall, I've got to drag him along to take the fall."
From complaining about school rules to bargaining on the black market, from arguing online to sharing advanced wall-climbing guides, the whole page was packed with "glorious exploits."
Chen Fan leaned back in his chair, laughing until his stomach hurt. He simply could not connect this cocky, chuunibyou "Sister Yuan" on the screen with the cool, composed Jiang Qingyuan in the classroom, who commanded respect without a show of anger.
"No wonder she wasn't surprised at all when I got caught climbing the wall... Turns out she's the founding grandmaster." Chen Fan stroked his chin, clicking his tongue in wonder. "So Professor Jiang had a rebellious streak like this."
He pictured Jiang Qingyuan ten years ago, wearing her youthful Jingfu University uniform, crouched at her dorm-room desk, tapping away at spirit patterns as she argued with people online. When she won, she would raise an eyebrow; when she lost, she would puff out her cheeks and look for a way to claw back. The image was almost too vivid.
He was wondering whether to browse her private messages for some old gossip when the Spirit Messaging talisman on his wrist suddenly buzzed.
Chen Fan glanced down, assuming it was spam, but as his fingertip swiped across the screen, the contents made him frown.
[Treasure-Gathering Spirit Loans] Dear user Chen Fan, your loan of 3,000 Spirit Coins is now 3 days overdue. Your current total repayment amount is 4,520 Spirit Coins.
Please repay as soon as possible. Overdue payments will be reported to the Immortal Palace cultivator credit registry, and your advisor and family will be contacted.
A shortened link was attached at the end of the message, labeled "Quick repayment channel."
"A scam text?" That was Chen Fan's first reaction.
Apart from squeezing ten thousand Spirit Coins out of a loan under Senior Qing Song's guidance at the start of the term, he had never taken out another loan. So how had another lending platform popped up now?
Chen Fan's expression darkened at once.
It was not a scam message. They really had all his personal information.
He tapped the shortened link and was redirected to a crudely designed webpage-the repayment page for Treasure-Gathering Spirit Loans.
His identity information was displayed clearly. The borrowing date was ten days ago, the loan amount was three thousand Spirit Coins, and the actual amount disbursed was twenty-five hundred Spirit Coins. Five hundred Spirit Coins had been deducted directly as upfront interest.
Under the contract, the daily interest rate was five-tenths of a percent, compounded, with an additional thirty-percent penalty interest for overdue payments. In just three short days, it had snowballed to forty-five hundred Spirit Coins.
"What a racket." Chen Fan sneered.
Upfront interest on top of a loan-shark loan-the interest rate was more than ten times that of the Immortal Palace's legitimate banks. It was plainly designed to fleece people.
He was one hundred percent certain that he had never signed any loan agreement, much less received those twenty-five hundred Spirit Coins.
Put plainly, this platform had stolen his identity information and fabricated a loan. It was naked extortion, nothing more.
"You dare try to extort me?" Chen Fan tapped the tabletop lightly, his gaze turning cold.
"Let's see who's behind you."
Chen Fan's fingers flew as he traced several concealed spirit patterns in the air, maxing out the penetration privileges on Jiang Qingyuan's account. Following the repayment-page link, he silently made his way toward the platform's backend server.
Ordinary users could only access the frontend repayment interface, but Jiang Qingyuan's account came with a Spirit Network backdoor she had personally created back then. Using it against a little underground platform like this was practically a dimensional strike.
A few seconds later, the platform's outer firewall was pierced as easily as paper.
Chen Fan did not venture deeper recklessly. First, he scanned the platform's registration information around the perimeter.
Sure enough, the scan confirmed his suspicions-the entire Treasure-Gathering Spirit Loans operation had no lending license issued by the Immortal Palace Finance Bureau, not even the most basic business registration. It was an entirely illegal underground P2 lending platform.
The server was hosted in a lawless region on the border between the Immortal Palace and Solomon, and the domain had been registered under a false identity. A textbook rogue platform.
"No wonder they're so brazen. It's a shady platform operating without a license."
Chen Fan continued probing and soon found the platform's borrower list.
He would never have known without looking, and the sight gave him a shock: the list was densely packed with names, over a thousand in all, more than half of them college students being taken for suckers.
Chen Fan's heart sank as he read.
No wonder this platform could obtain students' identity information so precisely. It was clearly targeting young cultivators in the Immortal Palace.
Students had little experience of society and were afraid of trouble. Faced with extortion like this, most would choose to pay up to keep the peace, making them fat sheep for these people to slaughter.
He tried probing one step farther into the core backend, wanting to find out who exactly controlled this platform, but the moment he touched the edge of the core database, he ran into a thick encryption barrier.
The encryption was highly professional, bearing the hallmarks of Solomon's advanced Spirit Network technology. It was nested layer upon layer, with anti-tracing traps laid throughout. Any attempt to force a decryption would immediately trigger an alarm.
Chen Fan made an immediate decision and withdrew silently, leaving not the slightest trace.
He leaned back in his chair, his gaze growing more grave.
The ability to set up encryption of this caliber meant that whoever stood behind Treasure-Gathering Spirit Loans was definitely no small fry. Most likely, someone from Solomon's upper ranks was backing it, and there might even be insiders in the Immortal Palace working with them from within. Otherwise, they could not possibly have infiltrated the various colleges so quietly and obtained so many students' identity information.