The Woman Obscured by Mosaic

Lao Ye turned to look as well. Seeing someone slowly making her way onto the stage, his expression did not change, but there was the faintest, nearly imperceptible shift in his eyes.

For someone like Lao Ye, whose emotions never showed on his face, such a change in his gaze was already enough to reveal a great deal.

But with Qi Shuheng and Wang Tianer right beside him, there was no way he could give Lin Shen any warning.

"Fourth Master, you don't mind that we invited this friend to observe, do you?" Qi Shuheng said with a smile, his eyes fixed on Lin Shen.

"Shuheng, that is where you are wrong. Her willingness to come has already done our Blackbird Base an enormous honor, making this Recruitment Assembly shine even in its humble surroundings. Besides, she is an old friend of Fourth Master's. Fourth Master should be thanking us; how could he possibly mind?" Wang Tianer shifted his gaze to Lin Shen and said with a half-smile, "Fourth Master, isn't that right?"

Why was she here? And how did Qi Shuheng and Wang Tianer come to share such tacit understanding? Could it be that the Qi and Wang Families had already joined forces? If that were true, they probably would not be able to hold out until Third Master and Fourth Master returned. Lao Ye felt as though he were being roasted over flames, yet he did not dare make the slightest move. Otherwise, Qi and Wang, who were staring hard at Lin Shen in an attempt to read something from his only exposed eyes, would grow even more suspicious.

Everyone's eyes focused on Lin Shen's face. As Lin Shen looked at the person who had already stepped onto the stage, there was no change in his gaze, yet his heart was filled with shock and doubt.

Can a human carry the Fire Seed of Super Gene Evolution too? What stunned Lin Shen was not this person's identity. In truth, he could not even see who this person was; he could only vaguely make out that she was a woman.

That was because the woman's entire body seemed to have been covered in mosaic censorship. Lin Shen could not see what she looked like at all.

Since discovering Fire Seeds, Lin Shen had only ever seen them on Gene Mutation Eggs. Even on Gene Mutation Creatures that had already hatched, he had never seen a Fire Seed's existence, much less on a human being.

In fact, Lin Shen had never imagined that humans could possess Fire Seeds as well. The discovery left him both delighted and alarmed.

He was delighted because he had found another way to obtain a Fire Seed. As for his alarm, it was naturally because he had no clue who this person was.

Forget whether he knew her or not—even if he did, with the woman covered head to toe in mosaic, he still would not be able to tell who she was.

"Senior Brother Lin, it has been a long time. Have you been well?" The woman walked up before Lin Shen and spoke lightly.

Those words gave Lin Shen a clue. He knew that when Fourth Brother Lin Xiangdong had been very young, Second Brother had sent him to the distant Seahorn Base to train. He had stayed there for nearly ten years before returning.

Whenever Lin Xiangdong drank too much, he would talk about how advanced Seahorn Base was and how incredible its Gene Mutators were. If Seahorn Base was a great metropolis, then Blackbird Base was not even worthy of being called a village in comparison.

Of course, Lin Xiangdong did not say such things to claim that Blackbird Base was inadequate. He was merely laying the groundwork for boasting about himself.

Every time, Lin Xiangdong would talk about how gifted he was, how all the important figures at Seahorn Base had fought over the chance to train him, how coaches from countless training camps had waited eagerly for him. After picking and choosing, he had reluctantly selected a coach reputed to be the number one person at Seahorn Base and trained under him.

The coaches he had not chosen had all beat their chests and stamped their feet, hating only their own lack of ability for making them miss out on a genius rarely seen in ten thousand ages.

He would also say that his fellow trainees had all been formidable beyond measure, but whenever they saw him, they were as terrified as mice spotting a cat, calling him Senior Brother at every turn.

There was no other reason: Lin Xiangdong had crushed everyone in his generation and stood invincible among his peers.

After hearing it so often, Lin Shen had felt that Lin Xiangdong's stories were wildly unreliable, with far too much bragging mixed in. If Fourth Brother really had been as amazing as he claimed, capable of suppressing his entire generation even in a place like Seahorn Base, then how could several people around his age still challenge him after returning to a small place like Blackbird Base?

However, Lin Xiangdong was such a gifted storyteller that even his boasting became a tale of twists and turns, stirring the imagination. Since Lin Shen had heard them so many times, he remembered quite a few of the people and names in those stories.

Naturally, all those people existed merely to highlight how impressive Lin Xiangdong was. They were nothing more than background props.

Yet to make himself seem even more impressive, Lin Xiangdong had given every one of those background props some astonishing identity.

A peerless prodigy seen once in a century, a young master from a prestigious clan, a campus beauty, and the like—after hearing enough of it, it all felt rather cliché.

Lin Xiangdong spoke of quite a few female classmates. Basically, they were all captivated by his charm and character, drowning in their infatuation with no way to pull themselves free. Each one cried and shouted that she had to become his girlfriend, leaving him endlessly troubled.

According to Lin Xiangdong, the only female classmate who had not wanted to date him was still a little fangirl who had been deeply won over by his talent for training and his combat ability.

Lin Shen remembered that the little fangirl in Lin Xiangdong's stories was named Bai Shenfei. She had been one year below Lin Xiangdong, yet she was a genius girl who had undergone Chrysalis Transformation at the age of twelve. She was also a martial fanatic, either training every day or on her way to spar and fight.

At the time, Lin Xiangdong had only been a year older than Bai Shenfei. Before undergoing Chrysalis Transformation himself, he had defeated Bai Shenfei, who had already achieved Chrysalis Breakthrough. From then on, Bai Shenfei had regarded him as an idol, consulting him whenever she encountered problems in her training.

So-called Chrysalis Transformation was a crucial step in evolving from human to Gene Mutator. Just as an insect formed a chrysalis in order to transform into a butterfly, it was the process by which the body reached a complete state. Practitioners had to undergo a similar stage before their flesh-and-blood bodies could evolve in the direction of a Steel Body.

Lin Shen thought back again. Among the background-classmate stories Lin Xiangdong had told, almost all of them had been students from his own year. Only Bai Shenfei had been a junior student.

This woman called me Senior Brother. Could she be Bai Shenfei? Lin Shen thought it was possible, but he could not be completely certain. After all, Lin Xiangdong surely had more than one junior female student. If he mistook her identity, the consequences would be unbearable.

Under everyone's watchful eyes, Lin Shen looked at the mosaic-covered woman and said with a somewhat haughty air, "Why was I the last to know that you had come to Blackbird Base?"

As he spoke, Lin Shen swept a glance over Qi Shuheng and Wang Tianer. Anyone could see that he seemed extremely displeased.

"On the first day I arrived at Blackbird Base, I went to the Lin Family to visit Senior Brother Lin. But your family said that you were tackling an important technical problem and were not available to receive guests for the time being, so I could only go to the Qi Family and Wang Family afterward," Bai Shenfei said.

Lin Shen could not see Bai Shenfei's expression or her eyes, but her tone was fairly calm. She had not become angry because of his poor attitude and had even explained patiently. It seemed she truly treated Lin Xiangdong rather well.

"From the sound of it, you did not come to Blackbird Base specifically to see me this time?" Lin Shen decided to continue probing her.

If they were merely ordinary classmates, then faced with his accusatory tone, even if she did not become angry, there would certainly be something unusual in her voice. If the woman showed no trace of awkwardness at all, then the odds of her being Bai Shenfei would be much greater.

"Fourth Master Lin, that is a rather unfair thing to say. She came all the way to our Blackbird Base and sought you out the moment she arrived, only for you to shut her outside your door without even letting her see you. Now that you have finally met, you are still wearing that lousy mask, and she still cannot see your face. Tell me, does that count as meeting or not meeting? Or is Fourth Master Lin's face too shameful to show others, afraid of being seen by acquaintances? Or perhaps the face beneath that mask is not Fourth Master Lin's at all?" Wang Tianer was just short of directly calling Lin Shen an impostor.