The New "Chatterbox"

The rain had stopped for a while, but fine water droplets still clung to the windowpane, blurring the neon lights of the city outside into patches of flowing color. A breeze picked up at night, carrying the dampness and coolness of the rain, seeping in through the cracks in the slightly ajar window, causing the edges of the few open documents on the desk to curl slightly.

Lin Feng sat behind his desk, neither looking at the documents nor at the night view outside the window. He simply sat quietly, his hands clasped on his lower abdomen, his eyes closed, as if he were dozing, or perhaps listening to some distant sound.

The room was quiet. Liu Zhenjun was in the next room, probably already resting, or silently checking every corner of the safe house. Lü Yi was probably playing games in the living room, but he was wearing headphones and couldn't hear a sound. The only rhythm in this silence was the extremely faint, rhythmic ticking of the second hand of the wall clock.

Some time has passed since the events in Northern Myanmar. K has safely returned, and his funds have quietly sunk into an unfathomable sea of accounts. As for Xie Yunchuan... Lin Feng, though not constantly monitoring the situation, could sense through some unseen connection that K was maintaining a calm demeanor, as if "the problem is being addressed." He didn't ask for specific details, and K didn't bring them up; this was their tacit understanding. Trust was built on results.

Everything seemed normal on Wei Guanglin's end, Zhou Wenyuan was handling some legal follow-up matters, and Old Liu (Liu Zhenjun) was managing daily security in an orderly manner. Life seemed to have returned to a tense but orderly track.

Lin Feng slowly opened his eyes and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was just past midnight.

It's a new day.

"Daily Random Summoning".

The thought arose as naturally as breathing. He relaxed his mind and sank his consciousness into that deep space that belonged only to him, intertwined with countless possibilities and causes. There was no expectation, no trepidation, just a routine attempt. Like going to pick a lottery ticket every day at a set time, not knowing the prize; winning the jackpot would be great, but not winning wouldn't matter.

Consciousness touches that invisible node.

This time, the feeling I got was... subtly different.

Unlike the steady, weighty, institutional "sense of importance" when summoning Wei Guanglin, or the clear, legally document-like "sense of order" when summoning Zhou Wenyuan, or the gunpowder-scented, sharp "presence" when summoning Liu Zhenjun, it is even quite different from the pure, cold "fluidity" of numbers and logic when summoning K.

It's a feeling that's... a bit "drifting," a bit "mixed," carrying the weariness and boundless curiosity of youth, and even a faint... scent of formaldehyde and disinfectant, difficult to categorize precisely.

The summoning was successful.

In my consciousness, the flow of information clearly emerges:

[Summoning successful. Suicide Soldier: Kong Xiang. Identity: China national, Master's student in Biomedical Engineering at XX University (a well-known university) in the United States. Current Status: Studying abroad, part-time worker. Specialties: Basic biological sample processing, basic medical knowledge, cross-cultural communication (specific field), information gathering and organization (non-technical). Loyalty: 100%.]

Biomedical Engineering? International Student? Part-time Job?

This combination made Lin Feng raise an eyebrow slightly. Among the assassins he had summoned were officials within the system, top lawyers, elite soldiers, hackers, and heads of state... but this was the first time he had summoned an international student. Moreover, the description "part-time worker" seemed particularly... ordinary, even somewhat abrupt, in the assassin's information.

As he was thinking, the newly established connection representing "Kong Xiang" suddenly responded on its own.

It wasn't an urgent report, a request for instructions, or even a simple greeting. Instead, it was a message... delivered with obvious emotion, spoken at a slightly fast pace, as if it had been held back for a long time and finally found someone to talk to, that resonated directly in his mind:

"Oh my god! Finally connected! Boss? Is this you, Boss Lin? Hello, hello! My name is Kong Xiang, Kong as in Confucius, and Xiang as in auspicious! Oh my god, it's almost midnight here. I just came out of the lab, and I'm so sleepy my eyelids are drooping, but as soon as I felt this connection, I immediately perked up! Boss, is it day or night where you are? Have you eaten yet?"

Lin Feng: "..."

He paused for two seconds, making sure he hadn't misheard. This tone, this choice of words, this overwhelming, undisguised "familiarity" and "talkativeness"—it was completely different from all the assassins he had encountered before. Wei Guanglin was calm and composed, Zhou Wenyuan was rigorous and polite, Liu Zhenjun was taciturn, and K was even more sparing with words. This one, on the other hand, started off like he was video chatting with an old classmate he hadn't seen in years.

"It's me." Lin Feng composed himself and responded mentally, trying to keep his tone calm. "It's midnight here. It should be afternoon where you are?"

"Yes, yes, it's almost 2 PM Los Angeles time." Kong Xiang's "voice" immediately came through again, filled with the excitement of finding someone to chat with. "Boss, you're still awake? Take care of yourself! Let me tell you, staying up late is the worst thing for your liver. We in this line of work... ah, I mean, I studied this, so I know it best!"

"... You studied biomedical engineering?" Lin Feng asked, following his words, while also taking note of the phrase "our field".

"Right, right, right! Biomedical engineering, sounds impressive, right? Actually, it's a bottomless pit of a major. You deal with cells, proteins, and all sorts of weird culture media every day. Boss, do you know how much effort it takes to culture cells? It's more precious than raising a child. If the temperature, humidity, or carbon dioxide concentration is even slightly off, they'll die in a heartbeat, and all your previous efforts will be wasted!" Kong Xiang began to complain incessantly about his studies, but there was a strange, almost gleeful, quality to his tone.

"Then why did you say 'coming out of the lab'?" Lin Feng asked.

"Yeah, just finished a set of apoptosis tests, the data was terrible, I'll probably get yelled at by my supervisor again tomorrow. But it's okay, I'm used to it." Kong Xiang's "voice" paused, then lowered a bit, with a hint of mystery, "Boss, let me tell you, actually, besides studying, I also do... well, it's a pretty special part-time job here. It pays fast, and I get to see a lot of things... that ordinary international students don't get to see."

"What kind of part-time job?" Lin Feng asked cooperatively. He realized that this might be the "value" of this new assassin, and also the source of his mixed aura.

"Hehe," Kong Xiang seemed a little embarrassed, but couldn't hide his desire to say it, "It's just... collecting corpses."

"What?" Lin Feng was slightly taken aback.

"Collecting corpses. More accurately, 'collecting unclaimed bodies'," Kong Xiang explained, his tone surprisingly casual, as if introducing a regular campus part-time job. "A distant cousin of mine in China runs a small, licensed 'biological sample transport company' here—basically a shell company that takes on all sorts of odd jobs. He saw that I was studying this and seemed fairly daring, so he asked if I wanted to help handle some 'special cargo'."

"Special source?"

"Yeah. It's those people found dead in hospitals, on the streets, or in some... inconvenient places, unclaimed, abandoned by their families, or simply homeless people or drug addicts, dead without even a name. The police have to go through procedures, but ultimately these 'unclaimed bodies' have to be dealt with. Some are sent to medical schools as cadavers, but most are cremated or buried. My uncle's company specializes in this kind of work, receiving these 'sources' from official or certain private institutions, doing preliminary processing—like drawing blood, taking tissue samples, etc.—and then, according to the 'client's' requirements, either transferring them to research institutes elsewhere, or... yeah, carrying out some 'compliant' final disposal."

Kong Xiang spoke quickly and fluently, clearly quite familiar with the process. But the content made Lin Feng feel something was unusual. This was not just a "part-time job"; it involved a rather gray, even potentially illegal, fringe industry chain.

"Aren't you afraid?" Lin Feng asked.

"Of course I was scared at first!" Kong Xiang replied immediately. "The first time I went with them was in winter, under a bridge in Oakland. It was an old homeless man who had been dead for who knows how long; he was all stiff. The smell was awful... I almost threw up my dinner from the night before. But after a while, I got used to it. And boss, you know what, this job is actually quite 'interesting'."

"Interesting?" Lin Feng repeated, the word sounding particularly strange in this context.

"That's right!" Kong Xiang's voice regained its excited, sharing tone. "You get to see the most authentic, and least desirable, side of society. You meet all sorts of people—even though they can't speak anymore. You can find out which neighborhoods are the most dangerous, which drugs are currently popular (by observing the characteristics of corpses), and even deduce from some details how they probably died and what kind of lives they led before. It's much more exciting than learning those dry theories in the classroom! And the pay from my uncle is really good, much better than washing dishes in a restaurant, and it also helps you develop your courage and... um, your observation skills?"

He spoke as if it were a normal summer internship. But Lin Feng could sense that beneath this "normal mindset," this young assassin named Kong Xiang possessed a mental fortitude far exceeding that of his peers, and an almost cold, detached perspective. He treated death and corpses as windows to observe society and "accumulate resources."

"Is what you're doing safe? Is it legal?" Lin Feng asked directly.

"Uh... well," Kong Xiang hesitated slightly, "The paperwork is definitely 'legal' on the surface. My cousin's company has the relevant qualifications and documents. We have 'cooperation' with some hospitals, forensic offices, and even police stations. We follow the proper 'unclaimed body donation' or 'entrusted disposal' procedures, and the documents are complete. As for safety... as long as you follow the procedures, take precautions, and avoid touching obviously abnormal corpses (such as those who died from highly contagious diseases), there shouldn't be any problems. It's just that sometimes when 'picking up' bodies in some less safe neighborhoods, you have to be careful of local thugs or drug addicts. But I usually choose to go during the day, or go with a police car."

He paused, then added, "Boss, don't worry, I know what's important. I absolutely won't touch what I shouldn't touch, and I absolutely won't ask what I shouldn't ask. I'm just a 'porter' and a 'junior processor.' Besides, I think this job... might be useful to you in the future? For example, what if you need some special 'biological samples,' or want to understand the 'ecology' of certain lower-class communities in the United States? I have firsthand information!"

Towards the end, his tone even carried a hint of seeking praise or wanting to demonstrate his value.

Lin Feng leaned back in his chair, gazing at the hazy night outside the window, speechless for a moment.

He summoned a fellow student studying biomedical sciences at a top United States university, a self-proclaimed suicide bomber whose daily part-time job was "collecting corpses," which he took great pride in and considered a way to accumulate resources and broaden his horizons.

This is truly... so unexpected.

But for some reason, he felt that this might not be a coincidence. The appearance of Golden Sun had already elevated the game to the national level. Therefore, it was not entirely incomprehensible that a character like Kong Xiang would appear in a more subtle and hidden corner. The gray world he came into contact with, and his "special channels" and "perspective," might actually come in unexpectedly useful at certain moments.

"I understand," Lin Feng finally replied, his tone returning to calm. "I understand your situation. Be careful with your studies and... part-time job. Unless there's an emergency, you don't need to contact me frequently."

"No, boss!" Kong Xiang exclaimed immediately, his voice tinged with grievance. "I'm so pent up! There's hardly anyone here to talk to about this. If I talk to my classmates, they think I'm weird. If I talk to my uncle, all he cares about is business. It's so rare to have you here, you have to listen to me! Let me tell you, the body I picked up yesterday was really interesting. It was found in an abandoned motel. It looked like a drug overdose, but I still feel like something's off..."

He began to chatter on and on about his new "experiences."

As Lin Feng listened to the young, lively voice in his mind, filled with a strange excitement, recounting the dark corners of another world across the ocean, he suddenly felt that tonight's "prize" from a "random summon" might not be so bad, even though it had a peculiar style.

At least, it won't be boring.

He closed his eyes again, interrupting Kong Xiang's enthusiastic narration. "That's all for today. It's getting late here. You... take care and get some rest too."

"Huh? Oh, okay, okay, boss, you should go to sleep early! Good night! I'll report back to you tomorrow!" Kong Xiang ended the call with lingering enthusiasm, the energy of his "talkativeness" seemingly still subtly lingering in the connection.

Lin Feng cut off the connection, and the study returned to silence.

Only the neon lights of the city outside the window, and the scattered fragments of memories about unidentified corpses on the streets of United States, silently tell the story of the complexity and absurdity of this world.

He glanced at the clock.

A new day began in such an unexpected way.