“Understood.” Parsi’s fingers danced quickly over the keyboard, like a master dancer performing on a burning iron stage.
Meanwhile, in the central control room.
All entrances were locked, and no unrelated personnel, not even those from the Execution Bureau, were allowed near. A top-secret team had moved in before midnight.
Cassell College, News Department.
The alchemical cypher machine was printing rapidly, producing crisp “pa-pa” sounds; the team rerouted through the college’s secret server units in Asia, downloading a vast number of news images; video files were being processed in 3D… if you looked at the data flow, it resembled “The Matrix.”
One man had his feet propped up on an expensive walnut desk, gulping down cola while tossing away files one by one. Printed sheets scattered all over the floor, and there was a mountainous stack of files on the desk. The number of empty cola cans was enough to play a game of dominoes.
“This one’s from ‘Sky One,’ titled ‘Whoa! What is Superpower? This is Superpower!’ The author of this post should have personally witnessed Chu Zihang releasing the ‘King’s Blaze.’ View count: 76,239. Replies: 8,734. It even made the headlines!” The section chief of News Department Group One hurried over and handed over a printed webpage.
“Do you need to inform me about such trivial matters? Have the guys brush it with another 2,000 replies, and ask the admin to change the post time. Reply with things like, ‘You’re crazy,’ or ‘Hahaha, that was my second cousin who’s a magician—he fooled you!’ or ‘OP always posts alarmist things, could you stop making groundless accusations and be more realistic?’ You got it? Go!” Finger waved his hand grandly.
“The Associated Press guy said they’d remove that report from their website for a thousand dollars!” someone called out.
“Give him two thousand, have him clear the comments as well!” Finger waved his hand again.
“Boss, you’re amazing!” praised the underling massaging his shoulders from behind.
“That’s right—what’s called efficiency? This is efficiency!” Finger grunted with satisfaction.
“Will you be able to repay us when you graduate this time?” the underling cautiously asked.
“No problem!” Finger gave him a side-eye. “The principal said if this matter is handled well, I’ll not only graduate but also get my credit card debt wiped and my other debts cleared!”
The underling was almost in tears, “We will definitely make sure the boss graduates! From now on, Chu Zihang is a flawless person in our eyes! Whoever dares say anything bad about him, we won’t let it slide!”
“We won’t let it slide!” The paparazzi, busy at their respective laptops, raised their hands in unison. They were Finger’s juniors, lackeys, and creditors—all conned into lending Finger varying sums of money when they first joined the News Department. For years, they’d remained loyal in the News Department, partly to keep an eye on the guy who owed them money.
“Boss, there’s something here that’s hard to handle… It’s a video,” someone said.
“Project it onto the main screen!” Finger tossed away an empty cola can.
The video seemed to be from a surveillance camera, black and white with numerous static snowflakes, low in resolution, capturing a night scene of an old building from below. The beam of a searchlight swept upward, with darkened windows. The timestamp flashed in the lower right corner, and the eerie silence was unnerving.
“This looks like a horror movie,” someone whispered.
Suddenly, a dark figure appeared on the screen, crashing through one of the windows. Immediately after, a second figure leaped out, holding a knife in one hand and grabbing a nylon fire hose with the other. The two fell in tandem, and the second figure kicked off the wall. At that moment, he found a leverage point and threw the knife. The blade pierced through the first figure’s chest—his heart must have been shattered, and blood spurted from the wound on his back, like a giant spray can painting a bloody trail on the exterior wall. The bloody figure then hit the ground hard, while the second person safely landed, holding onto the hose. After a cold glance around, he walked over, pulled out the knife from the corpse, wiped it clean on the sole of his shoe, and was about to leave when he noticed the camera. He approached, kicking it. The screen turned to static.
The person’s face wasn’t clear, but the blazing eyes left the paparazzi with no doubt about his identity.
“Too cold… too ruthless,” someone whispered, trembling.
“What is this?” Finger asked.
“It’s a front-page headline from April 2009—the case of the dismembered infant solved, the culprit brutally killed. This was actually one of Chu Zihang’s missions. A hybrid committed the crime at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, cutting the unborn child out of a pregnant woman’s belly—likely for some dark alchemical experiment. Chu Zihang disguised himself as a pregnant woman, infiltrated the hospital, and eventually identified the target. The suspect was killed by a knife thrown by Chu Zihang. This is the hospital’s surveillance footage. Chu Zihang was reprimanded for the scene being too horrifying—half the wall of the hospital was blood-red. It led to extensive media coverage, threatening the college’s secrecy,” someone explained.
“If this video is used as evidence, it would be highly unfavorable for us,” someone sighed.
“Disgraceful,” Finger sighed.
“Boss, wrong word—it’s brutal,” Group Two’s chief corrected.
“Oh, I meant that Chu Zihang actually stayed in the hospital with pregnant women for eleven days, spying on the bare bellies of moms-to-be…”
The underlings exchanged glances, then remained silent for a long while. “Boss… this is going to be tough. Time is tight, but this guy’s criminal record is as tall as a building! Besides this, there’s something even more troublesome—he blew up a building during an operation in Cape Town! And if it were just a regular building, that’d be one thing, but it was the Cape Town Baseball Center. That night, there was a local pro baseball final, with tens of thousands of spectators waiting outside, who all witnessed the entire event…”
“If we try to explain it as a collective hallucination of tens of thousands of people… probably no one would believe it, right?” Finger pondered.
“In April 2010, the ‘Night Wanderer’ serial killings in Stockholm—the killer was tainted by an unknown source of dragon blood, transforming into a Death Servitor. Chu Zihang encountered him just before dawn, and hanged him in front of ‘City Hall,’ a popular tourist attraction… the scene was quite religious. The locals took it as divine punishment for the killer; even the Pope visited in person to hold a grand mass for the victims!”
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