Chapter 190: Dark Boundless Realm 45
Every time she accessed memories, Kui Xin made sure she was in an absolutely safe environment, ensuring her mental state was stable.
She repeatedly checked the private meeting room next to Yefim’s office, and after confirming there were no issues, she sat down on the sofa and licked a drop of blood.
Chaotic memories flooded into Kui Xin’s mind, causing her head to pound painfully. She became Yefim, and the scenes around her kept changing—one moment she was talking to Valeri, the next she found herself in a resplendent building.
A younger Yefim gritted his teeth and said to his brother, “One day, I will kill all those lowly bastards in the Poleward District to avenge Mom!”
Then, the adult Yefim smiled at his brother and said, “How about we call our new car dealership ‘Free Men’? We should live freely as ourselves, without bowing to anyone.”
But in the blink of an eye, the young Yefim was sitting on the sofa, watching as a well-dressed “upper-class” person from the Poleward District pushed a box toward him. Excited, Yefim’s hands trembled with sweat as he tried to lift the box, but it was too heavy, and he couldn’t succeed. He opened the box to find it filled to the brim with gold bars.
The well-dressed big shot said leisurely, “Trust me, wealth will continuously flow into your hands.”
Yefim was dazzled by the gold, and he nodded slowly in agreement.
Back home, Valeri had a huge argument with him: “You said you would never be a dog for those people in the Poleward District, and now they’ve given you a box of gold, and you sold your soul! What happened to your oath?”
Yefim looked helplessly at his brother and said, “I just wanted us to live better…”
He took out half of the gold bars from the box and piled them in front of Valeri, saying urgently, “Everything I have is half yours!”
Valeri angrily replied, “I don’t want this gold; it’s tainted with the stench of the ‘upper-class’!”
Valeri stormed out, and over the next few years, the brothers saw each other only a handful of times.
Yefim once tried to reconcile with Valeri, but Valeri’s attitude was indifferent, and over time, Yefim stopped seeking him out, instead ordering his gang members to keep an eye on Valeri’s dealership.
Later, the “big shot” Yefim relied on fell from grace due to embezzlement, leaving him in dire straits, nearly captured and imprisoned, forced to sell all his assets to bribe the Investigation Bureau and narrowly escape incarceration. Valeri, unable to watch his brother suffer, reconciled with him, and the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder to rise again.
Having tasted success, Yefim couldn’t abandon the luxurious lifestyle and the feeling of being above others… Just then, someone came looking for him.
A man suddenly approached him, saying, “You’re clever and understand how to speculate. Our organization needs a talent like you to work for us, and I can help you regain success.”
Yefim, momentarily enthralled, unexpectedly agreed.
At this point, the memory abruptly ended.
Kui Xin opened her eyes on the sofa and raised her hand to rub her temples vigorously.
“What’s going on?” Augus’s voice timely entered her ears.
“Yefim has received blood transfusions before, so his own blood has been contaminated and is in an unclean state,” Kui Xin explained. “The ‘Blood Spirit’ requires that the blood of the memory retrieval subject is pure. If the subject has received someone else’s blood during treatment, the memories retrieved by the Blood Spirit are likely to be flawed, and if luck runs out, they might not be retrievable at all.”
Augus said, “You could wait for his blood to metabolize before trying to retrieve the memories again, but the human blood metabolism cycle is quite long—over a hundred days.”
Kui Xin walked to the office, ordered Valeri to move from the chair, then accessed Yefim’s smart brain, cracked the firewall, and pulled up a medical report detailing Yefim’s health condition and treatment history; it showed he had received a blood transfusion four months ago…
“Good, just a few more days, and I can try again to read his memories.” Kui Xin sighed in relief. “From his current memories, it appears the person he is in contact with does resemble a member of the Resistance Army… Could it be Ghost?”
The memory displayed the face of the man who contacted Yefim. Ghost can possess different people, and Kui Xin was unsure of what would happen to someone possessed by Ghost. Would they become a mere puppet? Would they lose their memories while possessed and then return to normal?
Regardless, Yefim might just be a marginal figure within the Resistance Army, which seemed inclined towards casting a wide net. Yefim was a small fish in this net, with seeds being sown across various regions and social strata, waiting to take root and flourish.
Kui Xin suspected that the Resistance Army had several contacts in White Whale City.
“Help me find someone, Augus.” Kui Xin maintained a data connection with Augus, extracting the memory visuals in her mind and converting them into a data stream to send to Augus’s data port.
Augus received the “data,” reading the data stream and converting it back into memory visuals, saying, “You want to find him?”
“Yes, can you find him? Or do you need time to compare?” Kui Xin asked.
“No need for comparison,” Augus replied. “This person is the secretary of the boss of Chuangtuo Technology Company, and the boss has appeared publicly a few times with his secretary present. Of course, we now know that Chuangtuo Technology Company is a shell company under Mechanized Dawn, so the boss is most likely a puppet of Eve.”
Kui Xin suddenly found the situation intriguing: “The boss’s secretary of Chuangtuo Technology is a member of the Resistance Army? No… it can’t be confirmed yet that the contact with Yefim is a member of the Resistance Army. Perhaps Yefim is being supported by Mechanized Dawn? There are certainly mentalists within Mechanized Dawn, and likely more than just Ambereye Black Obsidian. It wouldn’t be surprising if they could implant mental barriers—logically it makes sense… but my gut feeling clearly suggests…”
She pondered deeply, unable to resist saying, “Surely… that secretary isn’t a double agent like me?”
Mechanized Dawn wants to support a large gang that dominates the Midnight District, while the Resistance Army also needs to support a large gang in that area. This gang could facilitate their future activities in White Whale City, only for the secretary executing this support mission to turn out to be a double agent caught between the two organizations—the situation suddenly became absurd and complicated…
“Another double agent? Is your judgment based on your instincts as a spy? I am not very optimistic about your conjecture, but until suspicions are confirmed, anything is possible.” Augus finished speaking and sent over the secretary’s information. “This is all the information I could find online; it’s scarce, and most of this public data is likely false. Mechanized Dawn creates a convincing false identity for their people.”
Kui Xin received the data and read through it carefully.
The data showed that Chuangtuo Technology’s boss is named Li Ming’en, born into an educated family, inheriting a nearly bankrupt company from his father, which somehow struck it rich and developed to its current level…
The boss’s secretary is named Ji Xuan, a child from a poor family, who attended university with the sponsorship of Chuangtuo Technology and went to work for the company after graduation.
Mechanized Dawn’s companies have similar operations; for instance, the Rick Technology Company in Hei Hai City once wanted to sponsor Xi Liang, with the condition that Xi Liang would have to work for them after graduation. Now, Rick Technology in Hei Hai City has been completely purged, and it’s uncertain whether Xi Liang can successfully attend university.
Xi Liang’s face briefly flashed in Kui Xin’s mind, but she quickly brushed it aside. She had too many issues to resolve and hardly any energy to spare for anything else.
Augus asked, “What’s the plan next?”
“Can you find Ji Xuan’s address?”
“I can find it. The address is the employee dormitory of Chuangtuo Technology Company.”
“We have no choice then.” Kui Xin said softly. “To get to the bottom of this, I must break into Chuangtuo Technology and capture that secretary for personal interrogation. The difficulty of completing this task is too high; his disappearance will definitely raise alarms. Until I find a suitable method, I cannot take action.”
“You could also wait, waiting for the next opportunity to read the memories, which would provide more accurate intelligence from Yefim’s memories.” Augus said, “Or you could wait for Yefim’s contact to reach out to him. Since Yefim is supported by a certain organization, they will surely contact him regularly to require him to do things.”
“Waiting is an option.” Kui Xin said, “But what I lack most right now is time.”
She stood up and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, gazing through the glass at the night in the Midnight District.
The casino building was quite tall, able to capture the distant scenery in its entirety. The architecture in the Midnight District was very cramped, with slightly dimmer lights, many street lamps broken, and in certain alleys, flashy neon lights flickered, looking cheap and shabby. But looking further, the magnificent skyscrapers of the Poleward District suddenly rose, intruding into Kui Xin’s vision, the laser lights piercing into the clouds were dazzling, with the skyscrapers glowing like golden giants.
The lights divided the Poleward District and the Midnight District into two distinctly clear parts.
In the same city, such a dramatic contrast existed.
“They will come to capture me.” Kui Xin’s voice gradually sank, “Mechanized Dawn will come; they once made me kill Zhao Wenyao, and as long as they know the information is reported, they can confirm I am not dead. The Resistance Army will come too; I eliminated Annie Schalit to fake my death, and they can’t find either my or Schalit’s body, let alone the mental coordinates still lodged in my mind…”
Players killing players are reported with identification numbers.
On the day of her return, the list of fallen players displayed that Remover 233 had killed a player, Remover 777 had killed a player, and a Proxy numbered 129 had killed a player. Several weeks passed, yet neither Remover 233 nor Remover 777, nor Proxy 129 had been reported dead on the forum.
If Mechanized Dawn had enough player intelligence, they might deduce that Kui Xin was not dead.
As for the Resistance Army, Kui Xin had faked her death before making further contact with Ghost; Ghost should be unable to determine Kui Xin’s player identity, only suspecting that she had defected.
Fortunately, Mechanized Dawn and the Resistance Army were rival organizations, and Kui Xin didn’t have to worry about these two factions suddenly joining forces and exchanging information.
