New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Chapter 1063: Black Convoy

Alex rolled his eyes at her pushiness but still headed toward the SUV. Even if he didn’t understand the reason for her need for expediency, they were still in a rush.

The longer they took to reach Gu Fang, the more they risked not being able to bring him back.

Since they had no idea what was happening with him and Zhong Kui, it was better to imagine the worst and feel relieved.

And right now, the worst was getting to a dead body.

Alex wasn’t sure how he would react if he got to Huashan Mountain, only to find Gu Fang dead. If they had travelled all this way, broken all those laws, taken all those risks, only to find a corpse, what then?

As he sat in the SUV, Alex noticed the two other people in the back and smiled at them.

“How was your crossing, you two? Did you get into any trouble? Maybe stop to consummate your new marriage?” he teased.

Rì-Chū’s face instantly changed colours to a vivid red as Jin-Sil giggled and hung onto the latter’s arm.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, weirdo?” she teased back.

This made the poor boy turn almost scarlet, as he didn’t want to talk about their sexual practices, and he was sure Jin-Sil didn’t have the same reserves.

“Even if we had, it wouldn’t matter. That ship sailed some time ago on the lovely beaches of an island in the middle of the Eden Eastern Sea,” she added, confirming his fears.

“Stop that. They don’t need to know,” he whispered, his ears burning the side of his head. But the genie was out of the bottle, and hearing this, Kary was now infinitely intrigued. “On a beach? That isn’t somewhere that ranks at the top of comfort. Did you get taken by a sudden heat of passion?” she asked, wanting more details.

Alex looked at Rì-Chū apologetically, realizing what he had unleashed.

Meanwhile, Violette was trying to think of anything else, as hearing about intercourse was not something she wished for. Her delicate ears were almost ringing from the impurity of their conversation.

In the meantime, the vehicle had already started moving and was pulling out of the parking lot. And as it did, two more identical two pulled out from the other entrances to the same lot, following its path northward.

They had almost twenty hours of driving to cover before they got to their destination, and it was already late in the day. With the sun down and their trucks so conspicuous, Alex doubted they could travel long today.

But Kujaku assuaged his doubts.

“If we keep to the highways and follow standard trucking routes, we’ll be able to cover at least half the distance during the night before we need to stop and swap drivers.

“I recommend that you all sleep while you can because we never know if we’ll need to stop at any point tomorrow. Any rest you can get now, get it,” she said, before turning back to the front and pulling a night mask over her eyes.

Looking at the console in front of him, Alex noticed more of those night masks, and he shrugged.

‘Ah, what the hell? Why not rest?’ he thought, grabbing and passing them around.

“I know most of us have already rested a little on the plane, but no one is at a hundred percent yet. You should take her advice and get some shut-eye,” he recommended as he passed the masks to the back.

Ri-Chū thanked him with his eyes, thinking this would get the two women to stop talking about their sexual lives. But Kary and Jin-Sil looked at the masks, smiled, and said almost simultaneously, “Maybe later.”

This was the worst for him, as it was mainly Jin-Sil talking and Kary asking for details. He had never known that women were so greedy about other people’s sex lives, and he wished he had never known, either.

He slipped the mask over his eyes, trying to shut out their voices and giggles in an attempt to conserve his dignity. It was harder than he thought to push their conversation out of his mind, and he eventually resorted to blocking the sound around his ears with mana, at least until he fell asleep.

Hours passed, and soon everyone in all three cars was sleeping beside their drivers, as they proceeded northbound, their destination clear.

Eight hours in, in the pitch black of night, the three SUVs neared a spot of light in the dark, and saw a truck stop ahead of them.

It was now close to five in the morning, and the drivers all agreed it was time to switch shifts. Pulling into the truck stop, the three drivers exited the vehicles, stretching their limbs, before three other of Kujaku’s men took their places in the driver seats.

The swap was swift and silent, making it almost eery to the truckers who saw this from afar.

As the cars resumed their travels, the woman who had taken the driver’s spot in the lead vehicle woke Kujaku.

“Aoi san, please wake up. It’s your turn to be the spotter,” she whispered, tapping Kujaku lightly on the shoulder.

Kujaku shot forward, pulling a knife out of nowhere and stabbing at the woman driving. The knife stopped short of her eyeball, and the driver gulped nervously.

She pulled the knife back, clearing her throat and looking around after lowering the night mask.

“Sorry, Sakura. Sleeping away from home, right?” she said, stowing the knife away and rubbing her eyes.

“It’s okay, Aoi san. No harm done, no offence taken.”

Alex had jumped awake from the sudden jerk in the car, along with the surge in mana inside Kujaku as she powered her muscles awake with mana, and his heart was beating crazy fast inside his chest.

“What the fuck, dude,” Alex grumbled, realizing it was just the two up front in the car.

Kujaku turned her head to look at him, her cheeks taking a bit of pink colour to them.

“I’m sorry. I sleep well when I’m surrounded by my things at home. But sleeping on the road keeps me in a fight-or-flight state.

“Too many times did my father’s men receive orders to wake me up in the middle of the night

for combat training. It’s ingrained in me now.”

Alex frowned at the weird statement she just made.

“Your father forced his men to attack you in your sleep? That seems… wild,” he said,

confused.

‘What kind of parent does that to their daughter?’

“It was part of the training,” Kujaku replied, shrugging as if it was normal.

“One time, at the beginning of my training, I fell asleep so exhausted, I didn’t realize I was being attacked until I was stabbed,” she said, revealing a nasty scar over her collarbone.

Alex’s face went livid.

“Wait. They actually attacked you? That’s crazy!”

Kujaku looked at him with a giggle.

“They never aimed for lethal attacks, of course. My father would have had them tortured to death if they had seriously harmed me. Only flesh wounds. But you need a sense of danger for training to work. That is the Aoi doctrine,” she declared, a tone of pride in her voice.

‘Her family’s crazy. Now I understand why she seems off all the time. It’s no wonder…’ Kujaku could tell her words weren’t making sense to Alex, but then again, they didn’t make sense to people from her own country. How would they ever make sense to someone from a cozy home in a country where black organizations were so hidden they barely were a thing

anymore?

It was common practice in organizations held aloft by generations of the same family to train their offspring from a very young age like this. Kujaku wondered if there was anything similar in Canada, where Alexander came from.

She tamed her straying thoughts, remembering she had a job to do, and pulled out a tablet from the bag at her feet and tapped a few times on it.

The images of each vehicle’s reverse camera appeared on the tablet, along with a bird’s-eye view of the driving formation, and she looked at it for a moment before nodding in

satisfaction.

Alex saw the images and wondered what these were for.

“What’s the use for those feeds? Are you scared we’ll get followed?” he asked as a joke.

“Yes. It’s not rare for other black organizations to follow the movements of rival factions. Curiosity is a powerful motivator, and moving a significant force like ours around attracts attention from other players.

“We’ve been steering clear of them for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually catch up to us,” she declared as she tapped the tablet several times.

She started reading small messages one after another in rapid succession; her face turning to

a frown.

“What’s the matter? Why are you frowning?” Alex asked, his heart rate speeding up again.

“My spies report that we were being tailed in Macau, but the spotter insists there was never a tail on us. One of them is wrong, and we can’t figure it out right now. Uncertainty is the enemy of safety, though. I’ll have to stay vigilant.”

Alex didn’t like the possibility that someone was following them, but he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to follow them.

“Why would anyone be following us? It’s not like we are transporting something valuable.

What’s the point?”

Kujaku lowered her tablet, looking at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Seriously? You don’t see the value in our convoy? Are you slow, or are you fucking with me?”

she asked, her tone sharp.

Alex frowned at her sudden hostility.

“It’s just people… What’s the point of following a group of people?”

She sighed at his answer, unsure whether to laugh or cry at the simplicity of his mind’s inner

workings.

But Kary shed light over his darkness.

“It’s because we are all awakened. Whoever is trailing us wants our strength.”