Chapter 100: King of Great Xi

Chapter 100: Chapter 100: King of Great Xi

After putting Wan Rong through a thorough, methodical interrogation.

Xiang Yi tilted his head slightly and fell into thought, turning over everything he’d just learned.

He’d gotten one very important piece of information out of Wan Rong.

The network the company had built inside the Southeast City District — inside the entire colony, really — had two separate layers.

A dual network.

Neither aware of the other. Neither interfering with the other.

Xiang Yi had assumed that taking out three major nodes would leave the company completely blind in the Southeast City District. Turns out they still had a grip on things.

The first network he’d uncovered had grown out of Guo Long’s local gang — mostly people in government departments that needed external contact.

The source of the second network was still unclear. Even Wan Rong only knew part of it.

But based on what he’d given up so far, the vast majority of those involved — at least ninety percent — were internal government personnel.

Building a deep network like that from the inside? The source had to be someone at the very top of the government.

Which was both good news and bad news.

The good: this deeper network had been exposed.

The bad: whoever was running it from inside the upper ranks would be buried far deeper, and there was no guarantee everything in this intelligence was actually true.

Unlike what he’d gotten from the police chief and Guo Long — intel that could be cross-referenced — this required a lot more digging.

The two networks didn’t interact directly, but they absolutely influenced each other.

He needed to find one more key person.

Someone who existed in both networks at once.

"One more thing."

Xiang Yi looked down at Wan Rong, who was sprawled on the floor of the private room on the second floor of the teahouse, barely hanging on. "Who called you here?"

Wan Rong clutched his broken fingers and wheezed. "You don’t know what you did?"

Xiang Yi raised the Laser Rifle.

Wan Rong immediately threw his hands up and waved them frantically.

"It was — yes, yes, it was the Deputy Premier. The number two man!"

"I was surprised too, honestly. But he said he reached out because he wanted to know if I had any leads on you."

"You kill and investigate so efficiently that a lot of people started assuming you’re a Spiritual Ability User."

"And he used to be the Deputy Director of the Abnormality Strategy Department — the one in charge of all us Spiritual Ability Users. He’s been pissed off for days because of your killing spree."

"I didn’t even realize he was setting me up..."

Number two.

The Deputy Premier.

Former Deputy Director of the Abnormality Strategy Department, worked his way up.

Master Chang’s friend was a pretty big deal, apparently.

Not a bad thing, though. The bigger the fish, the more useful they were to him.

"Alright. You’re done."

Living people talked. Only dead men kept secrets.

He put a round through Wan Rong, then swept the teahouse just to be safe.

Once he was sure there were no hidden cameras that might have caught anything he didn’t want the government seeing, he left, disappearing into the city streets.

He took Wan Rong’s hovercar on his way out.

No license, but autodrive handled it just fine.

Not long after Xiang Yi was gone, someone came to the teahouse and quietly cleaned up the body.

Xiang Yi set the hovercar’s destination and started going through what he’d taken from Wan Rong.

Wan Rong’s personal terminal had almost nothing on it. Everything of value had been stored on a server he’d rented.

That server now belonged to Xiang Yi.

It was packed — personal identity files, records of everything Wan Rong had done for the company, and logs of what his own recruits had been up to. All of it usable as evidence.

That said, Xiang Yi planned to keep the detailed files on Wan Rong sealed for now, same as the ones on the police chief.

Both were major nodes. Too many threads connected to them.

Releasing that information would cause unnecessary leaks. Better to wait.

What was already out in the open was more than enough to bury them both.

Xiang Yi kept digging through the server data, looking for anyone worth flagging.

He had to be careful with all of this. One wrong move and the window he had right now would slam shut for good.

Then a name caught his eye.

Lu Qi.

He’d heard that name before. More than once.

First through Pingyu. Then on the network list he’d pulled from the police chief.

And now Lu Qi had shown up again — on this newly discovered second network, the one apparently built through government insiders working for the company.

He was exactly the kind of connecting node Xiang Yi was looking for.

Unfortunately, the database had far less on Lu Qi than on most of the others. Actually tracking him down wouldn’t be easy.

But there were still leads.

Xiang Yi was confident Lu Qi operated frequently in the Southwest City District.

Which meant he almost certainly knew the guy from the hardware store — the local fixer — and he almost certainly knew that Xiang Yi had worked with him before.

If Lu Qi had been pointed at Xiang Yi and told to do something about it, the hardware store would be his first angle.

Xiang Yi pulled up the Dark Zone site on his terminal and found the shop listing. He sent a message.

"Busy lately?"

"What do you want? Don’t bother me unless it’s business. Small talk costs fifty."

"Has anyone been coming around asking about you recently?"

"Client information is confidential. Whatever’s going on between you and someone else, keep me out of it."

"Fair enough."

That answer told him everything. Someone had been sniffing around, and it was connected to Xiang Yi.

The fixer had chosen to stay out of it. Keep his nose clean and let the two sides sort it out.

That was good news as far as Xiang Yi was concerned. The fact that he’d said anything at all meant he had no interest in teaming up with whoever it was.

No new enemy to deal with. No need to worry about ammo and weapon supply for the foreseeable future.

And now he had something to work with when it came to Lu Qi’s next move.

Xiang Yi pocketed his terminal. The hovercar had already crossed back into the Southeast City District.

He still had three targets tonight. With Wan Rong’s death not yet public knowledge, the honey trap approach was worth running again — with any luck, a few more would take the bait.

The night moved fast.

A faint line of pale light had started to show on the horizon.

Xiang Yi hadn’t managed to reel in any more fish from the company’s network, but the night hadn’t been a waste.

His list hadn’t gotten shorter — it had gotten longer. A few more pages now, filled with small-timers the police chief had never had direct contact with.

The intel on those small-timers, Xiang Yi figured he’d just hand over.

The core nodes at the center of their network were already gone. Everyone connected to those nodes was worth a lot less now.

It wouldn’t expose whatever node was still hiding, and it would save him a hell of a lot of work.

Tracking and killing one person took an hour or two at most.

Infiltrating and buying someone off? That took a whole different order of magnitude.

He couldn’t fix things at the root — so he’d dig it out layer by layer from the top down.

Kill. Keep killing until the blood ran in rivers, until every last person in the Southeast City District and across the whole colony was too afraid to have anything to do with the company. Make clearing out their bought men a daily routine.

Unless the military got involved, or he made a mistake in identifying the right targets, no one could stop him — not with Master Chang’s friend backing him up.

Before the sky fully brightened.

Xiang Yi made a quick detour to the Southwest City District.

While no one was paying attention, he planted a few surveillance devices near the hardware store.

They might not show much in a day or two. But give it a few days, and they’d start paying off.