Chapter 106: People from the Company

Chapter 106: Chapter 106: People from the Company

Asteroid Prison.

The warden’s office.

The furniture had been tidied up considerably, leaving the room looking neater than before.

The warden sat with a furrowed brow, working his way through a report.

He had obtained the last recorded footage before the chief of police was abducted — a massive, powerfully built figure hauling him straight out of his vehicle.

That was the Corpse Ghost. The one who never left Xiang Yi’s side.

If the Corpse Ghost was still alive, then Xiang Yi had to be alive too.

He was definitely still out there.

And in just two days, Xiang Yi had dismantled the entire network of contacts the warden had spent so long painstakingly building — wiped out completely.

The warden had seen it coming, but he’d been utterly powerless to stop it.

On top of that, Xiang Yi had killed several people inside the government during the process — people the warden didn’t recognize at all.

The government’s response suggested they had no real intention of going after Xiang Yi.

That left only one explanation: the people Xiang Yi had killed all belonged to the network the company itself had developed, not the contacts the warden had cultivated through his own channels.

The warden had been working hard to keep Xiang Yi’s existence under wraps.

But now that Xiang Yi had reached into the company’s side of things, there was no containing it anymore.

The company had undoubtedly taken notice of Xiang Yi. His plan — cover things up first, then make amends — had collapsed entirely.

It felt like the more he did, the worse things got.

A clean exit was slipping further and further out of reach.

For a brief moment, he even considered throwing in the towel altogether.

But his will to survive wouldn’t let him give up on the last chance he had.

Kill Xiang Yi. That was still a way out.

Over the past few days, the warden had kept his remaining handful of men on it — Guo Long, Lu Qi, and a few others.

But Guo Long had lost most of his crew. Only a few loyalists were barely managing to regroup, and they couldn’t accomplish much.

Of the three surviving members of the scavenger team, they’d only tracked down two — and one of those had managed to slip away.

The woman had vanished without a trace. It was as if she’d dropped off the face of the earth.

Guo Long was still short on manpower, and Xiang Yi wasn’t his only problem — he had rival gangs to worry about too. Progress was agonizingly slow.

Hunting down a specific person was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Lu Qi over in the Southwest City District had turned up a small lead — someone who’d worked with Xiang Yi before.

But when Lu Qi followed it up, all he found was a robot. No trace of the actual person behind it.

A robot that refused to cooperate was impossible to coerce.

This couldn’t go on.

The Power Armor had arrived long ago, yet all they’d managed so far were a few basic modifications based on what little they knew about Xiang Yi.

He had no way of guaranteeing that the Power Armor, in its current state, could actually take down someone who had walked away from an orbital laser strike.

He needed another encounter with Xiang Yi — needed to find some way to...

A knock at the office door cut his thoughts short.

The warden’s secretary crept inside, visibly trembling.

His whole body was shaking. Anyone could see the fear written all over him.

He wore the same expression as the day they’d been hunting Xiang Yi and learned the ship had gone down.

A cold sense of dread settled in the warden’s chest.

"What is it?"

"Someone’s here from the company... Chairman Liu’s people..."

The warden’s office, a few minutes later.

The man sitting behind the desk wasn’t the warden. He looked to be somewhere in his thirties or forties.

He had a scruff of unshaved stubble along his jaw, and everything about him looked unremarkable — except for his eyes. They were dark and sullen, the kind that made it seem like the whole world owed him something.

The warden recognized him. This was Liu Hongyu — one of Chairman Liu’s most trusted men.

Liu Hongyu pulled out his earpiece and looked at the warden and He Dong, both standing in front of him like a pair of scolded children.

"Chairman Liu is occupied with other matters. From here on out, I’ll be taking full charge of the Xiang Yi situation."

"So Xiang Yi really isn’t dead. He’s still alive, even now — even after you hit him with an orbital satellite?"

"Walk me through exactly what’s been going on. I want the truth. Chairman Liu wants the truth."

The warden was terrified on the inside, but he forced himself to hold it together and began to explain.

He had, at first, followed Chairman Liu’s orders and made attempts to eliminate Xiang Yi.

But Xiang Yi had used his Spiritual Energy to trigger a Blood Crystal riot and successfully broken out.

The warden had contacts within Anka Star’s internal personnel, and he’d intended to have Xiang Yi silenced in space — only for that to fall through as well, with the ship managing to escape into the atmosphere.

Liu Hongyu, Chairman Liu’s trusted aide, rapped the desk and cut him off. "You left something out. When Xiang Yi broke out, you faked his death to deceive Chairman Liu."

"..."

"Did you think Chairman Liu didn’t know?"

"Lucky for you, you weren’t completely stupid about it. You knew keeping the Xiang Yi situation contained was what mattered most, and even now the news hasn’t spread beyond Anka Star."

"Once Xiang Yi is dead, the warrant gets pulled, and after some time everyone will forget he ever existed."

"The company’s maneuvering has also kept the government’s investigation tied up. They rushed to deal with the Abnormality on board the ship and haven’t bothered chasing down a prison escapee since."

"Right, thank god the company has its eye on Anka Star..." the warden said, with a trace of relief in his voice.

But Liu Hongyu’s expression turned hard in an instant. "Thank god? You think this is something to be thankful for?"

"If Chairman Liu hadn’t known you had a few local Anka Star contacts to offer and stepped in to broker this arrangement himself, do you think the company wouldn’t have had you skinned alive?"

"Chairman Liu has been furious this whole time. Even so, he was willing to give you a chance to wrap up the Xiang Yi problem quickly — he’s always thought the prison had real earning potential."

"Especially after learning Xiang Yi survived the orbital laser strike. He figured the earlier failures probably weren’t entirely your fault, which is why he sent me here to oversee things."

"Alright, skip the excuses. Chairman Liu knows full well how the company ended up taking notice of your situation. What he wants to hear is what you’ve been doing about it lately."

"You have been making preparations, haven’t you?"

The tone in Liu Hongyu’s voice had taken on an unmistakable edge of accusation.

If the warden gave the wrong answer, his fate would be obvious.

So he quickly said, "All the weapons and equipment are ready. We’ve prepared a full set of heavy Power Armor."

"Not a bad idea. And then what?"

"The thing is, Xiang Yi’s Spiritual Energy is tied to mechanical systems. We’re not sure of its limits, so we wanted one more encounter with him to gather data for targeted modifications to the armor before we deploy it."

"One more encounter?" Liu Hongyu shot back, his tone imperious. "Do you think you have that kind of time to waste?"

The warden didn’t dare push back. He kept his head down and explained, "It really is the only option I have left. I want to make sure we can actually take Xiang Yi out."

"But right now I can’t even pin down his location, and I don’t know if there’s a better approach."

"A better approach?" Liu Hongyu echoed, then said, "Don’t count on Chairman Liu or the company to bail you out on this one. The Anka Government has made it clear they’re prepared to fight the company every step of the way."

"Short of sending in a fleet and going in guns blazing, there’s no way to bypass the government’s authority. At least on the surface, we have to play by the rules."

"There are others watching us from the outside, waiting to see if they can carve off a piece for themselves."

"The moment we break the unspoken rules, even if we finally take the planet, they’ll crawl out of the woodwork and use every regulation in the book to force us off Anka Star."

"Xiang Yi is a turtle in a jar — the problem is the mouth of the jar is too narrow and Chairman Liu’s hand is too big to reach in."

"That Power Armor of yours is probably the biggest thing that can fit through the opening. Whether it can actually kill Xiang Yi is the real question."

"As for pinning down Xiang Yi’s location... satellites are obviously off the table now, and the local informants have been getting picked off one by one by god-knows-who. They’re too scared of the company to be of any use..."

"?"

The warden suddenly froze.

It seemed like neither Chairman Liu nor Liu Hongyu had any idea that everything that had been happening in the colony lately was Xiang Yi’s doing.

Their picture of Xiang Yi was still that of a wanted fugitive — a prison escapee lying low somewhere on Anka Star.