Chapter 569: Alliances and Secrets in the Territory

Xin Yu nodded her thanks to Xia Qing, who had poured her tea, before explaining, “Jasmine has a thing for shiny objects. She snatched my pocket watch while I wasn’t paying attention, carried it up a tree, and ended up losing it. I spent ages checking the surveillance before I realized a red squirrel had taken the watch, so I followed the barrier to see if I could track it down. Turns out, your territory doesn’t match the map. I got lost. By the way, do you also free-range that red squirrel?”

That red squirrel is fast. Xin Yu had to lure it in with tobacco shreds and several pounds of Green Lantern dried fruits before finally catching it. If you just let it roam, there’s no way you could train it.

“Yeah. Most of its winter stash was stolen by evolved rats, so it’s been living in a tree hollow in my territory,” Xia Qing said. She dropped a handful of Green-Lantern pine nuts and chestnuts into the fireplace to roast, then suggested, “Why don’t you stay for dinner tonight before heading back?”

“Sure,” Xin Yu agreed.

She’d actually planned to stick around for dinner anyway. Reaching into her backpack, she pulled out a bag of frozen shrimp. “These are Green Lantern shrimp from Lan City. They’re great steamed or with garlic.”

“Who would’ve thought? After the disaster, Lan City, deep inland, actually turned into the country’s biggest seafood farming hub,” Xia Qing said, delighted, taking the massive shrimp—each one the size of her hand—to the kitchen to thaw them in filtered hot spring water.

“A few years before the disaster hit, Lan City was already raising seafood on land, taking full advantage of its saltwater resources. They’d scaled up pretty big, too.”

Long before Japan made headlines by dumping radioactive water into the ocean, several coastal countries—including Japan—had already been secretly discharging massive amounts of contaminated water. So, the sea had been polluted for years. As far as Xin Yu could remember, her family had stuck to Lan City’s seafood several years before the catastrophe.

Xia Qing scooped out the roasted pine nuts, placing them on a wooden tray. While Xin Yu peeled the pine nuts and sipped her tea, she got down to business. “The three I took with me were all from Chonglian. More specifically, they’re under Yu Wenchuang. He’s my uncle, the son of Yu Dongming, the current chairman of Chonglian Group. Do you know how I found the evolved bat handler’s hideout so quickly?”

Xia Qing looked up. “You’ve trained evolved bats before?”

Technically, bats aren’t birds, but they do have wings. Seeing as Xin Yu loved keeping birds, Xia Qing figured it made sense she’d try her hand at training bats.

The pine nuts Xia Qing collected had the Hardness Evolution trait. Their shells were much tougher than regular pine nuts. Xin Yu used pliers to crack them open, extracting the milky yellow kernels and placing them in a small wooden dish that was obviously Xia Qing’s handiwork.

“Yeah. I led the first evolved bat training experiments for Chonglian. Bats use echolocation to navigate and hunt, which takes pretty complex processing. So I thought it should be possible to domesticate them. But no matter how much we trained them, bats couldn’t follow verbal commands the way people do. They could only be controlled with low-voltage command devices, so I ended up ending the project.”

Using low-voltage controllers to command or manipulate small evolved animals for covert missions was extremely common, yet equally cruel, during the disaster years. Xin Yu called it quits, but that didn’t mean Chonglian did. “Others in the research team still saw huge value in the project. With my uncle’s nod, the experiments kept going. Now, evolved bats have become one of the Chonglian Security Team’s secret bio-weapons.”

Xia Qing scooped out the roasted chestnuts, putting them in a stainless steel dish on the table. “I heard Chonglian Group was founded by your grandfather, and your dad was the second chairman?”

Xin Yu corrected her. “To be accurate, my grandfather funded it, but my parents ran the show. They bought out several failing machinery plants, restructured the best assets, and built the company from there. My grandfather was chairman, my dad was the CEO, and my mom the CFO. After my grandpa retired, my dad became chairman and CEO. My uncle managed a subsidiary. In the third year after the disaster, during a huge insect swarm, my dad was bitten to death while protecting us, and my mom was bitten too. She was an evolved fighter so she held on until the fourth year.”

“Before she died, my mom gathered my grandfather, uncle, and relevant leaders from Red One and Huicheng as witnesses to write her will. She left all her and my dad’s shares to me. She also specified that if I died—no matter whether I had direct descendants or not—my 35% stake in Chonglian would go to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. That’s basically why I’m still alive eleven years into this mess.”

By the timeline, Xin Yu must have been only sixteen or seventeen then. That will showed a mother’s unyielding love and worry for her child, as she neared the end.

Xia Qing asked quietly, “You moved to Territory Eight last year because Huier Two wasn’t safe?”

“After my mom passed, I ran into dozens of ‘accidents,’ every single one meant to cripple or ruin me,” Xin Yu replied, telling her story plainly and without embellishment. “My dad was born and raised here, so this place is safer and freer for me than Huier Two ever was.”

Xia Qing refilled Xin Yu’s cup and asked, “Did you come here all by yourself?”

This was a territory, not a safe zone. It wasn’t exactly secure. If something happened to Xin Yu, more than a third of Chonglian’s shares would pass to the nation. And Chonglian was by far the biggest engineering equipment research and manufacturing company around Huier Two and the entire Huicheng Base.

Xin Yu nodded. “I came alone. My grandfather was worried, so he had people build a very secure house in my territory and cleared things up with the local administrators ahead of time. This time, Fire Phoenix approached Yu Wenchuang, and the evolved bats that attacked the territory were also from Chonglian.”

“If they did things by the book, my uncle and aunt could just say my cousin only bombed the factory because he couldn’t stand to see me suffer here and wanted to bring me home. But if they take the back channels, they’ve got way more room to maneuver.” After explaining, Xin Yu asked, “Are you planning to stay here for the long haul?”

Xia Qing nodded. “As long as this place doesn’t face a cataclysm, I’m not leaving.”

“Same here.” Xin Yu decided to show her trust. “The reason I feel safe here is because I’m a Magnetic Sense evolved fighter. I can sense the intense emotions of people and large animals within a hundred meters, so I know if anyone near me means good or harm. It lets me steer clear of trouble.”

Having laid her cards on the table, Xin Yu extended an invitation. “Including you and Uncle Ping, only two people know about my Magnetic Sense ability. Xia Qing, let’s join forces. If my evolved birds teamed up with your wolf pack, even Fire Phoenix and the core forces at Chonglian Security wouldn’t stand a chance against us.”