Chapter 504: Seven-Day Hearing (4)

By the time the second day of the hearing ended, Liu Xiuyun began to feel dizzy and muddled; he knew they still had made no progress.

No progress meant that they could neither prove Luo Qi was dangerous, nor could they find strong evidence to prove Luo Qi was trustworthy.

Humanity has always boasted of its judicial progress because they realized the importance of the presumption of innocence. Yet Liu Xiuyun believed that if there really happened to be a human capable of mass destruction, the others would never again hypocritically bother with any presumption of innocence; otherwise, why would they be so obsessed with taking down every nation that eventually acquired nuclear weapons?

Therefore, Luo Qi is too dangerous.

His danger is self-evident. He is powerful, lethal, yet was not incorporated into the core educational system of the Qionglin from a young age.

He turned to look at the Simulation Window on the wall; outside the window were the snow-capped mountains he was familiar with, his Magic realistically recreating the scenery outside his own office. He liked things to be unchanging; eternal immutability represented stability and peace. But if change had to happen, he could adapt; he reopened the file materials he had borrowed from Zhou Quan.

Under normal circumstances, wanting to study a person always starts well by looking at their childhood and adolescence. On one hand, it is because things that happen early leave a brand on a person's life; on the other hand, looking at it in reverse, a dangerous individual will always reveal traces when they are young. However, Luo Qi's situation is too special. When he was seven, he left behind a record as a Magic Barrier Child under the Committee's testing—in human terms, this was a mentally disabled child.

From that time on, the Magic World abandoned him. He had no shadow in any of the Magic society's children's activities; he was not allowed to participate in any of them. His fifteen-year-old test was his last chance, and he failed that miserably as well.

Liu Xiuyun carefully examined the data and was shocked to discover that Luo Qi did not attend his primary graduation ceremony, and the teachers did not notice his absence. And when he graduated from middle school, they did not notify him... For two of the most important activities in his early life, he did not even leave behind a Magic image. This person, Luo Qi, had so few traces in the Magic World that it was as if he did not exist at all. His activity traces only began to increase during the higher Magic education stage, perhaps because his classmates had all grown up and were no longer little brats who liked to bully others.

So in the "Pre-Luo Qi Era," they could not find much supporting material regarding Luo Qi's character; most of his teachers and classmates did not remember him, which was truly baffling.

But they could not just stuff Luo Qi into the underground Cube because of this; his crimes did not warrant it, and that brain-fried Doctor had pushed things to a very delicate edge. Furthermore, Luo Qi is too precious.

Liu Xiuyun could tell he was the Light of the Mage; Pei Shu, as the one and only top-tier Mind Mage, was already too old. Luo Qi's birth is the hope of the Mages; otherwise, once Pei Shu passes away, many Magics will no longer be able to be activated, ancient Yajian fragments will have no one to interpret them, and the revival of Magic will head toward danger.

He pondered fretfully in his room; the difficulty in gathering evidence now was that Luo Qi was not only tangled in a series of troubles, but he was also constantly entangled with Du Zhengyi, who simply contaminated all of Luo Qi's current proof materials. There was a component of Du Zhengyi in all of Luo Qi's good deeds, yet Du Zhengyi also had a hand in all of Luo Qi's bad deeds.

Who could have imagined that the top-ranked student would choose to be friends with the bottom-ranked one?

Unless they were not friends, and everything was politics—Pei Shu gathering personal resources.

But Liu Xiuyun quickly dismissed this thought; that was a lazy way of thinking. If Pei Shu had known early on that Luo Qi was of this caliber, he would have grown up in the Qionglin just like Du Zhengyi and Liu Ziyu, being cared for and cultivated as the Mages' most precious resource. Therefore, the way things are today is most likely the way things were meant to be.

Liu Xiuyun sent a Sound Transmission Magic in the middle of the night to wake Zhou Quan up and demanded a file on Du Zhengyi from him. Zhou Quan was yawning incessantly and tossed him a cheap storage Crystal. At first, he was a bit shocked; Du Zhengyi did not seem to match that cheap Crystal at all. But he soon understood: Du Zhengyi's life could be described by a series of "beeps," "beeps," and "beeps," as most of his work was classified. There were some contents that were not that he couldn't see, but they were certainly not allowed to be read outside of the Qionglin. The remaining accessible data on Du Zhengyi was really not much; a cheap public Crystal could hold it all.

He sighed and sat down on a comfortable sofa; the small room was also decorated much like his office. On the small table beside him were photos of his wife and daughter, and a lily was inserted in a water bottle—a flower his wife had planted herself. He poured himself another cup of tea before opening Du Zhengyi's data.

To understand a person, the best way is to understand the people around him, the people his heart yearns for. To understand Luo Qi, perhaps one could start by understanding Du Zhengyi. There must be a large part of their natures that is homogeneous for them to remain bonded under this series of high pressures.

The night was already deep, and midnight had passed for a while. He relied on tea to keep his spirits up and navigated the information stream to the moment of Du Zhengyi's birth. Following his usual habit, he wanted to first look at Du Zhengyi's biological family.

At first, he thought he might be too tired, which was why even his Magic for extracting information had gone wrong. Then, he stood up from the sofa. This time he did not rely on Magic; he pushed open the door of the room, walked into the dark red corridor under the flickering candlelight of the Highland Mages, and knocked heavily on Zhou Quan's door several times.

Zhou Quan's furious face appeared behind the door, and the moment he saw him, his anger escalated by several levels. "What is it? Great Mage!"

He waved Du Zhengyi's information, "Is this how you work? This information is completely incomplete."

"You want to see all of Du Zhengyi's information? Why don't you just revolt?" Zhou Quan's good temper from the day had long been worn away in the night; his hand gripped the doorknob, wanting to pull the door shut. "Go file an application with the High Committee yourself; once they approve it, then you can come to me for the file."

"Wait." Liu Xiuyun blocked the door, not letting Zhou Quan close it. "Look closely, his records before the age of eight are completely blank! What kind of things can someone do between the ages of 0-7 that become Qionglin secrets?"

Zhou Quan glanced at the data floating in the air, realized what was happening, and looked at Liu Xiuyun with annoyance yet amusement. When he spoke again, his tone was as annoying as those brats who mocked the Old Mage for not knowing how to use a mobile phone, "Oh, hehe, Du Zhengyi just can. Great Mage, there is nothing wrong with my work. You want to see Du Zhengyi's data? His data is only this much. You can't see his records before age eight? Then why don't you check the files in your own department? Aren't you the one who registers the household records?"

After finishing, without waiting for Liu Xiuyun to react, Zhou Quan pulled the door shut with force, and with a "bang," he disappeared behind the door.

Liu Xiuyun could not say how angry he was; he was just a bit lost. Although Zhou Quan was impolite, he was not wrong; he could indeed search in his own database. He had come over just hoping to prove Zhou Quan wrong; if he wasn't, then he simply could not explain all of this.

But no matter what, he still had to be certain of everything; he could not tolerate even a slight discrepancy in the data.

He did not use the method of remote data retrieval; he did not have Zhou Quan's authority, and remote information extraction could cause information leakage or some loss of information. He immediately set off for the Pendragon Orbital System Station twenty kilometers away and rushed back to the Qionglin.

His department did indeed record everyone's household registration; even if someone had retrieved Du Zhengyi's birth data, he would at least see traces of the retrieval and the destruction of the copies.

With the assistance of Magic, doing this should not take fifteen minutes. But he spent three hours. He used every method, guessed every possibility, and still did not find any materials related to Du Zhengyi. Traces of retrieval and destruction simply did not exist. After several tests confirmed this, he even manually searched and could confirm there really was nothing. He even back-checked all the age-appropriate male and female Mages based on Du Zhengyi's age. Although Mages have a long reproductive age and there would be many male and female Mages in this range, Du Zhengyi's special surname and distinct bloodline characteristics helped; it was not too difficult to check. The Du Clan did not have many survivors; he easily studied the remaining Du Clan members and finally extended it to all collateral relatives with bloodlines close to the Du Clan, in case someone in between had produced a mutation similar to Luo Qi, but the conclusion reached in the end was still that no one could be Du Zhengyi's parents.

When the eastern window lattice was covered with a slight dawn, Liu Xiuyun thought of the last possibility. A disgraceful possibility: a Mage who died accidentally, or a Mage imprisoned due to high-reaction problems.

He hurriedly checked the list of these people; the number of such Mages was even more limited, yet he spent a lot of time on this last hope, analyzing every minor possibility. Until the sun rose and he knew the Highland had already started the third day of the Hearing, he finally gave up the futile search. He still could not find the male and female Mages who could have given birth to Du Zhengyi; Du Zhengyi was as if he had appeared out of thin air.

He looked blankly at the snow-capped mountains outside the window; he had worked in the Qionglin his whole life, and this was the first time he had fallen into such confusion.