Chapter 159: General

In a hidden room within the Baekhansan Private Club, secretly backed by the Mind Religion.

A woman of sixty-three, who had ascended to the presidency of South Korea under a female identity and controlled half of the Jiangshan, sat respectfully behind a low table, cradling a delicate porcelain cup.

She stared with absolute focus at the tea leaves floating and swirling within the cup, as if she could see infinite illusions of past, present, and future through their shifting forms.

From her own childhood memories to the future trajectory of her entire nation; from the turbulent global shifts of the next two to three decades to the immediate personal attacks and conspiracies aimed at her.

She saw something—and yet saw nothing at all. The mystery was boundless, drawing her entire being into its depths.

Across the low table sat a young girl dressed in a Ji Xiaofu, eyes closed, holding a baby bottle, nursing the newborn infant in her arms.

When the tea leaves finally ceased their slow rotation and the illusions naturally faded, Madame Park lifted her stiff neck and exclaimed, shaken yet regretful: "It's over again."

Her close friend, seated in the corner of the room, asked curiously: "What did you see, my lord?"

"I seemed to see a golf course, a missile truck, and… you?"

Madame Park glanced puzzled at her lifelong friend, named Choi Soon-sil, as close as a sister; since the divination yielded no clear result, she did not understand what direction the "future" she had seen truly held.

She immediately bowed respectfully to the teenage girl and whispered softly: "Divine Maiden, tell me—is what I saw ominous or auspicious?"

Unlike those charlatan fortune-tellers, this young girl truly possessed the so-called "transcendent" power.

Whether the tea leaf divination, which nearly foretold the future at this very moment, or the spirit servants and demons—all were witnessed with her own eyes.

It was power beyond ordinary mortals, beyond scientific explanation, capable of breaking through established societal rules.

Compared to it, ruling a modern nation of fifty million people and trillions in GDP seemed utterly mundane.

The girl named Jiang Meixi spoke, as always, in cryptic words: "The past cannot be retraced; the future cannot be predicted. Whether ominous or auspicious depends on your choice right now."

Her words suddenly halted. Jiang Meixi turned her head, gazing far southward.

Choi Soon-sil asked in confusion: "What's wrong?"

"Someone is coming."

Jiang Meixi flipped her palm—and the baby bottle vanished into thin air.

At the same moment, the hidden room's door was knocked on. Two guards from the Blue House Security Division rushed in, knelt beside Madame Park, and whispered urgently: "My lord, Seoul is under attack. Five minutes ago, a civilian helicopter crashed low over the Han River."

The guard handed over a phone; the screen barely showed the helicopter's surface, bearing the Liu Chengzhe Group logo.

The Liu Chengzhe Group—that's the company that connected me to the Divine Maiden, isn't it?

Before Madame Park could ponder further,

Boom—

A muffled explosion, like thunder, echoed from afar, followed by a barrage of gunfire and detonations.

"Turn left at the door, the farthest room has a secret passage leading to the underground parking lot. Take the President there and escort her away."

Jiang Meixi rose calmly, gave the order casually, then ignored the others entirely. She held the infant and walked out of the room, passing through the corridor ringing with fire alarms, arriving at the club's front courtyard.

The courtyard was in ruins—the iron fence had vanished; vehicles parked by the roadside, including several Kia cars belonging to the Blue House Security Division, burned fiercely.

Li Cheng and Hui Yu stood in the courtyard, finishing the final moments of a massacre; a large pile of corpses lay beneath their feet.

The Baekhansan Private Club was one of the Mind Religion's key assets in Korea; all its staff were devout believers.

To protect the Divine Maiden, they each pulled out paper cutouts and summoned their spirit servants.

Tengu with wings sprouting from their backs; the slippery Kappa with elongated skulls; Muyi Fang, a blue-skinned, one-eyed creature draped in a monk's robe; Shifunü, a serpent-bodied hybrid of woman and beast.

The scene was truly a time of demons, a night of a hundred ghosts.

Unfortunately, it was of little use.

First, spirit servants could not stray far from their summoners—and their summoners were merely ordinary mortals, none even equipped with bulletproof vests.

Once the summoner died, the spirit servant dissolved automatically.

Second, low- and mid-tier spirit servants still retained physical form; faced with the firepower of modern heavy weapons, they still suffered wounds, died, and reverted to paper cutouts.

When Jiang Meixi appeared, Li Cheng's mechanical arm was replacing shotgun shells; Hui Yu held a burning car and smashed it down, crushing both the Tengu spirit servant and its summoner flat.

No one else remained standing in the courtyard. The three stared at each other in silence.

Li Cheng, gazing at the girl in the high school Ji Xiaofu, whose appearance matched the photo in his phone's album, thought he ought to say something. He cleared his throat and called out loudly: "Ji Mei, your JK uniform looks great—where'd you buy it? Not Shan's, right?"

???

The system's translation function rendered the sentence perfectly; Jiang Meixi tilted her head, and beside her, Hui Yu turned to look at him.

Seeing no reply, Li Cheng continued: "Anyway, how should I address you? Jiang Meixi—or the spirit possessing my daughter's body?"

"It seems my sister has told you everything."

Jiang Meixi—or rather, Jiang Zhihui—openly admitted all: "I founded the Mind Religion behind the scenes. I orchestrated the shipwreck. I possessed my niece's body. And I kidnapped Shaoxi and abducted this child."

She paused briefly, then asked: "Have you and your wife given her a name?"

"Jiang Ziya, Jiang Wei, Jiang Cha, Jiang Suan Cong. Considering this is South Korea, I lean toward Jiang Jun—it has a warm, sunlike feeling."

Li Cheng spoke offhandedly, asking calmly: "I have two questions I don't understand. First, why did you have someone create a human model of Jiang Shaoxi? Couldn't you just have found a corpse from a funeral parlor and destroyed its face to conceal the truth?"

"Second, why did you possess Jiang Meixi's body?"

He appeared to ask casually, yet remained on high alert—the bat-wing motorcycle remained idling, and his right hand, hidden in his sleeve, was ready to draw the Thunder Horn at any moment.

"The first question—I had the human model created at Shaoxi's request, to fake a corpse and make Jiang Wanyong give up searching for his wife. Otherwise, by my own inclination, I wouldn't have minded killing Jiang Wanyong outright."

Jiang Meixi said calmly: "The second question—as you suspected, the claim that 'both Shaoxi and I are heavenly goddesses descended to earth' is a lie, meant to deceive the Mind Religion followers."

"Yet I do require a living body with closely related bloodline to move freely in this world."

"Can you understand, fellow human player from another world?"

(End of Chapter)