Chapter 53: The Secret of the Spring

Running is useless, and killing Luo Pei to silence her is impossible. She had to calm down, figure out Luo Pei's purpose, and then act.

Xia Qing clenched her fists and forced herself to appear calm. "I thought I hid it well."

Luo Pei groped for her teacup, lifted it, took a sip with her head tilted back, exposing the part that could kill in one strike—her neck—in front of Xia Qing, then revealed her trump card to her. "You hid it pretty well. An ordinary person might have been fooled by you. But I'm a Level Ten visual evolver and Level Six auditory evolver, so it's easy for me to catch details that others overlook."

Xia Qing couldn't keep up the act any longer. She widened her eyes and asked, "Luo-ge also has a Level Six auditory evolution ability?!"

"Just like you, no one will easily reveal all their trump cards." The little girl who always played the wooden dummy had been provoked by her into such a vivid expression. Luo Pei couldn't help but laugh. "The fact that I'm a dual-system evolver—very few people in the squad even know. You have to keep it secret for me."

Xia Qing nodded immediately and carefully asked, "Of course. Luo-ge, do many people know that I'm a tri-system evolver?"

Luo Pei told her honestly, "As far as I know, it's only me, Yang Jin, and Xie Yu. I'm not sure about the others around you. Don't worry, we'll keep it secret for you too."

Everyone around her was an ordinary person or a regular evolver. Xia Qing was certain they hadn't noticed. She felt a little relieved. "Did Luo-ge tell Captain Yang and Captain Xie?"

Luo Pei shook her head. "Yang Jin figured it out on his own."

Xia Qing was shocked again. "How is that possible? I've never gone on a mission with Captain Yang, and we hadn't even interacted before."

"He didn't say." Luo Pei truly didn't know. Yang Jin valued Xia Qing highly, but Luo Pei wasn't sure why, so she chose to say nothing.

Xia Qing, her head full of question marks, calmed down again and continued to ask the question she cared about most. "Luo-ge, I still can't quite understand why the mountain suits me better. From your perspective, I don't think you should give me the mountain."

Xia Qing had been at the bottom of the base all these years, with limited information, so it was normal for her not to understand. Luo Pei patiently guided her thinking. "You know the uses of unpolluted spring water, right?"

Xia Qing nodded and held up two fingers. "Medical use and growing crops, but I don't know the specifics of how it's used."

Luo Pei nodded. "Then do you know how many springs our base has besides the one in your territory?"

Xia Qing certainly knew this. "Four, but I don't know where the springs are located."

This was a top-secret matter of the base, so of course Xia Qing didn't know. Luo Pei corrected her. "To be precise, in the past ten years, Hui-3 Base has discovered a total of four springs, but now only two remain."

Xia Qing's eyes widened again. "What about the other two? Did they dry up? Or were they seized by other bases?"

Luo Pei patiently explained to Xia Qing. "You've been in your territory for almost two months now. You should have noticed that the spring's daily output varies, right?"

Xia Qing honestly shook her head. "No, it seems about the same every day."

This girl was really honest. Luo Pei laughed and smoothed things over herself. "Maybe you haven't been here long enough, so you haven't noticed that the spring's output has seasonal variations. This variation follows the natural laws of Blue Star before the catastrophe. So after the springs were discovered, the vast majority of people in the base advocated probing the source of the spring water, finding out the cause of the springs, and excavating and producing more unpolluted water to benefit all humanity."

Xia Qing nodded. "That makes perfect sense."

Luo Pei's tone grew heavy. "But Blue Star today is vastly different from before the catastrophe. Many of the old technical methods no longer work. To date, every unpolluted spring that humans have probed and studied has turned into ordinary polluted water."

Xia Qing listened, her heart aching. "Can't the cause be found?"

Too many unexplained things had happened after the catastrophe. Many people therefore doubted the old science and turned to believing in all sorts of messy things and theories, throwing the safe zones into chaos.

"Mm, the cause is unknown. There's currently only one widely accepted but unproven hypothesis: under the influence of nuclear-contaminated water, violent movement of Blue Star's tectonic plates, and cosmic gamma-ray bursts, all water sources on Blue Star have been contaminated. Only a small number of mountains, under the combined effect of multiple factors, formed huge and complex natural filters or equalizers that filtered out most of the qi elements, radioactive elements, and other harmful substances from the contaminated water, creating unpolluted water sources."

"This kind of complex structure is completely beyond the knowledge and technology currently available to humanity. So once the internal structure of a mountain is artificially interfered with or damaged, causing the structure to change and lose its water-filtering ability, it cannot be artificially repaired. Therefore, deep development and exploration of springs has been expressly forbidden by the highest level."

Luo Pei emphasized again. "Spring deterioration has extremely dire consequences, so the highest level ordered the news to be tightly sealed. Just listen, don't spread it around."

Xia Qing tried hard to remember and digest the meaning of Luo Pei's words. "I understand. Luo-ge means that currently there's no way to artificially create unpolluted water, and even researching unpolluted water is forbidden because it would destroy the water source."

"Exactly. Although we can now distill pure water, we still can't stably dissolve qi elements into pure water, so distilled water can't replace unpolluted water rich in qi elements." Luo Pei continued. "So unpolluted spring water is a very important category of high-value resources. It makes the water source owner powerful, and also causes organizations that can't benefit from the water source to try every means to destroy it and weaken the owner's strength. The spring with the largest output in our base was destroyed exactly like this."

Xia Qing was immediately furious, her eyes wide. "Who was it?"

Luo Pei shook her head. "Knowing more won't do you any good."

"……Oh."

Xia Qing said "oh" and stopped asking.

Luo Pei went on. "The spring is in your territory, so it's yours. You'd definitely refuse to hand it over. If the northern mountain belongs to the Azure Dragon Squad, voices within the squad advocating opening the mountain to find a spring will always exist. Once the Azure Dragon Squad's successor opens the mountain to find a spring, the internal structure of Mountain Forty-Nine will inevitably be damaged, and the spring in your territory will be destroyed with ninety-nine percent certainty, turning into ordinary polluted water. The end result is that you lose the unpolluted spring water, and the Azure Dragon Squad gets nothing either. So you, who already possess the spring, are the only one who won't destroy the internal structure of Mountain Forty-Nine."

Some things Luo Pei didn't say out loud: there was actually another option—Xia Qing joining the Azure Dragon Squad with the spring. But this option didn't even need to be mentioned, because Xia Qing had previously chosen to hide her strength and join the construction team. Now that she had a territory and a spring, she was even less likely to join the squad.

Like most people who had been struggling through the catastrophe for ten years, Xia Qing only trusted herself and was deeply wary of others.

Yang Jin said that if Xia Qing was pushed to the brink, she would choose a mutually destructive end—destroying the spring.

This time Xia Qing completely understood. "So Luo-ge, you've already searched Mountain Forty-Nine and didn't find any new springs?"