Chapter 440: 48 Hours

Investigation Bureau Monitoring Center.

On a wall made of six high‑definition screens, the same footage is cut into different angles and looped. In the drinking area, under a shed, two half‑grown children in school uniforms stand in front of the water basin.

One washes hands, the other drinks water.

Less than three minutes in total.

Su Ming sits on a swivel chair, his legs draped over the edge of the console, his fingers absentmindedly twirling a pen.

The technical analyst Lao Zhou beside him removes his headset and pushes the noise‑reduced audio waveform onto the main screen. Dense spectral lines pile together, their middle smeared beyond recognition by a massive swath of white noise.

"Su Team, the noise floor of that faucet is too thick; the AI ran twice and could extract no more than nine effective phonemes. It can't piece together any meaningful phrase."

Lao Zhou brings up the timeline of facial micro‑expression analysis.

"Lu Yu faced the camera sideways the whole time, and the usable frames only captured the partial contour from the left cheekbone to the jaw. Chen Yao is even cleaner; her whole body is turned away from the clock tower, not even the movement of her lips can be seen."

He enlarges the conclusion columns of the two analysis reports; the red bold text occupies half the screen—

"Overall assessment: the behavioral patterns between the subjects match the daily social traits of peers, no abnormal information‑exchange signs detected. Confidence level: ninety‑one point three percent."

Su Ming stares at that number for five seconds.

Ninety‑one point three percent.

For any ordinary investigator, that confidence level would be enough to close and file the case.

But Su Ming is not an investigator.

He has lived from a past life to this one, relying on a pathological distrust of the word "normal."

"Lao Zhou."

"Here."

"What do you think, if a fourteen‑year‑old boy and a thirteen‑year‑old girl run into each other at the drinking area after PE class, what would they talk about?"

Lao Zhou pauses, scratches the back of his head. "Kids that age… complain about too much homework? Roast a perverted instructor? Or ask what the cafeteria is serving for lunch?"

Su Ming says nothing.

On the screen, Lu Yu bends down to press the water button, takes two sips, then straightens up to wipe his mouth. Chen Yao stands beside him washing her hands, scrubbing finger by finger.

The two are separated by half a step.

Neither far nor close.

Su Ming's pen tip spins three times between his fingers, then stops.

The problem lies in that "neither far nor close."

Thirteen or fourteen years old. Two children who survived the B09 Weird Domain life‑and‑death cataclysm. One is suspected of harboring a Quasi‑S‑level weirdness inside, the other has the most dangerous underground organization of the Federation behind them.

These two people get together and talk about the cafeteria menu?

Believe this, it's better to believe that kid Liang Wen will someday cure his adolescent delusion.

But believing or not is one thing; evidence is another.

Su Ming tosses the pen onto the desk, leans his chair back, and stares at the ceiling ventilation grille, lost in thought for a moment.

No evidence.

The sound of water washes everything perfectly clean. The angles conceal every expression without a leak.

Three minutes of contact, the two children produced a textbook‑level "clean answer sheet."

Can't find any flaw.

Not a single flaw can be found.

And precisely this flawless perfection makes Su Ming's spine shiver.

He closes his eyes.

"File it."

Lao Zhou replies with a sound, his fingers clacking on the keyboard as he saves the report into the encrypted database.

Su Ming stands up, walks to the doorway, then stops a step.

"Over at the Observation Unit, the monitoring level remains unchanged. Twenty‑four hours nonstop."

"Understood."

Su Ming pushes the door open and walks into the Corridor.

His footsteps echo in the spacious Underground Passage. After walking a dozen meters, he mutters under his breath.

The curse isn't at Lu Yu, nor at Chen Yao.

It's at himself.

He can't quite look after that kid anymore.

Lu Yu has been in the Federation's surveillance network for less than a week, and already at least three secure windows for information exchange have appeared.

What's more deadly is that Chen Yao's side has a gravity field that's too strong.

Eden Garden. Chen Shao. Shen Wanshan. The entire capital's hidden line is like a spider‑web laid beneath the Federation; Lu Yu only needs to reach out and he'll get stuck.

Or perhaps he originally wanted to be stuck.

Su Ming slips both hands into his coat pockets and quickens his pace toward the elevator.

If you can't control it, just watch it.

When the fish leaps out of the water, then decide whether to reel it in or cut the line.

Lu Yu becoming Eden Garden's focus of attention is inevitable; we only hope this vortex‑centered youth won't bring more chaos.

The safety door at the end of the Corridor closes behind him, emitting a dull click.

The Monitoring Center's screen remains lit, the image frozen on the last frame of the drinking area.

The two children face away from each other, each walking their own path.

So clean it leaves no trace.

At the same time.

Qiu Ce Yuan student dormitory area, Cdong, the single room at the far east of the third floor.

The sound of the door lock turning was very faint.

Chen Yao slipped into the room, casually hanging her backpack on the hook behind the door. She took three steps and drew the curtains. The thick blackout cloth blocked the last strand of evening light, and the room fell into dimness.

She stood still in place.

Three seconds. Five seconds. Ten seconds.

Her ears caught the lingering footsteps in the Corridor, the water pipe sounds coming from the neighboring room, and the echo of someone downstairs calling a roommate's name.

All the sounds gradually faded away.

It became quiet.

Chen Yao bent over, reaching her hand to the bottom of the nightstand. Her fingertips fumbled for two seconds and touched a raised circular button.

She pressed it.

There was no sound. No indicator light. No vibration.

But Chen Yao felt it.

The faint electronic hum in the air vanished. The low‑frequency background noise, normally wrapped by surveillance equipment and barely perceptible, was replaced at the instant the button was pressed by an absolute silence.

A military‑grade anti‑eavesdropping shield. Eden Garden spent 24 million to acquire the prototype from the Bu Lie Dian Black Market, and engineers disassembled and reassembled it, stuffing it into a bedside lamp base.

It effectively covers a radius of twelve meters and operates continuously for forty minutes.

That's enough.

Chen Yao straightened up.

She stood in the darkness, her shoulder line unfolding inch by inch. The lonely girl shell that had been curled up in a school uniform, timid, never daring to look up while walking, peeled away from her like a snake shedding its skin.

Her back was straight. Her chin lifted. Both hands hung naturally at her sides, fingertips without a trace of unnecessary curl.

She walked to the desk and sat down, pulling a black flip phone from the deep drawer. It wasn't a smartphone; it had no OS, no apps, not even a SIM slot. Its communication module used Eden Garden's self‑built encrypted frequency‑hopping network, with the signal passing through seventeen relay nodes before reaching the terminal, never passing through any carrier's base station.

The Federation's electronic warfare unit could only plug an antenna under her pillow and receive a heap of random noise.

Chen Yao opened the phone and dialed the only stored number.

It rang twice and connected.

"Yao Yao."

The voice from the handset was low and gentle, carrying a deliberately slowed warmth.

On the Faction: The Federation's wanted list, the second‑ranked S Ji dangerous individual, the creator of Eden Garden, "Demon Eye" Chen Shao—when he received his sister's call, his tone was no different from coaxing a child to sleep.

"Brother."

Chen Yao wedged the phone between her ear and shoulder, freeing both hands to open the notebook on the desk.

"How was school today?" Chen Shao asked.

"It was okay. We did shuttle runs in PE, my legs are a bit sore."

"Instructor Zhang Rui's training load was too heavy; I asked someone to raise it with the academy—"

"No need," Chen Yao cut him off, "It's just normal training, don't make a big deal of it."

There was a brief silence on the other end. Then Chen Shao laughed, his voice light, but it was clear he was genuinely laughing.

"Alright, never mind. Have you had dinner?"

"I have. Braised pork ribs, and broccoli stir‑fried with shrimp."

"Are you full?"

"Mm."

Small talk, like the phone calls between siblings in countless ordinary families.

But the notebook Chen Yao opened was filled with dense shorthand symbols.

After Chen Shao finished his third question about food and daily life, she changed her sitting posture and lowered her voice by half a tone.

"Brother, I have something I need you to help with."

The breathing rate on the other end remained unchanged.

"Speak."

One word. Straightforward and crisp.

No question of what. No question of why. No additional conditions.

Speak.

That single word weighed more than any promise.

Chen Yao's pen tip brushed across the notebook.

"I need to invoke the highest Intelligence clearance to fully retrieve several old files from Jiang Hai City."

"What are you looking for?"

"The batch of wild Weird that first appeared in Jiang Hai City," Chen Yao said slowly, enunciating each word clearly, "Sequence 001, Cavity Person. Sequence 002, Ghost‑Wall. And an unnumbered Symbiosis—Lin Fan and Ling Xinyu."

She paused for less than half a second.

"I want all activity logs of these three Weird from birth to containment: every person they contacted, every location they appeared, the Investigation Bureau's dossiers, the police's original records, hospital admission files, street surveillance backups—everything that can be found, pull it out."

"Especially the people who were in the same area during the time window right before and after their birth."

There was a three‑second silence on the other end.

It wasn't hesitation. Chen Shao never hesitated when faced with his sister's request.

He was thinking.

"Yao Yao," his voice unchanged, still gentle, but with a faint sharp edge underneath, "Where did you learn about these things?"

"Lu Yu."

Another three seconds of silence.

"He wants you to help him," Chen Shao said.

It wasn't a question.

"Right," Chen Yao nodded.

Chen Shao didn't follow up on why Lu Yu was investigating these, nor did he ask why Chen Yao agreed.

He only asked the final question.

"Do you trust him?"

Chen Yao's fingers pinched the pen and drew a tiny circle in the blank space of the notebook.

"I can't say I trust him like a brother," she said evenly, "but he used his body to shield me from a rule-level strike in the B09 Weird Domain. On that alone, I'm willing to help."

A very light sigh came from the other end of the phone.

Then Chen Shao said, "Give me forty‑eight hours."

The call ended.

Chen Yao closed the flip phone, put it back in the drawer, and zipped it up.

She leaned against the chair back and stared at the ceiling for a while.

The dim room had no light source, but her eyes had already adapted to the darkness and could see the ultra‑fine crack on the ceiling.

She could roughly guess the direction of what Lu Yu was investigating.

Cavity Person, ghost‑wall, Symbiosis entity.

The Federation's first three wild Weird incidents were officially classified as "Natural Gestation"—that is, human resentment spontaneously coalescing under certain conditions.

But what if it's not natural gestation?

Chen Yao took the Old Hairpin from the side of her hairline and placed it in her palm.

The repaired marks on the hairpin rose slightly under her fingertip; her brother had painstakingly soldered it back with the finest silver thread.

She curled her fingers and gripped the hairpin tightly.

Whatever Lu Yu is looking for, she will obtain what he wants.

Yunhu Technology Industrial Park.

The surface consists of a neatly planned office complex, its glass curtain walls reflecting the neon lights of the opposite commercial street at night, indistinguishable from any high‑end industrial park in the city.

Sixty meters underground.

Chen Shao sat at the center of the circular console, surrounded by a cocoon of information formed by twelve holographic projection screens that enclosed him in the middle.

He took off the communication earpiece and placed it on the table.

His fingers tapped lightly on the tabletop twice.

He didn't stand up, nor did he raise his voice.

He simply pressed the main switch of the communication matrix on the console.

All twelve screens lit up simultaneously.

Each screen linked to an Intelligence hub of Eden Garden spread across various cities and countries—financial sectors, political backchannels, grey‑zone information dealers, and infiltrated grassroots eyes‑in‑the‑Federation networks—forming a spiderweb that spanned three continents and handled billions of data streams daily.

Chen Shao spoke.

His voice was low and his speech slow.

"Level-1 Command."

Everyone behind the twelve screens simultaneously halted their actions.

"Target area: Jiang Hai City. Time range: three years ago to present. Retrieve all original files related to the following targets—"

He repeated, character by character, the three names Chen Yao had mentioned.

"Cavity Person. Ghost wall. Symbiosis entity Lin Fan."

"Activity traces, contacts, related incidents, peripheral surveillance, communication records, financial flows. Anything you can retrieve, retrieve it all. Anything you can't, find a way to retrieve it."

"Forty‑eight hours."

No one responded in the communication matrix.

No response is required. Level-1 Command accepts no discussion, no feedback, only execution.

Chen Shao turned off the communication.

The control room fell quiet again, leaving only the low‑frequency hum of the overhead air‑conditioning and the tiny flickering data points on the twelve screens.

Jiang Hai City.

That city is the origin of all Weird. The Investigation Bureau knows, and Eden Garden knows as well.

But no one has ever seriously pursued one question—

Why Jiang Hai City?

After forty‑eight hours, the answer will surface.

As for what lies beneath the surface—

Chen Shao closed his eyes.

Whether it's a fish or a dragon, you'll know once you pull it up.