Chapter 70
Chapter 70: The Cub’s Mother Doesn’t Smell Like Me—She’s Not the Female I’m Looking For
“You still haven’t sorted out that ancient nonsense?”
Snow whipped through the darkness, thick as goose down. Jiang Tea Tea met his golden gaze head-on—no guilt, no evasiveness. If anything, she looked like the wronged party. Worse, she somehow managed to look down on him.
Sui Xuan Chu had sworn his uncle couldn’t find out he’d blown his cover. And yet, in the blink of an eye, Old Loach already knew.
So much for secrecy. Looks like he’d been monitoring them in real time, far more closely than she’d ever guessed. Honestly, it made sense. The Gold Dragon Clan only had the two of them left, and his nephew was the Empire’s hope. If you didn’t keep an eye on him, the Insect Clan might actually manage to get him killed.
Fine. Once the championship ended, she’d stay far away from his “beloved big nephew.” No proximity, no real-time surveillance.
Chong Ming didn’t look angry. He didn’t look annoyed. His expression didn’t change as his thin lips curved slightly.
“It’s not that my subordinates are incompetent,” he said coolly. “It’s you, Jiang Tea Tea. Classmate. You seem to have more than just dual S-rank plant-type psychic power.”
She followed his lead with exaggerated curiosity. “Oh? What other ability?”
He gave her two words. “Invisibility.”
Her mouth curled up, bright as sunlight. “Right. I also have an invisibility ability.”
Then she leaned back like she was settling into a chair and went straight for the throat.
“So you investigated and found out I set my ex-fiancé up, and that my parents’ family didn’t actually commit ‘group sex’ like you accused them of, and now you want to let them go—give them their freedom—and arrest me instead?”
She lifted her chin, fearless.
“Fine. You’re in charge of the Empire. Commander-in-Chief. Whatever you say goes. If you want to arrest me, just give me a heads-up. I’ll go with you.”
The moment she admitted she had invisibility, Chong Ming’s eyes narrowed instead of relaxing.
“You don’t have invisibility,” he said flatly. “Do you know anyone who does?”
Her smile snapped shut. “Are you interrogating me?”
He returned a faint smile. “No. I just want to know where that branch came from… and where the green tea you gave your roommate came from.”
He’d considered the possibility—more than once—that she was the woman from the First Hotel. The night his psychic power went out of control… the night he spent with someone in the dark.
But from the first moment he saw her until now, he hadn’t smelled himself on her.
Dragons were possessive. The scent a dragon left on a mate didn’t vanish overnight. It lingered for at least three months—half a year, sometimes longer. And there was a condition: during that three-to-six-month window, you didn’t touch the mate. No contact, no intimacy. If you kept her close day and night, your scent stayed.
The higher a dragon’s mental rank, the heavier that scent became—heavy enough that other dragons would smell it and instantly know whose mate she was.
Jiang Tea Tea waved the tea branch in her hand like a flag. “So this is what you wanted to ask? Then just ask. All that circling—aren’t you tired?”
So it was about the tea branch.
For a second, she’d thought he was probing her, testing her—like he’d discovered she wasn’t human at all, but a demon.
Chong Ming studied her. “Can you tell me who gave it to you?”
She smiled sweetly and lied without blinking. “This branch? I yanked it out of the Primeval Forest. The green tea I gave my roommate—those leaves came from this branch.”
“And you’re going to ask how I knew the leaves would wake you up and clear your head.” She shrugged. “Someone told me. They said this kind of tree is called a tea tree. It’s rich in tea polyphenols, caffeine, catechins… and it carries natural plant-type psychic power.”
When she finished, she drew the branch back, braced it against her knee, snapped off a fresh segment, and held it out.
Chong Ming reached for it. The clean break released a sharp, clean fragrance—the same scent from the small piece he’d picked up at the First Hotel.
He held the fresh segment and stared at her.
“You said someone told you,” he said, voice lower. “Who?”
Jiang Tea Tea tilted her head, putting on a thoughtful face like she was searching her memory.
Then, with solemn seriousness, she declared, “A pretty Sister. A pretty female sister told me.”
She kept going without pause, piling the lie higher and higher.
“She said it’s the interstellar era now. Technology’s exploding. Tea trees mutated, like wild beasts did. They don’t look like tea trees anymore.”
“Only the ones that didn’t mutate still smell fragrant. Only those are rich in the components I listed—and only those carry natural plant-type psychic power.”
“And to be honest, the one you’re holding? It used to be mutated too. I purified it in secret so I could get usable leaves. I used my dual S-rank plant-type psychic power.”
“As for whether it can raise someone else’s ability rank… I don’t know. When I gave it to my roommate, it was just to wake him up and keep him from falling asleep—so he could finish the work you assigned him.”
Chong Ming didn’t take his eyes off her face. He watched every microexpression, every tiny twitch.
He couldn’t see the lie.
After a moment, his gaze dropped to the tea branch in his hand. Then he looked up again.
“The ‘pretty female sister’ you mentioned—what’s her name? Where is she?”
Jiang Tea Tea blinked, eyes wide with innocent shock. “Name? I only met her once, years ago. She saw me working odd jobs and looking miserable, so she said a few words to me. I was insecure and sensitive back then—how would I have the nerve to ask her name? Or where she lived?”
“Years ago?” Chong Ming’s eyes narrowed.
She didn’t miss a beat. Lies were like rolling snowballs; once you got them moving, they got smoother the longer you pushed.
“Yeah. About three years ago. Around when the Jiang family found their real daughter.”
Her tone turned casual, like she was talking about someone else’s tragedy.
“After that, they only had eyes for the real daughter. But they didn’t want to look like villains by kicking me out, so they tried another tactic. They stopped giving me money, hoping I’d crawl away on my own.”
“I had a little backbone back then. If they wouldn’t give me money, fine—I’d earn it. I worked odd jobs to feed myself. That’s when I met that pretty Sister.”
Her smile widened. “I remember her so clearly because she was ridiculously pretty.”
If he didn’t believe her, he could investigate. But the fake heiress—her—had taken all kinds of odd jobs over the past three years, in all kinds of places. Finding “a woman I met once and spoke to for a few minutes” would be impossible, even with power.
Chong Ming tightened his grip on the tea branch. “What does a mutated tea tree look like? What does an unmutated one look like?”
Jiang Tea Tea shoved the branch deeper into the ice, tapped her lightbrain, and threw up a projection.
“Here,” she said. “Mutated versus unmutated.”
She’d seen mutated tea trees in the Primeval Forest. Back then, she’d transformed her hand into a tea branch and taken photos—one with a mutated version, one with a purified version for comparison.
She hadn’t expected she’d actually need them, but of course she did.
The Heavenly Dao loved her. Anyone who tried to dig into her secrets would get fooled and brushed aside.
Chong Ming stared at the two images.
The unmutated tea tree—small, clean, fragrant—looked exactly like the sapling he’d picked up from the corpse of the three-headed giant python.
The only difference was size.
Which meant the “pretty female sister” who’d taught Jiang Tea Tea about tea trees wasn’t merely skilled. She was frighteningly skilled—high-level plant-type ability, maybe more than one ability.
An illusion that turned insects into tea trees. A stealth ability. A plant-type ability.
She’d been on his warship.
She could be one of the 1.8 million cadets. Or one of the two hundred thousand instructors.
Chong Ming opened his own lightbrain.
“Add me,” he said. “Send me those photos. I’ll have people locate both kinds of plants and study the natural plant-type psychic power inside the tea leaves.”
Study.
Study, my ass.
What “natural plant-type psychic power”? That was her magic power.
It was like a thousand-year-old ginseng spirit cultivating into human form. Even the water used to wash it—hands, feet—would be a massive tonic to humans.
Jiang Tea Tea added his contact to keep her cover airtight, sent him the photos, and asked bluntly, “If I add you, you’re not going to monitor my lightbrain in real time, right?”
Being monitored as a person was bad enough. Monitoring her lightbrain too?
That was basically stripping her naked.
Chong Ming’s voice turned stern. “Jiang Tea Tea. Classmate. My Minister of Information is the finest female information engineer in the entire M31 Star System.”
“If I want to, forget your lightbrain—I can do one-to-one duplicate surveillance. Anyone’s lightbrain. Anywhere. Anytime. I can monitor it and view it.”
His golden eyes were steady, his tone calm, like he was stating the weather.
“If you have any secrets you didn’t want me to know before—if you didn’t tell me—then tell me now.”
“As long as you don’t betray the country, I won’t hold it against you. I’ll keep training you as my successor.”