Chapter 035

Chapter 35: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Second Unit

Deep in sleep, Li Lin was jolted awake by a loud phone ring, and at the same time his spiritual warning flared in his heart.

As a skilled agent of the Special Affairs Bureau with excellent training, he realized at once that something was happening. He snapped fully awake, sprang from the bed in the rented room, grabbed the phone from the nightstand, and rushed to the street-facing window while lifting a device with a complex set of lenses to aim at the street below. He answered fast, saying: “This is Li Lin. What happened?”

Song Cheng’s voice came at once, unusually serious, as he asked: “Do you see anything on your side?”

Li Lin kept his eyes on the lights bent through the lens device, checked the nearby laptop that was auto-monitoring data, and tugged the monitoring log before he spoke quickly, saying: “All monitoring is normal. There was one small energy swell at 1 a.m. That was a regular periodic ‘surge’ of the Borderland.”

“Xu Jiali already set out and should be near you,” Song Cheng said in a low voice. “Keep watching the block, but even if you spot something, don’t go out. Report first. Remember, before Xu Jiali is in place, do not leave the base alone.”

“Ah? Right, got it!” Li Lin blinked, then couldn’t help asking: “What’s really going on?”

“The Borderland is having large-scale spacetime misalignment and reset of unknown cause, every five to ten minutes.”

Song Cheng ignored Li Lin’s gasp. He hung up, took a deep breath, and looked up at the giant screen of The End Web in the command hall.

The screen showed a flat map of the whole Boundary City. Around the map, countless curves and tags formed a 3D structure, along with huge amounts of fast-refreshing monitoring data and remote signals.

The big command hall was brightly lit. Employees of the Special Affairs Bureau in black uniforms stared at screens all over. Every so often, people came in and out through side doors, passing along updates from other departments or bringing more bad news.

“These last two days we saw a few small misalignments, but none this big or this often,” a woman in a black business suit from the Special Affairs Bureau murmured behind Song Cheng. “The Borderland’s spacetime is special. This kind of thing isn’t unheard of, so the alarm level was low.”

“Now it looks like a probe before a large operation,” another voice said nearby. “Now they’ve really started. We got careless.”

Just then, a report rose from one terminal and cut off the talk: “Detected a Rift forming! It points to Cha Wen 12b. We still can’t confirm the exact location… attempting to trace it!”

Song Cheng’s frown deepened. He said nothing and quietly counted in his mind.

A bit over ten seconds later, he heard the follow-up report: “Rift closed! Trace failed! Spacetime restored!”

Reports like that had already repeated many times in this hall, one set every few minutes.

The gaps were not steady, but each was within ten minutes. The length of each event wasn’t exact either, but never more than thirty seconds. It felt man-made, but what would be the point? And, more importantly, who could do something this outrageous?

“Detected a Rift forming! It points to White Dragon 4c. Exact location unknown. Attempting to trace…”

“Rift closed! Trace failed…”

Song Cheng’s brow furrowed tighter. Then a faint hum cut through his thoughts. A screen beside him lit up.

A woman who looked younger than thirty, with a calm face and an icy air, appeared on the screen.

She wore a white suit. Her ash gray hair was tied into a loose single ponytail at the back of her head. Her eyes were gray-white, the irises very light. The whole person felt… almost drained of color.

The moment he saw her, Song Cheng’s back straightened. A stiff, bitter smile tugged at his lips. He greeted her, saying: “Director, we’re still tracking-”

“How are things now?” the gray-haired, gray-eyed Director cut in, her voice cool and even.

“Rifts keep appearing and vanishing. We still can’t trace them, but we can now say they are harmless to the Borderland itself. The spacetime structure hasn’t been damaged.”

“Hasn’t been damaged?”

“Yes. We’re calling them ‘spacetime misalignments’ for now because the surface looks similar, but what they really are is hard to say,” Song Cheng said with a wry look. “Each time a Rift forms, it doesn’t actually tear spacetime. Rather…”

He struggled for a moment, recalled the Technical Expert’s wording, and went on, saying: “It feels like that’s the original shape of spacetime. When a Rift appears, it’s as if the Borderland always had a stable path to somewhere far away. When the Rift disappears, it’s as if it was never there. No shock, no collapse, and so far no victim reports.”

The gray-haired woman listened without speaking for a long time. Song Cheng also stayed quiet and waited.

“Any change at that ‘special location’ you told your people to watch earlier?” she asked at last.

“No. It’s now the calmest place in all Boundary City, calm like a black hole,” Song Cheng sighed. “That calm is the most abnormal thing. Everyone knows there must be a problem there, but the biggest problem is that nothing shows. I’ve sent the second team’s best Deep Divers, and I also assigned two extra monitoring groups to approach that street from different directions.”

“What do you think the person doing this wants?” the gray-haired woman asked suddenly.

“Hard to say,” Song Cheng answered carefully after a pause. “At first I thought it was an attack, but now it seems they’re just opening and closing Rifts, one after another. Almost a whole night has passed, and they haven’t even disturbed anyone…”

“Could it be a new Dark Angels phenomenon?”

“Probably not. When Dark Angels appear, Otherworlds always spiral out of control on a big scale, and the real world gets hit hard. This is not that harmless,” Song Cheng said at once, shaking his head. “We also haven’t gotten any reports about those angel devotees. If there really were new Dark Angels, that cult wouldn’t stay this quiet.”

“Not Dark Angels is good.”

“Yeah, as long as it’s not Dark Angels,” Song Cheng sighed. “But if this is human made, then… what kind of person could do this? What are they trying to-”

He trailed off, half talking to himself. The woman on the screen thought for a few seconds, then broke the silence.

“The world is huge. There are many groups and ancient beings we haven’t met,” she said softly. She still looked very young, yet her words carried a hint of old weight. “Our universe is very young. Many ‘theorems’ and ‘laws’ haven’t even formed. Learn to adapt, Little Song. Our work has never been about the known.”

“I understand.”

She nodded. Then, as if sensing something, she lifted her head and looked a certain way. Those pale eyes froze for a breath, and she said quietly: “It has calmed down.”

Song Cheng raised his head and looked across the hall.

No new Rift report came in.

…

A knock sounded in a special pattern. Li Lin stood at the door, used his Spiritual Intuition to check the presence outside, then stepped to the side and opened it.

A man nearly two meters tall ducked through the doorway of the rented place, dragging a huge black case that matched his size.

“This place is really cramped,” the big man said as he squeezed in. “It feels tighter than the landing pod I sat in two days ago.”

Li Lin rolled his eyes and said: “It’s still wider than your junk car. If you could drive that heap over from the Bureau, don’t complain about my place.”

The big man chuckled twice, shoved his heavy case to the wall, and dropped onto the couch with a long, satisfied sigh, saying: “All right, it’s a place meant for people. This sofa beats the hard rocks and scorching sand on Aimein-IX.”

Li Lin watched the man with a small ache in his molars.

This was Sir Xu Jiali, the most experienced and best Deep Diver of the Special Affairs Bureau’s second action team.

Li Lin did not find it easy to deal with this powerhouse.

The main reason was that on his first day, after seeing the roster and the name “Xu Jiali,” he asked around about the person. Then at the welcome party, a one-meter-ninety-eight hulk walked up, slapped his shoulder, and introduced himself as Xu Jiali. That self-introduction boomed like thunder. To this day, Li Lin still jolted whenever he saw him.

Sir Xu Jiali himself had no idea. He had lived with that name for thirty years and was used to it.

As the saying goes, the Special Affairs Bureau’s Second Unit is a place of hidden dragons and crouching tigers.