Chapter 35

Chapter 35: Hidden Dragons and Crouching Tigers in Second Unit

Li Lin woke to his phone shrieking beside his pillow—so loud it yanked him straight out of deep sleep. At the same time, a prickling sense of warning flared in his chest.

Years in the Special Operations Bureau had trained his body to move before his mind finished catching up. He rolled off the bed in his rented room, snatched up the phone, and hurried to the street-facing window.

“This is Li Lin,” he said as he answered. With his free hand, he grabbed the complex lens device on the sill and angled it toward the street below. “What’s going on?”

Song Cheng’s voice came through at once, unusually heavy. “Have you noticed anything on your end?”

Keeping one eye on the lens, Li Lin glanced at the laptop beside him. The monitoring program was running nonstop, data scrolling down the screen. He skimmed the logs and answered quickly, “Everything’s normal. There was a small energy spike around one a.m.—just a periodic surge in the Borderland. Nothing unusual.”

“Xu Jiali is already on his way,” Song Cheng said. “He should reach you soon. Keep watching the district, but even if you see something, don’t go outside. Report immediately. And listen—until Xu Jiali is in position, you do not leave your post. Not alone.”

Li Lin froze for half a beat. “Ah… okay. Received.” He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What happened?”

On the other end, Song Cheng exhaled. “Large-scale, unknown spatial-temporal misalignment and reset. Every five to ten minutes.”

Li Lin sucked in a sharp breath. “Every—”

But Song Cheng had already ended the call.

In the command hall, Song Cheng lowered his phone and drew a long breath. Then he looked up at the massive screen dominating the far wall.

A flat map of Boundary City filled most of it. Overlaid on top was a three-dimensional model built from countless curves, markers, and streams of telemetry. Remote signals refreshed at a frantic pace, as if the system couldn’t catch up with what it was seeing.

The hall was bright as day. Bureau staff in black uniforms stared at terminals across the room. Every so often, someone slipped through a side door with updates from other departments—or, more often, with fresh bad news.

“We had a few minor misalignment events in the past two days, but nothing this big, nothing this frequent,” a woman in a black skirt suit muttered behind Song Cheng. “The Borderland’s space-time structure is… special. This has happened before, so the alert level wasn’t rated very high back then…”

“Now it looks like probing before a larger operation,” someone else said. “Like they’ve officially started. Damn it. We got careless.”

A sharp voice cut through the murmurs from a nearby terminal. “Rift formation detected! Pointing toward Cha Wen 12b—exact position still unconfirmed… attempting trace-back!”

Song Cheng’s jaw tightened. He said nothing, only counting silently in his head.

A dozen seconds later, the follow-up came.

“Rift closed! Trace-back failed! Space-time structure restored!”

The same report had been echoing through the hall all night—once every few minutes.

The interval wasn’t perfectly stable, but it stayed under ten minutes. Each event lasted an uncertain span of time, never more than thirty seconds. Deliberate, almost taunting. But… to what end?

And more importantly—who could even do something this absurd?

“Rift formation detected! Pointing toward White Dragon-4c—unable to confirm exact position, attempting trace-back…”

“Rift closed! Trace-back failed…”

Song Cheng’s frown dug deeper. Then a faint hum cut through the noise, and a screen beside him flickered to life.

A woman appeared, not yet thirty by her looks, her features neat and composed—and her presence cold enough to frost the air. She wore a white skirt suit. Ash-gray hair, long as a storybook princess, was tied into a loose ponytail down her back. Her eyes were a pale, unnatural gray, so light they seemed nearly colorless. It was as if someone had drained every hint of pigment from her.

The moment Song Cheng saw her, his spine straightened. A stiff, bitter smile tugged at his mouth.

“Director,” he said. “We’re still tracking—”

“How is the situation now?” she cut in, her voice cool and even.

“Rifts are still forming and vanishing. We still can’t trace them. But we can basically confirm the phenomenon is harmless to the Borderland itself—the space-time structure hasn’t been damaged.”

“Not damaged?”

“Yes. We’ve temporarily classified it as ‘spatial-temporal misalignment’ because the surface traits look similar, but what it really is… it’s hard to say.” Song Cheng’s smile tightened, as if the words hurt. “When it forms, it isn’t tearing space-time. It’s more like…”

He searched for the right description, then finally latched onto what one of the technical experts had said. “It feels like that’s what space-time was supposed to look like. The instant a rift appears, it’s as if the Borderland has always had a stable passage leading out there from the very beginning. And when it disappears, it’s like it never existed—no shockwave, no catastrophic collapse. Up to now, we haven’t received a single casualty report.”

The Director listened without a word.

Song Cheng held his silence too, waiting.

“Has the special location you assigned people to monitor changed at all?” she asked at last.

“No.” Song Cheng let out a tired breath. “That place is the calmest spot in all of Boundary City—calm like a black hole. That’s the most abnormal part.”

He rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Everyone knows something has to be wrong over there, but the biggest problem is that we can’t see any problem at all. I’ve already sent Second Unit’s best Deep Divers. I also arranged two additional monitoring teams to approach that street from other directions…”

“What do you think the person doing this wants?” she asked suddenly.

Song Cheng hesitated. “Hard to say. At first I thought it was an attack, but now it looks like they’re just opening and closing rifts, one after another. It’s been nearly the whole night and they haven’t even disturbed anyone…”

“Could it be a new Dark Angels phenomenon?”

“It shouldn’t be.” Song Cheng shook his head at once. “When Dark Angels appear, it always comes with large-scale Otherworld loss of control and widespread damage in the Real World. Nothing this… harmless. And we haven’t had any reports about those angel believers lately. If a new Dark Angels event had happened, those cultists wouldn’t be this quiet.”

“If it isn’t Dark Angels, that’s good,” the Director said.

“Yeah. As long as it’s not Dark Angels.” Song Cheng exhaled, but the relief was thin. “That still leaves the question—if this is being done by a person, what kind of person are we talking about? They’re making a commotion big enough to shake the whole city. What are they trying to do…”

He trailed off, half speaking to himself.

After a few seconds, the Director broke the silence. “This world is vast,” she said softly. Despite her young face, her words carried an unintentional weariness. “There are still too many races and ancient individuals we haven’t encountered. And our universe is young—so young that many theorems and laws haven’t even formed yet. Learn to adapt, Little Song. Our work has never been about dealing with the known.”

“I understand,” Song Cheng said.

The Director nodded. Then, as if something brushed against her perception, she turned her head toward a direction only she could see. Those pale eyes fixed on a point in the air. After a heartbeat, she murmured, “It’s calmed down.”

Song Cheng looked up across the hall.

No new rift reports came in.

…

A knock sounded at Li Lin’s door—three beats, a pause, then two more. Li Lin confirmed the aura outside with his spiritual intuition, then stepped aside and opened it.

A burly man close to two meters tall ducked through the doorway, dragging a massive black case behind him like it weighed nothing.

“This place is cramped as hell,” the big man grumbled, looking around the rented room. “Tighter than the landing pod I sat in the day before yesterday.”

Li Lin rolled his eyes. “Still roomier than your junk car. If you can drive that thing all the way here from the bureau, don’t complain about my place.”

The burly man chuckled, shoved the case against the wall, and dropped onto the living-room sofa with a heavy sigh of satisfaction.

“Fine. At least it’s somewhere a human can stay. This sofa beats rock-hard stone and scorching sand on Aimein-IX.”

Li Lin stared at him like he had a toothache.

The most skilled, most veteran Deep Diver in the Special Operations Bureau’s Second Action Battalion—Mr. Xu Jiali.

Li Lin still wasn’t used to dealing with this macho mountain of a man.

It didn’t help that on his first day in the unit, he’d seen the name Xu Jiali on the roster and gone around asking about him. Then at the welcome party, a 1.98-meter brute had strolled up, slapped Li Lin on the shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth, and introduced himself in a booming voice as Xu Jiali. The memory still made Li Lin flinch every time he saw him.

Xu Jiali, of course, had no idea. He’d lived with that name for thirty years. He was long past caring.

Second Unit really was a place where hidden dragons and crouching tigers gathered…