“Yes,” Qingchen nodded.
Shen Dai Yunlu said absentmindedly, "Old Master Li gave my father information, which allowed him to return home. After my father returned to his hometown, the Shen Dai family gave us a villa. We moved from the Sixth District to the Third District, but we lost our freedom from then on. My father was placed under house arrest. The family was worried that he had been undercover for too long and had turned against us, so they did not allow him to leave the villa. Later, I went to Shenqiao to cultivate, and I returned home less often."
Kumashiro Yunluo: "The last time I saw my father was half a year ago. When he was leaving, he said, 'Yunluo, your father is going on a long journey and will not be coming back.' He stood by the red maple in the courtyard, with red maple leaves scattered on the ground. He was talking about a life-and-death separation, but I saw open-mindedness and composure, and a sense of relief in his expression. You know, I haven't seen him smile in a long time."
Qingchen knew what happened later: Shendai Yunluo's father helped Li Xiurui catch Shendai Yunshan, who was the expert with the best chance of becoming a demigod.
Finally, Shen Daiyunluo's father saw Li Xiurui one last time by the roadside and committed suicide.
The other party returned the favor to Li Xiurui and gave their life back to their family.
Kamishiro Unra smiled and said, "Although my father is dead, I admire their friendship."
"Don't you blame Old Master Li for causing your father's death?" Qingchen asked curiously.
“It’s not my fault,” Shen Daiyunluo said frankly. “My father said that he felt guilty his whole life because he approached the other person with an ulterior motive, and he lived in torment every day. Now the other person is giving him a chance to leave this world with a clear conscience. In fact, the other person understands him too well and knows what he needs.”
"So that's how it is..." Qingchen said in a low voice.
Friendship is a strange thing; every friendship is different, and the friendship between Li Xiurui and his friend Shen Dai transcends worldly conventions.
Kamishiro Yunra said, "So, in the last six months I've started to reflect. If you don't love anyone or make friends for the rest of your life, you can avoid being sad or heartbroken, but what's the point? Whenever I think back to the friends I pushed away, and every time I pushed away that little tagalong, I want to go back to when I was sixteen, say sorry to them, and get to know them all over again."
Qing Chen smiled: "It's not too late now."
After saying that, he downed the wine in one gulp; this was the first time he had drunk alcohol since he transmigrated.
Kamishiro Unra laughed heartily: "You didn't drink before because your life wasn't bitter enough. Now, you have things you need to forget. Even if you only forget for one night, you'll be happy."
The two drank until 4 a.m. before leaving in a drunken stupor. During the night, because they both had such a high alcohol tolerance, they even called Kamishiro Sora to send another case of alcohol.
While the two of them were drinking, the young girl, Sora Kamishiro, sat under a big tree behind them, chin in hand, looking at the white-clad figure on the edge of the cliff.
Before leaving, Shendai Yunluo said earnestly to Qingchen, "I plan to return to the North."
“So it was a farewell,” Qingchen said.
“Yes, you’ve done so much, Boss He and Boss Zheng have done so much, the Parents’ Association, Bai Zhou, and Kunlun have done so much, I have to do something too,” said Shen Dai Yunluo. “I used to despise that filthy family, now I despise that filthy world. When the day comes that weapons are sheathed and horses are released to graze, perhaps there will be fewer partings in this world. I will go to the north and help you take Shen Dai back into your hands.”
Qing Chen chuckled: "You're not helping me, you're helping yourself."
"I don't care. If I do it, you'll owe me another drink."
"OK."
...
...
On the third day after his return, Qing Chen had arranged everything on Whale Island.
Zheng Yuandong led him deep underground on Whale Island.
In the vast underground base, there are black iron staircases that run along the walls, winding upwards and dividing the surrounding walls into 12 levels.
Every wall in this room is inlaid with countless... key doors.
Each door has a label: Tokyo, Osaka, Paris, London, Dubai, New York, Washington, Wuhan, Beijing, Haicheng, Guangzhou, Angola...
Each floor has 8 doors, so the 12th floor has 96 doors.
There are also more than 130 Kunlun staff members whose job is to open and close doors, and some people sit in front of computers, constantly receiving all kinds of intelligence from all over the world.
What Boss Zheng is guarding here is not data, but the transportation hub of Kunlun, Parents' Association, Daytime, and Kyushu!
With such a transportation hub, they can appear almost anywhere at any time and quickly assemble everyone to win every war in the world!
However, everyone who enters or leaves this place must have their secrets kept by Boss Zheng himself... To be honest, when a demigod personally casts a spell, the secret is basically like being taken into a coffin.
At that moment, a member of the Kunlun team received the message and shouted, "Those in charge of the Cape of Good Hope, open the gate and let them in!"
Someone immediately ran to the door on the sixth floor that read 'Cape of Good Hope' and opened it.
Jiu Ran came out from inside. She walked down the stairs, glanced at Qing Chen, and then bowed slightly: "Hello, Dean."
Zheng Yuandong looked at her: "Is everything taken care of?"
“Yes,” Jiu Ran nodded, “the problem is solved.”
Qing Chen asked, "What is it?"
“A local gang came to the Hu Group’s factory to demand protection money,” Zheng Yuandong said.
"And then, how was it resolved?" Qingchen asked.
Jiu Ran: "They will pay us protection money every month from now on."
Qing Chen was both amused and exasperated. What were these gangsters after? They didn't even get the protection money, and they ended up getting themselves into trouble.
Such things are still happening all over the world. After the change in the equity structure of the Hu Group, the protective umbrella behind it has quietly been opened.
This massive multinational corporation is growing at an astonishing rate.
After Jiu Ran left, Zheng Yuandong looked at Qing Chen: "The fighter jets that attacked you were controlled by the kingdom, but it is still unclear how the information was transmitted to them."
“Puppet Master Zong Cheng,” Qing Chen said, “is a hidden danger.”
Zheng Yuandong said, "He Jinqiu once found out some information that a puppeteer once appeared in the Western Continent, but before he could rise to prominence, he was eliminated by the Fate Master. They seem to be very good at restraining puppeteers."
"How was it removed?"
"It is said that when they watched the fate fragments of all the puppets, they saw the same scene. In that fate fragment, there was a battle between the puppeteer and the charlatan, and all the puppets died in that battle. After more than half of the puppets were killed, the remaining puppets also died. The sudden death of the other puppets was the standard for determining whether the puppeteer had truly died."
"Understood, I'll think of a way," Qingchen nodded.
"What are the plans next?" Zheng Yuandong asked. "After the failure of the Roosevelt Kingdom to massacre the giants, an expedition to the Eastern Continent has become a foregone conclusion."
Qing Chen thought for a moment and said, "To fight external threats, we must first secure internal stability. It's not that I want a civil war, but some people can never be of any help while they're alive. Once the Roosevelt Kingdom brings them together, they'll become an even bigger problem."
Kashima, Kamishiro, the Chen family, and that puppeteer hidden among the crowd—they must be dealt with.
Dealing with them now is not an option, as the Roosevelt Kingdom is currently too far away to intervene. However, once Roosevelt arrives in the Eastern Continent, these individuals could all become weapons used against them.
However, at that moment, Qingchen suddenly felt unwell and started coughing.
Zheng Yuandong's expression hardened slightly: "What's wrong? Is your injury still not healed?"
Qing Chen laughed and said, "I was kicked by the Silver Duke earlier and had my heart and lungs injured by the blast from the cannonball. I probably have some minor injuries that even a shroud can't treat. It shouldn't be a big problem. I'm leaving."
As he spoke, he was led by a staff member to a door and went inside. The next moment, Alice, who was sitting in the training base's living room lost in thought, was startled: "How did you suddenly appear?!"
Qing Chen smiled and said, "Magic."
Alice didn't delve into these questions; instead, she asked curiously, "Are you in such a hurry to come back for training?"
Time waits for no one.
...
...
Countdown to crossing: 00:10:00.
Qing Chen sat alone in the room, looking through the intelligence reports from Whale Island. Everyone who knew his itinerary had been taken into custody.
Surprisingly, one of the puppets made no attempt to hide his identity and frankly revealed it.
Lu Yuan sent him a video, in which the puppet sat behind the interrogation table, smiling at the camera: "Qing Chen, I know you're not dead. Of course, this is just a little gift I'm giving you. Are you ready? The game begins."
Qing Chen turned off the video and sent a message to Lu Yuan: "Do everything you can to control him and prevent him from dying."
The countdown has reached zero.
Time travel.
...
...
At this very moment, above the edge of the Forbidden Forest, an aerial fortress drifts silently at an altitude of 12,000 meters in the sky.
There's almost no air movement here, so everything seems exceptionally calm.
The words "Storm" were painted on the air fortress.
The retired Storm has crashed in a nuclear explosion, and the real active Storm has finally returned to Earth from the sky, no longer hiding its tracks.
The aerial fortress slowly moved toward the designated coordinates. Duke Storm had left the central capital at some point and arrived at the fortress to personally oversee its operations.
But in a dark and spacious room, the floor was already filled with the potions needed by the Arbitrator.
At this moment, Duke Storm led over a hundred elite Arbiters into the dark room, handing each of them a list: "We are now about 800 kilometers from the Royal Court. All the PTA members on the cursed list must be somewhere right beneath our feet."
Chapter 903, The Curse of Life and Death, The Guardian of Black Leaf Plain
In the food chain, tigers eat sheep, wolves eat rabbits, big fish eat small fish, and small fish eat shrimp.
Aerial fortresses are at the top of the food chain, with no natural enemies.
In the dark room, over a hundred elite Arbiters cursed one by one, following the list provided by the puppeteers of the Eastern Continent.
After Zongcheng provided enough information, only two obstacles remained for the Arbitrators to break the curse that killed the PTA members:
The first point is that the number of adjudicators is limited. They also need to consume mental will to cast curses. For example, an A-level person can curse about one hundred people a day, which is the limit, while a B-level person can curse fifty people.
Secondly, it is limited by the strength level of the adjudicator. For example, a minor curse that brings bad luck to others can be used by a B-level person to curse another B-level person. However, if it is a curse of life and death, then a B-level person can only curse a C-level person. Once a curse is used on a target higher than one's own level, the life and death curse will backfire on oneself.
Fortunately, according to Zongcheng's intelligence, most of the parents' association members were only at the C-rank. Although tens of thousands of C-rank members were truly terrifying, no organization or force with tens of thousands of C-rank members had ever appeared in the entire underworld before...
The elite adjudicators in this dark room are mostly B-level, with a few A-level, more than enough to curse these PTA members.
Duke Storm turned and walked out of the dark room into another room.
Four war robots guarded the door of the room. According to their identification system, no one except Duke Storm himself was allowed to approach the room.
The alloy gate lifted, and Duke Storm looked at the holographic projection in the darkness. The woman was not feeding the fish by the stream, but sitting on a cliff, gazing at the sunset sinking into the mountains in the distance.
The woman smiled slightly.
Duke Storm walked in, hesitated for a moment, and asked, "You seem to be in a good mood."
"Hmm," the woman nodded, "It's alright."
"Has something good happened that you could share?" Duke Storm asked.