When Shen Wu pushed open the door, Jiang Nuan was sitting ramrod straight on the edge of the bed.
Her hands rested on her knees, and her expression was so dignified she looked as though she were attending the Federation’s annual awards ceremony.
Her hair was neatly arranged, her pajamas were clean, and the room was spotless.
There was even a faint smell of disinfectant in the air. Ye Que’s cleanup skills were so thorough they put the way he polished his gun to shame.
Perfect. Inwardly, she gave herself and Ye Que a little pat on the back.
She had even hidden a piece of black cloth beneath her pillow. Her plan was that the moment Shen Wu started making snide remarks, Ye Que would cover the man’s eyes.
Physical isolation, plain and simple. She would make sure that gaze of his—capable of seeing through everything—was rendered completely useless.
However, the moment Shen Wu had stepped halfway into the room, he stopped.
His gaze swept over Jiang Nuan’s tense shoulders and Ye Que’s arm, already coiled and ready to strike.
The next second, he raised both hands with admirable self-awareness.
He even took half a step back and leaned against the doorframe, striking an impeccably standard surrender pose.
“No need to think about how you’re going to blindfold me with that piece of black cloth.”
He sauntered into the room and casually locked the door behind him.
“But please try to keep your thoughts under control. The noise is giving me a headache.”
“…I wasn’t thinking about anything.” Jiang Nuan answered at once.
“Right.” Shen Wu gave her an expressionless look. “So the ‘don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it’ playing on repeat in your head is just me imagining things?”
Jiang Nuan decided that perhaps the world should just end already.
Shen Wu sat down on the sofa and crossed his legs.
He did not get straight to business. Instead, with the same gaze one might use to assess a crime scene, he looked Jiang Nuan and Ye Que over once again.
An eerie silence settled over the room.
Two seconds later, Shen Wu finally lost his patience.
“If you want to play escape room next time, let me know in advance,” he said without expression. “Then I can decide whether to make a sound.”
“Cough—” Jiang Nuan choked on her own saliva and began coughing violently.
“You’d better cover your eyes,” Ye Que said as he stood up and decisively picked up the black cloth.
“…Let’s talk business.” Shen Wu cleared his throat and raised both hands again.
Jiang Nuan breathed a sigh of relief. The food chain in which one person kept another in check was especially useful at times like this.
Shen Wu slowed his speech, as though weighing every word.
“While Bai Siyuan was taking you to the greenhouse this morning to reminisce over life’s hardships, I paid a visit to his study.”
Bai Siyuan’s study…
Jiang Nuan remembered from her dreams that it was practically the most heavily guarded place in the entire Bai family estate.
So this was the intelligence officer of Unit Zero? Breaking into the confidential study of a top family patriarch was apparently no different to him from going to the market to buy vegetables.
Jiang Nuan thought of the calm smile Bai Siyuan had worn as he led her to the greenhouse.
He had believed he was in control of the entire situation.
But behind him, someone had already picked his lock without making a sound.
“What did you find?” Ye Que asked in a low voice.
“A few very interesting things.” Shen Wu tapped his fingers lightly against the armrest of the sofa. “For starters, two lists.”
“The first is a record of the Bai family’s recent outgoing shipments.”
He took a thin sheet of paper from his pocket. The information on it had been copied down by hand.
“It’s all top-grade rare medicinal herbs, advanced pharmaceuticals, and prohibited weapons that don’t exist on the open market.” Shen Wu placed the paper on the table and tapped a number he had deliberately circled. “This column is the total estimated value.”
Jiang Nuan lowered her head and glanced at it.
“…That’s a lot of zeroes.”
“Enough to buy half of Azure City,” Shen Wu said.
The list contained a bewildering variety of supplies. Jiang Nuan had never even heard of some of them.
“But the strange thing is…” Shen Wu’s voice darkened. “The recipient’s address is blank. I checked the Federation’s logistics network, as well as those of the major families. There’s no record of any large-scale delivery being received.”
“The black market.” Ye Que frowned slightly as he studied the list. “Or some underground organization that can’t afford to be seen.”
Shen Wu nodded. “Anyone capable of taking such a massive shipment and erasing every trace of its transportation must have both a considerable appetite and substantial backing.”
“But that isn’t the most interesting part.” He continued, “The second list concerns a batch of highly classified materials being prepared under the Foundation’s name for delivery to the Federation’s upper echelon aboard the White Whale.”
He looked at the two of them, his expression growing more solemn.
“Cryogenic stasis pods.”
“What are those?” Jiang Nuan asked in confusion. “The high-tech kind that freezes people and then defrosts them?”
For an instant, an image flashed through her mind from a television show she had watched before transmigrating.
A liquid-nitrogen tank. Icy blue lights. A person lying inside with their eyes closed.
The old cliché from science-fiction movies: people with terminal illnesses were frozen in liquid nitrogen, waiting for medicine to advance centuries later so they could be thawed and cured.
Shen Wu shook his head. “If you mean the metal boxes that freeze you into popsicles and thaw you out a few hundred years later, those old geezers wouldn’t settle for something so crude.”
“The classified document attached to the list is codenamed Ouroboros.”
“Ouroboros…” Ye Que repeated softly.
His voice was low, but Jiang Nuan could hear an unusual heaviness in it.
“That’s right. Consuming itself in pursuit of eternity.” Shen Wu’s tone remained utterly flat. “The core technology behind these stasis pods is cellular telomere reconstruction and the reversal of functional decline. The rest is a mountain of academic jargon—more sleep-inducing than an official Federation bulletin.”
“To put it in plain English, those people in power, who already have one foot in the grave, don’t want to die.”
He paused.
“They don’t merely want to live. They want to regain their youth—and even pursue true immortality.”
Jiang Nuan drew in a sharp breath.
Immortality?
In the world she had come from, eternal life belonged in myths and cultivation novels. It was the butt of jokes about alchemy and the pursuit of immortality, a fantasy that science-fiction writers strained to construct with every ounce of their imagination.
But here, it had been written into a classified document with an identification number, given a codename, assigned a budget, packed onto a ship, and prepared as the subject of a transaction.
A powerful sense of absurdity rose within her, so intense it was almost nauseating.
“People outside are killing one another over a single energy bar. Ordinary citizens work like ants, using their flesh and blood to build bases and haul supplies. They can’t even dream without fearing that a restricted zone will swallow them whole.”
Shen Wu’s voice was quiet, yet it carried a bone-chilling coldness.
“And those people are using tons of resources to have the Foundation research ways to extend their lives indefinitely.”
No one spoke in the room.
Jiang Nuan stared at the thin sheet of paper in Shen Wu’s hand and unconsciously tightened her grip around her cold wrist.
“…The Bai family really does every kind of business, both aboveboard and behind the scenes,” she said hoarsely.
“That’s why Bai Siyuan was able to seize power in the Bai family so quickly,” Ye Que added coldly. “He has everyone’s weak points in his grasp.”
