Peace and Quiet?

For days on end, there had been nothing to do. None of the torrential storms Chen Yubo had anticipated ever came. After having a gun held to his head at the very beginning, his life in the villa over the past few days had been downright tranquil. Feeding the cat and basking in the sun every day, he almost thought he had been forgotten. "It feels pretty relaxing," Chen Yubo remarked with a sigh of relief as he gazed at the sunset outside the window. "Could it be that everyone's already forgotten about me?" "Yeah, right, totally," Ji Jue nodded helplessly. Blondie looked like he wanted to say something but held back. A-Yi kept his head down, pretending not to hear. As for Xiao An... he hadn't been playing video games lately; instead, he had gotten hooked on reality shows. Using Chen Yubo's VIP subscription, he sat glued to the TV, binge-watching variety shows with intense focus. Whenever a handsome idol appeared on screen, he would even pause, turn around, and compare the idol with Ji Jue. Ji Jue scratched his head. Something felt distinctly off. Those looks were getting weirder and weirder! "Where's Old Tom?" Chen Yubo seemed to finally notice something amiss. "I haven't seen much of him these past couple of days." "Uh..." Blondie's movements stiffened. "Out for a stroll, maybe?" "Yeah, exactly!" A-Yi nodded vigorously. "He overate and got indigestion." Chen Yubo looked baffled. "Should we buy him some digestive tablets?" Blondie eased into the groove. "No need, no need! He said he's just constipated. He'll be fine once he takes a few good shits!" Chen Yubo sucked in a breath of cold air and instinctively looked at Ji Jue, utterly shocked. You Celestial Chosen are so freaking weird! For a moment, Ji Jue opened his mouth, then thought better of it. The others could only pretend to be busy, averting their eyes and looking out at the gathering twilight with helpless sighs. As the saying goes, when you feel that life is peaceful and quiet, it's because someone else is carrying the heavy burden for you. Peaceful? Calm? The chaotic harassment and raids hadn't stopped for a single second! It was mainly because Chen Yubo made a huge fuss over everything, screaming bloody murder at the slightest sight. In the end, everyone simply stopped telling him anything, leaving him to feed the cat and watch short videos all day. At least it saved them a headache. As for the manual labor... Ji Jue, busy secretly trying to out-compete his senior sister every day, certainly wasn't going to do it, and Xiao An, with his disability, obviously couldn't run around either. A-Yi and Blondie were indeed the most dutiful bodyguards, guarding Chen Yubo step for step. Even when he went to the bathroom, they stood outside the cracked door, and at night, they slept on mats right beside the cat bed. Thus, all the dirty, grueling chores were dumped on the 'newcomer,' Old Tom. After all, who told him to keep bragging about being a master of all trades? Those with greater ability should do more work! In the sweltering late afternoon, twilight began to filter through. Amid the dense shade of the woods near the hilltop, the continuous scraping of shovel against soil echoed alongside relentless grumbling and complaints. "Dammit, I undercharged. I totally undercharged." Digging vigorously in the sandy dirt, Old Tom wiped the sweat from his forehead and grumbled in bits and pieces, "The contract didn't say jack about digging graves! Gardening fees and burial fees need to be billed separately!" Thud! A heavy corpse was dumped into the pit, then gradually buried, eventually turning into a dirt mound. Old Tom fished a handful of sand from his pocket, muttered a couple lines of eulogy, and casually tossed it over the grave mound, offering a perfunctory Mid-Continent ritual as a makeshift rite of passage. Right before him in the dense woods, mound after mound rose from the ground, stretching deep into the gloom. "Finally done," he sighed. He dropped the shovel and was about to leave when Ji Jue's voice crackled through the walkie-talkie: "Old Tom, company's coming. About a dozen people, with a Celestial Chosen among them." Ji Jue added, "Mind making another trip?" Old Tom blew his top. "How many fucking waves has this been?! Does it ever end? Do they think this place is a tourist attraction?!" "We're just getting started," Ji Jue said calmly. "The fact that only one Celestial Chosen has shown up so far is already pretty good." "No way! Why am I the only one working?" Old Tom glared. "Contractors are human too! Contractors have tempers! If you keep abusing your contractor like this, watch out—I might just quit!" "Fine, fine, fine, I'll take this one, alright?" Ji Jue sighed. Old Tom nodded in satisfaction. "Now that's more like it." "You're still the one digging the graves, though." "Ji, you motherf—" The line went dead. Meanwhile, on a fork in the road not far from the villa, a convoy of mud-spattered off-road vehicles had slowly ground to a halt. Under the darkening sky, a group of masked men wearing sunglasses gathered together, their exposed skin dark and weathered with sunburns. The leader raised a pair of binoculars, gazing at the cliffside estate in the distance, and let out the exact same envious sigh Ji Jue once had: "Fuck, living this lavishly? Aren't they afraid of cutting their lives short?" "That's nothing," a man beside him clicked his tongue in awe. "Sitting on an inheritance that huge, forget living here—it's enough to lie in the Governor's bed and work out with the Governor's wife!" "Is that... what's-his-name... Chen Yubo really in there?" Zhong Naohai turned around and pulled down his face mask, a glint of shrewdness showing on his scruffy face. "Would Pockmark Yu really be so generous as to let such a fat prize slip through his fingers? Why wouldn't he pull off a job this big himself? It's not like clinging to Lei Yaoxing's coattails made him wash his hands of crime and turn over a new leaf, did it?" "H-h-he said he's switched to being... being a client now!" A tall, skinny man with a severe stutter popped up to answer. "I-if we can pull this job off, he'll sh-sh-share the cash with us!" "Share the cash?" Zhong Naohai scoffed, amused. "I do the work, I kidnap the hostage, and then I hand him over just so he can throw us some scraps? What does that make me—a beggar on his knees?!" "Boss, you mean...?" The eyes of the man beside him lit up. "Who gives a damn about Pockmark Yu or Pockmark Wang? Whatever we snatch is ours!" Zhong Naohai spat. "The boys have suffered out in the desolate wilderness for too long. Once this job is done and we split the loot, we'll all be city folk! Look at that facade, that decor! Even if that Chen kid isn't inside, we can still loot the place clean before taking off! Hell, we might even bag a couple of mistresses to play with!" Hearing this, the others' eyes gleamed instantly. "The boss is right!" "Let's do it!" "M-m-me too!" They had spent far too long raiding and fleeing through the wilderness between the city-states. Who wouldn't want to strike it rich and move somewhere nobody knew them to live as a wealthy man? "Then it's settled!" Zhong Naohai snatched up the gun leaning beside him and racked the bolt. "Let's go make a killing!" Amid cheers, the engines roared to life, spewing billows of thick exhaust once more. But the moment he hopped into the passenger seat, a vibration buzzed against Zhong Naohai's chest. His phone was ringing. He irritably rejected the call, but the screen lit up again. Growing impatient, he answered, ready to unleash a torrent of curses, only to hear melodious piano music from the other end, followed by a seemingly prerecorded synthesized voice: "Dear visitor, we regret to inform you that due to facility maintenance, reception services have been temporarily suspended. For your safety, please turn back immediately—" "Turn back your mother!" Furious, Zhong Naohai slammed the end-call button. In that very instant, a massive boom erupted from the front. A deafening roar. Thick smoke billowed; flames erupted. It came from the armored off-road vehicle leading the convoy... The very moment it crossed the boundary marker, a gaping hole was punched through the custom bulletproof vehicle. It tore through the driver's seat in an explosion of crimson, blasted through the chassis, and pierced into the fuel tank, detonating it in an instant. The speeding SUV ground to an abrupt halt, swallowed by roaring flames. Smoke surged into the sky, forcing the entire convoy to a dead stop. Only then did the thunderous gunshot from the distant villa roll across the landscape. The convoy fell into chaos. Every vehicle instinctively reversed, backing up to hide within the shadows of the trees. "Fuck! A sniper!" Zhong Naohai's pupils shrank, cold sweat soaking his back in an instant. Thank god taking a leak had delayed him and kept him out of the lead vehicle, or he would have been blown straight to the afterlife right then and there. After the initial shock, sheer fury took over. "You think you're the only ones with long rifles?! I've got one too! Diao Mao, get your ass out here and snipe that bastard!" Goaded over the walkie-talkie, a man as gaunt as a monkey scrambled out of a trailing vehicle carrying a rifle. He climbed onto the roof, using the cover of the canopy to gingerly poke the barrel out. And then—thunder blasted! Crimson splattered abruptly across the roof, snaking slowly down the windshield, rendering the faces behind the glass even paler in the dead silence. "B-boss..." The stuttering driver felt as though he had never spoken so fluently in his entire life, nearly sobbing: "Diao Mao is gone!" Zhong Naohai said nothing. His phone vibrated again, the screen lighting up. Then came a second ringtone, and a third. In the dead silence, every single phone in the entire convoy began ringing simultaneously. The staggered rings sounded like wailing ghosts, jarring and cacophonous. So terrifying was it that not a single soul dared to answer. Until the calls from hell connected on their own. Melodious music flowed through the speakers: "Dear visitor, we regret to inform you that due to facility mainte—" "Maintenance your ass!" Zhong Naohai's face turned livid, and he roared into his phone, "Playing ghost tricks in front of your daddy?!" Scavengers who made a living raiding the wilderness might not excel at much, but their profanity was unending. Yet amidst his furious cursing, his fingers covertly signaled. From the rear vehicle, a figure slipped away into nothingness. As though invisible, camouflaged patterns shifted continuously across his body to match his surroundings. Like an agile lizard, the figure darted through the dense woods on all fours, without startling a single bird or disturbing a blade of grass. Circling from the flank under the cover of vegetation and boulders, he crept silently toward the sniper's vantage point. Yet mid-crawl, his movement suddenly froze. Confused, he glanced to the side and parted the foliage, only to find... an infrared camera with a blinking red light?! Boom! Accompanied by a thunderous blast that heralded death itself. Out of thin air, a blood-drenched figure materialized, sent hurtling backward as a piercing shriek grated against everyone's eardrums. He hadn't died on the spot, but under the impact of the high-explosive round, one of his hands had instantly been reduced to mangled pulp. Wailing, he rolled across the dirt, stumbling desperately back toward the convoy. Pleading for help. Yet in the dense forest, not a single person dared to move. In fact, they instinctively held their breath. "Ah, missed the mark," Xiao An, acting as the spotter, remarked as he lowered his binoculars. "The wind speed was slightly off." Ji Jue sighed. Handling the heavy anti-materiel sniper rifle with a hint of unfamiliarity, he began to miss the virtues of the Thunderbolt lever-action rifle. The residual spiritus left behind by a marksman over a lifetime, once animated by Deus Ex Machina, was infinitely more responsive than fresh factory-issue hardware like this. When you wanted it locked, it locked; when you wanted it to pierce, it pierced! Unfortunately, the caliber couldn't be altered, and over ultra-long ranges, the kinetic energy loss was too great, limiting its destructive power. He'd still have to get his hands on a dedicated ultra-long-range rifle later. Still, searching all of Yacheng through the Veterans Club had only yielded a single Thunderbolt; finding another wasn't very promising... Wait, if I want ultra-long-range strikes, why limit myself to a gun? The thought suddenly struck Ji Jue. Didn't the garrison's storehouse have a few howitzers retired ninety years ago? Supposedly they'd even seen combat in the wars of the Mid-Continent, hauled out on holidays for display, and they seemed pretty well-maintained! Maybe he should hit up Brother Feng one of these days, wait for the dead of night, and have the two of them just swipe one? He pulled the trigger. Boom! Amid the massive explosion, the crawling Celestial Chosen shot into the air before crashing down, his screams growing shriller. This time, his other hand was gone too. Xiao An blinked and looked over. "Wind speed still off?" "Got distracted, just an off shot," Ji Jue gave an awkward laugh, nearly blurting out gamer excuses like "he's one shot" or "he's cracked." Taking a breath, he focused and squeezed the trigger again. With one final roar, the writhing Celestial Chosen finally met his end. His head burst open. The sprayed blood splattered across Zhong Naohai's window, making his face twitch. He swallowed dryly. "B-boss..." a trembling voice came over the comm channel. "Maybe we..." "Old Six is right!" Zhong Naohai slapped his thigh, snapping out of it. "Go, go, go! Tough target, we're out!" No one bothered to correct him that Old Six had just died. Before his sentence even finished, the entire convoy was reversing frantically, fleeing back the way they came. However, back at the fork in the road, several massive pits had mysteriously appeared. Beside the pits, a man smoking a cigarette with a shovel slung over his shoulder stared at the approaching cloud of dust. He reversed his grip, jabbed the shovel into the earth, and grinned at the hurtling vehicles, baring his teeth. Carved across his teeth were the totemic runes of the Thousand Islands style. Gales whipped past as the vehicles barreled forward. Without even caring about the man blocking their path, the driver slammed on the gas as if an invisible demon were snapping at their heels, oblivious to the fact that the figure ahead was the true Reaper. In that instant, the longsword at Old Tom's hip hummed, clearing its scabbard. As it swept through the air, it drew a streak of brilliant metallic sheen. The oncoming SUV split cleanly in two! Then, a second blade was drawn from his waist, cleaving the second vehicle in half horizontally. Immediately following was a third, drawn by a hand sprouting from his back—and slashed down! A fourth, a fifth, a sixth! Upon those six sinewy arms, assorted swords and sabers gleamed against the setting sun, then whipped into a storm of death. Blood erupted, staining the evening sun a deeper scarlet. Smoke, burning, explosions, screams, wails. Soon, all went silent. Only corpses were tossed into the deep pit one after another. With each one, Old Tom patiently lifted the face and snapped a photo with his phone. Bounties were paid per head, after all! If he'd known it was just a bunch of trash, he would have handled it all himself! Instead, Ji Jue had barged in, costing him forty-five thousand! "One, two, three, four... eleven, twelve!" Tallying the photos, he broke into a broad grin. "Bumper harvest, bumper harvest!" "Old Tom, don't bury that Celestial Chosen. Bring him back for me, please," the voice on the walkie-talkie said. "I have a use for the corpse." "You won't even spare a corpse?" Old Tom blinked, dumbfounded. "You Embers bastards are the creepiest of all!" "I'll pay you for it." "Yes, Boss!" See? If you'd just said that from the start, customer service would've kicked right in! He ripped a tattered tarp from the wreckage, gleefully wrapped up the Celestial Chosen's corpse, tied it securely, and pondered whether to tack on a packaging fee later. After all, dine-in and takeout were two different prices! Meanwhile, up on the roof, having routed another wave of attackers, Ji Jue looked down at his phone with no trace of joy. Based on Xiao An's understanding and experience, Ji Jue's expression seemed to be darkening instead. "What is it, Brother Ji Jue?" he asked, puzzled. "You could say my worst-case scenario has been confirmed," he sighed, looking at the data transmitted from the cell tower onto his screen. "Lei Yaoxing has his eyes on us." Forwarded through the tower, photos and video clips of the scene appeared one after another, alongside textual reports detailing the situation inside the villa and photographs of Old Tom. Judging by the angles, the observer had to be hidden somewhere on the opposite hill, just beyond the tower's normal range. Had the signal on the other end not fluctuated and caused the phone to automatically latch onto this tower, even Ji Jue wouldn't have known. From the looks of it, they had likely been watching from the shadows since the very beginning. Xiao An glanced at the photo, and his gaze landed unerringly on a specific spot in a mountain hollow. "Should I take them out?" "No need." After considering it for a moment, Ji Jue shook his head. "It'd spook the snake. For now, leave things as they are." Once a lurker stepped from the shadows into the light, eight or nine-tenths of their threat vanished. Ji Jue could even turn the tables and use this informant to mislead the opposition. Still, to avoid outsmarting himself, he didn't plan on that just yet. Lei Yaoxing had far too many problems on his plate. Chen Xingzhou clinging to life in the hospital didn't even rank high on his list of priorities, let alone this younger brother who was utterly incapable of accomplishing or ruining anything. No matter how much money Chen Yubo held, as long as Chen Xingzhou drew breath, he couldn't liquidate it. And if Chen Xingzhou died, Chen Yubo could cleanly bow out of this bloody contest of the White Stag. As long as Ji Jue and the others didn't pose an obvious threat, Lei Yaoxing wouldn't bother with them. Yet the sheer neatness and perfection of the current situation made Ji Jue wonder what kind of scheme was hidden behind it. Otherwise, how could it be such a coincidence? Amid the escalating infighting within the Wild Gathering, Chen Xingzhou and Chen Yubo, tied together by such an immense fortune, had formed a haven that just happened to sit outside the storm's center. Chen Yubo was shielded by the remnants of his brother's faction, safe for the time being, yet his sheer incompetence kept him from being seen as a threat. Meanwhile, Chen Xingzhou had his brother drawing part of the heat, and that four-billion-plus inheritance even served to some degree as his life insurance. If anyone moved against him, they'd have to consider the risk that once he died, a desperate Chen Yubo might dump the entire four-billion fund and priceless shares onto the Wild Gathering as a bounty on the killer's head... Ever since the day Chen Yubo was attacked, all the tangled clues Ji Jue had uncovered sprawled in every direction, yet ultimately, nearly all of them passed through an inevitable nexus: Chen Xingzhou. Chen Yubo's older brother, whom Ji Jue had never once laid eyes on. Just what role was he playing in all of this? Ji Jue unlocked his phone and browsed through the messages sent over the past few days from Ye Chun, Tong Hua, and others. Most of what Ye Chun forwarded were street rumors and viral compilations of leaks, videos, and photos circulating on messaging apps. What Tong Hua sent, however, consisted mostly of internal intelligence from the Security Bureau. It all boiled down to one word: mad. Everyone was fucking losing their minds! Lei Yaoxing had gone mad, Drool Kun had gone mad, Lei Xiaoniu had gone mad, Xu Yan had gone mad... The entirety of Yacheng's underworld, far beyond just the Wild Gathering, every single person dragged into it—from top bosses to low-level street thugs—was on the brink of insanity! Once the possibility of a peaceful transition and unification vanished, the last shreds of order left behind by Lei Wuye went up in smoke. Everyone was swinging machetes, heads rolling, eyes bloodshot. Along with bloody annexations and conquests, nearly everyone—save for the idiots who couldn't read the room and still fancied playing both sides—was rushing into alliances. Faced with Lei Yaoxing's ruthless methods, those seeking self-preservation or harboring their own ambitions struck back at any cost, escalating the conflict further. At a time like this, the most effective and preferred option was external aid—or finding a godfather. Who among the shot-callers of Chaocheng, Chuancheng, and even cities beyond Haizhou would pass up such a golden opportunity to expand their influence? Who wouldn't want a piece of Yacheng, the Federation's greatest maritime hub? And so—Blood Slaughter, the Ghoul Brothers, Three of Spades, Wooden Man, Wolf Face, Centaur... Over the past few days, White Stag Celestial Chosen from across the Federation, the Empire, Mid-Continent, and the Thousand Islands, drawn by the vortex, had arrived in Yacheng one after another through various channels. Among them were no shortage of wanted fugitives and raving lunatics. This uncontrollable power churned the fragile balance inside and outside Yacheng, turning into a bomb primed to detonate at any moment. What tightened tensions to the breaking point was the steel monster that had surfaced in a secretly recorded video just this afternoon. —A suit of power armor striding openly down the street! It was hard to imagine the sheer psychological horror haunting the Governor upon receiving that report. A transmission spinal frame with serial numbers filed off and absent from military registries, a Federation engine paired with an Imperial core, a bootleg operating system coded by who-knew-what programmer, fitted with knockoff weapons from god-knows-where and outer armor roughly welded from sheet metal—a virtually complete, fully functional killing machine! With a suitable pilot and sufficient firepower and weaponry, it had enough damn juice to storm the Governor's mansion and execute the Governor himself! What are you doing? What the hell does the Wild Gathering want? Have you gone mad?! Are you trying to reenact the Tianyuan White Stag Turmoil from over two hundred years ago?!