Zhuge Wanjun switched sides. With her connections among the Different Races, finding out whether many of them had entered Duanzhou was much easier for her than it was for the Scorching Sun Department.
Not all of the Different Races like going into the city. Most of those who have particularly obvious forms, or can’t disguise themselves as human, don’t like acting in urban areas.
If they move around in the wilderness, as long as they stay away from highways, the chances of being caught on camera are very low.
And with channels like the Water Ghost Domain and such, they can bypass supervision and appear in Duanzhou.
Since the Water Ghost Domain can get into the chemical plant Domain, there’s always a way. Without Wang Xueqi, the water ghost, assisting, there are surely other methods too.
Zhuge Wanjun kept listing names, and she knew very well this wasn’t an ordinary time when compromise was possible through constant pushing and pulling—this was a classic zero-sum game.
She wanted to live, and to survive without being hunted down afterward, she could only go all in—follow Wen Yan down this road into darkness.
At least, from the information she’d gotten so far, and from meeting Wen Yan in person, it seemed to her that Wen Yan’s side had a much better chance of winning.
She’d just asked if she could get two somewhat important clients, something plausible on the surface.
In just a few minutes, they arranged three for her—and those three all had to be booked well in advance, the kind of people even she, a senior attorney at the South Wall Law Firm, would need to schedule an appointment with days ahead to see.
Just this alone made her realize that her decisive switch this time was absolutely the right choice.
If she’d hesitated even one more day, she’d already be out of the game.
And she was right—the dog-like behavior of Fake Mo Zhicheng would never change.
She used to think that, since she’d been brainwashed, she probably wasn’t just any expendable pawn—but the very next day, he gave her a mission: if you can’t do it, just die.
She even found herself a bit naive, thinking Fake Mo Zhicheng would treat her differently at all.
In reality, she was just another piece of expendable material, maybe just a bit more valuable than the others.
Now, Fake Mo Zhicheng probably didn’t have time to care about her, so there was finally a lot she could do.
Elsewhere, Feng Yao had dark circles under his eyes. After scratching his head, his hair started falling out in handfuls.
Wen Yan wasn’t even human—the requirements he gave, what kind of insane conditions were those? If Feng Yao wanted to find something matching those, he’d have to prep every possible dataset, write an algorithm, and feed it all into a supercomputer just for the initial screening.
But the possible data involved was astronomical, and there was absolutely no way to guarantee nothing would be missed.
Feng Yao checked everything according to Wen Yan’s conditions, quickly ruling out anything about the "Zhang Fan" identity with zero results.
Which made sense—Fake Mo Zhicheng had only been using Zhang Fan’s identity for less than two days.
The focus now was to keep checking everything from when the enemy was using the "Mo Zhicheng" identity, and that was a nightmare.
Following the clues, Wen Yan could basically deduce that, during the period he became Mo Zhicheng, he was fully invested—whatever he did would be in Mo Zhicheng’s identity, never stepping out of the role.
But Mo Zhicheng was a ride-hailing driver—there were just too many people he might have interacted with, so many that even he couldn’t remember them all.
And then there’s all the routes he traveled—all over town in his car—who he could have encountered in that process would be impossible to trace in detail.
Even if it’s hard, it still needs to be checked. He trusted Wen Yan wouldn’t overlook something this serious.
If Wen Yan brought it up now, it had to be something of critical importance.
None of this was something Wen Yan could help with—he offered up the intelligence, but what came next was out of his hands, nor was it his specialty.
All he did was practice his Scorching Sun Fist again and again, until it was pure instinct; and in the rhythm of training, he could finally settle down enough to think.
Fake Mo Zhicheng was already in the midst of switching roles—so, what exactly was that True Architect?
In a hotel in Duanzhou, Fake Mo Zhicheng, in the form of Zhang Fan, was indeed no longer in his room.
The cellphone for the "Zhang Fan" identity was just left tossed in the hotel room.
But the man himself had quietly gone down to the lowest level of the hotel’s underground parking garage, to a locked room.
This had originally been a small utility storage room, but once a leak flooded it, and a staffer—no one ever figured out how—drowned inside. After that, the place was sealed off.
He took out a key and opened the door. Half the room was filled with water, the water tinged with a trace of black.
He took off his glasses and became, in an instant, a completely ordinary-looking person, someone who looked friendly when he smiled—his real face.
After gearing up, he slipped into the water, instantly vanishing as if into the black depths of the Deep Sea.
He kept his eyes shut, using his equipment to speed through the water. After more than ten minutes, he broke to the surface, opened his eyes—and it was as if he had returned to the storage room in the basement again.
Only this time, there were still a few shelves left, all of them rusted over.
The place was filled with emptiness, oppression, and the stillness of death—a tiny Domain of its own.
He stepped out of the water and pushed open the storage room door. Outside there was nothing but darkness, a void, as if nothing existed at all.
He stood there, reached out a hand into the black nothingness, closed his eyes, and thought deeply for a long while, then stepped into the dark.
"There should be a concrete floor here."