As president of the Union, John was lodged in a seaside manor on Garde City’s coast—the highest level of protocol Glenaut afforded foreign dignitaries.
Since John still had to handle a slew of visits and meetings with Glenaut’s political and business circles—and of course with Lingman Corporation—and because Yvette was worried about Lianna and Firefly, she had him drop her off midway.
Anything else she needed to ask could be handled online. As a high-level rune hacker, she wasn’t worried about leaks.
Soon, she was back at the rental flat in the old district. Pushing the door open, she found Lianna already asleep while Firefly watched over her. With a long exhale, Firefly said, “I just saw on the net there was a combat incident at Lingman University. I’m so glad you’re okay, Sis.”
“Yeah—but it’s been handled,” Yvette said. “And I met a friend along the way.” In her head, she added: more like discovered a friend’s true face.
Then she asked, “No suspicious figures nearby, right?”
“Absolutely none. I’ve been monitoring the whole time,” Firefly said with certainty.
Yvette nodded. It seemed the scent-based tech support Lin-trans Biotech had provided Lingman only let them detect her residual scent on campus.
Which made sense. For scent-tracking, the old district—with hundreds of smells swirled into a stench—left little room to operate. Lingman University was different: clean air, and she often walked the same routes. A few keen-nosed dogs could probably sniff out several of her usual lecture-poaching spots.
Come to think of it, things had gotten a bit loud tonight. She could consider finding a new hidey-hole—though with this dream nearly over, the future could wait for the future. Maybe next time she came in, she’d be strong enough to force a megacorp to give up on Zero and One by herself.
In the second half of the night, Firebearer replied to the message Yvette had sent. “The matter’s settled, Miss Nameless,” he said. “But I recommend you leave Glenaut soon. No one can guarantee Lingman won’t try something off the books. And I won’t be staying here on this visit.”
“All right. Thank you for your help, comrade,” Yvette said, pausing. “And of course I won’t accept it for free. Next time the organization needs something, I can lend a hand.”
Firebearer sent a smiling emoji—clearly in good spirits.
“I still have some questions,” Yvette said.
“Ask away,” he replied.
“Is the Civilization Preservation Society your personal organization—or a secret agency of the Union?” Yvette asked.
It was a crucial question, but Firebearer’s answer was a little tangential: “Do you remember when you first discovered the Civilization Preservation Society?”
“Year 2124.” Yvette dug through her memory. It wasn’t that far in the past, but after centuries in the Lands of Termination, it was still hazy. It took several minutes before a picture formed.
That was her second time entering the dream, on Ish Island’s Blackwater Zone. Now it was the last two days of 2130—almost 2131—so nearly seven years had gone by.
“Yes—seven years already,” Firebearer said, voice tinged with reminiscence. “Back then I was just a rising figure in the Conservative Party. How would I have had the authority to approve a state agency? Don’t forget—even publicity I had to do myself, sneaking posts onto forums online, and thousands of them went ignored. Oh—do you remember what you were doing then?”
Yvette blinked, surprised. “So the hacker trading blows with me back then was you?”
If she hadn’t discovered a top-tier rune hacker behind the Civilization Preservation Society, Yvette wouldn’t have taken an interest in the group. She’d never imagined she’d been in a hacking duel with a future president—and fought him to a draw.
From that alone, it followed that President John was a hidden heavyweight with deep mastery in runology and rune compilation.
“Yes. That was me,” Firebearer confirmed. “So you see—this was a private organization I founded long ago. Even today, its headcount is small. Counting you, the entire organization still hasn’t topped thirty. The vast majority are on the Blacktide Continent,
with a few on Jadeite and Silvermirror. They gather rare, preservable classified data for me and, at necessary moments, take action to keep the times from straying off course.”
“Incredible,” Yvette thought. By reputation, President John’s record was beyond “bad”: he’d stabbed voters in the back once in office, handed Black Tower Pharmaceuticals and Lin-trans Biotech protective policies and subsidies, and was dogged by corruption cases.
That he was Firebearer? It was like a playboy secretly being Batman—hard to believe.
“Hard to believe, huh? Everyone calls me ‘Crap John,’ after all.” Firebearer sent a laughing emoji and a photo: years ago at a protest, a silver-haired girl with a stunning face and a dopey-cute expression marched at the very front, holding a placard that read “Crap John.” She was impossibly adorable and eye-catching.
“…” Yvette felt a little awkward. She remembered doing it for six hundred credits. She hadn’t expected the man himself to notice—and save the news screencap.
“Haha. Just kidding,” Firebearer added, even more amused.
After a brief silence, Yvette thought of the earlier fight and asked, “Do you know what that ‘Green Angel’ driven by Lingman actually is?”
She’d never seen a magic that directly leeched life force. Not even life magic or natural magic recorded anything like it. What’s more, later the Green Angel manifested the ability to conjure magical creatures from nothing.
In origin civilization, “magical creatures” and “elementals” existed only as artistic fantasy—utterly absent in reality.
Only in research into the ancient civilization thirty thousand years ago had anyone found a hint that magical creatures might have existed.
But like dragons, they’d long since vanished into history’s dust.
“I know very little about the Green Angel,” Firebearer admitted. “But I can infer its birth comes from the ‘Green Diadem’—just as Zero and One come from the ‘Divine Molt.’”
“Green Diadem?” Yvette seized on the key term.
“Yes. At this point, I won’t keep back intel so closely tied to the Eight Corporations, Comrade Nameless,” Firebearer wrote—his words grave. “Consider it laying a foundation for deeper cooperation in the future.”
Yvette: “Mm. Go on.”
“Just as Blacktide has the ‘Divine Molt,’ the ‘Eclipse Seeds,’ and the ‘Abyss,’ the megacorps of Jadeite and Silvermirror each have analogous phenomena—one per faction.”
“On Silvermirror, Skyvault Technologies’ special item is the ‘Heartcore’; Cindertrace Chemicals has the ‘Noetic Embers’; the Riftsky Group holds the ‘Void Mirror’; and Gravity Group, the ‘Soul Husk.’ Strip away the odd codenames, and in essence they share a single source—you can think of them as split off from Skyvault’s ‘Heartcore.’”
“On Jadeite, there’s only Lingman Corporation and the ‘Green Diadem.’ That’s why you can feel how out-of-step Lingman’s tech is—not just from the others, but from the world’s overall direction—especially the ‘Source Tree,’ that one-of-a-kind plant-type cloud server.”
“In fact, thirty-one years ago, the ‘Silent War’ broke out precisely because Black Tower Pharmaceuticals, Lingman, and Skyvault acquired three different things—‘Divine Molt,’ ‘Green Diadem,’ and ‘Heartcore’—and the leak of that information shocked and terrified governments worldwide.”
“Later, to court allies, two of the big three cut off portions of the ‘Divine Molt’ and the ‘Heartcore.’”
“The ‘Green Diadem,’ of course, wasn’t parceled out—perhaps no one wanted it, or for other reasons. Lingman paid with other concessions instead.”
“That chain of events led to the formation of the corporate alliance—and marked the beginning of the nation-state camp’s defeat in the Silent War.”
“As for the origins of the ‘Divine Molt,’ the ‘Green Diadem,’ and the ‘Heartcore,’ I still don’t know. But I can infer they’re relics from the civilization thirty thousand years ago.”
“In that mythic age—brimming with elements, dragons wheeling in the sky—nothing was impossible.”
“So I suspect those three things really are relics of the gods.”
Book 2: Chapter 162: Relics of the Gods
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