A car stopped at the hospital entrance. Doctors and nurses came out with a stretcher, and Long Ling was quickly lifted out of the back seat and taken into the operating room.

After those four left her behind to go after Wen Yuxian, Long Ling immediately crawled out of the cave on her elbows. What a joke. She was the young lady of the Long family. Why should she go work for some shady organization like that? Besides, there was no guarantee they would really take her in. They might just kill her instead.

She stumbled and rolled through the dark all the way down the mountain. She broke several bones, passed out a few times, and yet each time she woke up again with the stubbornness of a cockroach. In the end, she really did make it to the roadside, where a kind passerby found her and brought her to the hospital.

After treatment, her whole body was wrapped in casts, and her entire head was covered in bandages. She looked miserable. When Long Ankang and An Yao rushed over and saw her, they cried out on the spot.

“What happened? How did this happen?”

“Forget that for now. Go find out whether Tang Qiaoqiao has gone home yet,” Long Ling said with difficulty. She was so anxious she felt like she was going mad. Now that she had barely survived, she had started panicking about what came next.

It would be best if Tang Qiaoqiao were already dead. If she was dead, then everything would be fine. If she wasn’t, with Tang Qiaoqiao’s personality, she would never let this go. Deep down, Long Ling desperately hoped Tang Qiaoqiao had survived only to be taken by that organization for experiments.

As for the video on that woman’s phone, if they didn’t think she was worth using, they probably wouldn’t bother releasing it just to target her. After all, she was only an ordinary person. And if they did want to use her, they would first contact her and threaten her. So she wasn’t too worried.

“No, no. Contact the Zhou family first. Hurry.”

……

Before going home, Tang Qiaoqiao first stopped by the hotel owned by Chen Mo’s family and called him.

Chen Mo rushed over with several big and small bags. When he saw the injuries all over her, his eyes went wide. “Did you go steal something? Not only that, you got caught by the owner and beaten half to death?”

“You’re the thief! Your whole family are thieves!” Tang Qiaoqiao snapped. She snatched the bag from him, dug out a medicine patch, pulled open her collar, and pressed it onto her chest.

At once, Chen Mo’s expression changed. “What happened?”

That was a stab wound. Even for a Atavist, the heart is a fatal spot. Damage to other internal organs might not be fatal, but a wound to the heart means instant death.

“I got tricked by that bitch Long Ling,” Tang Qiaoqiao said through gritted teeth.

“What happened? Explain it properly right now.”

“…Stop asking. I’m not telling you. Beat me to death and I still won’t say it!” Tang Qiaoqiao wasn’t good at lying, but she also refused to talk about Wen Yuxian and Zhang Simiao. After choking on it for a long time, that was the only answer she could give.

After she woke up, she asked the people from the Tribunal Division and learned that Jing Pei had shown up. It was also Jing Pei who had left word with them that if they saw Tang Qiaoqiao, they should tell her to go home. That was why she forced herself not to do anything else and came straight back, even though she was still worried.

Since Long Jin was there, and since she was so much smarter than her, Teacher Wen should be fine… right?

Tang Qiaoqiao was stubborn to the bone. If she wanted to keep a secret, she truly would take it to the grave. So Chen Mo could only leave in a rage, calling Feng Yilian while he walked away.

Only after Chen Mo left did Tang Qiaoqiao take out the phone she had picked up. It was red, covered in rhinestones, and still had plenty of battery. It had to belong to that woman. Wen Yuxian and Jing Pei didn’t use this brand. She didn’t dare hand it over to the Tribunal Division in case there was something inside that could hurt Wen Yuxian.

She took a deep breath and nervously turned it on. There was no password. That alone almost proved there were no important files on it, but Tang Qiaoqiao didn’t realize that. She still checked every function in the phone one by one.

Then she found a fresh application video recorded not long ago.

Tang Qiaoqiao’s pretty face slowly darkened and twisted like a ghost’s.

……

“Doctor, Cheng Jun failed to take away the test subject. That brat from the Long family fooled him! She actually used a Black Tortoise shell to bluff him. What a move!”

“Tsk… if we can’t take it tonight, we’ll take it tomorrow. Why panic? Is taking away one Mutant really that hard?” said the long-haired man in a white robe.

“But the test subject and its protector must still be on the mountain. Didn’t you say there had to be a Bubble on the mountain? It was already hard enough to find, and now that brat from the Long family even took Qiu Fa up there. Do you think she went to ask Qiu Fa for help?”

Otherwise, there was no reason at all for her to take Qiu Fa up the mountain. It couldn’t be that she went up there for a date, right?

“So what if she asked Qiu Fa? Tsk… Qiu Fa may be the strongest, but he still can’t go above the law. And he definitely can’t fight the mainstream thinking of this world. Even if he feels pity for a moment and protects the test subject, he can only protect it for a while. We have plenty of ways to lure him away.”

As he spoke, he walked into another room holding a syringe. Inside, a man strapped to an operating table stared in terror, his eyes wide and his body trembling.

“Even if we can’t lure it away, as long as the test subject appears in a place where a third party can come into contact with it, we’ll find a way to get what we want.” As he spoke, he injected the liquid from the syringe into the man’s body. The man soon seemed to be enduring immense pain; his blood vessels dilated, his eyes turned red, and he began convulsing violently.

Amid the blood mist created by the man’s explosion, he flashed a maniacal grin. “We are the vanguard of humanity, the future of humanity. We carry the great dreams of countless people—there is nothing we cannot achieve!”

The doctor’s bold words made the other man’s blood boil, and he calmed down.

That was right. There was no way that little girl from the Long family could protect a rational Mutant against the power of their organization, no matter what she tried. She had probably only awakened not long ago and had only just entered the world of Atavists. She hadn’t yet felt how cruel reality was or taken a proper beating from the rules of this world. That was why she still foolishly believed she could protect Zhang Simiao after she had already been exposed.

Soon enough, she would learn what it meant to care and still be helpless.

……

The next day, after yesterday’s storm swept through many prefectures across Hualan, the air was still heavy with moisture, though it looked like it would not rain again.

The heat around the Ouyang case in Bohai Prefecture had already started to fade. The police had not found enough solid evidence, so Madam Ouyang’s younger sister had already been released, though they still believed she was highly suspicious and had no plan to stop investigating.

Old Madam Ouyang, however, had already decided the two sisters were the killers. She had filed a case in court and hired the best criminal lawyer in Bohai Prefecture to fight it.

By contrast, the lawyer Madam Ouyang hired, Xiang Huagong, was unknown. He had been fired from his law firm for an absurd reason and was now handling what looked like a hopeless self-defense case tied to domestic abuse. No matter how people looked at it, Madam Ouyang seemed to be in a losing position. Even her fans were anxious for her. She had so much money, so why couldn’t she just hire someone more famous?

Because lawsuits always took time, the public had already started shifting attention to other things.

Now, what people online cared more about was another case involving another rich family in a different prefecture.

Yesterday afternoon, a maid knocked on the young master’s room after he had been napping for a long time, only to hear two voices coming from inside. She found that strange, because when the young master went in to sleep, he had clearly been alone, and no guests had arrived at the house.

She pushed the door open and went in, then was so horrified by what she saw that she stumbled out in a panic.

“This is bad, something terrible happened! Hurry… hurry and call the master and madam back!”

This wealthy family was surnamed Zhuang. They were a major name in the food business.

After breakfast that morning, Tao Ze brought Mo Weiwei here because of information from Jing Pei, taking the role of detectives.

They were not the only detectives there. There were many others too. Some were famous detectives, some were unknown, some came because they liked solving mysteries, and some came for the large reward the Zhuang family had offered.

By the time they arrived, the Zhuang family estate was already in chaos, and people from the Tribunal Division were there too.

At the center of the crowd stood two boys around thirteen or fourteen years old who looked exactly the same.

“Dad, I’m the real Lele. A few days ago, we secretly went swimming at the reservoir without telling Mom. Isn’t that a secret only the two of us know?”

“Mom, I’m the real Lele. When I was eight, I told you a secret, and you told me not to tell anyone else. Don’t you remember?”

The two boys looked exactly the same. Their timid, innocent eyes and their uncertain, weak mannerisms matched perfectly, like a copy and paste.

“It should be a curse from an Atavist whose ancestral species is called Phantom Mist. The special power of this kind of Atavist is that they can curse people weaker than themselves. If the cursed person looks into a mirror, the self inside the mirror will come out. If no one identifies which one is real within the set time—or if they identify the wrong one—then the real one dies, and the mirror self becomes real.”

One of the Tribunal Division officers said this while reading the answer his teammate had found after searching through the Illustrated Compendium of Species from the Great Convergence all night.

“Since a mirror reflects the reverse of a person, once the mirror self becomes real, it will have the exact opposite personality. In other words, if the original was very kind, the mirror version will be very evil.”

That was the greatest danger brought by this kind of Atavist criminal. It was no longer a matter of only consuming one person. It could create a dangerous criminal who might threaten society.

When Mo Weiwei heard that, he said, “My parents would probably love to find this kind of Atavist and have them cast that curse on me.”

Wouldn’t that turn the monster in their eyes into an angel?

“Don’t say nonsense. You’re fine.” Tao Ze rubbed his head and asked in a low voice, “Did you figure out which one is real?”

“I did. But who cursed him?” Mo Weiwei stroked his chin in a very grown-up way, his round black eyes sweeping over the faces at the scene.

Mr. and Mrs. Zhuang both looked strange. How to put it? Their emotions were too mixed. Worry, panic, and fear were there, but it didn’t feel like they were only afraid of losing their child. The maid and the butler also looked odd. It felt like this whole family was working together to hide some kind of secret.

“Once you figure it out, say it before the time runs out. And this time, don’t give the wrong answer on purpose. Got it?” Tao Ze warned him. Every time before, Mo Weiwei had deliberately given the wrong answer, and it had scared Tao Ze half to death. He had wanted to teach him a lesson more than once, but for some reason the boss never got angry. Instead, she told him not to blame Mo Weiwei too much and to take better care of him.

Mo Weiwei didn’t answer. Every time he deliberately gave the wrong answer, Jing Pei proved him wrong. Instead of giving up, he only became more stubborn. One day, he swore, he would trip her up.

He didn’t believe she could really stay in one place and know all the answers in the world. Take this case for example—there was no way she could sit at home and know which one was the mirror self and which one was the real young master of the Zhuang family. At the very least, she had to watch some video and study the two of them, right?

A Phantom Mist Atavist’s curse was hard to break and easy to break at the same time. You only had to identify which one was real. The hard part was that, because it was a mirror copy of the self, even the memories, behavior, and DNA were the same.

But that didn’t mean there was no way through. Since the mirror self was not truly human, it had no feelings. Everything it said and did depended on the original’s memories and habits. So if someone knew the real person well enough, they could judge from tiny details which one was real and which one was fake, and that would break the crisis.

But this couple clearly couldn’t tell which one was their real son, and the servants and butler who knew him well didn’t dare make the call either. Who could guarantee they wouldn’t be wrong? No one wanted to bear that cost. That was why they had panicked and thrown money around, asking outsiders to help.

……

After waking up, Jing Pei did what she always did first—picked up her phone, went online, and checked the news before getting up to wash.

There were still many people at the Long family breakfast table today. The huge dining hall felt almost packed full. They said that if a family had fewer than one hundred members, it didn’t even deserve the title of a “great Atavist family.” Of course, that didn’t mean all one hundred people lived in the same place.

Still, a family like the Long family—large enough in number to deserve that title, but with only one true Atavist—was very rare.

Even they themselves felt it was not very impressive. In front of the other great Atavist families, they still couldn’t fully hold their heads up. For so many years, every humiliation and every setback they had suffered came from those same great families. It had more or less turned into a shadow in their hearts. That shadow had eased a little after Jing Pei was invited to the Atavist gathering last time, but it was still there.

So when they heard Jing Pei wanted to invite people from the other families to the house for a meeting, the people at breakfast almost choked.

The noodles slipped right off Long Yiming’s chopsticks.

“What did you say?”

Jing Pei said, “Call every major Atavist family and tell them they must come to Yunjin Prefecture on time tomorrow for this meeting.”

Out of courtesy, calls like this usually had to be made by an important person in the family. Jing Pei’s rank was too high, so it wasn’t suitable for her to do it herself. Long Yiming was just right.

“…And if no one comes, won’t that be embarrassing?” Long Yiming couldn’t help asking.

Jing Pei smiled and said, “Don’t worry. They’ll come. You just prepare whatever needs to be prepared at home.”

“What exactly is this about?”

“It’s something important. Second Uncle still shouldn’t know too much for now.”

Long Yiming was so annoyed that the veins at his temples jumped, but he still quickly finished breakfast, pushed aside his morning work, and started calling the major families for Jing Pei.

…Damn it. When they brought her back, he had thought the two sides would stay out of each other’s way—that she would just be the family mascot and a figurehead young master. Yet somehow, before anyone noticed, he had actually started following her orders. Not just him. The rest of the Long family had too. Only Long Peici’s unlucky son was still thinking about Long Ling.