Blind Spot
Chapter 585 - 537 amazed 1

Chapter 585: 537 amazed 1

Returning to the office, Dunis had already settled on the sofa, panting and drinking water—it was clear everything had been taken care of.

Upon seeing Li Chengyi enter, an expression of helplessness immediately spread across his face.

"Boss, about what just happened...."

"It’s in the past now, it’s fine. Next time if someone else comes, I’ll take care of it myself," Li Chengyi said with a smile.

Dunis had no words to respond, only able to stare at him with a look of resentment—a grown man’s resentful gaze that made Li Chengyi’s heart skip a beat.

"Alright, alright, I have a task for you. Collect information on all the large-scale crowd events that have occurred around this block in the last five years," Li Chengyi knew his efficiency would be too low if he went to ask around himself. It was better to have a native who was familiar with the area on the job.

"No problem. But...." Dunis was cut off before he could finish speaking.

"The expenses will be deducted from the agency’s account. Anything up to a million is fine." Li Chengyi had brought over quite a few gold bars, gold being universally valuable and easy to use.

Compared to diamonds, which could be synthetically produced, gold and silver are non-renewable resources, and many places use them as precious metals.

"Understood," Dunis said resignedly.

Nilan, who had been following behind and listening to their conversation, puffed up her cheeks, clearly dissatisfied.

As soon as Li Chengyi finished giving instructions and left, she dragged her father to a corner.

"Dad, do you really think this guy is up to snuff? I feel like our boss really isn’t cutting it. I had to call him back to handle the situation just now, and he stopped halfway. It was my best friend’s last-minute help that drove the two away."

"It’s not like that. Mr. Li doesn’t seem like that kind of person. After all, with so much money, there’s no need for him to get involved in these murky waters. You must have misunderstood," Dunis’s thoughts weren’t so simple, but he had begun to see a bit of the truth.

"Have you considered that maybe he wants to reap the benefits without putting in any effort?" Nilan retorted.

"That.... Can’t be, can it? He’s kept me on as an employee.... There’s no need for that," Dunis hesitated.

"Outward appearances can be deceiving, and the human heart is unpredictable," Nilan, despite her young age, began to educate her father. "I think we’d better prepare in advance for a quick getaway, just in case he never intended to exert himself or couldn’t even if he wanted to. That way, if something happens, we’d have a place to run."

"There’s no rush. I trust that Mr. Li isn’t that kind of person," Dunis shook his head.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t fathom why Li Chengyi would do such a thing. If he didn’t want to attract trouble, why didn’t he simply not hire him in the first place?

Seeing that she couldn’t persuade her father, Nilan could only pout slightly in resignation, staring in the direction of the office study as if trying to burn holes through the door with her gaze, fixating on the Li Chengyi sitting inside.

She was unaware, however, that at that moment the study office was completely empty, not a single person in sight.

In the city center of Ludian City, at the government office.

Within the empty office, government official Wenlin Sarton sat at his desk, tiredly rubbing his temples.

The black phone had just been placed back on the receiver, and the documents on the table still retained the warmth of having just been printed.

In the coffee cup on the right, the steam from the hot milk had already cooled off.

He was busy signing the newly delivered documents to the extent that he even forgot to drink his breakfast milk.

Knock, knock, knock.

Suddenly, somebody knocked on the door. The rhythmic knocking was neither fast nor slow, showing the steady patience of the person outside.

"Come in," Wenlin said in a low voice.

Not just anyone could enter here. Ordinary visitors would be stopped by the triple-gate of security outside, consisting of the guards, the Hunter inspectors, and his secretary Batty.

So, anyone who managed to come to his door was someone he was willing to meet.

Click.

The door was gently pushed open, and a man with silver-white hair wearing a black, form-fitting trench coat slowly walked in, closing the door behind him.

The man naturally took a seat in the guest chair in front of the desk, his black eyes flecked with gold focusing on Wenlin.

"Let me introduce myself—my name is Li Chengyi, and I’m currently the owner of a detective agency," he said.

"I don’t recall scheduling this meeting," Wenlin frowned at him. Merely the owner of a detective agency, and not even a large one at that, certainly did not qualify to be in this office.

He must have found some other underhanded means to sneak in—a small fry.

He immediately reached for the telephone receiver, ready to call his secretary to have the man ejected.

"If I were you, I wouldn’t do that," Li Chengyi spoke calmly. "A man who can enter your office freely, bypassing all other security, what you should do now is not provoke him, but rather try to listen to and understand his demands."

Wenlin’s hand, which was grabbing the receiver, halted. He had been bluffed.

He had been too tired to realize it at first, but now that he had snapped back to reality, it was clear what it meant for this man to be sitting there.

"Alright then, Mr. Li Chengyi, are you willing to tell me what it is that makes you willing to take such a risk to sneak in here, just to see me?" He let go of the receiver and looked earnestly at the man.

Li Chengyi, the name had a distinctly foreign style, clearly not a local of Ludian.

"Of course not," Li Chengyi casually picked up a document from the table and glanced through it.

"I’m just here to test the security forces. I was planning to visit the city’s Hunter Division, but since I have some things to handle here as well, I decided to make a trip here first."

In the time since his arrival in the area, Li Chengyi hadn’t only been keeping watch over the Floral Bead’s residual scents in the agency; he had rapidly become familiar with all the covert situations within the entire city.

Ludian is under the jurisdiction of the Anze within the Venus Federation and is one of its hundreds of municipalities.

All the security and military forces in the city are mainly managed by the Hunter Division. Unlike on Earth-Moon, where firepower and firearms take precedence, here the focus is on Hunters, with soldiers in support.

They need to defend not against conventional firearms, but against a wide variety of strange and eccentric adversaries from various Church Groups and countries.

Tactics involving large numbers of people are useless here. Only the elite are the key to ensuring everything remains stable.

This also led to hunters being akin to celebrities in the eyes of those who are aware of the shadowy world, both throughout the entire Federation and even the whole of Anze.

Powerful hunters were packaged and promoted as celebrities, causing the land around their residences to skyrocket in value, bringing them both fame and fortune.

The Federation government even came up with a hunter ranking system, completely financializing a portion of hunters, to the extent that a single powerful hunter could go public on the dark market to raise investments and gather funds.

Yet, the most contradictory aspect was that hunters did not possess any special abilities, at best they simply reached the pinnacle of human limits in terms of prime quality and skill. They still faced extremely high levels of danger when confronting various monstrous adversaries.

The downside of this celebritization was that the hunters who could remain active were all extremely adept at self-promotion.

As for the genuine, hardworking hunters, those who dared to do so were simply not fond of dying quickly enough.

"So, Mr. Li, you may now state your purpose here." Wen Lin adjusted his attitude, earnestly saying.

"I need the records of all crowd-gathering incidents that occurred around my office in the past five years," Li Chengyi stated.

"Crowd gathering? Do festivals count?" Wen Lin frowned.

"They count."

"That’s easy to manage. Major activities are all recorded." Wen Lin opened a drawer and rummaged through it for a while, quickly taking out a brown plastic-covered file bag.

The hefty file bag was filled with stacks of documents.

He handed it over to Li Chengyi.

The latter took it, quickly opened it, and scanned through it swiftly.

With hundreds of words on a single document page, Li Chengyi managed to comprehend it with just a glance.

His powerful Consciousness Power allowed him to easily master the languages and scripts of the Venus Federation, which compared to the highly difficult Black Sea Script, was much easier.

A document with over a dozen pages was like flipping through a book in his hands, read in one go.

As he flipped through, Wen Lin patiently sat in his original position, waiting for the outcome.

He pondered the power that the other party might belong to.

The name Li Chengyi bore the style reminiscent of the eastern Dongting, where the Ascension Sect Country’s names commonly adopt such a style.

But the Ascension Sect Country was far from here, with several powers in between. For such an individual to suddenly appear here, what was their purpose?

Seeking records of crowd gatherings was clearly for the purpose of an investigation.

Was it to investigate the people involved, the event itself, or to find an object?

If it was to find a person or object, they would definitely leverage the authority of municipal governance; the fact that he said he would visit the Hunter Division implied that he was not a hunter, and that his camp or power did not care about hunters.

If he was a member of the Sunlight Council, a simple directive from above would suffice to get the job done, with no need for such complications.

So...

The identity of the other party was almost within reach.

An outsider with substantial strength, not from a hostile force, who had just come from afar to search for something!

Realizing this, Wen Lin’s heart instantly warmed with excitement.

"Are you looking for someone, Mr. Li?" he asked in a low voice.

"Yes," Li Chengyi nodded. Wasn’t it precisely to make the other party follow his intent that he had revealed so much information on purpose?

"If the person you’re looking for has a similar name to yours, then an extreme altercation occurred four years ago near Snowboat Street. People from the Hades Congregation and a group of unknown origin came into conflict, resulting in many casualties on both sides; and before the Hades Congregation could deploy a high-ranking Bishop, that group mysteriously vanished," Wen Lin quickly said.

"I still remember that incident vividly. The Hades Congregation is a member of the Sunlight Council, and they had the right to deal with the other party according to their internal rules after providing evidence that the opposition violated regulations. Therefore, our Hunter Division had no right to intervene."

He paused, then continued, "What we didn’t expect later on was that the group successfully repelled the Church Group’s forces and withdrew on their own, leaving the city district."

"Do you know the identity of that group?" Li Chengyi asked.

"Most of them had yellow skin and black eyes, with several of them displaying extreme speed and enlarged physiques in action. There were also individuals who controlled some kind of fast-moving metal weapons for offense and defense. But they seemed quite fragile by nature, a power with both very obvious strengths and weaknesses," Wen Lin responded.

A chill struck Li Chengyi’s heart. Wasn’t this Flying Yi?

Although Flying Yi was fast, ferocious, and precise, Feiyi Masters themselves were actually quite weak. With a change in the fundamental rules, the strength of Feiyi Masters was bound to be drastically reduced; it made sense for them to fight without causing a huge commotion.

Having heard this, he was almost certain that these were the people from the Mingyuan Group.

"Anything else?"

"That’s all. We inquired all over at the time and still don’t know the origins of that group.

If you want to know more, you can only go to the Hades Congregation. However... they believe in the gods of the Underworld and possess some kind of Mysterious Power. If you’re not very confident, I suggest you first get clear information from the Hunter Division," Wen Lin advised sincerely.

After confirming the other party’s identity and origins, he knew that his opportunity had arrived.

All along, he had been in a rather awkward position, being the chief municipal official and also the deputy of the Hunter Division.

But in reality, the power of the hunters and the municipal government were both far inferior to the various Church Groups.

The reason they could maintain the current balance was merely due to mutual checks and balances among the other Church Group forces in the Sunlight Council.

Within the hunters, there was actually a dire lack of truly powerful experts.

Although the hunters had recruited many experts close to the Church Groups by various means, making them owe favors, these were ultimately not as good as having their own powerful masters.

"In the city district, the Hades Congregation and the New Moon Congregation are the largest forces, balancing each other out. If you want to investigate further, you could exchange information with the New Moon Congregation. Let me give you a tip: that group of Blood Tribe actually takes the spirit of contracts very seriously and act just like ordinary people when not feeding on blood. Claiming to be nobles, they place great importance on promises and oaths," Wen Lin hinted but did not elaborate further.