Master of Kaidan
Chapter 73: Trojan Horse Plan

Chapter 73: Chapter 73: Trojan Horse Plan

Listening to Kaidan’s oddly accented, loose-packaged English, Jeston found himself caught between laughter and tears for a moment. However, no matter what, the other party indeed intended to communicate and had the ability, so that made things easier.

He sized up Feng Xue with interest, but he also knew he needed to consider Fran’s feelings, so he said to Fran,

"Dr. Fran, this ghost is quite interesting. Let’s keep it for now. You can start your experiments with others first, um, ghosts don’t last very long here anyway, do they?"

"You’re right," Fran replied, his one eye scanning Feng Xue before deciding not to push back hard against Jeston. After all, this prison was the other party’s property, and his own people were the other party’s men. It wouldn’t do any good to insist on things here.

He nonchalantly pointed at a random prisoner, and immediately two burly Prison Guards opened the iron gate and, after a beating, dragged the poor ghost away from the prison.

Watching the dismal state of his fellow prisoner, the others couldn’t help but feel the sorrow of the perishing rabbit and the hunting hound. Feng Xue, on the other hand, was relieved that the wheelchair user had left and spoke a relatively standard version of Victorian language:

"Can you speak Chinese?"

Even though the phrase sounded very non-standard to Jeston’s ears, compared to those sentences that even Victorians needed to think hard about to understand, Jeston felt this one was very standard.

But...

Why would this ghost ask in Yan Country’s language?

Was he more proficient in Yan Country’s language than Victorian?

Regrettably, Jeston was just a wealthy son who owned a private prison, mastering a foreign language really wasn’t in his line of work, especially the notoriously difficult Yan Country’s language.

Of course, with the funds at his disposal, hiring a Yan Country language translator wouldn’t be an issue, but Jeston was somewhat worried that the translator might deceive him. After all, he had heard that joke about the "bank robber who couldn’t speak English and gave away his cash stash to a pressing translator." What if this ghost had something incredible to say, and the translator didn’t tell him? Wouldn’t that be a huge loss?

This was a ghost capable of communication!

Seeing Jeston’s hesitation, Feng Xue gathered that this man didn’t understand Yan Country’s language and immediately said,

"Dictionary need!"

Jeston, listening to this broken English, finally caught on and clapped his hand, saying,

"Yes! Dictionary! Jon, get me a Yan-Victorian dictionary, the most comprehensive one!"

"Got it, boss." One of his bodyguards immediately nodded and left the passage. Seeing that communication was short-lived, Jeston felt a bit bored and simply had a chair brought over to slow down and engage in conversation with this interesting ghost.

Jeston wasn’t completely ignorant about ghosts; after all, his dad was rich enough, and in the Columbia Federation, having money was the equivalent of having everything.

Although he, the youngest son, wasn’t favored and might not inherit much of the estate, he could still manage to grasp some secrets. It was precisely because of this that he could understand just how beneficial a communicative ghost could be.

While for the common folk ignorant of these matters, ghosts mostly brought slaughter and suffering, what did that have to do with Jeston? All he saw were the benefits brought by ghosts!

Those magic items were all money!

It was only because ghosts couldn’t communicate that they could only obtain magic items by hunting ghosts. No one really understood how these fascinating gadgets came to be, and now, with a communicative ghost appearing, did this mean that he might learn the origins of these magic items?

However, Feng Xue’s vocabulary in Victoria’s language was seriously limited. Even after racking his brains, he could only recall words like school, parents, grandparents, and morning, afternoon, evening. As for more nouns... Um, Saber, Lancer, Rider, do those count?

The difficulty in communication quickly frazzled Jeston’s patience. He settled back into his chair, quietly waiting for his subordinates to return. However, what came back first was not a dictionary but a USB drive.

"Boss, this is from Kalomi, just sent over." The bodyguard handed Jeston the USB drive with a smartphone interface. Upon hearing this, Jeston immediately plugged it into his smartphone, and soon, the image of a dilapidated street unfolded on the phone’s media player.

Jeston found that he fast-forwarded through the waiting part of the footage. After all, he had already watched such boring waiting scenes several times.

The Trojan Horse Plan, when it comes down to it, is unexpectedly simple—

Although they couldn’t manufacture a portal, they could pinpoint people who had gone missing, vanished without a trace. As long as they confirmed someone had indeed disappeared, they could stake out the spot where the person last was. If a ghost showed up in the meantime, they’d just kill it outright—this was currently the mainstream strategy for hunting ghosts to acquire magic items. (Chen Xiyao had run away from home, so no one knew exactly where she had gone missing.)

The Trojan Horse Plan, however, was an upgraded version developed based on some intelligence Dr. Fran had heard on the other side of the portal. It entailed letting the ghost that emerged go, continue waiting, and when the tortured, barely human Divine Hider returned, they’d forcefully prevent the portal from closing and shove a person implanted with a timed explosive into it, ensuring that person would die on the other side of the portal.

According to Dr. Fran, a real person dying there could trigger a terrible disaster which might force more ghosts to come out. Of course, the first experiment was a failure; they sent the person over, but no more ghosts emerged from behind the portal. Jeston thought he’d been played by Fran, but about twenty days later, a substantial number of ghosts did indeed appear near where they had forced the person through.

(Just to avoid any misunderstandings, let me just mention that Fran didn’t know about the portal that appeared in the landfill site being rebuilt; he just wanted to use a human bomb to retaliate. He had no idea his plan would accidentally succeed.)

The problem with this experiment was that it required them to passively wait for someone to go missing. Furthermore, they had no way of confirming when and where the subsequent ghost outbreak would occur. Since Jeston had picked up Dr. Fran, they had carried out the experiment five times, but this was the first time it had successfully ambushed the ghosts.

The video quickly flashed before Jeston’s eyes, and suddenly, his eyes lit up. The door swung open, and as the ghosts, faces filled with excitement and frenzy, rushed out and were mowed down by bullets, he felt an exhilarating thrill. But in the next moment, his brows suddenly twitched because he saw that this ghost, who spoke Victoria’s language, had actually summoned a golden box!

Then, he actually placed several things inside that box!

As he watched the box vanish into thin air, Jeston’s eyes turned red. Though he didn’t know what had been put inside, by putting himself in their shoes, Jeston felt it must certainly be magic items!

He must make the ghost hand over all those magic items!

That was Jeston’s first thought, but immediately, it was replaced by another, even more fervent thought—

Why did this ghost have so many magic items? He seemed to have mentioned the word "Blacksmith" before. Could he possibly be manufacturing magic items?!