Dragon Clan: Thought So Far.

Chapter 569 555. Selling Time
"There is some unfriendly information that I have to tell Her Royal Highness." Bunin clapped his hands, and the maids came out from the shadows of the small hall that could not be illuminated by the fire and quietly collected the remaining food scraps on the long dining table.

Although they were called leftovers, they were actually hardly touched. Even a heartless person like Lu Mingfei couldn't eat much in such a situation.

"What information?" Zero asked.

"The power of Kassel Academy is far greater than you think. Perhaps the Romanov family, as the former masters of this country, believes that our government today will not be infiltrated by an organization from across the Pacific Ocean. But I have to tell you that more than three platoons of GRU special forces have received secret missions after you entered Moscow and disappeared in the vast wilderness of Siberia." Bunin said.

"There are many people in the Kremlin who are my friends and they told me not to get involved in your affairs."

Ling drank coldly, and after a moment she said: "But you finally decided to stand on our side. Was it because of the business in Siberia? Or was it because of the pressure from China?"

"The land of the Far East is not the land of the Slavs. The cold wind of Siberia is as sharp as a knife when blowing on the faces of Russians as it is when blowing on the faces of Mongolians." Bunin said, "You are right. Almost more than 80% of my business in that frozen land depends on my Chinese friends who come from the other side of the port. Unfortunately, this is not the reason why I choose to stand on your side."

Ling raised her eyes, and there was no fluctuation in her expression in her platinum pupils. She just looked at Bunin's old face coldly.

"This room is in a strong magnetic field environment. Any communication equipment will be ineffective around us... I chose to receive you and Mr. Lu here not because I don't want to break the rules. In fact, the respected Romanov family deserves to be treated with any standard specifications." Bunin sat in his high leather chair until the maids who were cleaning up the mess stepped silently through the door of the room, and a clicking sound came from the originally thick door niche.

He took out a box from under the table, and Zero's pupils contracted slightly when he saw it.

It is black and is probably made of aluminum alloy. It looks no different from the equipment box of Kassel Academy.

There was nothing strange about this, the identical boxes didn't mean anything, what really shocked Zero was the huge gilded emblem on it.

A tree with vine-like branches and leaves wrapped around every edge of the box.

It was a world tree in full bloom.

The emblem of Kassel Academy is a half-rotten world tree, half dead and half alive, symbolizing the gap between life and death, and also symbolizing the nature of hybrids. The Half-rotten World Tree aims to tell every student and executive department commissioner that they are a species between dragons and humans, and are not accepted by either group.

So what does the flourishing World Tree mean? Zero made a judgment almost immediately.

"This is why I am willing to help Your Highness and Mr. Lu." Bunin patted the box, and a dull sound came from the box.

Zero hesitated: "What's in here?"

"Time." Bunin said coldly.

For a moment, Ling saw a kind of indifferent hatred in the old man's eyes, but then that hatred immediately turned into deep greed.

Ling was stunned for a moment, and suddenly a smile appeared on her plain little face. The smile gradually turned into a kind of mockery. "You can say that it contains the lost crown of the Romanov family, or you can tell me that the box stores the bones left after Jesus was killed, but you told me that time is placed in the box..." She sneered disdainfully, "Don't be ridiculous, Mr. Bunin. We all know that the only fair thing in this world is that time will flow through everyone. It will not change because of power and wealth. No matter whether it is Tutankhamun buried in the pyramids of the Valley of the Kings in the Nile River Basin or the medieval beggars whose bodies may have decayed so far, death will eventually come... If time can really be put into a box and sold, then China should still be ravaged by the iron hoof of the Qin Empire, and Attila, the Whip of God, is still lashing every piece of land from the Ural Mountains to the west."

"I know you don't want to believe me, but I think you must have heard the story that every winter Alexander Bunin and his friends would take a train to Siberia and disappear on the vast ice field, right?" Bunin shook his head and pressed his hands on the so-called treasure that hid time.
"Every year, young people with different faces would accompany me on the journey eastward. Huge amounts of money would disappear in the Moscow market, as if a monster that devoured money was sitting on a throne on that plain waiting for our tribute... In fact, there was no difference. Every year, we would trade time in a city in Siberia. The young people seen by the outside world were actually their ancestors. They were just old men who had regained their youth. They set out on the journey eastward again only because the time they bought from God had been used up, and they were eager to have a new life."

This is an incredible story, even Zero is unwilling to believe it.

Time was indeed stagnant in her body, but she knew why. It was a miracle that was difficult to replicate and an honor that no one else could obtain. Even people like Angers who had made a deal with the devil were constantly aging, but new vitality was still radiating from their aging bodies.

"You and Mr. Lu were once core members of the Kassel Academy, and the Romanov family is also a behemoth that controls the syndicate... I know many big shots in Moscow, and they are willing to be my umbrellas, because I spend hundreds of millions of dollars as my protection fee every year. Some of them are customers who have bought time from me... But I guess it's not difficult to find out with your methods that there is actually not much liquid funds in my personal account that I can actually use myself." Bunin smiled self-deprecatingly.

"Alexander Bunin, who is so famous in the circle of the rich and powerful, is actually just a puppet pushed to the front by a big shot. Isn't this ridiculous?"

"You mean you're actually working for someone else." Zero frowned.

"This is why, even though time is sold in my hands, I can never get it myself." Bunin nodded.

"I'm still skeptical of what you're saying." Zero remained unmoved.

"Then let me show you." Bunin unlocked the box and pressed a certain mechanism. There was a sound of gears turning inside the thing. After a moment, the box was slowly opened with a click.

It made a teeth-grinding squeak when it opened, and the rust on the wheel fell onto the birch table that looked to be two hundred years old.

Ling stared closely at the dark space in the gap of the box, as if he could sense a pair of eyes filled with cruelty and hideousness looking at him.

A pair of hands as old as dead branches opened the lid of the box and took out the things inside.

It turned out to be a sealed quartz jar. Probably it had been placed in an extremely cold environment, and the surface of the jar was covered with thick frost.

Zero slowly put a hand under the hem of her navy blue coat. She never went out without a weapon. A Glock pistol was fixed to the hem of her coat, ready to fire at any time. As if she hadn't noticed Zero's action, Bunin wiped off the frost on the surface of the quartz jar and handed it to Her Royal Highness.

There was some kind of transparent liquid in the jar, and in the center of the liquid a yellow-green mollusk was slowly wriggling in an inert state. It was a leech that was so large that it was somewhat scary.

But this leech was slowly entangled by the dark gold and blue-silver chains, and the ends of the chains were connected to every corner of the quartz jar, like a cage specially used to imprison this insect.

The moment he saw the bug, Ling believed what Bunin said.

The Word Spirit. Mirror Pupil was activated in an instant, and the structure of the leech was like a slice, displayed in detail and bloody in Zero's eyes.

But what really caught her attention was not the thing's nondescript soft tissue, but the fluid stored in its body.

It looks like blood and some kind of cell extract. To put it another way, it's serum.

A dragon's serum, a noble first-generation serum.

A strengthening medicine extracted from the black snake's body.

But the method was too crude, even inferior to the Molotov cocktails used by the ghosts. If it had not originally come from a noble king, this thing might have been the most unsuccessful one among evolutionary drugs.

"Leech is not special. What's important is the serum stored in its body. It was originally a biological tool for storing serum. The active liquid will not deteriorate in a short period of time. When it sucks someone's blood, it will also inject the serum back into that person's body." Bunin said softly, "During the Soviet era, the Super Soldier Project and the God Project were researched. This thing is the legacy of those two projects."

The serum extracted from the body of the first generation may indeed have a certain degree of similarity with the real golden holy serum, but after all, it cannot completely eliminate the toxicity of dragon blood, so the side effects are huge.

The real blood of the Dragon King's fetus can indeed make a dying old man return to his youth, just like Herzog in another world line, who shed his aging shell after becoming the White King.

But serum can't do that.

Before Zero had time to observe the leech in the quartz jar for too long, Bunin stuffed it back into the box.

"This thing is not complete. It is the first generation and has huge side effects, so the boss will put this sample in my hands." Bunin said with a smile.

"I know that Christina accepted a transformation plan called Nibelungen at Kassel College. She told me about it after it happened. Otherwise, I would never agree to her doing this... It is said that the Nibelungen Plan can completely eliminate the hidden danger in Christina's body, that is, ALS. Unfortunately, the plan did not go smoothly. The second phase has been delayed, and she broke up with the college."

Zero realized what Bunin was trying to do.

She also learned about what happened to Christina from Lu Mingfei. This girl from Moscow, like her, was actually a patient with a rare genetic disease. The ALS lurking in her body would end Christina's life when she was around 20 years old.

The reason why Caesar had to take the Deliaste to dive into the Abyss and make some achievements was to strive for the opportunity to restart the Nibelung Project from the Academy and apply this opportunity to Christina to completely heal her.

"Do you want to get a new serum to heal Christina?" Zero asked.

Bunin was silent for a moment. "According to the boss's plan, I should have retired this year, that is, I should have quit the game after the next trip to Siberia with those aging young people and presided over the transaction. But he did not allow me to participate in the competition... I know that all the serums were produced at the beginning of the year. Your Highness Romanova, you and Mr. Lu are both courageous and capable people. I hope you can help Christina take the latest serum from the depths of that city. This is my condition. As long as you can do it, the whole Siberia will be unimpeded for you. My army will become your highness's sword. No matter whether it is the GRU special forces or the pursuers from Kassel Academy who are blocking your way, they will only be greeted by PPSh submachine guns and hypersonic shells."

Rushing into a heavily guarded city and taking away the most valuable things in it was a huge test even for Lu Mingfei and Ling. Moreover, they urgently wanted to rush to the Black Swan Port north of Verkhoyansk as soon as possible to find out the truth of that year.

"I really want to reject you." said Zero.

Bunin's face showed joy.

"But your daughter is Caesar Gattuso's daughter, and Caesar Gattuso is Lu Mingfei's friend." Ling sighed, "I know him. People like Lu Mingfei actually have very few friends. Maybe he has experienced too many things. He hopes that everyone around him lives well. Even if they had their own ulterior motives when they first met... In fact, even if you don't put this condition into our deal, as long as he knows that this serum is necessary to cure Christina's ALS, Lu Mingfei will definitely do it."

“I am grateful that fate has allowed my daughter to meet friends like you.”

"But……"

"what?"

"Nothing." Zero shook his head.

She was just curious. It seemed that Bunin loved Christina very much. If that was the case, why did he hand her over to her adoptive father and even change her surname to Kabaeva?

(End of this chapter)