Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei Returns from the Elden Ring

Lu Mingfei neither dodged nor evaded, but punched the woman's arm directly. The woman felt as if she had hit a mountain. In an instant, her claws, bones, and flesh all broke. Blood spurted out from the ruptured wounds and was temporarily suspended in the air, like thick ink floating in water.

Immediately afterwards, Lu Mingfei kicked her in the abdomen, sending the woman flying backward with a gust of wind. In mid-air, her dragon form faded and she returned to human form, covered in blood and unrecognizable.

At this moment, the man's folding knife was already close to Lu Mingfei's neck. With just a light slash, Lu Mingfei's carotid artery would be severed.

A confident smile played on his lips. He would indeed coordinate attacks with women, but only women under the influence of the King's Servant and the berserk drug were truly qualified to cooperate. He knew Time Zero all too well; it was a paradox within the realm of Words of Power. In a battle of Time Zero, the only way for an ordinary hybrid to intervene was to burn their life force.

The brief moment a woman gains can be magnified 35 times in his hands!

Lu Mingfei suddenly disappeared.

The man's pupils contracted sharply, and he immediately stepped back.

The folding knife in his hand made a soft "sizzle" sound, flying out of his palm uncontrollably in a blur. Immediately afterwards, a chill ran through his wrist, and a burning pain felt like being scorched by flames.

He fell to the ground, a tearing, intense pain shooting through his calf.

Only then did he see a thin shadow against the light, which coalesced into the shape of Lu Mingfei.

“I’m clearly in the realm of time zero…” A look of confusion flashed in his eyes.

“You’re far inferior to Angers.” Lu Mingfei snapped the folding knife in half and tossed it away. A loud bang echoed through the air, slicing through the gun in the hand of the woman in the darkness at the end of the passage. The woman let out a muffled groan as the broken knife shattered the mutated bones in her body.

Shinnosuke Fujiwara had considered the possibility of failure, but he never expected it to happen in this way.

He stared blankly at the ceiling, his mouth moving.

Lu Mingfei's figure flashed, and when he reappeared, he was holding two teeth containing poison in his hand.

Fujiwara Shinnosuke looked into Lu Mingfei's eyes one last time, his face filled with confusion and fear.

He and the woman died just like that.

Not only did the two men have poison in their mouths, but they also had miniature explosives implanted in their brains. These explosives were even more insidious than arterial locks and were designed to kill instantly with 100% certainty.

Chapter 107

Fingel ran to check on the assassins outside the passage, and finally dragged a corpse down, saying, "Junior brother, this one is dead too."

Only two Beretta M9 pistols were found on the three assassins. The first three bullets in the woman's gun's magazine were alchemical bullets with hand-carved crosses on the bullet tips, while the S-class assassin's gun was only filled with standard brass bullets.

For an assassin who can carry out an assassination within a gap in time, there is little difference between a gun and a knife.

"Notify the branch office to take over this assassination attempt." Lu Mingfei took out his phone and gave the order to Norma.

At this point, the electromagnetic shielding has been removed.

The simultaneous deaths of the three assassins indicate that someone was monitoring the assassination process from the shadows. This person was in the dark but learned of the conflict immediately, making it unpredictable what will happen next.

Lu Mingfei had no intention of killing anyone. He had been controlling his strength to prevent being beaten to death by the two men, all in order to extract information from them. The academy's interrogation techniques were sufficient to pry open the mouth of any mentally sound human being.

Unfortunately, the assassins were highly professional and had sophisticated methods for silencing witnesses.

The only certainty is that the assassins came from a relatively organized and powerful organization. It's currently impossible to confirm whether they were people who arrived by plane or locals; that's a problem the branch office has to solve.

Fingel looked shaken. "Junior brother, I'd like to apply to join the dragon-slaying team!"

"Shouldn't you be buying plane tickets back to the academy right away, given your style?" Lu Mingfei was dragging the three bodies together and temporarily covering them with the surrounding rubble.

“Am I the kind of careless person?” Fingel said righteously. “What if they ambush me on the road? There are at least several thousand hybrids in this city now. The branch and Norma are very busy. How could they possibly have enough power to guarantee the safety of an F-rank like me... It’s safer to stay with you, junior brother.”

“Alright.” Lu Mingfei thought for a moment and agreed. “We are only responsible to the principal now. Just have Norma send him a message.”

“The branch specialist is expected to arrive within 8 minutes,” Norma reminded. “Please prepare for the handover.”

……

Caesar opened his suitcase, took out his laptop, connected to the internet, and accessed the only website in his browsing history: "Hunter's Market".

Caesar Gattuso was no stranger to "Hunter's Market"; he was a hunter and had his ID on "Hunter's Market" when he was fifteen.

He certainly didn't need to work for bounties; even the most generous bounty would barely cover the cost of his private jet's fuel and the tips he casually gave away. He simply enjoyed doing adventurous things, and there were many fun people among the hunters. His ID was "Governor of Gaul," a name derived from the historical dictator Julius Caesar who conquered Gaul.

He logged into his account with ease. The account ID provided by the board of directors was "World Tree 123". There were two unread messages in his inbox.

The sender's ID is "phoenix".

Caesar had never seen this ID appear on Hunter.net, but common IDs like "Phoenix" should have been registered long ago. This was an old ID that had been lurking for a long time, and it was only surfacing to sell information.

He clicked on "Phoenix's" profile page. Usually, profile pages on Hunter.net were cleared out, but Phoenix retained some entries, such as the registration date. It was registered twenty-three years ago, when the global internet was still in its infancy, and Hunter Market was probably still in beta. This ID had already been registered. It was the seventh ID registered here.

There were two short messages in my inbox.

"I received the deposit. You're quite honest."

"Let me know when you arrive in Beijing."

It appears that after the board of directors confirmed the post was removed from the website, they suspended the account until Gao Mi handed it over to Caesar.

Caesar pondered for a moment and then replied to "Phoenix" with a message.

"I've arrived in Beijing. Tell me your location."

Caesar browsed the posts on the site while waiting for a reply.

The other posts on the Hunter Market seemed normal. The various bounty quests didn't seem suspicious. Most of the quests were related to the illegal movement of artifacts, some were for exorcising evil spirits, and others were invitations to dive and explore the ruins of Atlantis.

About half an hour later, "Phoenix" finally came online.

"Sorry, I just got back from walking my bird."

Caesar had learned about the local culture of Beijing from Norma's database. In his imagination, the other person should be a retired local old man. It is said that the first thing this group does in the morning is to walk their birds, and then spend the rest of the day drinking tea and playing with walnuts.

"Phoenix" quickly sent Caesar its contact address.

It's a small shop in Liulichang Cultural Street called "Fenglongtang".

……

The earthquake bureau has set up many small monitoring devices throughout the city. Beijing is located on the Yanshan seismic belt in North China, experiencing hundreds of small earthquakes every year, but their magnitude and intensity are too low to be detected. However, the monitoring devices faithfully record every tremor. These tremors could be crustal movements, or they could be caused by something hidden within the earth's crust.

Chu Zihang constructed a simple mathematical model, substituted the data into it, and used various calculation methods and filtering conditions in the hope of finding the earthquake source.

However, there are too many factors in cities that can cause ground vibrations, such as heavy trucks passing by, subways passing by, construction machinery, and even fireworks during festivals, all of which will be recorded. In other words, earthquake data contains hundreds of times more invalid data, and it would take an unknown amount of time to remove them.

After another calculation, Norma input the data from the previous calculation into the new model and visualized the output as a graphic. The selected seismic data points were assigned different colors. There were still thousands of densely packed red dots on the map, all of which were suspected seismic sources. The good news was that this calculation produced a result that was very close to the predicted value.

Norma has retrieved detailed information about the location.

A subway station.

Subway stations are the most misleading type of data. Chu Zihang has a certain prediction that the initial result will be a subway station. This is a necessary process before obtaining the correct result. Its appearance means that the model and algorithm are working.

Chu Zihang stood up, picked up the general operations briefcase from the executive department, and prepared to conduct an on-site inspection of the subway station.

Subway station data might be the most likely to mislead the calculation model, but Chu Zihang chose to use rigorous methods to exclude it, and these processes will eventually appear in his task report.

After leaving the hotel, Chu Zihang followed Norma's navigation and headed towards the subway station.

In a coffee shop, Xia Mi sat in a corner, watching the red dot on her phone begin to move, and hummed a cheerful melody.

Chapter 108 No Results

The branch's specialists were dumbfounded. The underground passage had been completely reduced to ruins. The entire passage had collapsed to varying degrees, with the concrete structure crumbling and falling, exposing the twisted steel bars inside to the air.

The ground and walls were not intact, as if two armies had fought a fierce battle here. Thick, inky blood was splattered in every corner, leaving large patches of dried blood, a shocking sight.

"Commissioner Lu, are you sure there were only three assassins?" The branch commissioner was at a loss for what to do. After receiving Norma's mission, they thought it would be a routine assassination, at most cleaning up some bullet holes or bloodstains, but they never expected the scene to be so horrific.

“There is one person whose Word of Power is a bronze throne,” Lu Mingfei explained.

The main battlefield was a brief collision between two time-zero realms, but the Bronze Throne was indeed the culprit behind the destruction. Word of Power is a compulsory course at the academy, and the specialists present understood that this Word of Power with serial number 87 was almost the most dangerous below the Lord's Flame. They were actually more curious about how Lu Mingfei had defeated such an enemy.

Lu Mingfei was wearing the executive department's thermal uniform with a black trench coat over it. He was spotless, without even a trace of blood, whereas the bloodstains in the ruins looked as terrifying as if a blood freezer had exploded inside.

"Commissioner Lu, please allow me to undergo a physical examination." The medical staff took out medical equipment. "Please come back to the branch with us later. It's safer there. We're currently short-staffed and may not be able to guarantee adequate prevention of secondary attacks."

"No need. If there are any problems with the procedure, you can consult your minister." Lu Mingfei politely declined the medical staff's offer and then left the scene with Fingel.

According to normal procedures, the two should submit at least electronic and paper reports and undergo medical examinations, but the branch manager fell silent when he saw the words "You do not have permission to view incident reports" displayed on the console.

He had no choice but to ignore Lu Mingfei and focus his attention on the assassination attempt itself.

The situation at the scene has been brought under control. A safe zone has been created by using bright orange water-filled barriers. On all map navigation software, this area is shown as under construction. The branch college's construction team will enter the site to clean up the incident area and rebuild the underground passage.

Next, the branch will reduce the number of patrol personnel and concentrate manpower at various branch strongholds, both to guard against retaliatory attacks from the enemy and to prevent sudden crisis events.

The bodies of the three assassins have been transported to the branch base, and the collected biological information has been sent to Norma for comparison in a global database. The implants in their bodies are being disassembled and studied by a team from the Equipment Department.

Norma would notify Lu Mingfei's team as soon as the academy's investigation made progress.

……

Lu Mingfei and Fingel returned to their accommodation in the evening. The hotel suite was empty; Caesar and Chu Zihang had both gone out. Only the code on the projection screen controlled by Norma kept flashing, occasionally showing a huge matrix of numbers before being covered by the code again.

Fingel entered this comfortable environment like a fish in water, immediately pounced on the soft sofa and started browsing food delivery apps.

Lu Mingfei returned to his room and took out a special briefcase containing precious alchemical materials taken from the ice cellar. He had recently been trying to replicate the alchemical techniques he had witnessed in previous battles.

Chu Zihang returned around nine o'clock in the evening.

As soon as he entered, he saw Fingel sitting on the sofa with a chicken leg in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other, and he didn't react for a moment. He knew this good-for-nothing senior who had studied abroad for eight years, but he didn't understand why someone unrelated to the mission would be here.

"Junior brother, you've worked hard!" Fingel waved a chicken leg.

Hearing the commotion, Lu Mingfei came out of the room and explained what had happened.

Upon learning that there were potential mixed-race enemies in the city, Chu Zihang did not show any emotional fluctuation. He had encountered corrupted mixed-race people before when he was on internship missions.

He went back to his computer and removed the subway station from the location collection.

"Did you find anything suspicious when you went out?" Lu Mingfei asked.

"I investigated, and it was probably an algorithm misjudgment," Chu Zihang said calmly. "It's a subway station with a lot of foot traffic, so it's unlikely that anything was hidden there."

To be precise, it was an elevated station with the concourse on the second floor and the platform on the third floor. Below it was a main urban road, bustling with traffic, leaving no space for dragons to hide. Chu Zihang even encountered two branch inspectors along the way, who said they patrolled the subway system every day.

"When did you leave? Has Caesar ever come back?" Lu Mingfei glanced at the sky outside the window and suddenly asked.

"I left the hotel at 2 PM, and I didn't see Caesar before that." Chu Zihang also realized something was wrong. If Lu Mingfei had been assassinated, Caesar might also be in danger.

Lu Mingfei instructed Norma to send a message to Caesar to inquire.

"I'm fine, don't worry. There's a clue here. I won't be going back for the time being," Caesar replied after a while.