Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

"Where is Erii?" Lu Mingfei looked around the room, but Erii was indeed not on any chair, sofa, or carpet.

“Rest in the space fragment,” Frilian said. “She was exhausted last night. The mental shock is harder to recover from than the physical injury. She needs deep sleep to heal.”

“Spatial fragments?” Lu Mingfei was stunned.

"It's a small, isolated world. A long time ago, I found a small fragment of space on the edge of the northern continent. After refining it, I've carried it with me ever since. It's not very big, only a few hundred square meters. The ecosystem inside is part of a forest, with grasslands, a few trees, and a small patch of ivy that has been there since when I refined it. The sunlight is gentle, the air is clean, and it's perfect for recuperation."

As she spoke, Frilian raised her right hand and made a light swirl in the air.

A silvery-white crack, identical to the one she had just traced, slowly unfolded from where her fingertips had touched. The scene inside was completely different from the warm red wall lamps of the love hotel. First, a beam of soft, pale golden sunlight peeked out, followed by a gentle breeze carrying the scent of grass and damp earth, and the faint, melodious chirping of a few birds in the woods could be heard.

Lu Mingfei stared blankly at the crack, feeling as if his brain had once again reached new heights of understanding.

Once the crack was fully opened, Frilian reached in halfway and gently pulled Erii out from inside.

Erii was curled up in Frilian's arms, fast asleep.

She was still wearing the same blue-purple princess dress with black lace trim from last night. A few tiny blades of grass had somehow fallen onto the fabric, and the hem of the dress still carried a faint scent of forest dew.

Her right foot, which had been bare when her high heel fell off, was now wearing a fluffy slipper that Frillian had found on the spot, and her white sheepskin ankle boots on her left foot had also been taken off, leaving her bare feet wrapped in a clean blanket.

Her breathing was light and even, her face relaxed in her sleep, her eyelashes slightly curled, and the blue ribbon in her hair was neatly tied into a bow and secured to her ear. It was clear that someone had tidied her messy hair before settling her down to sleep.

Seeing her sleeping so soundly, Lu Mingfei's heart, which had been hanging in suspense, finally settled down. He couldn't help but reach out and try to tuck a few stray strands of hair that had fallen across her forehead behind her ear.

"Let her sleep a little longer," Frilian gently placed Erii on the velvet round bed and covered her with the soft down comforter.

Erii rolled over, buried her face in the pillow, and let out a very soft, contented breath.

-----------------

Genjiro and Tachibana Masamune each held an umbrella and stood side by side on the terrace of the Akishinji Temple. The rain was still falling, but its intensity had subsided considerably compared to the torrential downpour of the previous night that had almost engulfed the entire city. Fine raindrops were carried by the sea breeze blowing in from Tokyo Bay, slanting across the vermilion torii gate beams.

Two black oil-paper umbrellas cast two blurry reflections on the bluestone slab. The edge of the umbrella in Genji's hand was slightly tilted toward Tachibana Masamune's side, but Tachibana Masamune's crippled hand, wrapped in gauze, still hung down in his sleeve and did not step into the tilted umbrella's shade.

Yaksha, Crow, and Sakura were all left in the hall downstairs at the Awakening Temple; no one was to be allowed to eavesdrop on this conversation.

Erii's bloodline is the deepest secret sealed in all the top-secret files of the Snake Clan. Its level of secrecy even surpasses that of Genjiro's existence. The second son, who was completely erased from the family tree, is still vaguely known to at least a few living elders.

From the moment Erii was born, no more than three people in her entire clan knew that she was a demon.

Genjiro and Tachibana Masamune were two of them.

Chapter 826 Aftermath

“A street camera inadvertently captured a person. This person was also in the Ebisu Garden area last night, and someone saw him wearing a waiter's uniform as he walked into Chateau Joel Robuchon.”

Genji handed a stack of blurry black and white photos to Tachibana Masamune.

The photo was captured frame by frame from traffic surveillance footage, then enlarged and developed. The image was full of noise, but the person didn't need clear image quality to be identified. A pale face was smiling in the direction of the camera, with red lips and black teeth.

He seemed to have clearly noticed the camera was pointed at him, and deliberately tilted his head back, striking a pose as if greeting an old friend. Two rows of black teeth peeked out from the upward curve of his lips, making his smiling face appear both dignified and sinister.

“King,” Tachibana Masamune murmured the name. He took the photograph with his still-functioning hand, held it up to the dim light of the day, and examined it for a few seconds. “It’s him.”

“Before seeing this photo, I didn’t completely believe what you said. But now that the King has finally shown up, things should be clearer, right?” Genji said. His tone remained as calm as ever, but the fingers gripping the umbrella handle tightened slightly in the shadows.

After a private conversation with Tachibana Masamune in that abandoned warehouse, Tachibana Masamune revealed his true colors to him: the only KGB officer who escaped the Black Swan Harbor fire with Herzog's notebook, and the mastermind behind everything that had been built up from scratch by the Snake Clan over the past twenty years under the name "Tachibana Masamune."

The price of that conversation was that Tachibana Masamune cut off all the fingers on his left hand on the spot, and was then rushed to the hospital for hemostasis.

Genjiro is still unsure how much he should believe, but at least one thing is certain: the "other person" that Tachibana Masamune spoke of, the lonely soul who also emerged from the ruins of Black Swan Harbor twenty-one years ago, is now calmly smiling at the surveillance camera lens.

"Under our strikes, the peripheral gangs affiliated with the Demon Clan have basically suffered fatal blows, and most of their executives with demon blood have been imprisoned. Their strength has inevitably been weakened, but they may still have hidden elites. Wang Jiang's greatest skill is that he never puts all his pieces on the same board at the same time. He always manages to pull out a hidden piece he's already prepared when everyone thinks he's at his wit's end. His decision to personally appear at this juncture suggests that he intends to turn the tide with his last batch of elites."

Masamune Tachibana tucked the photo into his sleeve.

"He appeared near Ebisu Garden, and his target could only be Erii. The chaos last night, the leaked information, the ever-increasing bounty, and the externally hacked information system were all his doing. He wanted to take advantage of the chaos in Tokyo's underworld to abduct Erii."

Why is he so concerned about Erii?

“Perhaps they didn’t want to keep the deadly force capable of killing gods under our control.” Tachibana Masamune paused, revealing half of his bandaged hand from his sleeve, and gently wiped away the rain stains on the corner of the photograph with the end of the bandage. “He was probably the one who infiltrated the information system. The entire Snake Clan’s internal communication network uses the Executive Bureau’s encryption protocol. To be able to tear through this firewall in just a few minutes would require a top-level authorization key. I have never issued such a key during my time as patriarch.”

Yuan Zhisheng remained silent.

"What's the progress of the tunneling at the Red Well?"

"Yesterday we broke through the hard quartzite layer. The head of the Miyamoto family has been on site since last night, and we've already drilled to 340 meters. According to the hydrological map, they are approaching the main channel of the Akaki River. In a few more days, the drill will reach the Hatchery of the Gods. Miyamoto's report last night said that the drill hit a large amount of organic-rich black mud below the quartzite layer, and the smell of marsh gas and fetal blood is stronger than before, indicating that the direction is accurate." Tachibana Masamune took out another printed report from his pocket and handed it to Genji.

"What about security measures? Is it possible that the King will attack Red Well?" Genji took the report but did not open it.

"There's only one road leading to the Red Well, and it's been blocked by the Self-Defense Forces under the command of the Ryoma Clan Chief. The surrounding woodlands are densely populated with infrared sirens and ninja from the Fuma Clan. We've also deployed lightweight surface-to-surface missiles around the Red Well, so we can destroy the Red Well along with its underground tunnel system if necessary," said Tachibana Masamune. "The secrecy is very thorough, but the King's infiltration capabilities shouldn't be underestimated. He's probably already aware of the unusually large-scale movement of personnel and supplies around the Red Well."

"But we can't be certain in a short time that what we're digging up there is God's hatchery, right?"

“Yes. The family’s geological exploration work has been going on for nearly a hundred years. Judging from the surface, the Red Well site will only be regarded as a larger-scale deep geological exploration. But we can’t delay for long. Wang will try every means to find out the exact information about the Red Well. He is hiding in the shadows, and we can’t guard against him.”

"..."

"Leave all the work at the Red Well to the Ryoma and Miyamoto families. The most urgent task is to find Erii. She's already showing signs of losing control; the surveillance footage from Ebisu Garden captured her eyes. That crimson gold color isn't her normal pupil color, indicating that the dragon blood within her is surging and restless. This restlessness will gradually erode her sanity, and if we don't intervene quickly, her bloodline will irreversibly cross the critical bloodline limit. We must immediately inject her with the serum extracted from the Deadpool fetus to help her return to a stable state. Kassel College couldn't possibly possess such a serum; they don't even know its formula. It was developed over the past ten years using her own umbilical cord blood and Deadpool embryos through repeated cultivation. Erii must return to the medical monitoring center as soon as possible."

"She left traces when she fled the scene. Although the heavy rain washed away most of the marks on the road, we were still able to roughly determine from the broken pieces of her high heels and the torn hairband that she fled towards the border between Shinjuku and Minato wards. Their hiding place should be in that area. The Enforcement Bureau has initially identified several areas with the highest probability, mainly checking small hotels that do not have surveillance cameras, accept cash payments, and do not require full registration of identification documents. The search has been in full swing for two hours."

Genjiro pulled a photograph from his sleeve and placed it in Tachibana Masamune's still-functioning hand.

This photo was taken from another surveillance camera in the Weibisu Garden, and it was taken earlier, around the time when Lu Mingfei and Erii were enjoying an appetizer at a French restaurant.

"This was also captured by a security camera around Ebisu Garden. We found out why our search hadn't yielded any results for the past few days: she had a beauty treatment and hairdressing, completely changing her hairstyle and hair color, and even cutting her bangs from eyebrow-length to side-swept. Just changing a hairstyle can make a big difference in a girl's appearance, and it was impossible to recognize her based on old photos of her wearing a kimono and a red headband."

Tachibana Masamune lowered his head, gently pressing down on a corner of the photo with his crippled wrist, while his other, still-movable finger lightly and slowly stroked the girl's cheek in the image.

In the photo, Erii is wearing a blue-purple princess dress with black lace trim. The tips of her white sheepskin ankle boots are poised on the wet cobblestones, like a ballet beginner trying on pointe shoes for the first time. A corner of her headband is lifted by the wind, obscuring half of her profile, but the corner of her eye that is visible carries a very subtle smile.

That smile wasn't posed for the camera; it was captured by someone in a moment of unintentional sniping.

At that moment, her attention was probably completely captivated by a crooked, thumbs-up sketch someone had drawn on a sticky notepad.

"She's so beautiful. I never expected her to look like this when she's dressed up. Am I a negligent father?" Tachibana Masamune sighed softly.

He carefully put the photo into the inner pocket of his kimono, pressed his fingers against the lapel to make sure it was securely against his chest.

"This photo has been distributed to all members of the enforcement bureau. We will keep a close watch on all hotels and inns, especially small ones without surveillance cameras. The encirclement will gradually narrow, and we will have results within 24 hours," Yuan Zhisheng said.

"If we encounter the King again during the search, do not attack rashly." Tachibana Masamune switched the umbrella to the wrist tightly wrapped in gauze, and with his still-mobile hand, pressed down on the back of Genji's hand holding the umbrella, the pressure light but extremely solemn. "Ordinary attack methods are completely ineffective against him. I watched the surveillance footage from last night repeatedly. The young man in the Lamborghini and the sniper on the rooftop used high-powered pistols, heavy sniper rifles, and some kind of optical attack method that even I couldn't identify, all of which landed on him, yet he didn't slow down at all even after chasing him for several blocks. To deal with him, only you and I can do it. The royal blood has a special suppressive effect on him; this is the only weakness we can confirm at the moment."

Chapter 827 Lu Mingfei's 76 Kills

Before dawn, Lu Mingfei grabbed an umbrella from the corner of the wall and plunged into the darkest part of the rain before sunrise.

As he passed the front desk of the love hotel, the landlady who had been giving him the cold shoulder just a few days ago was dozing off on the counter, with a still-steaming cup of coffee beside her.

She heard footsteps, looked up, glanced at him, and her usual impatience was gone from her eyes. She simply said in a tired voice, too lazy to ask any more questions, "There's a convenience store to the left when you go out."

Lu Mingfei nodded, pushed open the glass door, his umbrella unfurled in the rain, and walked towards the capsule hotel.

Five minutes later, he pushed open the perpetually half-closed back door of the capsule hotel, made his way up the narrow stairs to the fourth floor, and knocked on the door of that familiar capsule.

Caesar stood inside the cabin with his arms crossed, coldly uttering two words: "Take off your clothes."

Lu Mingfei stood frozen at the doorway, raindrops dripping from the tip of his umbrella onto the synthetic carpet. He opened his mouth but before he could utter a sound, Caesar added a moment later, "I didn't tell you to take your pants off too!"

After saying that, she reached out and pulled him in, pressing him down onto the edge of the lower bunk.

"Oh...you made it sound so serious, I thought I had to take my clothes off completely," Lu Mingfei stammered, pulling up his pants again and sitting shirtless in the dim light of the capsule.

His shoulders and arms appeared pale in the light, as if they had never seen the sun in a long time, but that paleness was covered with shocking marks.

“Turn around,” Chu Zihang said.

Lu Mingfei obediently turned around, exposing his back to the two men. Chu Zihang raised his tactical flashlight, and a cold white beam of light shone on their skin. The two men almost simultaneously held their breath.

Lu Mingfei's back was crisscrossed with scars, with new, tender red skin covering the old wounds like a spider web, the edges still bearing lingering purplish-blue bruises. There wasn't a single patch of intact skin the size of a palm on his entire back; some wounds had scabbed over, then reopened and healed again, piling up layer upon layer of uneven, hardened keratinized skin.

It didn't look like it was cleaved by a knife or hit by a blunt object. It looked more like it had rolled on a butchering assembly line. Every cut was fine and neat, as if a madman had measured the spacing with a ruler and cut it one after another.

"Have you seen enough? I'm a little cold." Lu Mingfei couldn't help but hunch his shoulders after staring at his back for too long.

What he was embarrassed to say was that he felt cold because Caesar and Chu Zihang were both touching him from behind, pressing their fingertips against his newly healed scars and examining them over and over, making him feel like a beautiful white jade statue being repeatedly admired by two antique dealers from different angles.

"Incredible speed of self-healing," Caesar said in a low voice.

He bent down and brought his face close to a new scar on Lu Mingfei's back that was less than two millimeters wide, and gently pressed around the edge of the scar with his finger.

“Even with the Gattuso family’s top-tier medical care standards, this level of injury would take at least three weeks to recover to its current state. Yet, only a few hours have passed since he was injured. He didn’t have these injuries when he left right under our noses last night. And logically speaking, with lacerations of this extent and depth, he should have lost consciousness on the spot due to blood loss, let alone continued driving.”

"Because the wound begins to heal itself the moment it forms. The blood vessels spasm to stop the bleeding, so the blood in the body is locked in and there is no large outflow. Cells fill the soft tissue defects at high speed through an abnormally high frequency of division, and even severed tendon ends can reconnect and fuse under certain conditions. This level of cell activity far exceeds any mixed-race sample we currently know."

Chu Zihang's flashlight beam remained motionless, shining on the deepest scar on Lu Mingfei's back, slicing diagonally from the shoulder blade to near the lumbar spine. It had now healed into a very thin, pale red line, but before it healed, it must have been so deep that the bone was visible directly.

"His self-healing ability surpasses that of Genjiro."

"Could this be the real reason why the principal rated him as S-class?" Caesar straightened up, crossed his arms again, and frowned slightly.

He recalled the radiant look on Angers' face when he mentioned Lu Mingfei at the freshman orientation ceremony. At the time, everyone thought that the S-level was just something the principal had given out haphazardly in his old age. But now he had to reconsider the true weight that letter might hold.

“But he doesn’t always have this self-healing ability.” Chu Zihang put down the flashlight, picked up the notebook from beside his pillow, and flipped to a page filled with the curves of all the vital signs changes during his care of Lu Mingfei. “Last time he was shot in the chest, the injury was far less serious than this time, but it took him a full three days to regain consciousness, and it took almost a week for the wound to fully heal. His blood oxygen level was always low that time, and he even had great difficulty breathing on his own.”

"I thought of that too. If he always carries this super-fast self-healing ability with him, wouldn't he be a perfect mobile meat shield? In the future, when we encounter gunfights, we'll have him take off his shirt and stand at the front to absorb all the damage, while the two of us cower behind him, pushing the meat shield forward and taking turns shooting. The MT engages the monsters, the healer heals, and the DPS stays in the back row. Any MMORPG player would find this setup flawless."

"Your claim of not having a childhood is all a lie, isn't it? Boss, you're so skilled at using MT, do you usually play Warcraft or Warhammer?" Lu Mingfei finally couldn't hold back anymore, interrupting the two lunatics' so-called tactical discussion around his bare back. He grabbed his T-shirt from the bed and pulled it back on. "But whether you play Warcraft or Warhammer, shut up now, okay? I came to you because I have something much more urgent to do!"

“We already know. Even if you hadn’t come to us, I was planning to come to you this morning anyway.” Caesar reached for the remote control on the bed and turned on the old LCD TV hanging in the corner of the ceiling.

The screen lit up, just in time for Tokyo TV's morning news segment, and the female anchor's voice suddenly rang out in the cramped space of the capsule. Lu Mingfei involuntarily turned his head.

On the screen appeared the long street that looked so familiar to him: the narrow, spiderweb-like alleyway in the upscale residential area west of Ebisu Garden. The sides were originally lined with meticulously trimmed weeping cherry trees, but now the trunks of the cherry trees had been broken in more than one place, and pink petals were scattered among the broken glass and black tire tracks on the ground.

The wreckage of the motorcycle was still burning fiercely on camera. A red fire truck was parked in the ruins, and firefighters were spraying water at the motorcycle, which had long since burned to a skeleton, with the white mist rising into a large cloud of steam.

The real-time time displayed in the lower right corner of the screen indicates that this video was taken late last night.

Police cars, ambulances, and news vans from various television stations all arrived, and yellow police tape cordoned off the entire long street from one end to the other. Medical personnel were hurriedly carrying out one body after another from the depths of the alley, all wrapped in black body bags, zipped up to the top. The stretcher bearers were standing on puddles of a mixture of water and gasoline, which shimmered and glittered under the cameras.

The oxygen tanks and blood plasma bags brought by the ambulance were completely useless, as there was no one left at the scene who needed them.

The scene cuts to a reporter interviewing Chateau Joel Robuchon manager Dong Chengbu in front of the police cordon.

Dongcheng Bu, wearing his signature black three-piece suit and with his hair neatly combed, stood in front of the wrecked back door of the restaurant, with workers behind him temporarily sealing the large hole with wooden boards.

His expression was both sorrowful and composed, befitting an old-fashioned man who had run a top-tier French restaurant for decades.

"It's a tragedy. I saw them pass by the restaurant with my own eyes, several cars chasing each other at high speeds, heading northwest. Fortunately, the customers in the restaurant, including my employees, were not disturbed." The general manager shook his head slightly at the camera, filled with emotion. "I sincerely hope that the government can strengthen police deployment and not allow these gangs to run rampant on the streets of Tokyo any longer."

His family had clearly given him special instructions beforehand, and he had carefully considered every word he uttered during the interview.