I Can See You

Chenggong, Yunnan Province, China
October 4rd
14:30

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  Li Wei POV
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The case against Xian Fang was considered a lost battle, impossible to win within the Mystic Red Star. The ancient sage was always one step ahead, trapped in an endless web of betrayal and deceit. No one ever said it out loud, but we all knew deep down that defeating Xian Fang had been a hopeless task for decades. Before our founding, the Qing Dynasty had tried to stop her for over a thousand years. It had been the work of millions of men fighting an immortal, and like all of us, we had already lost a battle that had begun long before our existence. The Mystic's greatest power seemed to be her ability to bend the will of the entire society to her will. She was the will that moved everything, in a world where freedom and security were illusory, while everything revolved around Xian Fang's desires.

It wasn't surprising that the Mystic Red Star was extremely cautious when it came to doing anything, since our only basis for fighting such a monster was our anonymity, the fact that she didn't even know that we existed. That's why we took every possible precaution, always assuming that all our communications were compromised from the beginning, that anyone could be a spy and a personal friend of our enemy, that she would undoubtedly attack at any moment, that any day could be our last. None of us knew anyone's real name, even the alias I'm using now, Li Wei, is nothing more than a false identity with a background created with extreme caution and care, but even so, it's only one of fifteen different ones I have at my disposal. The members of our organization were carefully and thoroughly selected, and only those who the organization was absolutely sure had never had any contact or influence with Xian Fang were told the truth about her threat. It was also not an option that could be rejected; the Mystic Red Star never left any loose ends. Anyone selected to join our ranks had to do so immediately, otherwise the threat of data leakage was simply buried.

I had carefully selected my current partner, Wu Yan, as expected of us, checking her grades at the police academy, her university essays, her psychological profile, her level of patriotism and responsibility, her potential. I knew she would accept to join our group even before I asked her, it's a pity that her training has been interrupted by this current problem. I hope she learns quickly; she'll have to if she wants to survive another week.

But even with all that in mind, I had no idea what to do in this situation. The strange girl, Elise Valkyria, had appeared out of nowhere, and her mere presence had put the cursed sorceress on the defensive. My mission had radically changed from simply watching over the city that Xian Fang had rebuilt to her liking, to trying to gather more information and make contact with this new and strange being. The girl was easy to find; chaos followed her throughout the city; you just had to look for the place of the latest explosion and she would be there. Death patrols had already been sent to finish her off, but they weren't here now; spawn creatures had crossed her path, but they weren't here now. It was too good to be true; this could very well be another masterstroke by Xian Fang to lower our guard and corner us. When she suggested rushing headlong into kidnapping Mayor Xu Hao without a plan, I did what anyone would have done: I doubted her completely. I decided it was too much risk for too little reward. So I gave her an unloaded gun to expose her deception, or at worst, she could use it as a decoy to see how our enemy would react to an unexpected event. What I didn't expect was for her to do the whole kidnapping herself, keep the guards and the police at bay, face two strange monsters, and still manage to escape easily without using a damn gun. What kind of thing was she? How the hell did she make it look so easy? The only thing that came to mind was that it was a spectacular performance by Xian Fang to buy our loyalty, a trick to lower our guard, but if that's the case, why pay such a high price to create this illusion? Killing Xu Hao himself to make it seem more realistic complicates everything for their long-term plans. Are we such important prey that she would spend such valuable resources to find us? Or was Elise really the angry goddess she claimed to be? Maybe we've stumbled upon the monster Xian Fang has been running from all this time, and we didn't know it.

Everything is uncertainty and danger.

In just one day, Elise Valkyria has become our greatest asset against Xian Fang. She is someone who may be able to put an end to this eternal hunt. But if we trust her and support her, but she turns out to be yet another agent of the old witch's forces, the price to pay would be the end of our group. Or worse, the next tyrant disguised as a savior.

This is uncharted territory, this could be our moment or our end. An unexpected twist of fate, something he likes to use in the story.

"Good thing she didn't need our help."

"????"
"Sorry?"

"That strange girl, Elise, when she went to the mayor's house."
"She went in alone, fought the guards, threw that thing off the balcony, and managed to get away from the police without our help."
"I was willing to help her escape by stealing a police car."
"Good thing she didn't need our help at any time," Wu Yan commented innocently, not knowing that I had planned not to help Elise in the first place.

"Ah, yes, yes, lucky indeed," I replied, not having the courage to look her in the eye.

The heavy security door suddenly swung open, and the same girl we were talking about rushed through it and closed it immediately.

"God Damn it."
"Good fuck thing I didn't any help."
"..."
"Ah, I need to rest for a moment, otherwise I'm going to melt."
"I've been running through the metro tunnels all morning even though I promised myself I'd never do it again."
"I even got lost at one point and had to steal a map from a station."
"I nearly got run over by a train three times on the way here."
"..."
"Ah, now then, who was the funny bastard who gave me a gun without bullets?"
"Do you have any idea what happened in there? Don't you want to defeat Xian Fang?"
"Look here, I'm going to kill Xian Fang with or without your help, so if you don't want to help, at least stay out of the way."
"Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll have to consider you as enemies as well."

The water girl threatened us, but it was understandable that she was angry about what had happened; I honestly didn't expect her to survive at all. I was terrified of the monster sitting on the sofa, calmly drinking from a water bottle; that thing was what our sworn enemy feared, and I was beginning to understand why, unless it was really just a mirage to defeat us.

"李伟先生，我可以问一下那个女孩说了什么吗？"
(Mr. Li Wei, may I ask what the girl said?) Wu Yan asked.

"哦，Elise说她在调查徐昊的家时进展顺利"，
(Oh, Elise says she has made progress in investigating Xu Hao's house.)
(She says there's a lot to report.)

"Hey, stop mumbling in Chinese, you two, it's getting on my nerves!" said Elise, now angry.

"Oh, sorry, Wu Yan asked if you managed to find any valuable information from Xu Hao's house," I replied.

"To be honest, I didn't get much. I don't know if you noticed, but shit hit the fan pretty fast."
"The office was a mess in no time, papers flying everywhere."
"On top of that, Xu Hao only responded in Chinese most of the time, except at the end, right before he escaped and a sniper blew his head off."
"He just mumbled things I already knew, but the most important thing was that he said Xian Fang lives in Lóngyán Village, but it's protected by some kind of strange spell."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"I was also attacked by a strange monster that looked like a water golem or slime."
"After I defeated it, it dropped this mask that I split in two; it seemed to be functioning as its face."
"I don't know if it will be useful, but I'm sure it was part of this weird magic."

"!!!!!!"
"Let me see that!"

I had in front of me an ancient stone mask, an authentic museum relic, but although I did not know much about it, I knew people who did, so I contacted someone who could give us more information and its possible magical implications. The expert said that what we had in our hands was a Sanxingdui mask, which had clear influences from the Shang dynasty, the second dynasty in all of China, and the first to leave records proving its existence, the Xia dynasty, which was believed to be a myth and was only known to exist because the Shang dynasty wrote about it as their predecessors. But the bronze mask seemed to be even older than the Xia Dynasty, perhaps a mystical artifact from the time of the Three Rulers and Five Emperors, an era of myths and legends, where gods lived with humans, where mighty sages became immortal, and dragons existed, the mask itself was an anachronistic object, an object lost in time, out of its supposedly expected time date.

After all the scientific and magical jargon, what he meant was simply that Elise was right, this strange mask was very important to Xian Fang, so she didn't give it to Xu Hao as a gesture of goodwill, she gave it to him because she needed him to do something very specific, to actually keep it inside the water tank. According to the Taoist monk, he was convinced that it was a magic involving feng shui to realize the magic seal that hid Xian Fang's house. The idea, explained simply, was that Xian Fang had scattered personal belongings very important to her all over Chenggong, in places also important to the city itself, and by combining them in certain places with some elements, she could amplify her magic to the point of making her home impossible to find for anyone but herself.

"The mayor's house was in the north of the city, and the cursed object was in a water tank."
"Which means that according to Feng Shui, there must be something with fire in the south."
"Metal in the west.
" And Wood in the east.
"We can't find Xian Fang until most of the objects are destroyed," said the old Taoist monk, making an exception when he received our call on the phone.

"If they can be anywhere in the city and they can be small objects like the mask, we will never find them," Wu Yan said worriedly.
"All she has to do is bury something under a pile of concrete for our plan to fail."

"No, no, no."
"If magic must work, disrespect cannot."
"Important objects need important care," the monk clarified.

"......"
"Which means that even if she wanted to, she would have had to leave them in plain sight in important places."
"It's not that complicated, it's simple."
"Let me guess, the Tianhui Data Center is west of the city," Elise mentioned with a slightly nonchalant tone.

"That's right, the Tianhui Data Center is in Xishan to the west."
"It's a high security building, a subway complex with minimal access to personnel."
"There is no one inside because it does not even have oxygen to create a deadly environment against all living things, all the guards guard the outside."

"Attacking Tianhui is important, if we can destroy the AI, we can stop having the police on our heels all the time."
"As well as destroying the cursed relic Xian Fang left behind."

"Which leaves us to search for the rest of the relics."

"The only public park in Chenggong is to the east of the city."
"The only place with gardens and a large number of trees."
"That could be another place."

"If it is so obvious, in the old Chenggong district, the original one in the south."
"It's a modern place, a modern center and a university."
"However, there is the Jīnshǔ zhī Diān Foundry in the middle of all this place, many people have complained about its location because of the noise and asked to move it, but they never did."
"And well, a metal foundry, high temperatures, fire," Wu Yan said

Elise suggested we continue our mission. And my doubts about her came back to haunt me, what if all this was not the truth, what if it was just another distraction? What if this was Xian Fang's plan to trap me? Going along with this was a big threat, a trap. But what if it wasn't? That would make it even more difficult for me to finally have a chance to defeat her, which would be the first mission that could upset the plan she had made over the past few years. The best I could do was to try to find a middle ground as best I could, I couldn't compromise the rest of the organization in any way, but I had to try to help Elise at least with the resources we currently had, I couldn't call others for help, I couldn't use another safe house. That way, if this all turned out to be a trap, only me and Wu Yan would fall for it.

Elise is an exceptional fighter, she has proven it in a very short time, now when she says she will take over Tianhui's data center, it is something within the realm of possibility that she could accomplish, so I will leave it in her hands. The relic in the park is in a public place, and although I don't doubt that it has security, it will certainly be easier to destroy than the others. Now the real problem would be the metal foundry, a private place, dangerous machinery, closed, it is the perfect place for a deadly ambush. Xian Fang must be at his highest state of alert, the police as well, I have no doubt that now that Elise has escaped through the tunnels, they will check them thoroughly, which means that if we go out now, we will not be able to return. If we go out on this mission, we won't be able to stop until I've seen Xian Fang's house with my own eyes and passed the information on to the Mystic Red Star so that they at least have a chance. We will have to attack the 3 places at the same time, Elise will be in charge of the Data Center since Wu Yan is new, I will leave the Park to her, and unfortunately for me, I will have to do the Foundry somehow or die trying.