A week Later
Yue Lan's penthouse overlooked city skyline, glass walls reflecting the city's neon heartbeat. She scrawled her signature across the final page of the Division Spinoff Agreement, the ink bleeding into paper like a vow. Horizon Biotech's Xinjiang R&D unit—every lab, every lease, every silenced mind—now belonged to NovaGen Therapeutics.
Her inheritance, once a leash, had been liquefied: 19% of the Yue fortune, converted into ¥1.201 billion of molten freedom.
But it wasn't enough. She needed heatless capital. Not a wire trace. Not a venture audit. Something silent, fast, and irreversible. Han Chen was the only person she could ask.
The research burned capital faster than any boardroom budget. Custom viroprotein lattice printers. Illegal primate subjects shipped through military contractors. Encryption nodes so dense they required geothermal offsets. No venture fund could touch it without risk. No government would knowingly approve it. She needed silence, velocity, and control.
Han Chen provided all three.
His ¥891 million stake—quietly injected over two quarters—arrived via consultancy retainer agreements with ghost clients, Cayman shell entities disguised as biotech advisories, and one suspiciously untraceable data-for-equity deal registered in Vanuatu.
All traced, indirectly and legally, to Han Chen.
Officially, he was just a fourth-year law student at a Tier-1 university, known more for acing cyberlaw seminars and ducking photos. On paper, Han Chen was a private digital entrepreneur who'd made his fortune early, investments, digital currencies, flipping AI and algorithmic prediction engines and automated arbitrage platforms on the deep net and open net. He never held equity in any of the companies that used his tools. He simply... exited every investment before it could be flagged.
His wealth was clean. Whitewashed by other audit firms, it now sat in NovaGen's escrow as compliant capital—disclosable, tax-deferred, irreversible.
Not a single journalist had ever interviewed Yue Lan. No photo of her had circulated since her grandfather's funeral. At corporate events, she sent proxies. At board meetings, only audio. The media called her "The Heiress.", only she cut off her relations. CEOs spoke her name with reverence and fear. With his ability, it wasn't difficult for him to connect her to potential sellers.
The board convened at midnight.
Dr. Lim sat rigid beside a former Roche CFO whose reputation hinged on turning liabilities into assets, and a corporate lawyer from Hong Kong, whose specialty was retroactively dissolving intellectual property ownership trails.
Resolutions cascaded: bylaws ratified, banking severed, Horizon's patents gutted and reborn under NovaGen's private trust. Han Chen's capital was acknowledged in the minutes—just not under his name. Instead, it read: "Strategic Technical Capital, Class-C Silent LP – Entity 001ALFA (Unexposed Beneficial Holder, Legal in Practice)"
When the vote passed, Yue Lan's statement echoed through the room: "They say, I am without blood ties, there is no obligation. Then I forge my own path."
Months Later
The Yue family's fury arrived in waves—cease-and-desist scrolls, asset freezes, injunctions filed in five jurisdictions. Yue Ming's voice snarled through her speakerphone: "You gutted us. You stole what wasn't yours."
Yue Lan didn't answer. She didn't need to.
NovaGen was already sovereign. The entire division had been restructured, coded, and reborn within an independent Cayman-Mauritius trust chain. Its assets were invisible in Chinese jurisdictional registries, governed by zero-sublicense, no-return clauses.
Xinjiang's corporate database listed the divestment as "Strategic Disposal—Undisclosed Buyer." In reality, it had been consumed. Yue Group's action to drag the case onto court trials and leave her hanging and in debt, smacked them back in face as Han Chen already helped.
"The ruling came down clean: no wrongdoing, everything legal..."
"The verdict took in single 9 hour session —a record for Hong Kong's commercial court. Judge Tamlay cited 'precedent-setting efficiency' due to 'unusually complete documentation and brutually predicted and closed off loopholes and proper articulation.' Later, clerks would recall stacks of affidavits arriving pre-stamped, witness statements filed under vanished docket numbers. But by then, NovaGen's patents were already sailing.
To Yue Ming, it was a footnote—one more expense to bury in the noise of his circus: NFT health tokens, metaverse biometric apps, and his influencer-funded wellness DAO. He never noticed what was missing. He never remembered that Horizon once had a Sublevel B4.
He never asked where the off-books cold storage servers went, or why a single firewall node in Ürümqi now cost more than his entire digital diagnostics unit.
***
***
Han Chen's cultivation meanwhile progressed—slowly, deliberately—toward the final layers of the Foundation Building realm. Not from distraction. He was meticulous, not idle.
But trouble, once scattered and dormant, had begun to coalesce again.
It started innocently—Yue Lan contacted Hye Won through communication channels like any other. Just a professional outreach for Hye Won's request prior. At the time, Hye Won had been lamenting the soul-numbing grind of applying for her second internship through their mind connection. So they accepted the offer to join NovaGen's legal department.
A single contact. Seemingly harmless. But people interested noticed.
Months later now, a forensic linguist working in supernatural cases with victims flagged an audio fragment from a civilian's recording: the female voice, faint and filtered, matched phonetic patterns typical of a northern coastal dialect. The victims' reports and video with unknown sources also described a man and a woman moving like trained operatives, vanishing like ghosts but in blur. ML-driven reconstruction systems processed tens of thousands of blurred frames, refining silhouettes into skeletal motion and shape profiles.
That was enough to spark investigative attention to the people involved. Security agencies, split between pride and panic, debated quietly: Could one of their own citizens have executed a supernatural counter-operation of that scale?
Two potential matches surfaced in a list of 110,560 identified, not because of actively looking for it but involvement with another supernatural case. Hye Won, and man later cross-referenced to Han Chen.
Govt. Record vise, he was the "one-time suspect" from a cold case that turned into a media circus two years ago—cleared by an improbable absence of evidence and overwhelming common sense. A minor anomaly in a dormant case of Zhao family master level character, thus flared back to life.
The recent cult purge —classified, unsolved—had left behind no forensic residue. No bodies. Just a curved sword mark seared into concrete. Their names were buried in the bottom quartile, flagged but not prioritized. Yet the coincidence was noted. First, the cult's destruction. Then, the miraculous escape of Han Chen's parents from what was written off as a "Vehicle malfunction- supernatural." Both events: zero physical evidence. Zero surviving attackers or exhibits. Anomalies in surveillance footage.
Investigators reopened the archived file under the status: Investigative Review.
But again, the outcome was infuriating. No timestamps proved Han Chen's presence. In fact, location logs placed him in a different province during both incidents. Multiple witnesses confirmed it. Even his emotional demeanor in voice when news reached remained flat, unaffected, but — didn't give them a thread to pull. Psychological profiles marked him as stable. Strategic. Boring, even from interview with his survived parents.
And still, something was wrong. His financial records resurfaced just days later. Not in suspicion, but in admiration. Clean investments. Tax-paid assets. Audited capital flowing quietly through multiple startups—one of which Yue Lan had recently spun out. No leaked call records. No shadow interactions with her. Just a single known meeting... the yacht.
He was an enigma wrapped in bureaucracy. Clearly rich beyond 99.9% of the population but still unknown and leading a simple unknown life.
No illegal digital business. No shell accounts unregistered. No unregistered patents. And yet his digital footprint suggested a genius in deep systems design, encryption, zero-trust firewalls, even a few open-source libraries and profiting online services posted under pseudonyms and buried in Git archives. All public. All perfectly legal.
When pressed, some investigators recalled the initial review from his teenage years. "Too many impossibilities," they'd said. "No one moves like that unless they're in fiction."
But fiction didn't file taxes quarterly. Fiction didn't publish papers under ghost authorship agreements. Fiction didn't make an investment genius with zero losses, show up in mock court finals arguing law with surgical precision.
So the review stalled. Again. But this time, the agencies didn't close the file. They didn't have to. They just... shifted their focus. Surveillance transitioned from active suspicion to passive observation. Related peoples' phones were burned. Traffic rerouted. Every interaction from law internship filings—passed through layered proxies.
And as far as they could prove, Han Chen was just an unusually brilliant, unusually private, misunderstood law student. One who had survived an early brush with infamy... and learned never to let it happen again.
But then came the twist: just as the investigators reclassified him as a "low-threat watch," Li Mei returned.
.....
Somewhere else
The file landed on her desk with a quiet thud.
Li Mei's fingers hesitated over the cover. The name printed there—Han Chen—sent an electric jolt through her nerves. A name she hadn't spoken aloud in years. A name she'd tried to bury.
She flipped it open.
"Suspect flagged for supernatural anomalies. Possible ties to recent events. Proceed with caution."
A photograph stared back at her.
Him.
The same sharp features, the same unnerving calm and vicissitudes in his eyes. Seven years had passed since their last encounter—an interview she'd conducted back when he was just a remote suspect in a murder case. A routine interrogation. Nothing noteworthy.
Except it hadn't been.
Her stomach twisted as fragmented memories resurfaced. The way she'd circled his name in reports long after the case closed. The photos she'd saved—not as evidence, but as something obsessive. The way his voice had lingered in her mind, an echo she couldn't silence, possibly her own imaginations.
Unnatural and Uncharacteristic.
She'd burned those records herself, years ago, in a fit of shame. Even now, the memories felt disjointed, like a fever dream. Had she really been so... obsessed over a young man? The thought made her skin crawl. From the living room, laughter spilled in—her husband and daughter watching a movie. The normalcy of it anchored her. She exhaled, forcing her fingers to relax.
"Han Chen..."
The whisper escaped before she could stop it. Her lips still remembered the shape of his name and felt a block in her throat. She slammed the file shut.
Li Mei was a Martial Master (Mid-Stage) now—one of the youngest in the agency, possibly her own nation. Her rise had been meteoric. Two promotions in five years. Colleagues whispered about her unnatural talent, but the way energy thrummed through her veins with almost predatory efficiency, she felt misplaced with her previous self few years prior.
She'd never questioned it. But now? Is piercing the mental block and gaining entry into martial master so easy? Why can't she exactly remember the process?
But now, staring at that name, a cold suspicion slithered into her mind. Had he done something to her? Why? The last time they'd met, her memories had blurred. She'd chalked it up to stress. But what if—
Li Mei's fingers tightened around her pen underlining supernatural.
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