Chapter 312: Pinpointing Targets [Part 1]
Cillin didn’t set out to look for Moon’s black box immediately because of two reasons: one, Guan Feng’s business was more urgent and two, Cillin wanted to lie low for a bit before making his next move. Figuratively speaking, he had started quite the fire in the empire recently, and practically everyone was keeping an eye on him right now. It would be bad if someone found out about the black box because he was too hasty.
Just like Sigma’s master had said while he was still alive, some secrets were best left in the dark. In this case, he didn’t even know if he could find the black box or whether he could use it to reopen Shortcut again, so it benefited no one to reveal its existence.
Cillin and Guan Feng spent nearly the whole day in the latter’s workshop while Wheeze and Moon fooled around outside. Wheeze was happy that it finally found someone who would play ball with it.
The moment Moon caught the ball Wheeze threw at his direction, he knew instantly that it was made from the scales of that little snake from a long time ago. While they were playing, Wheeze told Moon about their meeting with the Black Viper.
Not many people earned the trust of the Black Viper itself, much less a gift. If Moon wasn’t sure if Wheeze and Cillin were trustworthy before, he was now. At the very least, they were a lot trustworthy than the Xi Family right now.
Xi Kai would be vomiting blood if Xi Kai could read Moon’s mind. Since when did their creation trust an outsider more than they trusted the family of their own creator?
By showing the Black Viper’s gift to Moon, Wheeze had unknowingly improved the robot’s impression of itself and Cillin by a lot. Moreover, their strong relationship reminded Moon of the good old times when all five of them and their master were still living together.
While Cillin and Guan Feng were busying themselves, Moon also took some materials from Guan Feng’s workshop and upgraded his parts. He switched out the old parts with new parts, and he even installed a concealed weapon in his body. Neither Cillin nor Guan Feng were exactly sure what kind of weapon it was because Wheeze was the only who was around when Moon was performing the self-upgrade. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good for its victims considering that it was the combined creation of Moon and Wheeze.
Cillin had to invest all of his energy in Guan Feng’s project, and he was so busy that he literally couldn’t afford the time to attend his courses despite having returned to AF1. Thankfully, none of the lecturers complained not only because Guan Feng had informed them of Cillin’s unavailability beforehand, but also because the young man himself was a special person right now. He had the privilege not to attend their courses without consequences, and they couldn’t even pretend not to know him since he was famous—or infamous—in the academic circle right now.
Cillin had said what many people dared not say, and done what many dared not done in their lifetime. Even now, the storm he started still hadn’t subsided completely, and the status of some established theories had never been as threatened as they were now. While everyone was Meanwhile, the culprit behind everything and his mentor was working overnight on a certain engineering project that had garnered an exceptional amount of attention from the army. A lot of people had probably forgotten that Cillin was officially accepted into the RAS as a member of the engineering department, not the virology department…
Finally, after a grueling period of almost non-stop working, Cillin finally completed the most important and complicated component of Guan Feng’s project. Guan Feng had also or or less returned to full health, so Cillin didn’t need to handle everything by himself anymore. The remaining tasks was more or less a piece of cake to finish, so Guan Feng gave Cillin the permission to leave the workshop and catch his breath a little.
It had been days since he was stuck inside the workshop, and when Cillin emerged he didn’t find Wheeze or Moon anywhere. He had no doubt that the naughty duo had left to cause some trouble somewhere.
Cillin ate himself to full and stretched out his stiffened muscles a little. Just when he was about to go back to the workshop and help Guan Feng finish the rest of the work, he suddenly received a call from someone in AF1, more specifically the supervisor who was responsible for looking after the animals. Cillin knew immediately that Wheeze and Moon were behind this the moment the person introduced himself, and he was right. The supervisor told him that a brawl had broken out at the animals’ dwelling—which was nothing new—but when he arrived at the scene, he was surprised to find two unfamiliar faces. Well, maybe not Wheeze, but Moon was definitely a stranger no one had ever seen before. By now everyone knows that Cillin was Wheeze’s caretaker, so the supervisor had contacted Cillin immediately.
When Cillin arrived, the animals were receiving a stern lecture from the supervisor. The gigantic King Kong was bowing its head and wearing an aggrieved expression on its face. Almost everyone else was more or less wearing the same expression as well; everyone except Wheeze and Moon. Those two were standing at the side and glaring at the supervisors as if it was their fault for interfering with the brawl, Cillin could spotted claw marks on the faces of two other supervisors. It was obviously Wheeze’s handiwork.
Wheeze dropped its gangster-like demeanor immediately when it saw Cillin. Moon was acting like an innocent and obedient child who had no hand in the brawl at all, and it might’ve worked if everyone hadn’t seen him punching a rhinoceros into the air with their own eyes.
“Brawling, huh?”
Wheeze’s ears drooped even lower.
Cillin stood in front of the two troublemakers and glanced back and forth between Moon and Wheeze. The robot was looking at the floor and playing with his finger, while Wheeze’s eyes were darting everywhere and looking suspicious as hell in general. Cillin lifted Wheeze by the neck and pried open its mouth. He immediately spotted some suspicious looking skin and tissue stuck between its gum, and the worst part was that it didn’t all belong to the same species. Only god knows how many animals it managed to bully before the supervisors finally stepped in to stop things. He could still remember that poor little crocodile who ran away every time it saw Wheeze because it took a bite that left it in tears.
Wheeze and Moon weren’t part of the animal gang, so Cillin had to pay for the damages they caused. Cillin made sure to wave the receipt in front of Wheeze’s face after he did so, causing the gray cat’s heart to turn as cold as ice. How could it possibly know that a simple brawl would cost this much money?? It would never have listened to Moon’s devilish whisper and took part in the brawl if it knew about this, it would have stayed a good bystander and enjoyed the scene from the sidelines… Wheeze counted its claws for a bit and realized that the compensation fee was worth two hundred catties of new-flavor fish biscuits. Two hundred catties of fish biscuits gone just like that…
Moon looked away and feigned ignorance the moment he noticed Wheeze’s thinking.
Cillin gave Moon and Wheeze a task to complete in order to prevent these two troublemakers causing trouble again the moment he looked away. He gave them a name list and told them to keep an eye on the people listed on it, or more specifically their activities on the Return forum. He was sure that Wheeze and Moon wouldn’t be discovered even if they had to observe everyone on the list at the same time.
When Cilin went back to the workshop, Wheeze whipped Moon with its tail before asking, “Did you finish collecting the samples?”
“More or less, yes.”
Moon egged Wheeze into joining the brawl because he wanted to collect their blood samples. Although AF1 had a database on all the animals in AF1, the Original robot preferred to perform the analysis himself. It was one of the habits and traits he inherited from the peak generation of the Xi Family.
“What do you need them for?” Wheeze asked.
“I don’t know yet, I’m just doing this out of habit for now. Who knows, it may come in handy one day. And even if it didn’t, it’s in our circuits to collect data. I like having a huge database.”
Wheeze agreed. Once upon a time, it was like Moon too until it grew lazier and lazier. The gray cat threw the topic to the back of its mind and never thought about it again.
Wheeze and Moon were slackers and troublemakers, but they weren’t stupid enough to put off Cillin’s task. They quickly realized why he had asked them to keep an eye on the people on the list.
Relatively speaking, all the people on the list were experts in the study of space, wormholes and other relevant topics. Some of them were famous people, but some of them were so humble that they were practically unknown. In fact, some of them could never reveal their true identities because they were aliens, slaves, or some other sensitive identities. This was especially true for the slaves. If their buyers ever learned that they were performing researches in secret, they would be executed for sure.
After Cillin completed his own work and exited the workshop again to check on Wheeze and Moon. he was very satisfied with the result. After a brief selection, he began looking at star charts and plotting his next move.
Cillin had no intentions to put all his eggs in one basket, or the black box in this case. It would be great if he could find it of course, but if he couldn’t then he must develop the technology to cross star systems himself. Of course, he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he could do this alone. To begin with, he wasn’t an expert in this area. Although he had absorbed a tonne of relevant knowledge, he was aware that that wasn’t enough to bridge the gap between himself and the true experts. Everyone has their own expertise, and Cillin had no problems admitting that there were people who were better than him in certain things.
Cillin first choice was of course, not the famous researchers of the industry. He would go after the nameless experts first.