When Xu Xiaoyou woke up, it was already dusk outside the window. A slight vibration and a bumpy sensation caused her to slowly open her eyes. A girl's fingertips were stroking her face, running through her hair.
Looking up, she saw that Tang Xin had also fallen asleep, leaning against the car window with her hair messy against her face. Xu Xiaoyou could hear her light breathing.
It had been a long time since she had slept so deeply. Upon waking, her mind felt much clearer.
Outside the window was a sky of residual blood-red. Beneath the layered floating clouds, three radiant stars hung between the distant mountains, their final scattering rays of light appearing somewhat eerie.
She sat up, and the movement woke Tang Xin. The girl looked up, smiled at her, and took her hand.
"Yuzu, are you feeling better?"
Xu Xiaoyou nodded and scanned the interior of the car. The two shadow brothers were also resting with their eyes closed. Lin Xing was in a deep sleep, while the slightly more robust Lin Sheng sat upright with his arms crossed. His eyelids were slightly closed, and his aura was steady.
He sat there as still as an old bell.
Only through long-term training could a shadow master this way of sleeping. The mind enters a state of rest, yet the body remains in a normal state. Judging by the frequency of his nostrils' slight movements, it wasn't hard to tell that his pulse and blood flow speed were nearly identical to when he was active.
Should a crisis occur, he would wake up and react in the shortest time possible, his physical skills completely unaffected.
"You're awake," Chen San, who was driving in the front, spoke. Through the rearview mirror, one could see that after long hours of driving, the man's tense poker face showed a hint of fatigue.
The off-road vehicle had already left the Fars Mountain Range and was now driving across the wilderness.
After traveling four hundred kilometers from the Star of Art, the snow on the plains finally began to melt, revealing patches of green and yellow. Under the blood-red sky, the surrounding atmosphere felt inexplicably strange.
This indicated they were getting closer to their destination, with less than a hundred kilometers remaining.
"There's a refugee settlement nearby. The Dawn Agency established Station No. 3 there. The car is almost out of fuel, so I plan to resupply there first. We'll wait for daybreak tomorrow before driving to the final destination," Chen San said.
Xu Xiaoyou gave a slight nod and didn't speak further, turning her gaze back to the window. The vast wilderness sped past her eyes. The wind blowing in carried away the last of her grogginess, leaving her consciousness completely clear.
Before the sky turned completely dark, the off-road vehicle pulled up in front of the station. It looked like a doomsday base—a square iron box resembling a giant cage. The alloy walls were covered in rust, with the marks left by time clearly visible.
Chen San got out of the car, pushed open the metal louvered door, and led everyone into the courtyard in front of the station. A gust of wind blew, causing the crooked old tree planted in the courtyard to sway slightly. The last rays of the sun filtered through the gaps in the leaves, forming mottled spots of light on the ground. The tree's massive shadow moved with the wind, its leaves rustling, adding a touch of desolation to the courtyard.
Chen San entered something at the metal door of the station and then stood there waiting for a while. When he received no response, his brow furrowed. He looked up at the camera positioned at the eaves of the porch and waved his hand.
"Li Yin?"
"A-Qing!"
After getting no response for the second time, his expression darkened slightly. He returned to the group behind him. "I don't know what they're up to. There doesn't seem to be anyone inside the station."
Xu Xiaoyou frowned. "As commissioned personnel traveling abroad, aren't you equipped with IC cards for these stations?"
Chen San paused. "We used to be. But a few years ago, something quite bad happened. A Diamond 4 suddenly defected while on an external commission. He used his ID card to open a station door, killed the resident staff, plundered the supplies, and vanished after taking several confidential files."
"Since then, the Dawn Agency stopped providing ID cards to commissioned personnel. We have to communicate and confirm with the resident staff before we can enter a station for resupply and adjustments."
"It seems your internal unity isn't as strong as it looks," Xu Xiaoyou remarked casually.
She quietly observed the diamond pattern on the chest of his suit, wondering if the internal ratings for the Dawn Agency's commissioned personnel were related to the suits of playing cards.
In a deck of playing cards, excluding the jokers, there are thirteen cards for each of the four suits—hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs—totaling fifty-two cards. This meant that out of tens of thousands of registered Dawn fixers, only fifty-two could obtain a suit.
She vaguely remembered that the young man named Jian Liu had a Six of Clubs pattern on his black windbreaker, and he was the director of the entire Dawn Agency. Based on that inference, clubs should be the highest suit in the evaluation, followed downward by diamonds, spades, and hearts.
Chen San was a Diamond 3, and his status within the agency didn't seem low, yet he was just an ordinary grade 1 fixer who hadn't shown any particularly brilliant performance so far.
Had she misjudged?
Perhaps the specific classification of rank had nothing to do with the suit or the number.
But even if that were the case, he was still one of the fifty-two suited members. It didn't seem right for him to have such mediocre performance.
Perhaps he was still hiding an unknown trump card, Xu Xiaoyou realized.
"What happens if we force the door?" Lin Xing asked thoughtfully.
Chen San gave him a look as if he were an idiot, speechless for a moment. "See that patch of ground?"
Everyone looked where he pointed. Under the crooked old tree in the courtyard, amidst the large piles of fallen leaves and shadows, there seemed to be a square metal hatch. Otherwise, it looked no different from anywhere else.
"Triggering the station's alarm will raise two autocannons. If you're confident you can survive a metal storm of six thousand armor-piercing rounds per minute with those physical skills you're so proud of, feel free to try."
There was no doubt that the physical body of a grade 3 profession, even one known for frontal defensive strength, could never survive such firepower, let alone withstand it. A body would be turned into a sieve within seconds—out of three hundred pounds, two hundred would be lead.
Chen San tried to open his communication curtain, but upon finding that it wasn't functioning normally and was in a state of no network, he sighed deeply and looked at the group.
"Let's go ask in the nearby settlement. Maybe they know what's going on."
Thus, everyone left the off-road vehicle fueled up and parked at the station and headed down to the settlement at the foot of the mountain.
The entire refugee settlement was built against the mountain, housing around three hundred people. The crude houses were scattered about. Calling them houses was a stretch; they were actually constructed from discarded metal sheds, rough logs, rusted metal components, and similar items. The connections were merely simple wedge joints tied with thick ropes; a bit of force would cause the whole thing to collapse.
The mountain's shadow cast over them, forming a natural protective barrier. Without looking closely, it was difficult to notice the settlement's existence, effectively reducing the chance of being discovered by bandits or other predators.
Standing before the settlement, a strong sense of impending danger rose in Xu Xiaoyou's heart. She slowly looked up as if the entrance, enclosed by old iron railings, had transformed into the gaping maw of a monster ready to swallow them whole.
Her intuition told her that the settlement before them was very wrong.
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