49 Apocalypse Rules

In the early morning, before the sun had risen.

Guan Tong stepped out of the dormitory assigned to him by the academy, locked the door, and hung the key on the doorknob.

He hadn't stayed in this dorm much over the past few months. Most of the time, he used Body Shifting to return to his own shelter, so the interior was almost unchanged and didn't require any tidying up.

After leaving the dormitory building, he walked along the path in the morning quiet until he reached the academy's main gate. The guard on duty from the academy's security office saw him and said, "Mr. Guan, are you leaving today?"

The news that Guan Tong would be leaving the academy after Shi Jingyi's return had spread long ago, so the security staff naturally knew about it.

Moreover, they felt a bit awkward facing Guan Tong. The soldier said apologetically, "Sorry, Mr. Guan. You're about to leave, and we still haven't managed to catch the culprit."

The "culprit" he mentioned was the Sisiya assassin who had thrown a bear's head into Guan Tong's dormitory.

After the incident, the security office had been investigating continuously. But since Guan Tong had dealt with the three assassins himself, it was naturally impossible for security to find them. They simply assumed the assassins had fled.

"It's nothing," Guan Tong said. "I'm still here in one piece, which means they were just trying to scare me."

The soldier nodded. "That's for the best. Well then, Mr. Guan, take care."

"Thank you. Goodbye."

Guan Tong walked out of the academy and turned his head for a final look at the place where he had spent more than three months.

Of course, he had no particular feelings for the academy itself, and his relationships with the other teachers and the dean were merely casual. However, he was quite satisfied with most of the students.

Before he'd had any contact with them, he had assumed the academy's students would be somewhat arrogant, thinking that because they met the requirements to enter the academy, they were the most valuable group of people, incomparable to those outside.

But after actually interacting with them, he found that most of the students were relatively humble, rarely displaying a sense of superiority.

This included the earlier "Shen Yun case." Only a minority of students had participated in the protests. Most viewed the situation from a neutral standpoint, believing that Shen Yun was indeed at fault for killing multiple people and that his sentence was not excessive.

'Xiaotian's class of students has already been assigned to various government departments. After next year's class graduates and gets assigned, the 'academy faction' within the government will probably grow even larger...'

Guan Tong didn't know if this was a good or bad thing, but it wasn't a problem he needed to consider right now.

Averting his gaze, he strode forward.

Before long, he disappeared down the street.

...

「Outside Pinglu City, beneath the canyon.」

Guan Tong appeared silently in his shelter and took out some daily necessities he had been keeping in his Storage Ring.

He sat on the bed and let out a long sigh. "Now I don't have to run back and forth anymore."

Before, he still had to stay at the academy dorms every so often. Even with an ability like Body Shifting, which made the trips easy, it was still a mental hassle.

Now that he had officially left the academy, he could stay in his shelter with peace of mind.

"Meow."

Hearing the noise inside, Coal Ball ran in from outside and came up to Guan Tong's side, letting out a cry.

As its body had grown, its cry was no longer cute like before, but had become a deep, low rumble that sounded impressively powerful.

Guan Tong looked at Coal Ball, who now stood as high as his thigh, and rubbed its face. "Coal Ball, if I told people you were a cat now, they'd definitely think I was crazy, right?"

These days, Coal Ball looked less like a cat and more like a mutated cheetah. Its personality had also become more ferocious; only in front of him did it still act somewhat docile.

Guan Tong played with it for a while before letting it go off on its own. He, on the other hand, needed to plan his next moves.

'Who should I go collect a debt from first?'

What Guan Tong had told Shi Jingyi earlier was true. After leaving the academy, he planned to find his enemies one by one and settle his scores, thereby returning to the state of having a "heart without burdens," just as he'd had on Mingdao Mountain.

But as for who to target first, he didn't have a clear plan.

Guan Tong turned on his computer and first accessed the small hard drive Shi Jingyi had given him. It contained some text documents.

He gave them a quick browse and saw they were some of Shi Jingyi's latest cultivation insights, things that hadn't been mentioned in her previous online course videos.

'I'll have to study these carefully later...'

Guan Tong didn't dive into studying them right away. He first saved all the files.

Then, he logged into the Ascender's Home website.

His website was now well-established, with all its sections quite mature. Clicking on any of them, whether the intelligence or commission boards, he could see many Ascenders posting and accepting tasks on their own.

As for the general discussion board, it had practically become the world's largest online gathering place for Ascenders.

Whenever any news broke, someone would post it here immediately, keeping the site's traffic consistently high.

Guan Tong opened the admin panel, selected an account, and checked its recent activity.

He discovered this account was active periodically, and its content was mostly related to intelligence and commissions.

Its most recent activity was two days ago, when the account posted a commission thread. The content was roughly about being in urgent need of Sublimation Coins and wanting to sell several high-value items at a low price quickly.

The reason Guan Tong was paying attention to this account was because it was the same one that had posted the "leak" about Shadow attacking Prince Lado's convoy.

He hadn't dealt with the account at the time because he wanted to wait until he had a moment to track the device's location and settle the score later.

Perhaps because he hadn't taken action, the account's user thought they were in the clear, didn't switch to a new account, and continued to be active on the site with it.

Guan Tong reviewed all the posts made by this account and quickly discovered a pattern.

The commissions posted by this account mostly used keywords like "selling cheap," and the threads usually lacked any follow-up communication.

It looked like they were fishing.

Guan Tong checked the device location for the account's logins. It was south of the North Star Country's border, in the region of the former Andai Kingdom.

However, since the Andai Kingdom had collapsed, the Human Federation had held a meeting before the earthquake Apocalypse Rule and decided to allocate this land to the Sakura Prayer Nation. The Yingqi People who had been relocated from their island now lived there.

Guan Tong now had two theories.

First, the person, or group, behind this account had been in the Andai Kingdom from the start. It was very likely they knew the truth about the attack on Prince Lado's convoy—or they were the ones who did it, framing Shadow to throw international investigators off their trail.

Now that the Sakura Prayer Nation had moved in, this group still hadn't left, which might mean they had already established a base of operations there.

His second theory was related to those "selling cheap" posts.

These posts were likely bait, used to obtain Sublimation Coins through deception or intimidation. Perhaps they did have high-value items on hand, but they would never sell them cheap, and the items themselves might not even belong to them.

'Lado, that prince of a fallen kingdom, is still missing, his fate unknown. If this group attacked Lado, then all the Sublimation Coins and items he had should have fallen into their hands...'

Guan Tong pondered for a moment, his gaze hardening.

He made his decision. He would start by making an example of the people behind this account.

The reason was simple: they were close.

By comparison, whether he went to Sisiya to find Yelena's brother or to the Tulip Federation to find Lucifer, the journey would be quite long.

Especially that Birdman, Lucifer—it wasn't even certain if he had returned to the Tulip Federation. If Guan Tong rushed over rashly, he might end up on a wild goose chase and not find him, which would be a waste of time.

But by starting with the group in the Sakura Prayer Nation to settle his debts, he might be able to kill three birds with one stone.

First, he could solve the problem of the user behind the account.

Second, he could deal with the faction from the Sakura Prayer Nation that had sent people to bomb him.

And third...

As he thought, Guan Tong clicked on the "Baqizi" account.

The account's last activity was a month ago. That was a long time, and he wondered if something had happened.

The last time she'd messaged Guan Tong, she said she was under house arrest by Sakura Prayer officials and hoped he could help her find the parents who had abandoned her years ago.

At the time, Guan Tong had agreed to help, seeing as she had saved him a lot of trouble by directly giving him the Qimo Star Fragment on Leming Island.

However, his reply to her then wasn't that he would find her parents, but that he would rescue her and let her find them herself.

Therefore, rescuing the imprisoned Baqizi was the "third bird" of his three-birds-one-stone plan.

However, this matter wasn't so simple; it required a thorough investigation first.

Identifying which Sakura Prayer faction had previously sent people to bomb him would likewise be a troublesome and somewhat dangerous task.

Because of this, Guan Tong figured his planned trip to the Sakura Prayer lands would probably take a considerable amount of time... he might even spend the duration of one or two Apocalypse Rules within their territory.

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