Chapter 9: Lord of the Sea Abyss × Researcher (9)

For funds of unknown origin like this, banks always have to conduct audits, especially for citizens with fixed incomes like Ji Qingzuo.

In addition, due to An Kun's "special care", Ji Qingzuo's personal account has been under close surveillance.

One night, Ji Qingzuo received a call from her personal account manager, a sweet female voice coming through the receiver.

"Miss Ji, hello. We noticed a large sum of money in your account. As far as I know, you were recently unemployed. Did you find a new high-paying job?" The account manager asked Ji Qingzuo, holding an electronic terminal in her hand. Although her voice was soft and beautiful, there was always a somewhat intimidating feeling to it.

"It's from selling gold bars." Ji Qingzuo was calculating data, not even lifting her head, and directly answered with a prepared explanation.

"Gold bars?" The account manager was surprised. "Were they your reserve funds from before? But we couldn't find any records of you purchasing gold products."

"No." Ji Qingzuo's answer was brief, avoiding key information. "I found them in the sea."

"The sea? Are you referring to the Nightblaze Sea you bought before? But there doesn't seem to be any gold deposits there." The account manager was somewhat astonished.

The original Lanhai Company had already scanned every inch of the Nightblaze Sea, and if there were any valuable mineral veins, they would have already been exploited.

"It's not surprising for such a vast sea to have sunken ships, tombs, and other locations, right?" Ji Qingzuo put down the pen in her hand. "It's just a small amount of money. Miss Manager, how long are you going to interrogate me?"

For the entire ocean, that bit of gold wasn't much, and Ji Qingzuo's explanation made sense.

"Hehe, Miss Ji, you've misunderstood. We're just worried that you won't be able to repay your loan." The account manager chuckled.

Ji Qingzuo hung up the call directly. She also had no intention of using the funds given to her by Shen Rongyu. Currently, she could still barely pay off her loan, and she would deal with the future when it came.

Shortly after, another call was connected.

"Yes..." The account manager adjusted the earpiece on her lip. "Miss Ji probably happened to find some treasures left behind hundreds of years ago in a sunken ship or something in the sea—they are mostly worthless, except for a bit of gold."

"Chairman An, please rest assured. If Nightblaze Sea had any resources that could be easily obtained, Lanhai Company wouldn't be so poor." The account manager reassured.

"The benefits we've brought to your bank, you should know very well. If there's another situation where you lend to her..." An Kun warned.

"Chairman An, we wouldn't dare. But who could have predicted that her decision would be so crazy?" The account manager inwardly sighed, feeling that they had also been thoroughly deceived by Ji Qingzuo.

A person like her deserved to go bankrupt and have her citizenship stripped away. With such a good life in front of her, she didn't want to enjoy it and actually went against a corporation as large as An Kun Group.

Ji Qingzuo stayed quietly in her room alone, continuing her research. At the same time, Shen Rongyu was also researching the chains that bound him.

Shen Rongyu wanted to leave this place. He behaved obediently in front of Ji Qingzuo to relax her guard and gain her help in freeing him from the chains.

Originally, these chains were only sealed on the outside of the coffin, but later, when he was submerged into the sea and the sunken ship disintegrated, the chains were deeply buried in the seabed. After millions of years, these chains seemed to grow on their own, binding him as the center and spreading throughout the Abyss.

When Shen Rongyu had just awakened, he thought these chains simply served to seal away the evil. But a few days ago, Ji Qingzuo shared her research results with him, giving him a new idea.

He raised his hand, his well-defined fingers caressed the chains, and as he moved, the chains trembled slightly. Shen Rongyu felt a pulse-like throbbing on the chains.

Rather than saying these chains were cold metals, it was more like they were veins and nerves connecting something.

---

The next day, after Ji Qingzuo woke up early, she watered the cactus placed on her windowsill. When the weather was normal, these resilient beings only needed to be watered once a month.

On the top of the cactus, a small bud was growing, slender and elegant, not yet blooming.

Ji Qingzhuo knew that it would only open under the moonlight on certain days, as the flower grafted onto the cactus was a night-blooming cereus, clearly two different plants, but through long-term cultivation, the night-blooming cereus could also bloom on this desert plant.

She gently caressed the slender bud on the top of the cactus, softly brushing over the stem of the night-blooming cereus. It seemed to remind her of something.

Shen Rongyu and the ocean... was their relationship also like this?

But what kind of creature was Shen Rongyu himself? How was he able to connect with this entire ocean?

Ji Qingzhuo was filled with curiosity about things beyond her own understanding. She stood up from her electronic terminal in front of her.

She had made an agreement with Shen Rongyu that she would rest on weekends, so she wouldn't dive underwater to gather information.

Shen Rongyu, who had just heard this news, turned around and said to her with surprise, "Miss Ji, I will feel lonely without you here."

Ji Qingzhuo, a beautiful woman who had been single for twenty-five years, indeed... she was... not flirtatious. She quickly replied, "Mr. Shen, weren't you alone here before for thousands of years?"

"I was sleeping at that time and knew nothing." Shen Rongyu approached her, his enticing peach blossom eyes like magnets, attracting Ji Qingzhuo's gaze, and then locking onto it. "Miss Ji, but when I just arrived, I wasn't sleeping."

"I was alone in a small cabin." Shen Rongyu described the scene at that time. In fact, his conditions were even worse when he first arrived. He was completely sealed inside a coffin.

- Of course, Shen Rongyu would never reveal where he had been sleeping before.

"Mr. Shen, I understand now." Ji Qingzhuo finally realized, "When I'm not here, you feel lonely, right?"

She murmured while recording this information, her mutterings reaching Shen Rongyu's ears, "Can creatures like this also fear loneliness?"

"Aren't you afraid?" Shen Rongyu countered. Of course, he wasn't afraid. It was all part of his disguise. There was nothing in this world that he feared. In many ways, he was fear itself.

"I'm not afraid when I'm alone." Ji Qingzhuo took back her notebook. "On the contrary, I might be more afraid of crowds."

"I will come down this weekend, but I'll be late." She bid him farewell.

Shen Rongyu watched her leave and realized that Ji Qingzhuo agreed to accompany him just to take care of his emotions, not because she hoped to gain anything from him... ridiculous... research data.

Very foolish human, but too clever for her own good.

Deceive her soul, and then get her, devour it... it must be delicious, right? Shen Rongyu licked his lips.

Even though it wasn't time yet to go down and keep his promise with Shen Rongyu, Ji Qingzhuo still left early. She planned to share her hypothesis with Shen Rongyu himself; he had the right to know about her research progress.

But since it was the weekend, Ji Qingzhuo didn't wear her research uniform, just her regular clothes. Most of her attire was simple, wearing only a mid-ankle white skirt, revealing her shoulders and clavicles, accentuating her slender neck.

Because she had to travel between her residence and the Mid-Oceanic Abyss, Ji Qingzhuo spent a week of her leisure time transforming her used car into a seafaring yacht. Being amphibious and controlling the complex circuits of the vehicle was no problem for Ji Qingzhuo; she only relied on robots to help her with the parts modification.

If she did it herself, the used car would have exploded.

Ji Qingzhuo pressed the vehicle switch, and the modified yacht shot out onto the sea like an arrow. Her car had been converted into an open-top, as she didn't have extra money to buy materials and had to dismantle the roof of the car for the modifications.

A perfectly fine used car, in Ji Qingzhuo's hands, became a battle-damaged version in no time. She herself didn't care much about the appearance of vehicles.

No one would see it on the sea, so why bother with so many concerns? Ji Qingzhuo comforted herself while driving the modified yacht.

At this moment, she heard a disturbance coming from the distant sea surface. Ji Qingzhuo was very sensitive to danger and immediately turned the steering wheel in that direction. At the same time, she also activated the monitoring of the Night-Lan Sea area on her electronic terminal to pinpoint the source of the disturbance.

Sure enough, at the end of the surveillance footage and her line of sight, she saw several huge whaling ships. From her perspective, she saw ropes with tail hooks being dropped from the ships, dragging the massive silent whales from the sea. Blood flowed from the wounds where the tail hooks had cut the whales, staining the sea red.

Almost subconsciously, Ji Qingzhuo reached for the glasses next to her and put them on. Her brows furrowed, feeling an overwhelming anger rushing to her head as she saw An Kun on the closer surveillance footage.

He stood on the deck in front of the whaling ship, gazing at the distant sea. He leisurely blew smoke rings, even flicking his cigarette ash into the sea.

An Kun wore sunglasses, arrogantly commanding his subordinates to drag the whales onto the ship. Due to the destructive exploitation of ocean resources, live wild whales like these had become scarce throughout the entire star system. Because of their scarcity, many elites used their meat as a symbol of their status, even though it was not tasty.

The natural ecosystem of the Night Mist Sea was already a precious existence, and it had taken Ji Qingzhuo several years to secure the best outcome from the Lanhai Company. Later, An Kun acquired the Lanhai Company, and she also made her greatest effort to protect this sea.

She thought that the Night Mist Sea was hers now and that the An Kun Group wouldn't do anything. But Ji Qingzhuo realized that she had been too naive.

She stepped on the accelerator, speeding towards the whaling ship, causing huge waves to surge behind her.

Ji Qingzhuo wanted to stop them. The Night Mist Sea belonged to her.

When she arrived beneath the massive whaling ship, she dared not move her gaze towards the side of the ship. She could smell the pervasive scent of blood in the air, and the gigantic whales struggled desperately after being lifted out of the water. But the harder they struggled, the deeper the tail hooks sank.

An Kun had already noticed her presence. When Ji Qingzhuo accessed the surveillance footage, he even whistled playfully towards the sky camera.

"An Kun." Ji Qingzhuo looked up, gazing at An Kun standing above the whaling ship. Her voice, rare with anger, said, "You're messing with my things."

An Kun took off his sunglasses, his disdainful gaze scanning the modified yacht Ji Qingzhuo was piloting. He had long known that Ji Qingzhuo would come, and he was not afraid of her anger. "Oh, isn't this Miss Ji? The owner of the Night Mist Sea."

Ji Qingzhuo didn't know how to stop the whaling operation. Her gaze swept over the long ropes—this angle was not enough to obtain accurate data. She needed a higher vantage point to gather useful information.

"Miss Ji, driving such a shabby yacht all by yourself, what a pity." An Kun smirked at her and shook his cigar. He ordered his subordinates, "Quick, why haven't you brought the beauty up yet?"