The Investigation Unfolds
Time passed few more months from novaGen established. On state investigators side, after extensive research on potential suspects, specialized teams were assigned to surveil each individual. The investigation began by monitoring the suspects in controlled scenarios to observe their reactions.
Leveraging her authority, Li Mei joined the teams assigned to monitor Han Chen. Since the abilities and power level displayed by the subjects could influence or affect those under observing, directive was different: no direct engagement, no psychological tip-offs. Just controlled variables - each scenario precisely designed to measure stress response, perceptual acuity, and metaphysical resonance.
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The Sniper Incident – Rooftop Observation Post
Nearly a 900 metres away, the sniper exhaled slowly, crosshairs steady on Han Chen's temple as he smiled at some unheard quip from Hye Won. From an adjacent rooftop, Li Mei watched through binoculars, her knuckles whitening around the comms unit.
Flinch. React. Give me something.
He didn't.
She hesitated, re-calibrating—perhaps a proximity shot to test his sensitivity. To see if he would twitch, if the illusion of normalcy would crack.
But something else did.
A pigeon startled behind the sniper. Instinct betrayed him—he fired. Even Gun shifted somehow. A costly mistake. Or is it?
The shot cracked through the dusk, a clean, sharp whip of displaced air—the unmistakable report of a supersonic round. But panic didn't follow immediately. City's concrete sprawl had its own symphony: revving scooters, vehicles, the clatter of evening vendors. For a moment, it was just another noise.
Then the bullet just happened to shatter a green traffic signal, sending a spray of broken plastic and warped metal raining onto the intersection. A cloud of fine dust and fragments washed over the road. The impact sounded unnaturally sharp, localized, and weirdly directional. People across the intersection turned at the same moment, not toward the source, but toward the exact point of impact—as if their ears had been guided, not alerted.
A woman in a red scarf looked up, then squinted at the shattered traffic light with a shudder. A child dropped his juice box without knowing why. Motorists didn't just slow — they stopped suddenly, leaned out, looked toward the dust. Drivers braked hard. A courier van swerved into the next lane.
Pedestrians froze, scanning the rooftops. Within seconds, a crowd began to gather, murmuring, phones raised. No screams—just growing unease.
Someone pointed upward. Others followed their gaze. And there, silhouettes of individuals responsible was already visible against the smog-thick skyline, exposed.
A flake of shattered signage drifted past Hye Won's shoulder. She glanced down at the speck on her coat, brushed it away with a flick of indifference."Guess we walked into someone else's mess," she murmured, lo-fi jazz still curling through her headphones.Anyone watching would see nothing more than a couple—unbothered, oblivious.
Seconds After the Shot, up at the station: The advanced rifle barrel still smoked gently.
The sniper froze, finger slack on the trigger, breath caught halfway to exhale. What did I just do? He hadn't meant to fire. Not yet. Not like this. He was a trained operator — every motion drilled, decisions made in microseconds but never without cause. And yet, the memory burned clear:
His finger had moved first. Not his mind. Why now of all times did my body reacted like that? That stupid bird...
Below, the bullet's impact had detonated into more than debris.
His scope twitched. Two floors down, on the rooftop balcony across the way, the comms team was staring at him. No words, just a wall of shocked faces behind binoculars and earpieces.
He pulled back from the scope, heart thudding too fast for his training.
"—What the fuck was that?" someone barked into his earpiece, a half-second delayed.
He couldn't answer. His hands still gripped the rifle, but he couldn't explain his unnatural muscle twitch. Not his own. My career is over. He gulped.
Meanwhile the person responsible for subtle manipulations didn't even glance up. They moved, almost too casually, slipping through the slow-moving cluster of onlookers, then vanished down a side street just as attention redirected skyward.
The Staged Assault
Few days later, on a deserted road, Han Chen and Hye Won encountered a group of men seemingly assaulting a woman. Hye Won moved to intervene, but Han Chen stopped her.
"Look closer," he said, revealing their emotional spectrum—beneath the façade of malice lay no genuine threat or lust, only awareness directed toward Han Chen and Hye Won's position. It was a setup. They walked past, unfazed.
But Han Chen had grown weary of the games.
The Poisoned Meal
Han Chen's villa was pristine—newly purchased, subtly fortified, and deceptively ordinary. Over the past week, a quiet infiltration had begun. Delivery agents with forged tags, cleaners from unverified agencies, a courier who lingered just a second too long at the threshold—all part of a coordinated operation. Even the takeout food and items bought was laced with a sedative designed to incapacitate extra ordinary individuals, testing their resilience.
With a mere flick of his wrist, he invoked the alchemic law of fire purification, his spirit sense detecting and incinerating the toxins before they could take hold. The food remained untouched, the poison reduced to harmless ash. He had warned Hye Won to avoid.
The failed attempts were growing tiresome—not just for the unseen observers, but for Han Chen himself. Their carelessness was becoming insulting. Dropping precautions, mistaking luck for incompetence, growing complacent in the belief that no true threat could penetrate their illusions of safety, from two youngsters.
"I'm done entertaining ghosts," he muttered. Without another word, he strode into the gathering dusk, Hye Won following close behind.
****
A few streets away, just beyond the villa's passive surveillance perimeter, the city pulsed with its usual rhythm—commuters weaving through sidewalks, street vendors calling out their wares, the electric hum of scooters gliding past.
Li Mei stepped out from the crowd, flanked by two CSMA Grandmasters. Their presence was ordinary yet—pressure rippling through the concrete, a hairline crack tracing beneath their feet. Civilians edged away without realizing why, herded by agents broadcasting low-frequency dissonance—subsonic avoidance tones calibrated to herd without panic.
Moments earlier, they'd watched Han Chen retrieve a courier package from just outside his door. Their instruments hadn't picked up signs of immediate rejection or shielding or even a qi spike, and for a flicker of a second, they believed the sedative-laced delivery might have been successful.
That flicker was enough. As soon as he use internal energy the it will drastically weaken him. They believed in science. At the end of the day it's just human body no matter how powerful expert you are, it will only work in a known way.
They hadn't expected to act so soon. But when Han Chen stepped out of the villa with his live-in partner—no bodyguards, no veil of qi, just a man and a woman blending effortlessly into the crowd—they saw an opening. If he'd tried to purge poison, to circulate his qi too hard, maybe he'd be weakened. And if not… well, they'd still prefer to make the retrieval under the illusion of law and not for using force.
This wasn't a rogue in hiding. This was a citizen in plain sight.
And they were walking in the middle of a society that had no room for public disruption—not yet. That meant no assault teams. No sudden force. Not until legality could be seen—or at least claimed.
So Li Mei and her Grandmasters approached directly, cloaked in bureaucracy and threat. Calm. Controlled.
They halted directly in front of Han Chen.
"Long time, Teacher Li," Han Chen said, the title rolling off his tongue like a curse. Seven years ago, she'd worn a different face.
"Come with us," Li Mei ordered. "No warrant needed." Her qi simmered in the air, leaving a metallic tang. Hye Won stepped forward, all naive concern."Wait—CSMA—?"
"They don't need warrants," Han Chen said dryly, eyes locked on Li Mei.
"Famous for making people vanish. What is it this time?"
"Walk with us," Li Mei repeated, voice colder. Han Chen shrugged and tossed Hye Won his keys."Feed my koi. They bite at seven."
"I meant both of you."
A beat of silence.
One of the Grandmasters reached out to guide Han Chen—slow, testing.Not an arrest. Just an escort, for appearances.
Han Chen didn't resist but his attention shifted to other agent.
But when another agent grabbed Hye Won's wrist—too firm, too public—she instinctively pulsed her qi in defense. Barely perceptible, but refined. A Grandmaster's aura, unmistakable.
The agent jerked back, startled. Pedestrians kept walking. But the nearby CSMA team tensed.
Hye Won glanced at Han Chen, eyebrows raised. Still want to keep pretending to be low profile?
Han Chen's gaze sharpened. He sighed, almost disappointed.
"Li Mei," he said, voice calm but carrying. "I was willing to play this out a little longer."
His hand lifted—casual, unhurried."But you laid a hand on her. That's your misstep. "
Then something shifted.
The agent who clutched Hye Won before now took a defensive stance blinked—eyes glazing, breath catching. He staggered and fell down. Another agent, who'd stepped instantly closer to Han Chen with his dagger swing only to simply collapse face first. What is it with this idiot? He know suspect could kill grandmaster, did he really think he would at least put up a fight, that too after his companion fell down in public? Both Han Chen and Li Mei had a frown. Across the perimeter, weapons drew immediately.
Li Mei's hand hovered over her holster—hesitant. The others weren't. They fired.
Rounds cracked like thunder—then halted midair. Suspended. Perfectly still.
One by one, they clattered harmlessly to the pavement.
Li Mei stared, pale. "You…"
Li Mei drew her Glock, but Han Chen ignored it. With a mere look, he neutralized the other agents. One by one, every enforcement officer collapsed, eyes glazed in sudden drowsiness when his eyes gloss over—yet the crowd acted as if nothing had happened, no alarm over bullet sounds no recognition, without Han Chen even taking a step. She fired seeing her team losing in absolute. The air grew heavy.
Li Mei realized with horror that their suppression tech, drones, vehicle monitors, even comms—all had been hijacked. She fired, but bullets that could pierce cast iron and qi shields merely bounced off Han Chen's skin. Only bullets that Han Chen intentionally let go.
"Hmm, without a shield, it still stings like a needle," he mused.
Trembling, she kept her gun raised. "You… It was you… Please, don't kill us like this. We are very willing to make cooperation."
"I won't," Han Chen said. "But your people did try to kill me days ago."
He gestured at the bullets now scattered in the gutter. "I'd say this is a fair response as they saw their companions fall but not the earlier one."
Silence.
"Why?" Han Chen pressed. "All this strategies for last two weeks, and now you have nothing to say?"
Li Mei struggled to speak. "...Now that you've assaulted officers in public, there's a record… the public will—"
Then she noticed—no one was watching. Not a single soul is nearing them or turning to them.
"Reality is what you show the world," Han Chen said. "Drag them. Come with me."
Han Chen and Hye Won led Li Mei to the CSMA's suppression vehicle—a massive armoured and modified transport with qi-dampening talismans based cage and lab facilities inside.
But as they step forward, avatars of themselves and the unconscious agents materialized, walking in perfect synchronization toward the vehicle. The crowd, previously oblivious, now stirred as they "witnessed" the arrest—two suspects being escorted by stone-faced enforcers.
Meanwhile, the real Han Chen, Hye Won, and Li Mei invisible to any monitoring, stepped past the illusion, slipping into the vehicle's passenger compartment unseen.
The suppression cage hummed with energy, its talismans pulsing faintly—utterly useless against the one who had long surpassed their design limit.
Inside the Invisible Theater
Han Chen reclined in the plush seat, fingers drumming idly against the seatbelt clasp. Hye Won nestled close, her wide eyes flickering between him and the unfolding spectacle outside. Across from them, Li Mei sat rigid, her Glock trembling in her lap. The two Grandmasters slumped in their seats, still unconscious.
Outside, the illusory officers played their parts flawlessly—barking orders, radioing in status updates, even mimicking the weight of restrained prisoners. The Spirit Will woven into the illusion replicated every detail: the shuffle of boots, the crackle of comms, communications, even the way the "illusionary suspects" resisted just enough to sell the act.
***
The vehicles separated, the lead vehicle carrying the avatars toward a prearranged site. The driver, unaware of the ruse, followed protocol without question. Upon arrival, the illusory Li Mei stepped out, her duplicate agents dragging the "suppressed and resisting" Han Chen and Hye Won inside.
The real Li Mei, still invisible, watched with dismay, as her double conducted the interrogation with chilling precision—every question, every calculated glare, every pause for effect was identical to how she would have acted.
The avatars responded just as expected: Han Chen played the part of a mildly annoyed but cooperative martial artist, his answers just vague enough to frustrate without raising suspicion. Meanwhile avatar of Hye Won feigned confusion, her responses laced with just the right amount of naive concern.
" How are you doing all this? " Hye Won asked with great interest seeing her avatar in action. Li Mei also very much intrigued. She saw that her teams are still breathing and not dead as she initially presumed. So she just sighed in luck.
" Well a bit of soul suppression, memory retrieval, illution array, spirit will, shielding " He explained cryptically.
When the avatars of interrogators demanded a blood test, Han Chen smiled. With a thought, he altered the genetic essence of two unconscious strangers nearby, their blood now mimicking a perfect match for his and Hye Won's lineages. The lab results would show exactly what the CSMA expected—no anomalies, no hidden high cultivation bases, just two ordinary martial artists a Dark jin peak and Ming jin beginners. Infact, suspects were 'caught' is enough to guess that it was not them, but the rest was just for profiling.
Financial records? Already rewritten. Han Chen was even deemed financially untouchable—a "holy one" with no trace of wrongdoing.
Interrogation logs? Connection with Yue Lan, ... Impeccably consistent. Even the energy signatures in the room were scrubbed clean, leaving no trace of manipulation. The avatars underwent questioning, resulting in a final assessment: "Low threat. Unrelated to any incidents." The Truth Revealed.
Seeing things are about to finalize somehow, Li Mei turned. As illusion happening in background, Li Mei confronted Han Chen: "Who are you? Did you control me years ago?" Tears welled in her eyes. "Just tell me. I don't hate you. I need to know..."
"Why don't you remember?" Han Chen countered.
A flicker of realization crossed her face. "Wait—" As if sudden enlightening, her eyes went back and mouth opened.
Hye Won looked puzzled. "What happened?"
"I unlocked her sealed memory," Han Chen said.
Li Mei's eyes widened, tears spilling as she whispered, "Master…"
"I am no master of you. You will forever forget the memory from now on. This chapter ended long ago. Let it stay closed."
A snap of his fingers—like the breaking of a seal.
Li Mei's pupils dilated, then dulled. The weight in her chest vanished, the fleeting moment of clarity dissolving like smoke. She blinked, her posture shifting back to that of a CSMA officer mid-operation, her confusion smoothed over.
Across from her, the avatars of Han Chen and Hye Won "reluctantly" signed the non-disclosure agreements thrust at them by the illusory agents, their faces carefully showing powerlessness.
The pens lifted from paper, the duplicates returned in careful coincidences back to their bodies location on ground one by one. The unconscious and invisible bodies stood up under his control on the spirit will, mimicking same posture. Then avatars shimmered—then dissolved into motes of light, reabsorbed into the unconscious bodies of the real operatives, merging false memory overwriting seamlessly with the members including Li Mei and martial grand masters making them conscious & regaining body control.
The false interrogation concluded without a hitch. Every log, every scan, every second of footage now reflected a perfectly mundane encounter—one where two low-level martial artists were questioned, cleared, and sent on their way. Han Chen closely verified the memory alterations of two Grand Masters and Li Mei.
The convoy rolled to a stop near a metro station, its armored doors hissing open. Han Chen and Hye Won stepped out, blending into the foot traffic without a backward glance. Behind them, the CSMA vehicles idled briefly before pulling away, their occupants already shifting focus to the next name on their list.
Li Mei rubbed her temples, scrolling absently through the finalized report on her tablet:
Case #X-7294
Subjects: Han Chen (Dark Jin), Hye Won (Ming Jin)
Assessment: No aberrant qi signatures detected. DNA sequence normal; Financials clean. No ties to incident.
Recommendation: Downgrade to passive or no surveillance. Lowest priority.
One of the Grandmasters who pulled the stunt earlier muttered into his comms, "Waste of time. Move to the next target."