“Hui, I have one more question.”
Orlando called out to Hui, who was about to leave.
Hui’s hand rested on the doorknob.
He turned at the sound, closed the door again, and walked back toward the chair—but didn’t sit down.
His half-black, half-white hair still had not fully settled from the arc lifted by the last draft of wind through the corridor.
“Miss, please go ahead.”
Orlando was silent for two seconds.
His fingers tapped unconsciously on the desk once.
The question had been sitting in his mind ever since the dinner party last night.
Hui’s expression didn’t change.
“That man called Gaoerji… who is he?”
Always that perfectly appropriate smile—not a fraction too much, nor too little.
But he paused for a moment before answering.
For someone like Hui, a pause itself was a kind of language.
“Well…”
Hui tilted his head slightly.
His heterochromatic pupils flickered briefly under the light.
“I’m not very familiar with that.”
“However, he is a native of Urske.”
“If you’d like to know more, you could find that old gentleman privately for a chat.”
Hui’s voice was always soft.
Orlando leaned back in his chair, his mind turning over several possibilities.
An Urske native.
That wasn’t surprising.
Orlando recalled how Gaoerji had looked the night before when he set his tray down at the table.
Those dark brown eyes, the broad frame, the faded gray shirt washed nearly white, and the habit of breaking a whole piece of black bread in half, putting one half back on the plate and eating slowly—
Like an instinct developed in a place where resources were scarce.
But the question was: what was the common impression of Urske?
Permafrost, war bears, savagery, the Shishouzhe with black armor covering their fingertips, Dongbu stores, barbaric neighbors…
But what was Gaoerji like?
A clerical worker.
A writer who recorded everything in shorthand symbols and spoke with a bookish air.
He looked more like an old professor about to retire from some university in Rantesti City than an Urske native.
In the Empire’s propaganda, he was basically a “civilized man” among the “uncivilized savages”?
Or perhaps—
The War Bear tribe.
Orlando flipped through his memories of the ancient descriptions of the War Bear tribe.
The books said:
They stood one and a half times the height of a man when upright, possessed immense strength, and were even more taciturn than the sturdiest Urske soldiers.
But this old gentleman was at most half a head taller than Orlando.
His frame was indeed broad, but the flesh and muscle were clearly insufficient—a sign of long-term malnutrition.
“Although this is my first time seeing a War Bear tribesman in person.”
Orlando muttered as if to himself.
“Bear ears and a human face. How should I put it… Even in the Empire’s racial encyclopedia, the War Bear tribe is drawn like shaggy brown bears scaled up to twice the size. But Mr. Gaoerji—well, except for those bear ears, there’s not a single second feature that resembles an Urske native.”
Orlando raised his head, pulling the conversation back on track.
“By the way, Hui, it’s just the two of us. On this trip to Urske, are you really not planning to bring anyone else?”
Hui turned his head at the question.
“At the station, there is a dear friend. He is also our companion.”
Someone like Hui chose his words with precision down to the punctuation.
When “dear friend” was a title that came from his own mouth, it meant that this person was already within Hui’s plan, just kept under wraps until the right time to reveal them.
Orlando silently revised his assessment of Hui in his mind.
This man had already drafted the contract days ago, booked the tickets, and had a “dear friend” waiting ahead of time at the station.
It wasn’t just that his mind worked fast—the span of his planning was at least several days ahead.
Any foreseeable accident had already been accounted for.
Even the unforeseeable… probably had a backup plan.
He had even written down the location of the travel manual on a note in advance.
With this level of execution, it was probably why Prunier could let the Red Sun Company run on autopilot while she played the absentee boss—because Hui was covering for her.
A genius leader with zero execution ability, paired with a deputy who pushed execution to the limit—it was like a bizarre form of complementarity.
Hui raised a finger and placed it in front of his lips.
His nails were neatly trimmed, shimmering with a faint pink luster under the light.
“And then.”
Orlando watched his face, always wearing that warm, smiling expression.
He felt like laughing, but also couldn’t quite manage it.
The same warning, the same tone.
“Miss, don’t let anyone else in the group know about this.”
How tight-lipped this man really was, Orlando still wasn’t fully certain.
But at least before they set off, he would play the part of a qualified accomplice.
“Understood.”
Orlando stood up from his chair and rolled his shoulders, stiff from the oppressive humidity of the rainy day.
“We’ll set out in three days.”
Hui pushed the door open.
This time, he didn’t look back.
The door closed softly behind him with a nearly inaudible click.
There was no sound of footsteps in the hallway, only the rain pattering dully through the air vent at the end of the corridor.
Orlando stood alone in the duty room and pushed the chair back under the desk.
He glanced at the desktop.
Where Hui had stood, there wasn’t a single fingerprint left on the surface.
The “bankrupt merchant” who left no trace.
A pair of heterochromatic pupils—one gold, one red—like the two ends of some ancient scale.
A “dear friend” waiting for them at the station.
A Holy Mountain perpetually covered in snow, and a Sacred Lake on its peak said to reflect the deepest fear in a person’s heart.
At the end of the corridor, the dark red door stood quietly closed.
Orlando picked up the note Hui had left and read the last line of small print again.
He folded the note and put it in his pocket, then pushed open the duty room door and walked into the hallway.
Hui said he could talk to that old gentleman, but he needed a little time.
He needed to sort out the logic of this trip first.
Urske was a country on the Tundra.
Who knew how many secrets it held?
Besides, if he was going to sit down with Gaoerji and talk, he wanted to listen from an honest standpoint—not just go running over out of curiosity sparked by one of Hui’s remarks.
Most of the lamps on both sides of the corridor were already lit.
Rainy afternoons always grew dark quickly.
Orlando’s shadow stretched long, slanting across the floor behind him.
Gaoerji had always been a mysterious man, his mysteriousness probably ranking just one notch below the two great beings residing inside Orlando’s own body.
He always gave off an elusive, unfathomable air of mystery.
Even if you killed him, you could only destroy his physical form;
You still couldn’t grasp what he had been through.
The first night back from Wolfgang, Gaoerji had carried his tray to Orlando’s table.
Orlando asked if there was anything he wanted to do but couldn’t.
Gaoerji replied, “The same as what you’re thinking.”
Then he left.
Orlando still hadn’t figured out what that sentence meant.
Because Gaoerji had no way of knowing what Orlando had gone to Wolfgang for.
Unless he knew.
When Orlando turned back, the corridor was empty except for himself.
He stopped and looked back at the door of the duty room.
Give himself three more days.
Get the questions he needed to ask, asked clearly.