Chapter 137: The Shapeshifting Art Crosses the Border

“Sister, let’s do this. On the road of disguise, let’s each lay our cards on the table for once,” Lin Xiaosu said.

“Fine.”

Blue Demon answered with a single word.

Then, for no apparent reason, her body began to change. It was as though a current of water had swept across her face. Her features shifted, transforming her into a completely unfamiliar man in his thirties.

Her clothes changed as well, becoming an ordinary T-shirt.

Lin Xiaosu stared at the astonishing sight before him, somewhat dazed.

“What is it? Have I finally managed to shock you?” Blue Demon laughed. Her voice was full-bodied and unmistakably masculine, without the slightest trace of artificial alteration. Perhaps she had not changed her voice at all. Her vocal cords might simply have been thickened by physical means.

“That is quite a shock!” Lin Xiaosu said. “Two things in particular stand out.”

“Oh? Let’s hear them.”

“First, your hair can actually retract.”

“And the second?”

Blue Demon was genuinely interested. The first point was itself the most incredible aspect of her transformation. When she became a woman, her hair flowed down her back; when she became a man, it withdrew completely. Her hair could be long or short at will. That was the one area in which modern disguise techniques could never hope to compete. Only unusual genes could produce such a bizarre alteration.

The last time she had assumed the identity of Ding Ruoshui, Ding Ruoshui had already possessed long, flowing hair. Blue Demon had only needed to conceal its blue sheen. Thus, she had never displayed this peculiar skill before Lin Xiaosu.

Today, she had done so. Perhaps, on some subconscious level, she had indeed wanted to intimidate him.

She wanted him to understand that although she had once crossed swords with him in this field and failed to gain the upper hand, she remained the undisputed queen of disguise.

“The second point is…” Lin Xiaosu said. “Sister, your breasts can disappear too. Viewed from another angle, does that mean you can also make them swell beyond the ordinary?”

His gaze fell upon the chest of the man standing before him.

It was an entirely normal, powerfully built male chest.

The two conspicuous mounds that had been there moments ago had vanished without a trace.

Ordinary disguise altered the face and the air one gave off. Her shapeshifting art, however, began with physical transformation, overturning every conventional understanding of the human body.

To be honest, Lin Xiaosu was deeply shocked.

Blue Demon sighed. “Your priorities are truly exasperating… Your turn. Let me see your disguise technique.”

Lin Xiaosu’s face trembled faintly, as if a wave had passed beneath the muscles before surging away and disappearing. His features had already changed.

He was still a young man, and even the outline of his face remained broadly similar to Lin Xiaosu’s.

His transformation was merely a subtle one.

Yet it had to be admitted that the human face was a marvelous thing. The features themselves need not change greatly; the slightest adjustment was enough to turn one person into another. At the very least, the impression he gave had been transformed completely.

Judged purely by disguise technique, his subtle alteration seemed immeasurably inferior to Blue Demon’s earth-shaking transformation. Yet judged by the result, both had successfully become complete strangers.

Blue Demon was a grandmaster of disguise. She naturally understood that the elegance of the process and the dramatic nature of its appearance were not what mattered. Sometimes, true mastery revealed itself in the smallest details, and that was where the essence of disguise lay.

She nodded lightly. “So you can make minute internal adjustments with vital energy. The subtlety of ancient martial arts is truly admirable.”

Lin Xiaosu slipped into the nearby brush, removed the clothes that had been reduced almost to rags, and changed into a fresh set. For him, this seemed perfectly ordinary.

Blue Demon’s eyes, however, suddenly lit up.

She had finally seen what truly interested her.

There were two things.

First, his clothes were saturated with blood. In theory, his back should have been covered in wounds. Yet, through the grass, she had visually scanned his back. Though bloodstains remained, the flesh itself was intact.

He had been injured. That was a fact.

He had healed. That was also a fact.

Instant regeneration?

Instant regeneration was the ability most coveted by the Hidden Dragon warriors.

A person like that was a natural-born fighter, and the Hidden Dragon naturally possessed no shortage of such talents. For instance, Sky Wolf, known as the “Undying Heavenly King,” could recover from injuries in an instant. That was the effect of his Undying Insect gene.

But Lin Xiaosu was not a genetically enhanced human. He practiced only ancient martial arts.

Could his ancient martial arts actually reproduce, by another means, the extraordinary properties of the Undying Insect gene?

The second point was his clothing.

Tonight, he had merely been pursuing an enemy and had brought no luggage with him.

In this season, he wore only a single layer of clothing and carried one military dagger.

There was nowhere on him to hide anything.

And yet, with a flick of his hand in the brush, a fresh garment had appeared out of thin air.

Where had it been concealed?

A single article of clothing was insignificant to her. Yet it happened to strike directly at the point that interested her most about Lin Xiaosu.

What interested her most about him?

The previous S-rank mission.

The S-rank mission to recover the Purple Demon Stone.

The enemy had established checkpoint after checkpoint at the airport and the docks, using spirit mirrors to conduct searches. In theory, he could not possibly have concealed the energy emanating from the Purple Demon Stone, and there was no way he should have been able to bring it back.

Yet he had done exactly that.

What did this mean?

It meant that he possessed some wondrous object or extraordinary technique capable of storing items.

That technique could even conceal them from spirit-mirror detection.

Tonight, an apparently worthless garment had appeared from nowhere. Blue Demon, exceptionally sensitive to such things, immediately caught the connection.

Could this be the mysterious “storage art” that had left the entire Hidden Dragon baffled?

The man before her was becoming increasingly intriguing.

His vital-energy disguise resembled her shapeshifting art.

His use of vital energy to heal injuries resembled the Undying Heavenly King’s ability.

And now there was this incomprehensible storage art—something for which the Hidden Dragon had no precedent whatsoever.

“Come on,” Lin Xiaosu said, stepping before Blue Demon. “Let’s go sightseeing in Shan State, Greenface Nation.”

He spoke a sentence in the Greenface language, fluent and effortless.

Blue Demon slowly raised her eyes. “How long did it take you to learn the language of Greenface Nation?”

She, too, spoke in the Greenface tongue.

“If I told you three months, would that surprise you a little?” Lin Xiaosu asked.

“Nothing surprising about it,” Blue Demon replied. “Opportunity always favors those who are prepared. Let’s go.”

The two of them followed the jungle path downward.

This was not a time for battle, so there was no need to display the overwhelming presence that made every blade of grass and every tree tremble when they entered the forest. They looked more like two tourists taking an occasional late-night stroll.

Blue Demon’s mind was bubbling with thoughts, though she had no convenient way to analyze them with him.

She had said that opportunity always favored those who were prepared. The words were positive enough, but the image they conjured in her mind held a trace of sorrow.

Why?

Because learning the Greenface language was not an ordinary undertaking.

It was a minor language, one no student would have learned during school. No student would study a tongue utterly useless in examinations and unlikely to be of practical use in ordinary life.

Lin Xiaosu could only have begun from scratch.

He knew that Greenface Nation was politically complex, shared a border with Great Xia, and had countless points of contact with it.

To become a better spy, he had learned an entirely new language.

He had said it took three months. The timing fit perfectly.

He had prepared to such an astonishing degree, yet the gates of the Hidden Dragon had not opened for him.

The Hidden Dragon had rejected his application for permanent admission, shutting him out entirely.

How…

How had the people above arrived at such a decision?

Were they truly not afraid of wasting a gifted man with both determination and ability?

On the surface, Shan State appeared to be a prosperous and thriving place. It could hardly be called a barren wilderness. It had broad highways, neon-lit nightlife, countless industrial parks, and streets crowded with luxury cars and beautiful women.

That was merely the surface.

The reality was that drugs flourished there, while most of the industrial parks were engaged in illegal enterprises—scams, kidnapping, and, naturally, combinations of the two.

When money came easily, people did not value it much, especially the leaders of those fraudulent operations and the kingpins of the drug cartels. Their businesses were already illegal. Why would they care about committing a few more crimes?

And so, using money to drown themselves in drink and indulge every human appetite became inevitable.

Lin Xiaosu and Blue Demon entered a luxurious hotel side by side.

The hotel’s management was purely symbolic. The staff did not even check their identities. Blue Demon casually handed over several green hundred-pound notes, and the receptionist swayed her ample hips as she led them to the third floor.

After opening the door, she asked, “Would either of you gentlemen like a girl? Local or foreign, university students or virgins—we have them all…”

Blue Demon was about to shut the door.

But Lin Xiaosu spoke first. “Do you have any virgins from Great Xia?”

The receptionist hesitated. “We have women from Great Xia, but virgins… they’re difficult to arrange. The men from the industrial parks are all like wolves. Whenever a virgin arrives, she’s usually taken immediately. Still, if you’re willing to pay enough, there’s always a way.”

“Never mind, then. Not tonight.”

Lin Xiaosu closed the door.

Blue Demon folded shut the small device in her hand. It was an anti-surveillance instrument, one of the finest used by the Hidden Dragon.

There were no cameras in the hotel.

Lin Xiaosu smiled faintly. “Did you hear what the receptionist said?”

Blue Demon raised her eyes. Of course she had heard, but she did not understand what he meant by the question.

Lin Xiaosu said, “In this place, once people from Great Xia arrive, those with value are forced into the scam networks, while those without value have their organs harvested. Virgins are nearly nonexistent. Taken together, the conclusion is obvious: this land harbors an almost pathological malice toward the people of Great Xia.”

“And so?”

“So no matter what strategy we adopt, we can proceed with a clear conscience.”

Blue Demon smiled. “I was wondering why you had taken such a long way around. You were worried that my identity might become a constraint on what we do.”

She shook her head lightly.

“You’re mistaken. Do you know why I’m called Blue Demon?”

“Because you have no scruples?”

“Nor would I claim to have none,” Blue Demon said. “Questions of right and wrong still give me pause. But when traveling beyond our borders, the objective comes first. Everything else is a mere detail.”

“Tomorrow, we’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of the power structure in this place. Tonight, we rest.”

They rested.

But in this accursed place, getting a proper night’s sleep was not easy.

Someone in the next room kept crying out. It was a woman’s voice, exceptionally loud and shrill.

Such sounds were difficult to hear within Great Xia—or, more precisely, it was difficult to hear anyone making them with such unrestrained abandon.