Chapter 63: Espionage Skills

If someone drives while focusing intently on reversing time, it’s simple enough in theory. The problem is he’s the one behind the wheel—one moment his gaze is fixed on the events of last night, the next it returns to the present. It’s incredibly dangerous. If his timing is off, he could collide head-on with an oncoming car—imagine, a car approaching in reality, but his attention still wandering the empty roads of yesterday. How could that possibly end well?

One must admit, many skills are born of necessity.

Lin Xiaosu had driven for dozens of miles when, with a blink of his eyes, he split his temporal vision—his right eye maintained a normal view, while his left eye peered into the past. Instantly, everything felt much easier. The car accelerated markedly.

Dongzi traveled this national highway, stopping for fuel at a station ahead. Lin Xiaosu fueled up there too. At noon, Dongzi ate at a small restaurant near the border of Dingshi Province; Lin Xiaosu had his meal there as well.

In the afternoon, Dongzi’s car veered onto a winding mountain road. Lin Xiaosu followed suit.

By nightfall, Dongzi stopped at a scenic area. He slept in his car in the parking lot for three hours, then set off again.

In truth, just two hours after Dongzi resumed his journey, Lin Xiaosu had already arrived at the place where Dongzi had slept. If he’d wanted to catch up, he could have simply sped up and reached Dongzi within a few hours. But Lin Xiaosu was in no hurry.

He booked a room in the scenic area and enjoyed a comfortable night’s rest. He turned off his phone, dismantled the car’s tracking device, and melted into the crowd like a drop of water—untraceable, his main purpose now sightseeing, leisurely trailing Dongzi. After all, Dongzi could never escape him, nor was Dongzi truly his target.

It had to be said: possessing the ability to reverse time made tracking someone an almost divine pursuit.

In the latter half of his journey, Dongzi’s pace slowed noticeably. At the western edge of Dingshi Province, he even stayed overnight. The next day, he strolled through the small county town, taking in the scenery along both banks of the river. He played the role of a casual traveler, embracing a spur-of-the-moment trip.

But when Lin Xiaosu retraced Dongzi’s steps eight hours later, he discovered the real reason for Dongzi’s slowed pace: Dongzi was watching for anyone following him.

His demeanor seemed relaxed, even a bit careless, but his eyes were sharp as blades.

Lin Xiaosu’s heart raced—he knew he was close to his destination.

Only after Dongzi was certain he wasn’t being followed would he proceed to his true goal. This, indirectly, suggested that the destination was no ordinary place.

Of course, Dongzi could never imagine someone tracking him from hundreds of miles away. Thus, reassured, he began the final stretch of his journey.

Ahead, a great mountain loomed—the Yuntai Mountain Scenic Area. In truth, it was only called a scenic area by the locals; it was far from developed. Despite the local government’s efforts and dedicated funding for promotion, it had barely attained a 4A rating—hardly a distinction, as 4A scenic spots were everywhere.

Dongzi’s car entered the area, winding its way to a farmhouse called Ziyi Manor. The manor occupied a broad expanse: orchards above, ponds below, and two small houses built against the mountainside.

Meals were no problem. On weekends, families came to pick fruit or fish, but customers were few since the surrounding scenery wasn’t particularly impressive—separated from the main Yuntai Mountain area by a ridge.

Lin Xiaosu drove in behind Dongzi. Yet, upon arrival, he noticed something odd—Dongzi’s car had vanished. There was only one mountain road, and this was its end; Lin Xiaosu hadn’t seen Dongzi’s car anywhere outside, yet here it was, disappeared into thin air.

Where had it gone?

Reversing time, Lin Xiaosu quickly discovered that, under cover of night, Dongzi’s car had entered a basement. Dongzi himself had then gone into the right-hand building and never emerged.

The destination had been reached. There was something off about this manor.

Ostensibly a farmhouse, yet everyone inside seemed to know Dongzi well. His car had driven straight into the basement. The building Dongzi entered wasn’t for guests but rather the owner’s residence. Stranger still, he went into a room that didn’t look like a room at all and didn’t come out for eight hours. With Lin Xiaosu’s all-seeing eye, even from hundreds of meters away, it didn’t seem as if anyone was inside.

The car was hidden, the man gone—he’d traveled all this way, but didn’t eat, didn’t check into the guesthouse, simply vanished into thin air.

Lin Xiaosu parked, got out, and took a travel bag from the car.

“Would you like something to eat?” a middle-aged woman in an apron approached, speaking in the local dialect.

“Yes.”

“The dining hall is over there—just local dishes. Where are you from?”

“Local,” Lin Xiaosu replied, echoing her dialect, though, truth be told, he only knew these three words—the ones she’d just said.

“Oh, local? From the county town?”

“Yes. What local dishes do you have?”

The woman launched into a long-winded description.

No one would have guessed that Lin Xiaosu had never spoken the dialect before. But with his extraordinary intuition, he kept his answers minimal at first—just enough to prompt the woman to keep talking. Gradually, he pieced together phrases from what he heard, asking the next question. Like a snowball rolling, he completed the entire exchange without revealing a single flaw.

In the restaurant, he pointed at the menu and ordered a few dishes, then sipped his tea and waited.

Nearby, a lively table of guests from the county chatted and toasted each other, and Lin Xiaosu’s “linguistic mastery” expanded rapidly. The dialects of this country weren’t difficult to grasp; they differed mainly in pronunciation and vocabulary. In this lively environment, Lin Xiaosu’s understanding of the local dialect quickly grew complete.

This was the terrifying power of a truly gifted mind.

He could master a new language in half a day; how much easier a dialect rooted in the same mother tongue?

By the time a waiter brought his food, Lin Xiaosu could already joke with him in the local dialect.

Speaking the dialect didn’t have particular significance for today’s mission, but it served as a trial run for Lin Xiaosu’s extraordinary espionage skills.

After his meal, Lin Xiaosu asked for a room. The woman was delighted to oblige, giving him a room in the left building, just as he’d expected.

The left building was newer and housed the guest rooms; the right was older, the manor owner’s ancestral home. The division was typical of a farmhouse—locals, having seized new opportunities in modern times, transformed themselves into manor owners, offering meals and lodging. It wasn’t about making a fortune—just scraping by, for what else could they do?

All this the middle-aged woman told him, perfectly reflecting the local way of life.

But once Lin Xiaosu entered his room, he noticed something was off: surveillance.

The monitoring was sophisticated, hidden inside the power outlet—so advanced it wouldn’t be detected by ordinary equipment, not even by specialized devices that search for reflective surfaces.

But Lin Xiaosu, forewarned, had already pinpointed the surveillance.

His all-seeing eye was not something ordinary people could comprehend.

He behaved like any other tourist; every move was in keeping with the typical self-driving traveler’s routine—drop off luggage, boil some water, lounge on the bed, play on his phone… Ruo Lan called, but Lin Xiaosu didn’t answer.

Then, he went downstairs for a stroll, snapping photos of the distant Yuntai Mountain, checking out the free-range chickens near the manor—everything as expected. Eventually, he wandered up a nearby slope, four or five meters above the manor, about fifty meters away.

From there, Lin Xiaosu could see the window of the room he’d been curious about. The heavy curtains drawn last night were open now—perhaps the owner feared that closed curtains in daylight would arouse suspicion.

With the curtains open, every detail of what happened after Dongzi entered that room was laid bare to Lin Xiaosu by means more uncanny than any surveillance system.

He was truly astonished.

Every mystery was unraveled. The reason Dongzi never emerged was because he was no longer in the room. The building was constructed against the mountain for the same reason as the old Laoshan genetics site—there was more to the mountain than met the eye.

Behind the room’s wall was a hidden entrance, opening into a vast cavern within the mountain. The house, the owner’s ancestral home, looked every bit the part. Ordinary visitors would see only the old building—never the expertly concealed entrance to the cavern beyond the wall.

Even if the most trusted confidant entered, the heavy curtains would block any view while the entrance was opened; once the curtains were drawn back, all that would be visible was an unremarkable wall.

The precautions were clever.

But Lin Xiaosu’s mastery of time was beyond such defenses—he simply ignored the laws of physics, using the rules of time itself to reconstruct events. This was a level no surveillance technology could ever reach.

Lin Xiaosu gave no sign of special interest in the room, continuing to enjoy the scenery. To the manor’s residents, he appeared perfectly ordinary.

But to Lin Xiaosu, these people were anything but ordinary.