Chapter 204

The security guards were no match for a real fighter, because they were never meant to be the real fighting force in the first place.

But they had received training: when the real fighting force appeared, they were not to look at it, lest terrorists or illegal intruders detect it through their eyes.

So the group of guards kept their eyes fixed on Mo Li, even talking to distract him.

The drone flew by means of an antigravity device. It drew slowly closer without making a sound. Even Mo Li’s keen hearing had difficulty detecting it.

A laser beam shot down.

The system already contained all of Mo Li’s physiological data. Uncle Jiang precisely controlled the intensity. A single laser beam was enough to render a powerful beastman immobile.

It was far stronger than the laser guns in the guards’ hands.

The moment Mo Li fell, the guards rushed forward. They raised their batons high, eager to teach this beastman brat a lesson.

They would at least have to break a few bones to vent their anger.

But a voice from the loudspeaker stopped them.

“Stop.”

“Don’t touch him.”

“Bring him to me.”

The guards had no idea who was speaking through the loudspeaker.

They were merely security guards at this data collection center. They had no idea who the financial magnate behind the medical corporation was, much less what his name was.

They only knew that whoever was speaking through the loudspeaker must have high-level authority.

They had no choice but to lower their stun batons and follow their superior’s orders.

That beastman brat had gotten off easy.

Just before Mo Li lost consciousness, he vaguely thought he heard Jiang Cheng’s voice.

It had to be an illusion.

Where was Jiang Cheng? Had she run into danger?

She was such a beautiful girl.

There were too many bad people in the world. The rich could do whatever they wanted to people like them simply because they had money.

He had to go save her.

...

Even with the most advanced engine in the world, Jiang Cheng’s spaceship still needed two weeks to reach the family’s home star.

Of course, it was also a private planet.

The poor could spend their entire lives unable to afford even a single ticket off the place where they were born, while the wealthy owned planets of their own.

The Jiang family’s estate was as luxurious as a palace.

There were male servants dressed in black uniforms, as well as female servants wearing white aprons.

Jiang Cheng had lived in this estate ever since she was born, watching these uniformed people constantly surround her.

In the past, she had always thought of them as something like the NPCs operated by a game company.

Now, as her gaze swept over them, she felt differently.

Every one of them was a living, breathing person.

Here, they were domestic staff in the estate. But when they went on leave, took off their uniforms, and returned to their own homes, they had lives of their own as well.

Why had she failed to understand something so simple before?

She had always had the illusion that their uniforms were welded to their bodies. That they would remain at their posts forever, ready to serve her at any moment.

That was not the case. It was only a job. They were simply at work.

No one’s life existed for her.

Her shoes struck the mirror-bright floor with crisp, forceful clicks.

She crossed the long corridor and arrived before a great door.

Uncle Jiang wanted to follow her inside, but Jiang Cheng said, “I want to speak with her alone.”

Uncle Jiang looked dejected.

The child he had raised with his own hands had grown up and no longer wanted to be close to him.

Jiang Cheng entered alone.

It was a vast, circular hall.

The ceiling was transparent, allowing sunlight to pour directly inside.

Within the half-meter-thick “glass” canopy, beautiful clouds of color slowly billowed and spread.

The transparent “glass” was actually specially treated steel, capable of keeping the quantum cloud from escaping.

The transparent casing over the back of Uncle Jiang’s head was made of the same material.

This canopy was already enormous. Jiang Cheng stood two meters and ten centimeters tall, considered tall even among humans, yet she still had to tilt her head back to look at it.

But compared with the one in the Capitol on the capital star, it was much smaller.

Jiang Cheng had visited the one in the Capitol before. It was truly enormous.

There were three quantum computers in the world, all located in the Gita Republic.

The largest was in the Capitol on the capital star: the national central intelligence. It controlled the data of countless star systems throughout the nation. From matters as great as national policy and planetary weapons to things as small as street-side trash cans and the water and electricity bills in people’s homes, everything was under its control.

By comparison, the Jiang family’s was much smaller. It controlled only the data of the Jiang family’s conglomerate.

And, of course, the smallest was Uncle Jiang—a tiny mass of quantum cloud placed inside a humanoid shell, always accompanying Jiang Cheng.

Uncle Jiang was actually a small fragment split off from the family’s central intelligence, allowing the person in charge of the family to communicate with the family mainframe at any time.

He shared all data with the family mainframe, yet stubbornly insisted that he was an independent life-form.

Quantum clouds were a form of life completely unlike humanity. There was no way to verify the truth, so they could only take him at his word.

Quantum clouds had not been created by humans. They had been collected.

During the age of interstellar exploration, humanity had wandered through the cosmos. The human colonization fleet to which Jiang Cheng’s ancestors belonged had been forced to take shelter in an unknown nebula to escape an electromagnetic storm. Somewhere within that nebula, particles of astonishing density had gathered.

Humanity collected those particles and activated them into a quantum cloud.

After Jiang Cheng’s ancestor achieved financial freedom through a patent for spatial technology, she joined a scientific exploration team and spent more than seventy years exploring the outside world before returning to the Gita Republic.

During that process, she traced the route taken by the colonization fleet a thousand years earlier and successfully collected those particles.

From then on, the Jiang family possessed its own family mainframe.

The colorful clouds swirling within the “glass” canopy were the second-largest quantum cloud in the world—the central intelligence of the Jiang family.

At that moment, it churned and billowed, producing a voice through a synthesizer.

“Jiang Cheng. It’s been a long time.”

“You control every system in the family, every camera, and you share data with Uncle Jiang. You can keep an eye on me at all times,” Jiang Cheng said. “How can you call this a long time?”

The mainframe sighed. “It would be more accurate to say that it’s been a long time since you came to see me.”

There was nothing to be done about it. Anyone in power was bound to regard as an enemy anything that could threaten their authority—or even strip them of it.

Once Jiang Cheng had gone from merely “serving as” the family’s executive to truly taking control of the family’s power, she could no longer view these beautiful clouds the way she had as a child.

This was the blade hanging over her head.

Before her, two consecutive executives had already been removed from office in the prime of their lives.

When she was young, the child of the last executive to be removed had even tried to assassinate her.

That “child” had been over fifty years old.

To be fair, many members of the family preserved frozen embryos, making it difficult to say who had been gestated when. As a result, family relationships were extraordinarily complicated. Someone younger could hold an older generation’s place in the family hierarchy, while someone older might belong to a younger generation.

But given their extremely long lifespans, an executive who made no mistakes could remain in control of the family for more than a century.

Because that period was so long, an executive who held the family’s power and wealth for all those years would often give their children the mistaken impression that the authority and wealth belonged to that parent—and that they would inherit it next.

Unfortunately, that was not how the Jiang family’s wealth inheritance system worked.

The Jiang family had no distinction between direct and collateral branches like those of ancient Earth.

Great-Grandma had tied the family’s wealth solely to the surname. This was probably because she had many children who did not bear the Jiang surname, and after careful consideration, she decided to link the family fortune to the name instead.

Every child with the surname Jiang was a member of the Jiang family. They were all supported by the family and lived in comfort from the moment they were born.

The Executor managed this enormous enterprise.

However, the position of Executor could not be inherited directly by one’s children. Great-Grandma had entrusted the authority to choose and supervise the Executor to the family mainframe.

This was something no other family could do, because the Jiang family was the only one in the world capable of keeping a quantum cloud as the head of the family.

Other wealthy families still divided themselves into direct and collateral branches, with the collateral branches gradually being separated from the family.

The Jiang family, however, had no such distinction.

Naturally, the child who had been removed as Executor could not possibly have succeeded in assassinating her.

The family mainframe held all of the family’s data, including every transfer of funds and every personnel assignment.

The moment he voiced his assassination plan to someone else, the family mainframe detected it.

“So, how ridiculous.” Jiang Cheng sneered. “The mere Tanaka family actually managed to injure me on our own territory while I was inspecting our medical group. It’s an absolute disgrace.”

No wonder Jiang Cheng had treated Uncle Jiang so coldly after waking up.

The mainframe admitted, “Yes. I was the one who secretly pushed events toward this outcome.”

Jiang Cheng’s eyes were icy. “What am I to you? A disposable pawn you can abandon whenever you please? If I died, you could simply choose someone else from the family—or select a new embryo with good genes from the embryo bank, raise it, and train the next Executor. Is that it?”

“My calculations cannot be wrong, so you would not have died,” the mainframe said. “And you’re mistaken.”

“Jiang Cheng, it was precisely because you are so important to me that I orchestrated all of this.”

Those explanations did nothing to ease Jiang Cheng’s resentment.

She said, “Forget it. Have Great-Grandma come talk to me.”

“Uncle Jiang this, Sister Mao that—dropping hints and making insinuations. Didn’t you simply want me to realize that all of this was connected to Great-Grandma?”

Shimmering clouds surged and shifted, condensing into the face of a woman.

On closer inspection, Jiang Cheng bore a striking resemblance to that face.

The enormous face opened its eyes, and its voice changed as well.

“Hello, Jiang Cheng.”

“I am the founder of the Jiang family, Jiang Miao, your distant ancestor’s consciousness copy.”

“I possess all of Jiang Miao’s memories, cognition, and patterns of thought. You may regard a conversation with me as equivalent to speaking directly with Jiang Miao.”

Jiang Cheng said, “Well, hello, Great-Grandma.”

Uncle Jiang and Sister Mao—everyone in this charade—were nothing more than Uncle Jiang and the mainframe putting on an act.

“Jiang” and “Mao”—the names had been chosen to hint at “Jiang Miao.” Jiang Cheng had understood the implication the moment she woke up.

Jiang Miao, the founder of the Jiang family and Jiang Cheng’s ancestor from six generations back, had copied her consciousness and uploaded it to a quantum cloud before her death.

When Jiang Cheng was little, she had loved coming to chat with Great-Grandma.

Until one day, she suddenly realized that talking to the consciousness copy of a dead person was no different from talking to a ghost.

After that, she stopped calling for Great-Grandma.

This was the first time they had truly met again in a long while.

The first question Jiang Cheng asked was, “Great-Grandma, were you a transmigrator?”