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His amputated hand, wrapped in layers of gauze, rested on the table, while his other, movable hand slowly turned a rough pottery teacup.

The tea in his cup had gone cold, but he didn't drink it. He just stared at the continuous rain outside the window, as if waiting for an old friend he had arranged to meet.

A faint ripple suddenly appeared in the empty air before him. Under the invisibility spell, no one could see Lu Mingfei raise the Desert Eagle.

He gripped the gun with both hands, his legs slightly apart to ensure a stable stance, and the sights were firmly aimed at Tachibana Masamune's forehead.

He said to Frilian in his mind, "Once Tachibana Masamune is in position, and Herzog arrives, I will count to three. You will teleport me out first, and then we will each take one."

“No rush. Let me take a look first.” Frillian’s voice was calm as usual, but a sharp light, unlike anything Lu Mingfei had ever seen before, shone deep within her silver pupils. It was the experience of confronting countless mages and ancient monsters over a thousand years reminding her that something subtle was hidden in this room.

The sound of cables slowly tightening came from deep within the elevator shaft as the high-speed elevator rose from the main observation deck.

About two minutes later, the elevator doors opened, and a waiter entered the special observation deck.

He was wearing the black suit that had been ripped and torn in the rainy night in Ebisu, his white shirt collar was neatly tied, he wasn't carrying an umbrella, and every inch of his clothes was soaked through by the downpour, yet he didn't shiver from the cold.

His face was still that of a nobleman, with crimson lips, iron-black teeth, and a dignified and serene smile on his lips.

He held a silver tray in his hands, on which were two freshly poured teacups. The tea was still hot, and the steam briefly danced above the pale blue flame of the alcohol lamp.

Herzog sat down opposite Tachibana Masamune, a silver tray placed between them, the flame of the alcohol lamp gently bent by the airflow.

The two old men sat facing each other, one wearing a soaked black suit and the other a dry dark gray suit; one wore the same old noble mask that had never been worn before, while the other looked tired but still stood straight.

They look like two old coins pulled from the same well, one corroded beyond recognition, the other barely retaining the original casting pattern.

“Comrade Bondarev, it has been twenty-one years since we last spoke face to face, hasn’t it?” Herzog spoke first, his voice hoarse and slow, coming from behind his mask, like fingers gliding across rusty strings.

"Twenty-one years and three months. I haven't seen you since the night of the Black Swan Port explosion. I thought you were burned to death in the freezer." Tachibana Masamune picked up the rough ceramic teacup, but didn't drink from it. He just tapped the table with the rim of the cup.

“The fire in the freezer was indeed burning fiercely, but I happened to find a cryo-chamber. You know, the kind used to preserve embryo samples, -196 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, the cells of the ancient dragon would actually enter a more active cryogenic awakening state.” Herzog picked up another teacup and took a small sip. “Interestingly, after crawling out of the cryo-chamber, all the burned tissues on my body repaired themselves within a few weeks. Unfortunately, my vocal cords didn’t heal very well.”

"So I wasn't the only one who took all the research data from Black Swan Harbor. What you took wasn't the hard drive, it was your own body," Tachibana Masamune's voice was dry and hoarse.

“Your physique isn’t bad either. You can still sit here calmly drinking tea after cutting off your left hand fingers. I admired that kind of endurance back in the KGB interrogation room.” Herzog smiled, the wood grain on his mask making a very subtle creaking sound as his facial muscles moved.

“I didn’t cut off my finger to show you,” Tachibana Masamune said, placing his teacup beside the silver tray. “Speak, what do you want to talk about? What do you want from me?”

“Got it? That word sounds too unfamiliar.” Herzog put down his teacup, took out a long, slender ebony pipe inlaid with silver from his robes, and slowly filled the bowl with golden tobacco. “We each hold a key. You are a high-ranking hybrid, second only to the Emperor among the White King’s bloodline. Your bloodline gene sequence contains the first key to activate the Holy Relic; and through over twenty years of human experiments with evolutionary drugs, I have successfully extracted the second key from the cerebrospinal fluid of hundreds of Dead Servants’ fetuses. By merging these two sequences and implanting them into the body of the Uesugi family head, she can complete her final transformation in a very short time, directly transforming from human form into the White King. At that time, the true form of the Yamata no Orochi will reappear on the earth. Who do you think deserves this achievement?”

When Lu Mingfei, who was invisible, heard the words "implanted into the main body of the Uesugi family," he was startled.

He instinctively gripped the Desert Eagle's grip, silently telling Frillie, "Wait, what does he mean—"

"Quiet," Frilian's voice steadily suppressed the unease churning in his mind.

Then Tachibana Masamune smiled.

He lifted his bandaged, mutilated hand from the table and placed it on his knee, saying, "Dr. Herzog, there's no need for beating around the bush. Your real plan is to use the neural control module you extracted from Bondarev's remains at Black Swan Harbor after the White King's resurrection to forcibly take over its will, making yourself the master of the throne who controls the fate of the world. No, not to control the world, you just want to be the only god."

Herzog did not answer immediately.

He lit the tobacco in his pipe with a match, took a puff, looked at Tachibana Masamune's face through the smoke, remained silent for a moment, and then slowly nodded: "That's right. The one and only god. For countless centuries, both humans and dragons have only been worthy to kneel on this one and only seat. And you, as the current patriarch who has cultivated the White King's bloodline for over twenty years and poured countless serums and drugs into the Uesugi family head, do you think I don't know? You also want to become that god."

The two stopped talking, but stood across the round table covered with a white tablecloth, each picking up their teacups and looking out the window at the huge city submerged by the torrential rain.

The blue flame of the alcohol lamp flickered on the rim of the teacup, squeezing out the last trace of human warmth from the room.

Frillie listened to everything.

Using magical telepathy, she simultaneously spoke the same words to Caesar, Fingel, Chu Zihang, and Genji, who was currently braving the rain and climbing the iron ladder to get inside Tokyo Tower: "The evidence is sufficient. Make your move."

Then she turned to look at Lu Mingfei and said to him in her mind, "Are you ready? I'll deactivate my invisibility first, and then teleport us both to the top of the table at the same time. You can choose which one to attack, and I'll take care of the other one."

Lu Mingfei nodded vigorously, his ten fingers gripping the gun as steady as two interlocking iron blocks. He had only one thought in his mind: "I'll shoot the one with the mask."

The silver light cracked in the air, as if a portal to the deep sea had suddenly been torn open in the very center of a sealed glass fish tank.

Lu Mingfei's figure fell straight down from the sky, the Desert Eagle held in his hand at eye level.

He pulled the trigger while still in mid-air, and the large-caliber blunt-metal armor-piercing bullet blasted directly into Herzog's chest cavity at a distance of less than three meters.

The cavitation effect of the bullet exploded inside his soaked body, spraying a mixture of blood and fragments of internal organs. The bullet exited from his back, bringing with it a cloud of blood mist and charred pieces of clothing.

Herzog and his chair tumbled backward with a loud crash, the noble mask striking the floor with a sharp, metallic clang.

At the same instant, Frillian's figure emerged from another tearing silver light, the tip of her wand pressed against Tachibana Masamune's heart.

Tachibana Masamune didn't even have time to turn around; he didn't even have time to put down the rough ceramic teacup in his hand. A cold blue beam of magical energy pierced his chest from the tip of his staff, penetrated his heart, and shot out from his back, causing the charred fabric of his suit to spark a few times in that instant.

Tachibana Masamune leaned forward, his forehead hitting the snow-white tablecloth. The teacup rolled from his hand and shattered into several irregular pieces on the floor.

After the power was cut off, the special observation tower was deathly silent, with only the sound of rain and occasional distant rumbles of thunder remaining.

Lu Mingfei stood up, his gun still pointed at Herzog's body, his breathing rapid and heavy.

He looked down at the blood still flowing on the nobleman's mask, a large amount of crimson human blood, unlike the blood he had seen on Ebisu that night. That night, when he fired a blunt metal bullet at Herzog, what gushed from the bullet hole resembled everything except blood.

"How is it?" he asked Frillie, panting.

Frillie didn't answer immediately. She used the end of her wand to turn Tachibana Masamune over, squatted down, and reached her fingers under the still-warm skin at the collar.

Then she narrowed her eyes slightly, and a faint golden light flowed around the depths of her silver pupils.

A moment later, she stood up and shook her head with very light force.

"No. These two are still just puppets. The soul structure within them is exactly the same as the traces of external forces repeatedly infusing Erii before she lost control. Someone has precisely infused their consciousness, memories, and language habits into new bodies each time. The real Herzog and Tachibana Masamune have been dead for many years. The person who infused the memories has been the same person for twenty-one years, and his true self has never appeared in this room."

She paused, looked up at the dense rain outside the window that obscured all the lights, and said, “And I’ve confirmed one thing. Tachibana Masamune and Herzog, their souls are exactly the same. Not similar, but all the deepest memories, the most primal fears, that part that even dragon secret arts cannot forge, are exactly the same.”

"You mean... Tachibana Masamune and Herzog are the same person from beginning to end?" Lu Mingfei's eyes widened in disbelief.

"Yes. He played two roles for twenty-one years. He kept all his deepest memories in his real body, and then made a backup and put it into the puppet to be his own enemy. Everything he did—raising Genjiro, abandoning Genjiro, protecting Erii as Tachibana Masamune but putting a bounty on her in Herzog's name, claiming to kill him yesterday and negotiating with him today—all of this was orchestrated by the same person after that Christmas night in Black Swan Harbor, in order to manipulate the resurrection of God."

“So there weren’t two former KGB colleagues fighting over the inheritance at all,” Lu Mingfei said, his voice hoarse and tired. “It was just him. He was hiding behind some unknown mask, watching us all being pushed around like pawns.”

Frillian said nothing more, but raised her wand and used magic to encrypt all the images and sound signatures she had obtained from the watchtower that night, then divided them into four streams that flowed down to the bottom of the tower.

Caesar, Fingel, Chu Zihang, and Genji, who was standing halfway up the iron ladder, soaked to the bone by the rain, all simultaneously heard Frillian's voice in their minds. Then came scenes of old colleagues reuniting harmoniously, detailed technical discussions about merging two sets of keys into one genetic sequence, and Tachibana Masamune and Herzog's naked declaration of dominating the world from the same soul beneath their masks.

Yuan Zhisheng's hand, gripping the iron ladder railing, twitched slightly in the downpour.

He heard his own voice emerge from deep within his throat, utterly calm: "Sakura, change targets. Tachibana Masamune, designate him as a top-priority elimination target. Take action immediately upon contact."

"Understood," Sakura replied decisively through the earpiece.

Chapter 844 Zero VS Kanto Branch

The torrential rain poured down on the valley of the Tama River all night long, and thick rain and fog filled the dense forests upstream. Before receiving the urgent communication that Tachibana Masamune had been assassinated, the Sheki-Hachi family garrison led by Ryoma Genichiro was slowly moving along the winding mountain road above the Akaki River.

Their temporary camp was set up on a slope less than one kilometer from the vertical wellhead of the Red Well. The camp was surrounded by infrared alarms and trigger traps set by the Fuma clan ninjas. The only road leading to the Red Well was blocked by two light armored vehicles.

Genichiro Ryoma personally squatted down next to the hood of an armored vehicle, placing a tactical tablet on his lap as he made final defensive preparations.

He was unaware that the meeting atop Tokyo Tower, over 200 kilometers away, had already yielded results. Within minutes, his satellite phone would ring, and Sakura would inform him in that icy voice: the former patriarch, Tachibana Masamune, had been confirmed to be the same person as the Demon Kings. All armed forces belonging to the Snake Clan were to immediately cease their internal searches and instead focus on eliminating this person and his associates as the highest priority targets.

But before that phone call arrived, something lighter pierced through the rain.

A crossbow bolt flew diagonally from the deepest part of the dense forest, accurately piercing the window of a Hummer SUV on the westernmost side of the camp. Then a second and a third bolt followed closely behind, piercing the seam between the armored vehicle's body and the windshield.

Immediately following, the artillery barrage blazed as several portable rockets, trailing white smoke, swooped down from both sides of the dense forest and detonated in succession among the unsuspecting Humvee convoy.

The firelight illuminated the entire valley, and the detonated ammunition boxes emitted a heavy, dense roar as they exploded, sending fragments and broken branches flying everywhere.

Ryoma Genichiro slammed the tablet under his body and rolled to avoid the shockwave, drawing the short sword from his waist and holding it in his hand.

He coughed up the acrid gunpowder smoke and looked up to see a row of elite mixed-race soldiers dressed in the black combat uniforms of the Kanto branch standing on the hillside at the edge of the dense forest.

Their captain was none other than the head of the Kanto branch, Akechi Asuya.

While the entire Sheqi Eight Families mobilized to suppress the Oni Clan and the main force of the Execution Bureau was concentrated around the Red Well, the Kanto Branch suddenly launched a full-scale attack on the main family's garrison from behind the Tama River.

Akechi Asuya didn't waste any more words.

He waved his hand, and several mixed-race individuals in the back row simultaneously drew their fighting daggers and short swords and rushed down the slope to the camp.

Ryoma Genichiro gritted his teeth and charged forward, his short sword and dagger sparking in the downpour, but the enemy's numerical advantage was overwhelming the position like a tidal wave.

Not far above the camp, on a high platform on the rock face where the mountain road had been blown up, Zero stood alone.

The rain soaked her long hair, causing strands to stick to her cheeks, and the hem of her black trench coat was stretched straight by the gale.

Upon receiving Frilian's message that Tachibana Masamune and Herzog were the same soul, she immediately traced the signal's source and rushed towards the Tama River, only to stumble upon the Kanto branch's surprise attack on the garrison troops.

She could have bypassed the chaos and gone straight to the Red Well, but Akechi Asuya discovered her while sweeping through the camp and dispatched a six-person half-blood squad to flank her. Zero did not retreat, and the battle suddenly erupted here.

Her Word of Power is "Mirror Eye," which can replicate and reproduce any Word of Power she witnesses in a very short time.

The six-person squad is composed of elites from the Kanto branch. At least two of them are A-rank combat hybrids. One of them uses "Airburst," which can rapidly compress and detonate air, while the other possesses "Teleportation," which allows him to move at speeds invisible to the naked eye over short distances.

Given the vast disparity in numbers and bloodline levels, she should have been able to barely hold her own and try to stall until reinforcements from her own clan arrived.

However, tonight it wasn't just these hybrids who felt different from usual; everyone who had entered the signal coverage area outside Tokyo Tower a few minutes earlier to listen to conversations at Tokyo Tower was unknowingly having their fates gently stirred by a being who had long since departed.

In the most secret room at the top of the tower, the man in the waiter's black suit had just died, but his gloves were still lying on the floor.

A little devil, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit and always wearing a smile, stands between another patch of wet rubble and the night, overlooking for a moment all these desperate fighters from a certain conceptual height.

He sighed in the rain and muttered to himself, "Sigh, things have really gotten far out of control. It's all Frillian's fault for not leaving any room for maneuver."

Then he gently flicked away the last drop of water from the bottom of the cup with his fingertip. The drop didn't fall to the ground, but instead silently traveled from the other side of time through hundreds of optical fibers and every heartbeat thousands of miles away, gently landing on Zero's shoulder as he stood against six opponents.

The little devil shook his head and snapped his fingers without turning around.

Zero suddenly felt that all the sounds surrounding her had become extremely distant.

The movements of the elite Kwantung branch soldiers, who were wielding knives and cutting at high speed, seemed as slow as if someone were pressing down on their shoulders one by one.

The gene sequence in her body, which had been locked up by drugs for a long time, was rapidly unraveling at a rate that would not be detected by any clinical tests.

Someone directly enhanced her bloodline without conducting any experimental infusion.

She raised her eyes. The Mirror Eye was passively triggered, and the number of copied Words of Power increased from one to six.

She didn't use them all, but simply pressed her right hand, still dripping with someone else's blood, forward in a gesture, while whispering one of their incantations: "Teleport." Several elite warriors, attacking from different directions in the torrential rain, who had simultaneously drawn their swords to sever her throat, found themselves dragged away before they could even touch her skin.

Zero simultaneously appeared behind each of them, despite their attacks coming in different directions. Then, more incantations that should have been unfamiliar or opposing were released one after another on the same rainy night: Flame detonated the air explosion that was trying to retaliate in mid-air; the ice spell copied from another girl froze the water below the knees of the knife-wielding man, causing him to fall heavily onto the rocky platform.

She snatched the last man's longsword and tossed it into the valley. Then, she braced herself on her knees, panting slightly, as rainwater trickled down the shallow wounds on her wrists.

The entire six-man squad that had surrounded her lay on the rocky platform.

After sweeping through the last few guards at a distance from the camp, Akechi Asuya stood up and silently gazed through the rain and mist on the hillside at the small figure standing alone on the edge of the rock platform, still trying to catch his breath.

She looked cold and exhausted, as if she could fall off a cliff at any moment, yet he dared not go any further.