TN: And we're back! sorry for the week long hiatus, it was not intentional since I had to get my right leg in a cast after tripping 3 floors down a stairwell (like an idiot ://) and be unable to use my PC setup upstairs BUT I should be OK now.
Anyways, Thanks for Arcanic Madness, WeissAkumu and WolfWTF for becoming as Supporters!,
===BREAK===
Thanks to years immersed in the cutthroat scheming of the business world, a small warning hammer lightly struck an alarm in Jade's mind.
Recalling the negotiation she once had with that "Galaxy Ranger," numerous strange points of doubt began to line up and recombine.
The first was that grossly overqualified ion storm warning—something no one had ever been known to predict.
Then there was the almost childish demand for compensation, which showed no visible benefit to him whatsoever.
Unless… those two people were truly that important to him—important enough that a wealthy place like the Silverchain Galaxy wasn't even sufficient weight to tip the scales!
Following that line of thought, she reverse-engineered things from the older woman she had taken in.
Did she have any powerful relatives or friends?
No. Sigonians were notoriously weak… wait—Sigonia?
Jade's gaze sharpened instantly. She stared straight at Aventurine's face. If she could, she would have already pried open his skull with her eyes to see exactly what he was thinking.
Aventurine was also a Sigonian—and that woman had once had a child stolen away.
Could it be… Aventurine was that child? And the one who saved those two back then… was Aventurine himself?!
The moment the thought formed, Jade startled herself with how absurd it sounded.
Yet the more she considered it, the more she felt that while outrageous, it wasn't impossible.
After all, with his luck, who knew what kind of treasure he might pull out of a Curio Trash Can?
Artifacts capable of traversing time didn't seem all that unthinkable.
The more Jade thought about it, the more reasonable it all seemed.
Especially that man's bizarre logic of action—everything suddenly clicked together in one stroke!
Jade's gaze grew downright chilling.
Having already decided to keep everything unpublicized, Aventurine instinctively tried to clear his own suspicion.
"Uh… why are you staring at me like that? You don't seriously think I'm some lecher with ulterior motives toward them, do you?"
Aventurine complained loudly, deeply dissatisfied with Jade's blade-like scrutiny.
"I won't deny I'm at that age, but over the years, the women pursuing me at the Corporation could line up from here all the way to Pier Point. If you really think that of me, that's just hurtful."
The best way to dispel suspicion was to flip it around and question the other party instead.
Sure enough, those two completely off-topic remarks disrupted Jade's train of thought again.
Not because she was truly distracted.
On the contrary, she precisely caught one crucial piece of information.
Aventurine had been with the Corporation for a long time. If those two women truly had something to do with him, why was he only bringing them up now?
If he really had gone back to the past, how could he possibly tolerate not seeing his family for twenty whole years?
Because of this, the seemingly reasonable deduction from earlier instantly became absurd.
How could she know that Aventurine could only stay in the past for two hours? Or that an Aeon had also intervened, helping him "smooth out" the timeline?
Jade had no interest in endlessly patching up a theory riddled with holes—that was no different from pure conjecture.
She might as well guess that Aventurine was an incarnation of an Aeon. That would make everything simple—anything he did would be reasonable then.
"I wasn't thinking that about you. It's just…"
Jade pressed her temple, finding her own sudden urge to dig deeper rather strange.
"It's just that I didn't expect you to be this fond of meddling. Consider it that I owe you a favor."
Thinking back to how Aventurine had once helped the roomless Trailblazer argue with hotel staff in Penacony, Jade accepted that he probably said all this simply out of habit.
She smiled. "I'll notify the orphanage administrators. When you're free, you can go there and take them in. Later, I'll book a banquet at the best hotel in the Exalting Sanctum, invite the others, and celebrate your successful promotion—consider it an apology as well. How does that sound?"
Phew—
Aventurine let out a huge sigh of relief in his heart.
Though he didn't know whether Equilibrium's correction of time had made him unusually easy to suspect, Jade's reasoning ability and vigilance were undeniably formidable. Without such massive information gaps, she might really have deduced the correct answer.
Hearing her words, he raised two fingers and laughed. "Those are two separate things—so it has to be two dinners."
If you were going to act, you had to commit. Being a little petty was necessary.
Jade naturally wouldn't begrudge such a small expense. She nodded. "Alright."
Having finally put this matter behind them, Aventurine decided to strike while the iron was hot.
"By the way, do you know any reliable Remembrance Pathstriders? I have a project that requires making two memory bubbles. It involves confidential information, so I need someone with a solid reputation."
Jade paused for a moment. Considering she'd already made one misjudgment earlier, she felt embarrassed to pry further.
Why am I so suspicious today?
This is a colleague I've worked with for years—someone I personally promoted.
"I do, actually."
…
In the early morning, a small shop in the Exalting Sanctum opened right on schedule.
Sylvester sat behind the counter, leisurely scrolling through news on his phone while waiting for customers to arrive.
Qingque, meanwhile, sat energetically in the lounge area, playing Imperial Jade so intensely it was absolute chaos.
After days of training, her Multiple Shadow Clone technique had begun to bear fruit—she almost never woke up feeling dead tired anymore.
Of course, the price was that her daytime antics had become even more unrestrained.
Like right now—she was connected with two other versions of herself, wildly seal-clubbing and ganging up on unsuspecting strangers.
Every time Sylvester saw her effectively forming a one-person team, he couldn't help but sigh that it was such a waste she didn't play competitive games.
With that level of coordination between clones, if she played a multiplayer tactical arena game—say, Honor of Kings—she'd definitely bully the opposing team into questioning their existence.
Well… there was also another possibility.
That she'd be so bad she couldn't even blame her teammates anymore.
Come to think of it, would clones blame each other for being weak?
Imagining several Qingques getting bullied into furious embarrassment, sob sob sob, so pitiful, then suddenly snapping and frantically dumping blame on "themselves" until it turned into an all-out brawl—
Only for the clones to vanish, leaving her biting her own arm while pulling her own hair—
Yeah… that was pretty ridiculous.
Just as Sylvester was letting his thoughts run wild—
He suddenly heard a man and a woman arguing loudly as they were about to enter the shop.
"Hey, little one. Didn't you say just a few days ago that you envied that baby dragon who smacked the Preceptors around like they didn't even know their own mothers, and that you wanted to get stronger too? Why are you chickening out now?"
A pale green flame floating in the air tugged on a command pennant, forcibly dragging a foxian girl of the same color into the shop behind it.
Huohuo stumbled a couple of steps before steadying herself inside.
Since she'd already been dragged here, refusing outright no longer made sense—especially since she really did want to become stronger.
Still, she stubbornly protested, "It's easy for you to say when it's not your money. One trash can here costs half my monthly salary!"
Tail rolled his eyes disdainfully. "Don't think I don't know—you've been working for years, and you've saved up enough to almost buy a place on the Exalting Sanctum's central ring. Instead of wasting it on supernatural comedy movies that scare you into screaming, you might as well buy something actually useful."
He floated up to the counter, his fiery body forming a hand that pointed its thumb back at Huohuo.
"Hey, boss—max out her spending limit. I want to see this crybaby turn into a ferocious, jacked menace!"
===BREAK===
Like the story and want more chapters?
Join and support me by joining my Patreon!
[email protected]/SiRoasa