Chapter 673: Jiming Shirogane
[EX00? · THE GOD KING]?
Kaito Shirogane had already read the answer directly from Song Xian's mind using his telepathy, but he still found himself slightly puzzled.
He now understood that the foundational "Cards"—the very items that had initially turned him into a universal target and dragged him directly into the Space as a Reincarnator—were exceptionally unique tools. They had been meticulously forged by [The Three Supreme Kings] using a vast concentration of conceptual Authorities for a specific hidden purpose.
Even a Chosen One, a member of that elite group heavily favored by the Space terminal, possessed absolutely zero capacity to independently manufacture a tool that simultaneously housed top-tier functions like Selecting Reincarnators, Unlocking Unique Trials, and Granting Unique Capabilities.
There were fifty-two Cards in total, each bearing a distinct card face, systematically categorized into specific sequences.
The Tarot Sequence held twenty-two cards; the Mandate Sequence held twelve; the Virtue Sequence held eight; the Mortal Sin Sequence held seven; and finally... the three most mysterious cards on the ledger, whose card faces and sequences had never been uncovered by a single soul.
Each category corresponded to a specialized archetype of Reincarnator. An interloper who lacked the innate aptitude would find it layout-wise, monumentally difficult to ever trigger them, and even if they initiated the sequence, surviving the trials was almost unviable.
According to the intelligence data resources available at this stage:
The Tarot Sequence explicitly required the user to hold the system status of a Chosen One to activate.
The Mandate Sequence remained the most obscured, seemingly linking to fate-side capabilities, leaving behind a lone structural riddle: To be granted exclusively to the destined individual.
The Virtue and Mortal Sin Sequences both unlocked trial missions with exceptionally exaggerated difficulty thresholds—comfortably ranking as the absolute most brutal trials across all cards. Consequently, any asset who successfully finalized those conditions was universally recognized as an absolute deviant.
"Song Xian, exactly where did your agency extract this resource?"
Song Xian evaluated Kaito Shirogane, who sat casually suspended mid-air without utilizing an afterimage or phantom disguise to shield his face. Although his mind had long since accepted the cold reality that the blood-drenched monster known as Mercenary Tao was explicitly the same student, Kaito Shirogane, he had historically observed back at Binhai University, looking at him still forced his focus into a brief frame of dazed unreality.
Once upon a time, the entity before him had been nothing more than an ordinary mortal...
The corners of Kaito's mouth split into a subtle grin. Tracking the data that Song Xian's intellect still managed to visualize his past self under the archetype of an "ordinary mortal" cede his processing matrix a wisp of dark amusement.
"This intelligence resource was dropped down our line by a woman. She explicitly self-identified under the title—[The King of Destiny]!"
Sizzle~
Song Xian executed a lone blink. In that single microsecond, the form of Mercenary Tao cleanly vanished from his sight, replaced by a sharp crackle of blue-white electrical current rippling through the empty air. His motor nerves instinctively coiled his musculature dangerously tight, his Armament Haki rapidly plating his skin.
Concurrently, his cells began to manifest the initial indicators of an elemental transformation.
Yet in the very next fraction of a second, a pair of fingers smoothly and flawlessly pressed themselves against the absolute center of his twin temples.
A microscopic wisp of electrical current bored straight into his forehead. Instantly, his cerebral cortex registered a sudden, severe spike in thermal heat, forcing his neural pathways to involuntarily and flawlessly reconstruct the precise visual profile of that woman.
Kaito Shirogane scanned the memory tracks with perfect clarity. It was a well-endowed woman with long blonde hair, wearing a thick white knit sweater that was layout-wise, completely unsuited for the local season, with a vibrant pink overcoat draped loosely across her shoulders. Her entire presence radiated a highly unique, commanding aura.
It cede the sensory grid an absolute reality where she naturally and effortlessly occupied the absolute center of the world; even captured purely through Song Xian's memory recall, her silhouette automatically hijacked the focal point of the visual frame.
Her fingers clamped a lone Card. The rear face of the relic was an absolute stygian black, intricately webbed with complex silver patterns that beautifully traced the mechanical symbol of [Infinity]. As the woman casually flipped the card face around—
Kaito's eyes mapped a lone figure seated rigidly atop a massive sovereign throne. The entity was completely devoid of facial features, its form sketched exclusively by raw, minimalist lines that flashed with an infinite spectrum of color-shifting brilliance beneath the sunlight.
The top-left boundary of the Card was hardcoded with a crystal-clean sequence identifier: [EX00?], while the absolute center bore two words: [The God King].
Kaito had initially calculated that this EX00? variable was an intentional strategic play executed by the King of Destiny to deliberately hide the precise numerical designation from Song Xian's network. Yet looking at the sub-atomic layout of the card face, the printing itself was explicitly, flawlessly a [?].
Expressed through a strategic framework, this verified that the remaining three most mysterious cards on the ledger entirely refrained from utilizing standard identifiers like 1, 2, or 3. To state it with cleaner clinical precision: whichever organism amasses the absolute peak threshold of power... will naturally hardcode its profile as 001.
Kaito relaxed his left fingers, evaluating Song Xian as the man's respiratory rhythm entered a slight disruption. That asset's raw parameters had permanently caved past the point of ever mounting a viable threat against his engine.
"A lone glimpse of an unmapped card face is layout-wise, entirely insufficient to purchase an offensive intervention from my blade."
Song Xian held a perfect comprehension of that reality. He immediately reinforced his proposal:
"In actual structural reality, this trade protocol isn't merely an exchange launched by our agency; it simultaneously functions as an absolute trade line pushed by the King of Destiny."
"Our collective objective requires your blade to systematically and permanently liquidate the asset codenamed [The Mad King]."
Kaito's grin expanded past its previous boundaries. He was beginning to develop an exceptionally deep, professional interest in this Reincarnator self-identifying as the Mad King.
To successfully and consecutively trigger a severe wave of dissatisfaction across this many separate, high-tier factions was an elite metric.
"Analyzing the absolute baseline of the King of Destiny's parameters, even if her own hand refrains from stepping onto the board, her networks could effortlessly isolate a sufficiently reliable champion to execute him. Why go through the logistical redundancy of—"
Kaito cut his own vocal tracks mid-syllable, his sharp intuition instantly parsing the underlying layout. He was explicitly the exact blade the King of Destiny had meticulously selected to handle this harvest.
Song Xian marching to his coordinates was an automated consequence of that Sovereign's intent.
An elite practitioner of destiny required zero explicit verbal mandates; across multiple world cycles, they merely needed to nudge a critical sequence of events until the chronological tracks naturally slid into an absolute, logical progression that flawlessly mirrored their strategic designs.
"As our baseline compensation for your blade, our tracking vanguard has successfully locked down the real-world coordinates and absolute civilian profile mapping the Reincarnator known as Jiming Shirogane."
"He has officially broken cover from the southeastern maritime boundaries, frantically fleeing into the deep interior mountain ranges. His matrix highly likely logged the immense tactical pressure radiating from [The Heaven]'s tracking arrays."
As he unhitched his jaw to deliver the data, Song Xian produced a sleek tactical tablet. The digital files displayed within explicitly mapped the precise Agility-specialized Mortal Sin Reincarnator provided by the corporate networks—an asset historically logged under the codename [Temür].
Song Xian methodically handed the tablet over to Kaito's palm. This specific intelligence file didn't merely expose Jiming Shirogane's absolute civilian name down to the character; it concurrently housed a succession of high-resolution, un-blurred real-life photographs tracking his daily routines.
His network was perfectly aware that Mercenary Tao still held the active priority to deploy [The Fragments of the Death Note]. An absolute data resource of this classification was more than sufficient to execute an immediate, un-blockable curse liquidation from across the continent.
Kaito Shirogane let out a sharp, raspy laugh. His clinical focus had marginally underestimated the raw operational capacity of a massive nation-state machine like East Asia.
When an immense global executive apparatus of that caliber genuinely throttled its engines into active deployment, while it might fail to directly restrict the physical displacement vectors of a highly mobile, high-tier Reincarnator asset—
Meticulously stripping away every single shred of data mapping an individual's civilian file, reconstructing his entire biographical lineage, and pinpointing every single bound associate on his ledger was child's play to their intelligence divisions.
"It appears this Mad King has genuinely driven your leadership into an exceptional state of distress~"
Had the tactical situation failed to reach an extreme threshold of peril, Kaito calculated that Song Xian's collective would be fundamentally disqualified from ever displaying this level of desperate urgency to secure his cooperation.
Furthermore, this coordination loop was optimized to an absurd degree: they were delivering the exact spatial coordinates, manually providing the verified civilian name, and submitting high-resolution photographs. If his engine willed it, his fingers could initiate a point-blank curse execution to wipe the asset off the ledger this exact microsecond.
Song Xian's expression turned intensely stygian. He cast a long, wary glance to evaluate the surrounding parameters of the [Eden] marketplace. Highly likely because the territory functioned exclusively as a centralized hub for Reincarnators, the entire sector was densely clogged with thousands of large and small spatial barriers.
The real-world digital network was entirely void here.
"Deep within the sovereign matrix governing the Mad King's Kingly Authority, there exists an exceptionally troublesome, rule-bending capability. It commands the absolute priority to manually stream a memetic curse directly through the global information grid."
"Leveraging a specialized memetic strain self-identified under the archetype of [The Game], his arrays have successfully captured, re-engineered, and enslaved over several hundred thousand civilians across East Asia. The total number of targets his engine has compromised within the Japanese archipelago is highly likely a monumentally grander metric."
"That freak... evaluating his empirical data resources, can comfortably and legitimately be classified as a literal, absolute King..."
Song Xian intensely loathed lunatics of this classification, yet the evolutionary data of the Space was consistently bizarre: the more thoroughly fractured and maniacal an asset's psychological baseline grew, the more monumentally terrifying their raw power metrics became.
Analyzing the structural rules of [The K Project] multiverse, a Kingly Authority was layout-wise, far from a top-tier cosmic capability—yet his network had failed to calculate that this specific freak could manually scale its wide-area saturation mechanics to force a global cataclysm of this magnitude.
The critical variable his jaw refrained from explicitly detailing was that this Mad King simultaneously commanded multiple distinct variations of Kingly Authority. One specialized strain among them held the absolute priority to manual-override and dominate the mental faculties of fellow Reincarnators, though its exact mechanical execution remained unmapped.
Analyzing the current logs tracking the Eastern District, over twenty distinct, high-priority title-grade Reincarnators had already sustained absolute capture under his grid.
This compromised ledger explicitly housed [Solar Flare], [Moshi Mowang], and [Show]—all premier, highly renowned champions of the district.
Particularly evaluating that asset codenamed [Show]—the King of Destiny appeared to place an exceptionally high strategic value upon his survival parameter, which was explicitly why her arrays had proactively dropped these tracking metrics down his line to force Kaito Shirogane's blade onto the board.
Song Xian watched the wide, monstrously contorted grin splitting Kaito Shirogane's features, letting out a heavy, internal sigh.
When pinned against a world-ending lunatic... your single optimal tactical blueprint is to unleash a vastly grander, completely unrefined Demon...
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