Inside the video store, Wise leaned against a shelf, his brows knotted into a hard crease. His worried gaze stayed locked on his sister.
"Belle… isn't this too risky?" he asked, unease plain in his voice. "If you want to establish contact with Officer Zhu Yuan, there are tons of ways. Why drag Morningstar into it?"
He hesitated, then added, "Why not just ask Nicole and her crew to go deal with those gangsters directly?"
Ever since Belle proposed the idea of forming the Inter-Knot Collaboration & Development Foundation, Wise had fully understood what role Morningstar played in the Inter-Knot ecosystem.
He didn't want that kind, earnest woman to get hurt because of any gap in Belle's plan.
Belle lifted her head. Her clear eyes held a trace of helplessness—almost wounded.
She clicked her tongue.
"Brother, what do you take me for?"
Her voice was bright, tinged with complaint.
"How could I possibly push Morningstar into a fire pit just to get in with Zhu Yuan?"
She stepped closer and looked him straight in the eye, expression serious.
"My goal was never to help us get close to Zhu Yuan. From start to finish, I've been trying to get Morningstar connected to Officer Zhu Yuan."
Wise blinked, caught off guard. He clearly hadn't expected that.
Belle let out a soft sigh. Something complicated flickered across her face, like a memory resurfacing.
"In the last loop… Morningstar tried to help us get stronger. With the limited network she had, she worked herself to the bone, paid who-knows-what kind of price, just to get Nicole's contact info."
"And then she handed it to us. For free."
Belle's eyes sharpened, her tone turning decisive—unarguably so.
"Even though we'd already built ties with Nicole long before that, I can't pretend that kindness didn't matter. I've kept it in my heart."
"So in this loop, I'm paying her back—tenfold." She lifted her chin slightly. "I'm going to expand her network brutally. Zhu Yuan is just the beginning."
Then she laid her plan out cleanly:
"Once the foundation is standing, I'm hiring Morningstar as Chief Advisor. I want her to be able to approach all sides openly—under Phaethon's name—build her reputation properly, build her social capital properly. That's my real goal."
Watching the light in Belle's eyes, Wise finally understood.
After the last loop, Belle's "contact list" was already stuffed with the numbers of agents and powerhouses of all kinds.
He could practically see what Morningstar would become under Belle's push—someone dangerously valuable: an intermediary holding a web of crucial connections, a walking treasure that every faction would try to win over.
"Okay, but…" Wise processed the plan, yet his expression turned odd again—he still didn't understand the detour.
"Why not just give Morningstar Zhu Yuan's contact info directly? Or you could just send Zhu Yuan the gang's names and location and let her handle it. Why do we have to let the gang go after Morningstar first, then have Zhu Yuan show up and 'save' her? Isn't that… extra?"
He genuinely felt the steps were unnecessary.
Belle's mouth twitched. She clicked her tongue again and looked at him like he was a hopeless case.
"Brother."
Her voice was saturated with exasperation.
"People have pride. How do you not get something that basic?"
"Think about it. If I slap a million dennies in your face and say 'take it,' and compare that to you doing something incredible and receiving a million-denny reward from the foundation… do those two feelings sound the same to you?"
Wise considered it—seriously. Then he answered even more seriously:
"I think… as long as I get the million dennies in the end, it's good either way."
His expression was sincere. To him, the result outweighed the method.
Belle froze like she'd been physically hit.
She stared at her own brother in disbelief, as if seeing him for the first time.
"My god…"
She muttered under her breath and rubbed her forehead, suddenly exhausted.
"My brother… you're actually wired like this?"
She gave up trying to explain and turned toward the phone on the counter.
"Fairy! Explain it to my brother!"
Her face clearly said: I'm not doing this with words anymore.
"Understood, Master."
The phone screen lit up. Fairy's signature feminine electronic voice flowed out clearly.
"Second Assistant, hello."
Wise's attention shifted, confusion still written all over his face.
"After integrating Officer Zhu Yuan's patrol habits, response efficiency, equipment parameters, personality model, and all known variables regarding the target gang—movement patterns, weapon loadouts, psychological expectations, geographic constraints—this artificial intelligence executed over one billion simulation runs."
"The optimal pathway indicates the gang unit will arrive at a precise timepoint, reaching the public corridor approximately 15.7 meters outside Morningstar's residence. Upon sensing external threat, Morningstar will initiate her prearranged emergency escape procedure."
"A brief contact event will occur within that corridor. At the critical threshold where the gang initiates intent-to-harm behavior—error margin no greater than 0.3 seconds—Officer Zhu Yuan will arrive on schedule and complete a successful protective intervention."
Wise's eyebrows climbed higher and higher as he listened. The plan sounded like walking a tightrope.
"That's way too extreme," he blurted. "What if? What if there's traffic? What if Zhu Yuan is one second late? What if one of those idiots gets a brain cramp and starts early? Your calculations… how do you guarantee this?"
On the screen, Fairy's abstract blue "eye" seemed to ripple slightly, like an unseen processor spooling up.
"If Second Assistant requires logical proof, this artificial intelligence can construct a chain of explanation across 37,420,000 dimensions, covering variables you can imagine and variables you cannot, along with their probability distributions—ultimately producing a logical structure you will be unable to refute."
Wise opened his mouth, then closed it again. He didn't even know where to start.
"However," Fairy continued, and its tone shifted.
"Just as this artificial intelligence can accurately identify your current confusion index as 87.2%, and predict three possible emotional response trajectories within the next three seconds along with their probabilities, this does not indicate true understanding of the human subjective experience of confusion or worry. It is prediction behavior driven by databases and probabilistic modeling."
It paused, as if simulating a human thinking gap.
"Similarly, to the question of why the final result is guaranteed, this artificial intelligence's foundational answer is: I do not know. The core algorithm driving this predictive capability is itself a black box whose internal mechanism cannot be fully parsed."
"It receives input, performs complex operations that are not visible, and outputs results. We trust the output, not full comprehension of the process."
Wise felt his head swell, like he'd been forced to swallow a textbook.
To be honest, he understood almost nothing about how artificial intelligence truly worked.
New Eridu was full of Bangboo and smart machines, but he'd never dug deep into how "intelligence" was actually produced.
He scratched his head and thought self-mockingly: It's not that strange. Humans haven't even fully figured out how their own brains work.
Fairy concluded with a calm, flat certainty:
"Returning to the core concern: Morningstar's safety. Under purely probabilistic evaluation, even when all foreseeable worst-case factors are compounded, the probability of Morningstar suffering serious injury remains below 0.05%. Officer Zhu Yuan's comprehensive combat effectiveness significantly exceeds the combined total of all target gang members. Conclusion: Morningstar is absolutely safe."
"See, brother?" Belle stepped in smoothly, voice reassuring and confident.
"Stop drilling into it. Fairy, with infinite energy behind her, is basically the god of the network. If she tells you something is one-hundred-percent certain, you generally don't need to doubt it. Put your heart back where it belongs."
Wise looked at Belle's confident face, then at the lively blue electronic eye on the phone screen. In the end, he nodded.
Deep down, he still had an instinctive distrust of "AI"—but the phrase a super AI with infinite energy was so far beyond normal common sense that it broke his usual framework.
It was like a brick being hit with unimaginable force—if it didn't shatter, that didn't mean the force was small. It meant the brick itself was something else entirely.
And "force makes miracles happen" was a hard truth in any field.
—
Almost at the same time, shrill sirens tore through the calm of a New Eridu arterial road.
A police cruiser surged through traffic like a steel beast unleashed.
In the passenger seat, Officer Zhu Yuan's lips were pressed into a thin line. Her eyes were sharp as a hawk's as she quickly checked her sidearm and handcuffs.
Every muscle in her body was taut—fully in combat readiness.
In the driver's seat, Qingyi was the complete opposite.
Her hands rested casually on the wheel. There was even a faint, almost lazy smile on her lips—like this wasn't an emergency response at all, but a leisurely drive.
"Qingyi! Watch the road!" Zhu Yuan snapped, seeing the dense lanes ahead.
"Relax, relax. Sit tight, Zhu Yuan."
Qingyi's voice was airy and unconcerned.
Approaching a near 120-degree sharp turn, Qingyi's hands crossed and twisted with a boneless ease. The steering wheel snapped hard.
Screee—!
The tires shrieked against the asphalt. Centrifugal force whipped the car inward.
The cruiser executed a brutal drift at an absurd angle and speed, slipping into a narrow lane with surgical precision—so close to the curb it nearly scraped it.
Inside the cabin, unsecured items clattered and tumbled.
The moment the vehicle straightened and surged into the target street, the navigation route Qingyi had been receiving in real time from "Phaethon" vanished. A silent "destination reached" prompt blinked.
"We're here!"
Qingyi hit the brake to stop.
Zhu Yuan's eyes snapped forward.
Her pupils contracted—hard—locking onto the entrance of an old apartment building.
A few gaudy, rough-looking figures—people who practically radiated trouble—were already cursing as they shoved the glass doors open and stormed inside.
Every one of them had a bulge at the waist. Weapons.
A spike of anger shot straight into Zhu Yuan's skull.
She didn't even wait for the car to fully stop. She flung the door open and bolted for the entrance like a blue streak.
—
Inside the building, in Morningstar's small apartment.
Warm light. A faint smell of instant coffee.
Morningstar was fully focused on her screen, slender fingers flying over the keyboard. The monitor was packed with commission listings, task details, risk notes—an endless river of Inter-Knot work.
Even with 500,000 dennies newly sitting in her account, her face showed no looseness. No complacency.
She was still the same Morningstar: methodical, meticulous, filtering out the traps—jobs with inflated rewards, hidden pitfalls, mismatched difficulty—and selecting only those rare "sweet" tasks that were truly safe and suitable for rookies.
Then—
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Violent pounding shook the thin door like a hammer.
Morningstar's heart clenched so hard it felt like it stopped.
She jerked her head up, eyes wide with alarm.
The pounding turned into savage battering—like someone was trying to break the door down by force.
"Open up! We know you're in there, bitch!"
"Don't play dead! Open the damn door!"
The profanity sliced through the door panel. Morningstar's whole body started to tremble, fear flooding her veins like ice water.
She recognized those voices.
That gang—one that had extorted rookies under her wing before.
The door rattled again. Behind the yelling came a greasy, sycophantic voice.
"Boss! No mistake—Morningstar's chick lives here! Grab her and make her go claim that foundation money! With the kind of 'Newbie Guide' crap she wrote, she's gotta be eligible for a huge payout. Then—heh—those dennies are basically ours, right?"
A heavier voice—clearly the leader—answered with a cold, contemptuous pressure.
"Hm?"
The sycophant's tone instantly shrank.
"O-of course! All the money's yours, Boss! All yours! Heh… heh…"
Inside, Morningstar went bone-white at the words foundation, guide, dennies.
They weren't random.
They were here for the payout.
And they knew exactly why.
Exposed.
Terror surged—then, immediately, survival instinct took the wheel.
In a world like the Inter-Knot, she was not a naïve newcomer. She'd fought too long to be unprepared.
She sprang from her chair—but not toward the door.
She lunged for the small balcony.
A compact descent rig was anchored to the railing—unremarkable at a glance, but solid.
She grabbed the handle and yanked the window open.
Cold air slammed into the room.
No hesitation.
At the moment the front door groaned—on the verge of being kicked in—Morningstar gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, and threw herself out the window—down into the open air.
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 155)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter200)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter110)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter230)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 77
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 200
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 180
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass Volume2/5
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 230
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 220
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 154
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player Volume4/30
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 120
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 67
Uma Musume: From Beginner 135
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 85
Uma Musume: I Want All 110
I Can Copy Unique Skills 100
Summoning an Evil God, but the 70
Supernatural Multiverse 100
My Harem Is Indescribable 90
Jujutsu Kaisen: Heroic Spirit 95
"I'm just a Valkyrie passing through." 68
Uma Musume: Today Is Another Romantic Battlefield 105
Still playing traditional Honk 69
The Most Filial Son Under Heav 80
What Should I Do After Switchi - Volume2/3
Reincarnated as a Demon, Skill 70
Hell-Difficulty Dungeon? 55
Transmigrated as Sukuna 75
Checking In in Demon Slayer 80
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 85
I Refuse to Become a Heroic 70
My Best Friend Into a Slime? 65
A Saiyan Stands Above Marvel 70
What Do You Mean by Using a Lab Mod to Be the Hero? 70
Tanya Starts from Re:Zero 65
Why did they assign me to Uma 65
MYGO Beauties 65
DanMachi: Emiya the Giant Hero 55
The Gacha Merchant Who Started 65
Honkai's Otherworld? Wait—Who Are You People?! 45
Emiya Shirou, Determined to Slay Every Curse and Evil Spirit 45
The Uma Musume Who Became 40
I'm Definitely Not the King of 45
After Maxing Out Every Class 45
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