"Northern Sea Whale God? Didn't it leave?" I asked, somewhat surprised.
"Who told you it left?" Lin Xi retracted her upper body and elegantly cut a braised egg with her steak knife.
"...They said it came to inspect Tianchi, and then it should return to the Northern Sea, right?"
I know the Northern Sea. It's not Lake Baikal; there are no whales in Lake Baikal. The Northern Sea refers to the Sea of Okhotsk, to the northeast of the northeast, further north than Sakhalin Island. Because ancient times, vast regions including Sakhalin Island and the Outer Khingan Range were part of Yan Xia's territory, the sea adjacent to the mainland in the northeast region was called the 'Northern Sea'.
"Perhaps something happened in the Central Plains that piqued the Whale God's interest, causing it to transform into human form and come for inspection." Lin Xi cut the braised egg into five small pieces and brought them to her mouth with a fork.
"Where is it?" I asked, activating my phase qi technique. I detected no aura of a great demon within the hotel.
Of course, being inside a building, my phase qi technique wasn't very effective. Mountains can block phase qi, and very thick buildings can too. For example, if a great demon radiating purple qi appeared on the rooftop, and I was in the restaurant seven floors below, I might not be able to detect it.
"It stayed here last night and went out at midnight. I didn't track it. I suspect it will return," Lin Xi said.
"What makes you say that?"
"Because it hasn't checked out yet. Its belongings are still in the room, so I haven't touched anything. I'll wait for it to return."
"...Captain Lin, you don't have phase qi, how did you track it?" I asked, confused. Saphia's technological level was undeniable. Yan Xia's most advanced R&D was preferentially applied by security agencies like Saphia, but as far as I knew, they hadn't developed instruments with functions similar to 'phase qi'.
If I had to interpret it technologically, I believed phase qi was not electronic technology, but quantum technology, perhaps a product of the next technological era.
Lin Xi wiped some egg yolk from her lips with a napkin, then glanced at it. She crumpled it into a ball and tossed it aside. She then rolled up the sleeve of her left arm and showed me her watch. It displayed a crosshair, and in the second quadrant, near the edge of the watch face, a green dot was blinking and moving towards the center origin.
"You planted a tracker on it?" I guessed.
Lin Xi nodded. "It's heading back now. Eat up, and after you're done, I'll take you to the entrance to see it. You can get a glimpse."
"...Aren't you curious why I'm here?" I asked with a smile.
"Not curious. My main mission for this business trip was to track the Mohe, which then turned into tracking the whale demon—why are you here?"
I didn't need to hide anything from Lin Xi. She was a high-ranking official of Saphia, and besides, her sister was in Fucheng and knew the whole story.
I spent a minute briefly explaining the situation to Captain Lin Xi.
Midway through my explanation, Lin Xi stopped eating and listened intently, nodding. When I finished, she held an unlit cigarette and pondered for a long time, then made a deduction that I found somewhat unbelievable: "Could it be... you are the reincarnation of Bai Ze?"
"What Bai Ze?" I asked.
Lin Xi grabbed my wrist and felt it for a while, like an experienced traditional Chinese medicine doctor taking a pulse, then shook her head. "Doesn't seem like it. You're just an ordinary person... Have you had any unusual experiences since you were a child?"
"Before meeting Mu Jige?" I asked. My life began to change drastically from the moment I started dreaming of Yao Yao.
Lin Xi nodded.
I shook my head, stating with certainty, "No. Apart from my parents dying young, everything else was very normal."
Parents dying young was usually a standard trope for male protagonists in novels, but my parents passed away when I was approaching adulthood. I had already formed my worldview, and it was due to an accident. Moreover, after my parents' death, my grandparents, aunts, and uncles all raised me together, making my upbringing no different from that of a child in a normal family.
Therefore, I grew up as an ordinary little boy, attended a normal university, and after graduation, took an ordinary office job. It was all very mundane. If there was anything special, it was that during university, because my performance was decent, I was recruited into a positive energy "organization" with tens of millions of members in the country. Since I'm not allowed to elaborate, I won't. There's nothing much to say anyway.
Lin Xi smiled faintly. "Perhaps I'm overthinking it. Are you finished eating?"
"Almost," I said, popping the last piece of sandwich into my mouth and finishing the remaining half cup of coffee.
"Let's go," Lin Xi said, standing up.