Deity Investigation Report

Chapter 326 The Person Closest to the Throne

"Imperial bloodline?"

"Just him?"

"No, no, weren't all traces of the emperor's existence erased?"

Han Su's first reaction was that he couldn't understand everything Xue Zhi said: "The current emperor is just an empty title, and there are no records of him. How could such a bloodline suddenly appear in this small Qinggang?"

"How could a scoundrel like Xu Ji possibly be a descendant of the emperor?"

"..."

He had a million impulses to subconsciously refute it.

But when the words were about to come out, he hesitated slightly, suddenly remembering that when he was facing the consciousness of the Mechanical Mother downloaded by Anwei on Baila Mountain, he had also heard a vague voice.

It was as if it were Miss Ai, whom I knew well, who had traversed countless historical dusts and conveyed a sentence to my ear. At that time, she earnestly said:

"Emperors did exist!"
At that time, I didn't really know why she wanted to convey that message to me.

Now, there's a strange sense of symmetry.

Could it be that Miss Ai was actually referring to Xu Ji?

If Xu Ji is indeed a descendant of the emperor, then by working backward, wouldn't it also confirm that the emperor existed?
For a moment, his mind was a jumble of thoughts. Han Su suppressed his thoughts, looked up at Xue Zhi, and asked, "How did you come to this answer?"

"Very complicated."

Xue Zhi slowly began to speak: "Initially, it was because I discovered that there were so many unreasonable people and families in Qinggang. I believe that there must be a reason behind all these unreasonable phenomena."

"Of course, there may be some hidden reasons that I cannot access, but some clues on the surface can always satisfy my curiosity."

"Thanks to Secretary No. 5, through the authority he granted me, I was able to see at least the reasons why these families came to Qinggang. For example, Mr. Chen Ji, a regular guest of D7, and his family were the first to attract attention and arouse curiosity."

"Bowl cut?"

Han Su suddenly became alert.

Xue Zhi just mentioned that this guy is from Haiwei City.

“I knew about Mr. Chen Ji’s existence a long time ago because Secretary No. 5 had been secretly funding the D7 experimental project.”

Xue Zhidao said, "Actually, that far-fetched experimental project was officially halted ten years ago."

"Because creating a 'perfect organism' is a pipe dream, and the investment would be too huge."

"However, after the project was officially halted, it was only four or five years ago, when I was sorting through information, that I discovered there was actually a strange pair of professors and their students who were still continuing their research in the abandoned project."

"These two guys are a bit off their minds and have no presence. The key is that their research doesn't require much money, so they quietly restarted the project even when everyone else had forgotten about it."

"Moreover, the test subjects all cooperated with them voluntarily; that test subject was Mr. Chen Ji..."

“I reported this discovery to Secretary No. 5, and as a result, he also became curious about the project. In the end, he decided to ignore the project for the time being and only give it a little bit of authority.”

"It's a move that's not really necessary; let's see how far their research can go."

"Of course, because this experiment is extremely bizarre, I naturally had to organize and search his data. What I found shocked me."

"Mr. Butcher, do you know how terrifying Mr. Chen Ji's family is?"

"..."

Han Su was actually quite surprised.

The experiment that guy with the pot lid participated in was actually against the rules?
No wonder he was able to take leave!
However, a guy whose head doesn't look normal actively cooperates with a pair of neglected professors and their students in the D7 experiment to conduct a surgical experiment that has been forgotten by the disaster management bureau.

Without funding, without support, and without even a meeting to discuss the significance of the surgery, it was spotted by an ambitious individual who deliberately protected the experiment.

This whole thing has a weird vibe to it, doesn't it?
"He comes from Haiwei City, one of the world's five major central cities!"

Xue Zhi asked and answered himself: "Even Qinggang is only a second-tier city. Above Qinggang, there are some first-tier cities with more important strategic positions. Mr. Chen Ji's family comes from Haiwei City, which is known as the center of the world and is above a first-tier city."

"The people living there are all people with absolute power. I haven't found out why they came to Qinggang, but if they wanted to, they could do whatever they wanted in this city, controlling everything. But in the end..."

"Not only did they keep an incredibly low profile, as if they had been forgotten, but even their son joined D7 to participate in this meaningless experiment..."

"This……"

As Xue Zhi finished speaking, he pointed to his head and smiled wryly, "This is simply outrageous!"

"Most importantly, through my investigation of the Chen family, I discovered that there are other families in Qinggang that are similar to the Chen family, such as the Wei family, the Lu family, and the Lü family."

"They may not all be as prominent as the Chen family, but they are definitely not a family that small Qinggang can contain."

"To put it simply, with their qualifications, even if they went to a first-tier city, they would have had the opportunity to obtain special privileges and exemptions. But in the end, they stayed in Qinggang and didn't even have the chance to sit in a chair in the Qinggang Council."

"They are incredibly low-key, only participating in what are considered ordinary business competitions and charity parties in the eyes of mystical superhumans. They live an ordinary life as if they know nothing about the mystical world."

“Looking at them, I sometimes have a feeling…”

He paused, then said in a low voice, "They are like prisoners trapped in Qinggang."

"Qinggang is their secret prison!"

"..."

"Secret prison?"

Han Su was somewhat taken aback by his description.

There are secret prisons around Qinggang, and there are three of them.

The independent investigators imprisoned the fish-men of the sea village, the banshee polluters, and many other strange and unusual creatures in one place, observed them, and experimented on them.

So, if Qinggang is also a huge secret prison, then who are the investigators guarding these families and individuals?
My thoughts inexplicably drifted back to the Battle of Qinggang, the annihilation of the city in my previous life storyline.

At that time in Qinggang, apart from a small number of people who were quickly evacuated, everyone else was exposed to danger.

Indeed, it's somewhat like the attitude towards prisoners in secret prisons.

"So, how did you come up with the idea of ​​the Xu family?"

Han Su quickly asked the question that concerned him most, while keeping his guesses for the time being.

Only after Xue Zhi has accepted the contamination can we discuss it with him with peace of mind.

"Because the Xu family is the strangest people I encountered during the entire data collection process."

Xue Zhidao said, "To put it bluntly, it was because of my investigation into the Xu family that I ended up attracting those two strange guests."

"It's already quite strange that a family with a background like the Chen family of Haiwei City could come to Qinggang and keep a low profile, but if you really analyze it carefully, you can find some patterns."

"It's nothing more than failing to win a title, or being ostracized and forced to live a meager existence in a small city. But such reasons just don't fit the Xu family."

"The Xu family is the only family I found with a publicly known noble title when I was organizing the data."

Xue Zhi paused for a moment, then looked at Han Su and spoke.

"I know."

Han Su nodded slightly; this answer did not surprise him.

Even before he knew anything, he had already discovered Xu Ji's special qualities. This guy always seemed to have a higher status when he hung out with anyone. No matter how much of a loser he acted, those people would always look at him with a sense of awe.

Even their family's special assistant, Xu, often mentioned that the Xu family belonged to a distinguished family.

At the time, Han Su was unaware that this identity was a noble title.

"The Xu family's title is Viscount."

Xue Zhi continued, "But if I'm not mistaken, this title is probably fake."

"Because compared to the occasional performance of the Xu family, the viscount is too low."

"..."

He said with almost certainty, "This irrationality manifests itself in every aspect."

“I once compiled information on Secretary No. 5’s allies and enemies in Qinggang, and many of them involved these mysterious families. However, Secretary No. 5 was not afraid of them and treated them as ordinary politicians.”

"He's terrified of the Xu family the only one he's truly afraid of..."

“He even told me before the Baila Mountain operation that if anyone was obstructing the plan, he could remove them, no matter who they were in the Qinggang Council. However, if the Xu family interfered in the plan, we should find a way to bypass them.”

"If that were all, I would have considered the Xu family to be a noble family with a mysterious origin and real power. I even suspected that the Xu family might be a true noble family, that is, the bloodline of the Twelve Knights." "It wasn't until I compared the Xu family with some of the information about the emperor that I knew about them that a huge conjecture came to me."

"..."

When he got to this point, Xue Zhi's voice sounded a little different.

He first stared at Han Su for a moment, then said in a low voice, "Remember everything I'm about to say."

"After I accept your contamination, I will repeat it again, and then I will compare what I said in the two versions."

"..."

Han Su asked in surprise: "Are you worried that you've been affected, or even that your memories have been altered?"

"Yes."

Xue Zhi nodded: "Although I can judge the completeness of my plan by using the numbering system, I am, after all, just an ordinary person. There are some forms of pollution that I cannot understand, let alone resist. So, I need to be more careful about the key issues."

"In the years I spent in Qinggang helping Secretary No. 5 organize various materials, there were only two things that interested me, one of which was the errors I discovered in Qinggang."

"And the other one is even earlier, which is the vague but absurd history I discovered when I first came into contact with this kind of mystical knowledge and information."

“I have a very strange idea: the era we live in is also a huge mistake in the course of history.”

"..."

"Ok?"

Han Su was surprised that he would blurt out such a sentence and looked at him with astonishment.

"Just like many people shouldn't be in Qinggang."

Xue Zhidao said, "The rebuilt civilization we live in should not exist in the history of this world in the first place."

Han Su asked, "Why?"

"Because I'm not qualified."

Xue Zhi said in a deep voice: "In those deliberately obscured historical records, all sorts of mysterious things have appeared in the history of this world, and their power has even exceeded human imagination in many cases."

"Then, how can humanity possibly defeat so many powerful adversaries, and seal those monsters out of reality simply by 'not believing'?"

"Our survival model, which is based on modern civilization and is dominated by ordinary people living in the comfort of reality, should theoretically not exist in this kind of competition, because we have no chance of winning."

"It was with this question in mind that I naturally began to pay attention to the legend of the Emperor and the Twelve Knights. The information about the Emperor's existence has been completely erased, and there are very few records about the Twelve Knights."

"All we know is that they defeated all anomalies, resolved the endless catastrophes, signed three great pacts with the world in the five holy cities, and then went to various places to rebuild civilization."

"But because they deliberately obscured history, we don't know how they did it."

"It doesn't say how they won the war before the reconstruction of civilization, nor does it say how they led humanity to multiply and establish real defenses after the reconstruction era began."

"All we know is that the tides come in again and again, and humanity wins time and time again..."

"Of course, there's also the emperor!"

"Their efforts to erase the emperor's traces were so drastic that more and more people discovered the strangeness."

"I was one of them. As I explored that vast history time and time again, my attention began to shift from the Emperor and the Twelve Knights to the Emperor alone."

"I began to collect any legends about the emperor, and to examine any relics with imperial writings, analyzing why the imperial writings were there and what the emperor had done there."

"..."

"So you call yourself a follower of the Emperor?"

At this point, Han Su seemed to realize something.

At first, I thought Xue Zhi, this follower of the emperor, was recruited by someone else, but it turns out he did it spontaneously?
Xue Zhi was even a little proud: "Being so obsessed with the emperor, I am of course a believer in the emperor."

"Then how did you manage to connect the emperor with the Xu family..."

"..."

"You are an extraordinary person, have you ever heard of this saying?"

Xue Zhi paused, then said in a low voice, "If you pay too much attention to certain things, you'll attract mysterious prying eyes?"

Han Su paused for a moment, then nodded.

This is basic common sense in the mystical realm: when you pay attention to the mystical, the mystical realm will also take notice of you.

"I must have been paying too much attention to the emperor at some point, which led to the arrival of two strange guests."

When Xue Zhi got to this point, his expression became slightly dazed for the first time, as if he couldn't tell what was real: "One of them was an old man in a tuxedo, with elegant but stiff manners."

"The other one was a woman of a certain age, but possessed an indescribable charm, resembling a songstress from a bygone era..."

"They came to my place to visit."

"Of course, that visit was strange in itself, because the place I lived in was almost like a prison. After all, Secretary Number 5 didn't trust me very much, so it was quite difficult for me to leave or for others to enter my place."

"But the two of them just showed up in my room and very amicably discussed with me everything about the great emperor of the past."

"The old man spoke of the emperor's greatness, of everything he had done, and of the approaching tide, and how only the emperor could save civilization in the face of the gods' vengeful wrath."

"The old singer spoke of the tragic fate of the emperor's bloodline, mentioning a group of women who existed to await the emperor's return, but now had become tools in the hands of others..."

"..."

Listening to Xue Zhi's story, Han Su could no longer contain himself.

He interrupted Xue Zhi for the first time, his breathing slightly heavy: "What does that old man you're talking about look like?"

"It's a bit blurry."

Xue Zhi rubbed his temples and said, "I only remember discussing things with those two for a long time, and it was all very clear. But when I woke up the next day, there was no sign of anyone else entering the room. It was as if it was all just a dream..."

"but……"

"..."

He paused slightly, and from Han Su's eyes, he could tell that Han Su was very concerned about this issue.

So, with a slight pursing of her lips, she said, "I remember dreams too."

"His appearance..."

At this moment, he seemed to be talking in a dream, speaking in a low voice: "Slender, very tall, wearing a heavy coat, and inside the coat, it looked like withered vines were hidden..."

"His skin was deathly pale and stiff; he always spoke slowly and deliberately, and his skin had cracks like porcelain..."

"It's him!"

Upon hearing this, Han Su also closed his eyes slightly.

After a long while, he finally let out a breath, now certain that the old butler from the castle had appeared.

Some answers that were shrouded in mist have begun to become clear before my eyes.

"so……"

After a long silence, he looked up at Xue Zhi and asked, "You learned about the relationship between the Xu family and the emperor from them?"

"They didn't explain it that clearly."

Xue Zhi hesitated slightly, then shook his head and said, "Besides, when they came to visit me, it wasn't to tell me anything."

"Based on my own analysis, they are more like a mysterious contamination. Because I touched the Emperor's power, they came to see me, like a magnet being attracted... However, it's a bit strange that I was still an ordinary person afterward."

"However, they did mention that Qinggang has the emperor's bloodline. So, by comparison, I think that among all the families in Qinggang, only the Xu family fits all of this."

"Of course, all of this was just speculation before, but just now, with Miss Wei's successful ascension to the throne, I have finally confirmed it."

"..."

He took a deep breath and said in a low voice, "The Empress Organization exists because of the Emperor."

"The only ones who can exercise power in place of the emperor are, of course, the emperor's bloodline."

"According to that old man, the world has forgotten the emperor, but the throne still exists and is waiting for the emperor's return. So I think he is the person closest to the throne."

(End of this chapter)