Guo Yun: Plays Ye Shunguang, teammate Ye Shiyuan

Ambi was already waiting next to the convenience store in Guangying Plaza.

She stood next to the vending machine on the side of the convenience store, her back against the buzzing machine. The faint vibrations from the metal casing traveled through her clothes to her back, making her feel numb, as if countless ants were crawling on her skin.

Her hands were in her coat pockets, her fingertips unconsciously rubbing the fabric of the pocket lining, where there was a small loose thread, the end of which was wrapped around the edge of her fingernail and she gently pulled it off.

The morning light slanted in through the gaps between the buildings, casting a sharp line of light and shadow on the ground. Ambi stood in the shadow, only her toes touched by the sunlight, a warm yellow dappled on her white shoes, contrasting sharply with the shadows on her toes.

She looked up, her gaze passing over the low awning of the convenience store, and towards the direction of Sixth Street in the distance.

It's much quieter there now.

Three months ago, Sixth Street was one of the busiest areas in the entire school district.

The streets are lined with all sorts of shops—music stores, convenience stores, cafes, and now there's even a daily scratch card booth run by a dog.

Every evening, the street is packed with students leaving school, a cacophony of noise, the air thick with the aroma of fried snacks and the carefree laughter of young people.

Even according to Ambion's intuition, most of the shops there were shady businesses, but not quite as obviously so.

But now, the area is full of grey shops.

The so-called "gray shops" are trading points that operate in a gray area between legality and illegality.

Nominally, it's just an ordinary grocery store or recycling station, but in reality, it's a transit point, information exchange, and supply depot for cave raiders.

Since the incident three months ago, the core business district of Liufen Street has narrowly escaped being swallowed up by the void, but the surrounding residents and ordinary merchants have moved away one after another, and the empty shops left behind have soon been occupied by all kinds of people of unknown origin.

Although the familiar signs are still there, and even the concealment work is better than before, it cannot change the fact that Sixth Street has effectively become a completely gray street.

Ambi once saw a survey report about Sixth Street on the rope net.

The report states that the number of tunneling raiders operating in that area has nearly quadrupled in the past three months. They flock there like sharks smelling blood, establishing bases in abandoned shops, digging new passages in underpasses, and even setting up temporary "safe houses" in abandoned residential buildings.

The most troublesome thing is that there are now listening devices almost everywhere there.

It wasn't the kind of legitimate listening device used by the police—those things at least have a model number, a frequency band, and a signal source that can be tracked.

The listening devices on Sixth Street are a motley collection; some are walkie-talkies modified by the tunnel raiders themselves, while others are military-grade obsolete goods bought from the black market.

Although these things are not very precise, they are numerous, widely distributed, and completely unpredictable.

You never know if there's a microphone hidden in the air conditioner unit above your head, or if there's a listening device stuck to the bottom of the basket of that old shared bike next to you.

Not to mention that those grey shops themselves are intelligence exchange stations.

I used to be able to chat with the store manager there because of my connections, but a month after the incident, one of the managers seemed to have disappeared, and the other manager moved away, disheartened. It's such a pity...

As for how Ambly knew, Nicole's connections are no joke.

If you spend just five minutes in any shop on Sixth Street, your physical characteristics, clothing, and even the temperature of the drink you ordered will be recorded in a notebook and then transmitted throughout the underground network that same night via an encrypted channel.

As Ambiya thought of this, she unconsciously frowned. Her brows furrowed slightly, and two shallow lines extended from the inner corner of her brows to the center, like two parallel thin lines, before quickly spreading out again.

That's why she chose Guangying Plaza.

Although the Guangying Square is crowded and noisy, it is precisely because it is "too lively" that those shady eavesdropping methods are difficult to carry out.

Most of the equipment in the gray shops relies on capturing sound signals of specific frequencies. However, in places like Guangying Plaza where the ambient noise exceeds 70 decibels, the cheap microphones can only record buzzing sounds and nothing else.

More importantly, the security patrol density at Guangying Square is more than five times that of Sixth Street, so the owners of those shady shops wouldn't risk being invited for questioning by the sheriff to conduct blatant wiretapping here.

Moreover, after the incident three months ago, although the voids in the Sixth Street area shrank considerably due to the disappearance of the Void Hunter—some even disappeared entirely—the mess left behind was more troublesome than the voids themselves.

Anbi's gaze returned from the distance to an empty beverage can at her feet. It was a can of oolong tea that had been crushed; the surface of the aluminum can was dented and deformed, and the original design had been reduced to a few blurry patches of color.

She gently nudged it with the tip of her shoe, and the jar rolled half a meter away, hitting the curb with a crisp "click".

The disappearance of Xu Shou.

This matter remains a mystery to this day.

Three months ago, an unusual peak in cavity activity occurred in the Sixth Street area. The activity level was so high that it almost exceeded the limit on the cavity monitoring bureau's recorder. The instrument pointer hit the extreme right-hand limit, emitted a piercing beep, and then burned out completely.

Everyone present at the time thought it was a sign of a massive collapse of the cavity, and the entire school district was thrown into chaos by evacuation alerts.

Then, the Void Hunter arrived.

No one knows for sure what happened inside the cavity.

But by the time the activity of the void finally stabilized and the monitoring equipment resumed operation, the Void Hunter had vanished.

It didn't die, nor was it moved after being injured; rather, it simply vanished.

The Hollows Monitoring Bureau's report used a very ambiguous term: "missing". In official contexts, this term usually means "the person cannot be found for the time being, but the possibility that the person does not want to be found cannot be ruled out."

But this time the situation was clearly not that simple. Because the cavity in that area began to undergo an unusual change afterward—it didn't expand, but rather shrank.

It was as if some core force that kept the voids running had been suddenly removed, and the boundaries of those voids visibly contracted inward.

Nicole happened to have a contact who worked at the Hole Monitoring Bureau, and this information came to light: "The observed cavity boundary is retreating at a rate of three to five meters per minute, with the interior decreasing synchronously at a rate similar to skeletal activity. This decay pattern does not match any known model of the natural demise of a cavity."

Simply put, that void was "killed" by human intervention.

The only person capable of doing this is the missing Void Hunter.

Ambi's fingers tightened slightly in her pocket, the curve of her knuckles barely visible, only the skin at her fingertips could feel the fabric being gently pulled.

Her gaze returned to the direction of Sixth Street, but this time her focus wasn't on the buildings, but on a more distant place—a location known only to herself.

The void there has shrunk or disappeared, but the power vacuum it leaves behind is more dangerous than the void itself. Various forces are trying to fill that void—caveman, black market dealer, information broker, and even some organizations that even Anbi can't name.

They established a new order on the ruins of Sixth Street, weaving an invisible net with grey shops and listening devices, turning the entire area into a massive intelligence trap.

Naturally, Nicole rested inside the rabbit when she left, and who knows if she might come back there to get some more information.

Ambi is not worried about her safety.

Her concern was that if she met with Opoles's team there, Nicole might find out...

Thinking of this, Amby's body stiffened involuntarily. Her shoulders shrugged up less than a centimeter, the muscles on both sides of her neck bulged slightly, and then quickly relaxed.

Her back bounced a little away from the convenience store's exterior wall, her spine straightening again, as if an invisible thread was lifting her up from above.

Nicole discovered it.

In that situation...

goo.

Ambition's chin tightened slightly, and her lips pressed into an almost invisible line. Her Adam's apple bobbed up and down, emitting a very soft swallowing sound, a movement she herself was unaware of.

She imagined the scene in her mind—

Ambi shook her head violently, much more vigorously than usual. Her short white hair swung in an arc through the air, the ends brushing against her cheeks and causing a slight itch.

She took her hand out of her pocket, raised her right hand, and pinched her brow with her thumb and forefinger.

The pressure from the fingertips was just right, leaving a shallow indentation on the skin, and you could feel the nerve under the brow bone throbbing slightly.

She erased those horrific images from her mind, like wiping away writing on a whiteboard, stroke by stroke, cleanly and neatly.

Ambition glanced down at her phone.

The time displayed on the screen is 9:17 AM. There are thirteen minutes left until the agreed time.

She turned off her phone, put it back in her pocket, and then turned and walked toward the trash can at the entrance of the convenience store.

The trash cans are the typical outdoor recycling bins, with blue recycling bins and gray general waste bins placed side by side, each with a faded instruction label.

Anbi stood in front of the trash can and pulled a crumpled paper bag from her pocket—she had folded it neatly after eating the fried chicken burger, with all four sides aligned and the creases straight, like a folded piece of paper.

She threw the crumpled paper into the recycling bin.

The crumpled paper made a soft "plop" sound as it fell into the bin, mingling with the sounds of other trash colliding in the bin before quickly fading into the noise of the square.

……

A voice suddenly came from in front of me.

Ambi opened her eyes.

A woman with blonde hair and an eye patch stood about a meter away from her.

The woman was wearing a dark jacket, zipped up all the way, almost covering her chin.

Her hair was a bright golden yellow, almost dazzling in the morning light, with the ends sticking up irregularly, as if it had been haphazardly cut with scissors.

The most striking thing was the eye mask she was wearing.

That wasn't an ordinary goggle. Ambly recognized it at first glance—it was a variant of a tactical goggle, with a modified outer shell and several tiny sensor arrays along the edges that were almost invisible unless you looked closely.

The surface of the eye mask was matte black, which, combined with her yellow and black outfit, made her look very capable and free-spirited.

She realized what was happening and took the initiative to say, "Hello."

"Was it you who contacted me through the rope net?" the woman asked.

Her voice was lower than Ambion had expected, yet it was unexpectedly kind.

"Mm." Ambly nodded.

Her nodding motion was very small; her chin moved down about two centimeters before quickly returning to its original position.

Her short white hair swayed on both sides of her face as she did this, with a few strands falling above her eyebrows, which she didn't brush away.

Something flashed on the woman's blindfold.

Ambi could see it clearly—it was a tiny indicator light inside the blindfold, which lit up briefly and then went out, so fast it was almost an illusion.

But it seems that when I was describing what I looked like to someone else, I said I was holding a hamburger...

"...Oh. Hamburger. Sorry, I was too hungry, I already ate the hamburger." Ambly remembered why the other person was acting like they didn't trust her, so she said somewhat embarrassedly.

Her hands were clenched into fists pressed together, the knuckles touching each other, her wrists slightly turned inward, the backs of her hands facing the woman, her gaze shifting from level to a slightly upward angle, her eyelashes casting a small fan-shaped shadow below her eyelids.

After saying that sentence, the action returned to its normal posture—hands fell back to the sides of the body, back straightened, chin returned to a horizontal position, and the expression on the face switched from "apology" back to "expressionless" as quickly as turning a page of a book.

"Thank you for finding me. Well then, let's work together to stop the Silver's resurgence... What was your name again?"

Ambly's voice returned to its usual flat, emotionless tone. But her gaze lingered on the woman's face for a second longer than usual—she was observing the woman's reaction.

The woman did not answer immediately.

Her blindfold flashed again, this time with a yellow light that shone through the gaps at the edge of the blindfold. The yellow light lasted for about two seconds before going out.

"I haven't had a chance to introduce myself yet, and I haven't decided whether to trust you or not," the woman said, her voice more serious than before.

"Oh," Amby replied briefly.

This "oh" has only one syllable. When pronouncing it, the lips hardly move, and the sound is squeezed out directly from the throat, with a faint, almost inaudible breathy sound.

But at the very end of that breathy sound, there was a very tiny tremor—so tiny that even Ambi himself might not have noticed it.

Please don't let your heart be wounded like this.

The woman's blindfold turned yellow. This time it was a bright yellow, much brighter than before, as if a small light bulb had been lit behind the blindfold.

She raised her hand, palm facing Ambi, and pointed at Ambi with one finger.

"It's understandable that I can't believe someone who only met me once and made a claim based on nothing but words on the rope net."

Ambi remained silent for a while.

"But... I can't deny that I feel a certain familiarity with you."

The woman's eye patch turned pink.

"Even though I can't see your face, you remind me of a friend."

The woman's voice suddenly softened.

"She's in danger right now," she continued, a hint of worry in her voice.

"She was taken away by those people, right?"

Ambi's voice suddenly turned serious, and her gaze was fixed on the woman's blindfold.

"How much do you actually know?" the woman asked, her blindfold turning blue.

"I don't know more about what's happening now than you do."

Ambi closed her eyes.

The eyelashes trembled slightly at the last moment before the eyelids closed, like the final flap of a butterfly's wings as it folds them in.

She might have thought about it for a while—maybe three seconds, maybe five seconds, Amby herself wasn't quite sure.

Then she opened her eyes.

"You might know my name," Ambly said.

Her voice was soft, but every word was clear.

"My name is Ambition, Ambition, the commander of the Silver Army."

When she said those words, her aura underwent a subtle change.

"You... are..." The woman's eye patch turned yellow.

This time it's a dull yellow, different from the bright yellow before, as if it's been covered with a layer of gray.

When the yellow light shone through the edge of the blindfold, it illuminated a small patch of skin on her forehead, where the pores were slightly open and a thin layer of sweat glistened under the light.

Her breathing became a little faster—Ambion could hear it.

"...Yes." Ambly nodded, this time more deeply, her chin moving down about three centimeters before rising again. "Trigger. I'm the one who died in place of 'Number 11'."

"So...you should understand why she is also my responsibility."

……

"If I say I can't trust you right away, can you understand?"

The woman finally spoke.

"Don't worry, I've seen people even more suspicious than you."

"Words are no proof. How about this, let's meet in the cave," Ambly said.

"Empty..." the woman thought for a moment.

"I'm not good with words, so it would be great if I could show you through my actions," Ambiya explained. "You just need to watch me fight—"

"Ambi!!!"

A voice suddenly came from afar.

The voice was sharp and bright, like a needle suddenly piercing Ambi's eardrum.

The voice was high-pitched, with an urgent, even somewhat panicked quality. The last syllable vibrated and spread through the air, like a stone being thrown into a calm body of water, with ripples spreading outwards in concentric circles.

Ambi's body reacted the instant it heard the sound.

A look of terror appeared on her face.

That was an expression that was extremely rare on Ambi's face.

After looking around and confirming that Nicole was running towards her, she really didn't want Nicole to get involved in this, so she could only ask Trigger, whom she was chatting with, for help.

"!...Trigger...I need to hide in the convenience store for a while. Can you help me deal with the questioning from my current employer's boss? I'll stall for time as long as possible and try to distract them...please!" Ambly explained to Trigger in a panic. After speaking, she immediately hid in the convenience store next door.

Trigger instinctively used her body to cover Ambi's movements, even though she didn't know if it would be enough, she did it anyway.

……