Magical Girl Fan Bingbing

Jiang Ran hung up the phone and drove aimlessly through the city.

What I just said to Leng Qiaoqiao and those people from the Public Security Bureau was actually half true and half false.

He truly wanted to retire from his criminal activities. But the one retiring wasn't him, but Leng Qiaoqiao.

Leng Qiaoqiao, a young girl not even twenty years old, shouldn't have continued down this path to ruin.

Jiang Ran knew all too well the cruelty of this industry. The fact that Leng Qiaoqiao had managed to stay in jail until now was purely due to her good luck in running into Jiang Ran, a former teacher who could protect her.

Otherwise, given her previous small-scale workshop approach, let alone running into a surprise attack led by Chu Ying herself, she might not have been able to withstand even a passing security guard who smelled the odor and asked a few more questions.

The little girl had been blessed by fate so many times, but one day, fate would slap her in the face.

Jiang Ran had no choice but to push her off this path before fate could intervene.

The so-called "doing one last thing" was essentially a way for Jiang Ran to set a stepping stone for Leng Qiaoqiao to get off the bus.

Once this deal is done, Leng Qiaoqiao will have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of her life. She can then make a few more investments in the industries that the Demon Cultivation Association is about to expand into, and she will become a glamorous young female tycoon, which will be a fitting reward for the years of anxiety she has endured.

As for Jiang Ran herself...

He glanced down at his left chest.

He couldn't see much through the hoodie, but he could clearly feel the purple snake constantly devouring his life force.

As long as it exists, Jiang Ran will probably never be able to reach the other side in this lifetime.

……

The car glided slowly along the main ring road.

On a weekend afternoon in Tianhai City, the traffic was not heavy. The leaves of the trees on the roadside rustled in the wind. Occasionally, a few withered leaves would swirl and drift onto the windshield, only to be swept away by the wipers and disappear from his sight.

Jiang Ran's fingers tapped unconsciously on the steering wheel.

Jiang Ran now has tens of millions of yuan in cash in her bank account. According to the old doctor's previous plan, a full organ transplant plus artificial organs plus subsequent recuperation and maintenance will cost about ten million yuan.

But even if you have enough money, it's useless.

Even if Jiang Ran really spent money to have himself completely replaced inside and out, the purple snake on his left chest wouldn't disappear. That thing had been parasitizing his body for twenty years, and even his former comrades from the Demon Alliance couldn't do anything about it. How could a full-body organ transplant possibly solve it?

The result is nothing more than stuffing a healthy new organ into the body and then watching helplessly as the purple snake continues to slowly devour it. Over ten million has been spent, and the countdown to death might be extended by six months, or even a year.

This only addresses the symptoms, not the root cause.

What truly allowed Jiang Ran to survive was the magic essence.

Jiang Ran remembers clearly the feeling of being frantically taken by the purple snake for the first time in the RV that day.

But it was that brief feeling of fullness that reminded Jiang Ran of her state twenty years ago before she was injured, that long-lost feeling of being filled with vitality again.

From that moment on, he knew he couldn't live without this thing.

"Who knows, maybe one day it will devour my body too."

Jiang Ran muttered to herself while looking at the windshield, then a helpless smile appeared on her lips.

Of course, it's also possible that one day the purple snake will overeat, and the world snake will emerge from its cocoon in his chest, allowing Jiang Ran to perform the scene of a newborn alien.

But Jiang Ran had no choice; if she didn't feed it, it would die immediately, but if she did feed it, it might not die.

Then there's only one option...

"Please, my future self."

The person in the rearview mirror did not answer him.

Of course, all of the above plans are based on the premise that Jiang Ran can take down a high-level magical beast before the Security Bureau can act.

And this is precisely the most difficult part of the entire plan.

Jiang Ran stepped on the gas and wandered aimlessly through the streets and alleys of Tianhai City for an entire afternoon.

As a first-tier coastal city, Tianhai City already experiences a relatively high frequency of monster invasions, but this is far from enough for Jiang Ran.

According to statistics released by the Public Security Bureau over the years, the vast majority of detected monster intrusions within the city limits are concentrated in the lowest tiers: Iron and Bronze. These two tiers of monsters can usually be dealt with by a typical magical girl with a guardian squad.

The Silver and Gold levels, which are above that, only occur about a dozen times a year on average. The magical girls from the Municipal Security Bureau can usually handle them, and with the headquarters also in charge, there haven't been any major problems over the years.

As for the Diamond and Shining level monster invasions, the sample size was too small to even summarize any patterns.

The last time a Shining-level monster invaded Tianhai City was a few years ago when the Nine-Headed Sea Monster landed, killing tens of thousands of people and being reported on the news for more than half a month.

Leng Qiaoqiao's relatives died in that incident.

Even Cangxingshi in his prime would have to be cautious when facing a monster of that level, let alone himself who only has two years left to live.

Diamond-level magical beasts frequently cross the border to the North Sea front, engaging in bloody battles with magical girls. If Jiang Ran were to make the trip, obtaining the corpses of high-level magical beasts would be a piece of cake.

But...

The front line is, after all, the front line, where more than one member of the ten-seat parliament has been stationed for a long time.

Some of them might be people Jiang Ran doesn't want to see for the time being.

After the Demon Alliance disintegrated, Jiang Ran was seriously injured and had to retire. For a period of time afterward, he was marked as missing. A few years later, perhaps thinking that Cang Xing Shi could not possibly survive such a level of injury, the Ten Councils secretly held a funeral for Cang Xing Shi that no one knew about.

If Jiang Ran really goes, I'll probably be the one who gets taken down.

……

The car drove around the city several more times, but apart from the low battery warning popping up on the dashboard, Jiang Ran didn't see anything else.

Fortunately, the experience of driving around in the new car was quite good.

Jiang Ran was already very satisfied with the car the day she picked it up, and after driving it for a whole day, her satisfaction level rose even higher. The comfort of the seats, the precision of the steering, and the overall comfort of the cabin completely outclassed her previous secondhand commuter car, which had been a nightmare for half its life.

Especially the self-driving feature—following other vehicles, changing lanes, and parking automatically—requires almost no intervention. Even if he were to suddenly experience chest pain and collapse at the steering wheel while driving, the car could at least automatically pull itself to the side of the road, preventing an innocent pedestrian from being struck by lightning.

For that reason alone, this car is a worthwhile purchase.

It wasn't until the low battery warning sounded for the third time on the instrument panel that Jiang Ran finally realized that this approach was too inefficient and that she needed to change her thinking.

Jiang Ran drove the car back to the residential area, plugged in the charging gun, and sat in the driver's seat in a daze without getting out of the car.

A memory suddenly surfaced from the depths of my mind.

On the day the car was purchased, less than a minute after the monster appeared on the exterior wall of that commercial high-rise building, the first people to arrive at the scene were not the local Tianhai magical girls, but Moonlight and Sirius from the Magic Cultivation Association.

At the time, Jiang Ran only raised an eyebrow slightly, thinking that the other party's reaction speed was good, and didn't take it too seriously.

But now that I think about it, the Demonic Cult's reaction speed was actually faster than the magical girls on the police force's payroll.

Logically speaking, the magical girls on the police force's payroll are stationed at the local branch and have a dedicated detection system for early warning, so they should theoretically be the ones responding the fastest.

Could it be... that the Demonic Cultivation Society has mastered a method to predict where magical beasts will appear in advance?

If this is indeed the case, then Jiang Ran's assessment of the Demonic Cultivation Society's strength would have to be raised several levels.

The ten councils have never given up on studying the patterns of monster invasions over the years, investing astronomical sums in research every year, with top laboratories from all over the world participating.

Even with all that money spent, humanity still can't predict where monsters will emerge even a minute in advance.

As a last resort, the authorities deployed a large-scale network across all densely populated areas nationwide specifically to detect monsters crossing borders.

The official name of this network is "Magic Network," a super-large magical array jointly built by the ten councils and local governments.

Through detectors spread across every node of the city, the magical network can detect magical anomalies in the air in real time. Once a magical beast crosses the boundary from the interface of the world bubble, even if it only extends a tentacle, the magical network can immediately capture the magical fluctuations that do not belong to this world and push the alarm directly to the magical girls on duty nearby, so that they can take action immediately.

Back when Jiang Ran hadn't retired yet, the prototype of Magic Network had just been rolled out in a few first-tier cities, using the most primitive first-generation array.

Twenty years have passed, and it has probably gone through several iterations by now.

"Perhaps... things aren't as complicated as I thought."

Jiang Ran suddenly realized that she didn't need to study the Demon Cultivator's mysterious prediction methods, nor did she need to dig into the research progress of the Ten Councils.

Every time the magic network alarm sounds, the first to receive the signal are the magical girls on duty at various branches of the Public Security Bureau. The system will push the coordinates to their work terminals immediately.

In other words, as long as she can connect to the police department's magic network system, Jiang Ran can receive intelligence about the monster invasion at the same time as all the magical girls in Tianhai City.

They were even one step ahead of them.

The only problem is, how can Jiang Ran obtain access to the Magic Network?