I See through Everything

The matter of Du Bolun’s family had, for the moment, come to an end.

Hailufeng Company continued to develop methodically.

In truth, undercurrents had been surging across the globe for the past few months, especially with various powers ganging up to dismantle the Locke Clan’s external network.

This not only caused the Locke Clan’s peripheral power to shrink drastically, but other factions also used the exposed sleeper agents to trace and uncover many other problematic associates.

At the same time, this incident had another enormous impact: all the major powers became more sensitive and tense regarding any internal disturbances. Now, anyone making even the slightest suspicious move was liable to be suspected as a sleeper agent for America and subjected to a secret investigation.

Take Du Bolun’s family, for instance. This time, there was basically no chance for them to recover.

Because the timing was so sensitive, the affair his wife, Tang Ke, was involved in was enough to drag the entire Du Family into an irredeemable abyss.

And Jiang Miao’s decision to act without hesitation—eliminating David A. Locke and simultaneously leaking the Locke Clan’s various secrets—was precisely to foster this large-scale atmosphere of tension.

Now, the internal structures of every major power in the world were mired in a state where everyone feared for their own safety. Those with guilty consciences, in particular, became exceedingly cautious.

For the next few years, at least, everyone would lie low, not daring to make any moves that might bring trouble upon themselves or their families.

This was also the favorable macro-environment Jiang Miao had engineered for Hailufeng Company.

Perhaps for the powerful and influential, the next few years would be like walking on thin ice. But for Jiang Miao, who was relatively clean himself, this environment was, paradoxically, the most advantageous.

There’s a saying that puts it perfectly.

It’s better to drag your opponents down than to raise yourself up.

For a Go novice, trying to beat a master on the board is a fool’s errand. You don’t know the rules or the intricacies of the game. After all, your opponent has spent decades navigating the world of Go; you can hardly expect to outplay them within the established rules.

That’s when you must learn from the Great Han’s ’Sage of Go’: just pick up the board and smash it over your opponent’s head. Show them what it means to play with Heaven and Earth as the board and all of creation as the pieces.

Who says the game must be played on the board?

I am the Sage of Go! I have reached the ultimate realm where anything can be a game piece. Come at me if you dare.

Jiang Miao, a master of this philosophy, didn’t need to make any overt moves or personally enter the fray. He only needed to escalate global conflicts, using the resulting tension to prevent any of the major powers from focusing their attention on him.

In a few years, once the atmosphere had eased, he could just detonate another American financial clan. This would once again force the major powers to conduct internal purges, buying him several more years of peaceful development.

Their anxiety was his peace of mind.

After all, America’s various financial clans had spent decades buying or coercing a host of sleeper agents around the globe. These Trojan horses, which they could use, could naturally be used by Jiang Miao as well.

It was just that Jiang Miao’s way of using them was rather ruinous for the people themselves.

For example, this time, based on the information he had gathered, at least 80,000 people were directly affected, and of those, no fewer than 2,000 were killed.

In any case, among America’s conglomerate powers, there were still nine he hadn’t yet ’utilized.’ When the time was right, he could just randomly select an unlucky one to sacrifice.

In this world, the kind of people who might move against Jiang Miao and Hailufeng Company were rarely paragons of virtue themselves.

After all, if they were truly good people, they wouldn’t be attacking Jiang Miao and Hailufeng Company in the first place.

People like that were actually quite easy to deal with.

With just a slight push, all the sordid, corrupt dealings they kept hidden would spill out from beneath their glamorous facade.

...

Over the next two days, Jiang Miao worked with Station Chief Guo and his team to finish filming a series of videos.

On October 9th, Station Chief Guo and his entourage hurried off to film in other regions.

Jiang Miao, however, was not in the lab.

He was in the experimental greenhouse, right next to the strawberry greenhouses.

Before him lay another vast patch of bright red strawberries. But these strawberries had a rather ’stinky’ aroma—a classic case of a fragrance so intense it becomes a stench, much like the overwhelming scent of a camphor tree.

The origin of these strawberries was tied to a genetic mutation that had appeared in a previous batch of tissue-cultured seedlings.

The mutant plant, a vanilla strawberry, was characterized by an extremely intense fragrance, one that was almost foul. The farm workers were about to dispose of it, but an agricultural technician working at the farm, Su Zhiling, happened to discover the mutant and saved it.

In the R&D department’s technical development briefing at the end of May, Jiang Miao had read a report about this particular strawberry.

And that was what led to the ’stinky strawberries’ before him now.

These ’stinky strawberries’ were divided into two groups: third-generation tissue cultures from the mother plant, and seedlings grown from the mother plant’s seeds.

The third-generation tissue cultures were much like the mother plant, possessing that same fragrant-yet-foul scent.

The seedlings grown from seeds, on the other hand, had undergone mutation induction and a second round of selection by Jiang Miao himself. As a result, they exhibited a bizarre and wide array of traits.

Right now, however, Jiang Miao’s gaze was locked on one particular seed-grown plant. This was it—the special mutant he had discovered among thousands of seeds.

The fruit of this ’stinky strawberry’ contained a high concentration of vanillin.