Chapter 38 — Analyst vs Analyst

The night roads were, as they tend to be on weekdays, rather empty. The headlights cut a narrow corridor through the dark whilst everything else remained drenched in a shadow that made the hairs on Chen Wei’s arms stand up.

He was on the phone, and he was not in a good mood.

“I’m telling you, Mei, I had just sat down. The tea was still hot, and then my phone goes and it’s Elder Fang’s number and I think, fine, it’s late; it must be something serious. So I pick up—”

“I’m sure she had a good reason,” chipped in his wife from the other end of the phone call.

“No, but listen. She wants me to come in straight away because apparently there’s been some kind of emergency meeting with Shen Bowen himself, and they need someone who can move quickly and discreetly.” He paused for a minute, afraid that speaking too fast would enrage him too quickly. “‘Discreetly,’ they said — they said that to me!”

Mei laughed through the speakers, and a quieter, more high-pitched voice burbled a noise too. “Oh is my little butterfly hungry again?,” she said, in that hyperaggressively cute voice that comes whenever in conversation with a baby.

“So I go in, and the whole story comes out. Shen Yue — you know, the clan head’s granddaughter — was supposed to get married to some mortal today, and now he’s just gone. Disappeared this morning and nobody knows where.”

His wife asked the obvious question.

“That’s the thing! Apparently it’s more complicated than it sounds. I can’t tell you much, but the short version is that they need him found as soon as possible — something to do with the holy land portal or whatever.” He drummed his fingers along the steering wheel. “The others are all busy on another case, so instead they ask me to go alone.”

“That’s great, Wei Wei!” she chimed. “Look, that means they trust you and maybe… maybe you’ll even be considered for a promotion!”

“Yes, I know it’s technically a compliment, but I’m just saying — I had hot tea and was ready to get to bed.” He squinted at a road sign as it appeared and disappeared in his headlights. “And now I’m driving through the middle of nowhere at—” he checked the clock on his dashboard “—one thirty in the morning, trying to find someone based on an IP address that puts him somewhere in a five kilometre radius, which, as you may know, is not a precise location.”

She asked if he knew what he was looking for.

“I’ve gone through the maps and pretty much narrowed it down to a cluster of motels. There can’t be many and his name’ll be in the logbook somewhere. Hopefully I can just get it over with as soon as possible and get home.”

“You’ll be fine, stop complaining. Message me when you’re on the way back — I have a feeling the little one won’t let me get any sleep tonight,” she said.

“I will do,” he said, slowing down as the road narrowed. “And, for the record, they said to be discreet. I don’t do discreet — that’s not what sound arts are for! I’m not exactly Jiang Pei to tiptoe through a motel corridor and pretend I’m invisible. My whole thing is being heard!”

She said something short.

“Yes, I’ll call you when I’m done. I love you too. Take care.” He ended the call and set the phone in the cupholder.

***

Chen Wei pulled over about a hundred metres before the first motel and cut the engine, before getting out in the cold.

This was, he reflected, entirely the wrong kind of job for him — stealth operations favoured people with movement techniques and concealment arts, neither of which he could claim any mastery in. In fact, he was ranked near the bottom in his cohort for those specific subjects.

Chen Wei’s particular skillset was loud by nature, but sound arts required a lot of attentive listening to master as well. So he listened very closely as he spread his Qi in a thin layer across as many surfaces as he could, and listened very closely for any vibrations.

There were many kinds of tracking techniques that could be used, especially when searching for a specific Qi signature, or simply when searching for the presence of Qi itself. However, this was an extremely advanced application of one’s spiritual control, not due to its difficulty, but, rather, because cultivators had very hard limits to the radius around them where their Qi could extend. Going any further than this boundary would turn this ‘self-Qi’, as people had come to call it, into true, ‘external Qi’ that can linger and retain its attributes, but can no longer serve as an organ for the practitioner.

In this specific instance, sound arts were peerless. He could sense the rough locations of anything causing significant vibration in a certain manner and follow the trail until he honed in on its exact location.

His wife would jokingly call him a sniffer dog.

Cultivators had a signature, and even sleeping ones leaked something of themselves into the surrounding air.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

He got two distinct pings from the motel directly in front of him.

Chen Wei considered this for a moment: two cultivators was unexpected, with one notably weaker than the other. He had been told the target was a mortal, possibly with some minor constitutional quality, and the weaker one probably fit this theory. The other, he hoped, was someone who just happened to share the same motel as Lin Che.

He moved towards the entrance.

The front desk was unmanned at this hour, so he walked over behind the counter and found the paper register. He ran his finger down the entries until he reached tonight’s bookings, and, sure enough, Lin Che’s name was there, and he had seemingly booked two rooms.

Chen Wei went down the corridor and stood outside the door closest to him. He listened for the vibrations, and they matched those of the weaker signal he had detected just earlier.

He tried the handle, and, thankfully, the door was unlocked.

He stepped inside the dark room and could just about make out two bed-shaped masses. Both were motionless, but one had a steady breathing rate, whilst the other faintly snored.

He moved towards the bed closer to the window and needed to confirm the identity before doing anything else. In this light, he couldn’t see enough to be certain.

He stood about three feet from the bed and clicked his fingers.

A small spark of Qi ignited the air above his hand, just enough light to see with, revealing the sleeping face beneath him.