78: Chapter 78 The Feast at Hongmen: A Miraculous Resurrection

Edward stood up from the ground and slowly loosened the collar of his blood-soaked jacket, his movements unhurried.

"A bullet through the brain won't kill me."

He downplayed it as if announcing he didn't want steak tonight, then raised his eyes to look directly at the row of gun barrels still aimed at them.

After a moment of silence, he added:

"This is what the Tech Faction gave us."

"What did your Immortalist BOSS give you?"

The color drained from Diana's face at that moment, leaving her extremely pale, but she still stood perfectly straight.

Sterling's fingers tightened around his whiskey glass, turning even stiffer than before, but he still tried his best to maintain his cold, arms-aristocrat expression;

Augustus lifted his hands from the table and crossed them over his chest. His stern face, with his heavy chin slightly raised, remained cold and hard, but his lips pursed involuntarily.

No one ordered to fire.

It wasn't that they didn't want to, but everyone present had just seen it with their own eyes:

Firing was completely pointless.

Then Musk raised his wrist, turning the watch face toward everyone.

His movement was as relaxed as presenting a slide in a team meeting.

"See this watch?"

"There's a micro-explosive inside, carbon fiber directional charge, with an effective radius that just happens to cover the entire Lackland Air Force Base."

He lightly patted the strap, his tone as casual as pitching a limited-edition watch,

"Don't worry, it's very expensive to make. The cost of one is equivalent to two of your Stinger missiles. I just had my men finish making it recently."

"Just a tiny dose is enough to blow this base and all of you into a pile of rubble."

"If we die, we can grow back. As for you... well, you don't have that kind of superpower."

He leaned against the pillar next to the wreckage of the cart, curling his lips and pinning that smile firmly in the center of Diana's gaze.

Edward pulled a tube of green reagent from his inner jacket pocket and held it up to the light, letting everyone see the reflection of the pale green liquid.

"liquid zero, extracted from the eyeball of a Grey Alien."

"Each tube represents a fresh physical regeneration, restoring a body from zero to complete."

"We brought six tubes!"

He pulled out three more tubes from his other jacket pocket, put them back, then uncapped the first one, inserted the needle into the outside of his forearm, slowly pushed it all the way down, and set the empty vial on the tilted edge of the table beside him.

Musk also took out two tubes from his pocket, injected them one by one, and tapped the empty vials onto the table.

The three empty vials were lined up, their openings glowing with a lingering, faint green fluorescence.

At that moment, the scene in the banquet hall dissolved into utter chaos.

At the tables, the socialites and dignitaries who had just been talking about "Nevada hillbillies" and "South African bumpkins" now showed their ugliest colors,

some slowly backed away using chairs as shields,

some desperately tugged at the suit sleeves of their companions,

and some simply pushed open the back door and stumbled out, completely discarding their status and dignity.

The barrels of the three hundred fully-equipped tactical shooters were still half-raised toward Musk and Edward, but not a single one of their sights was steady.

They stared at the row of empty, slightly glowing vials on the table as if staring at a row of detonated landmines.

Augustus Knox was the first to speak.

He lowered his crossed arms, spread his right hand, and took a half-breath through tightly closed lips before lowering his voice to say:

"You walk out now... and today's matter ends here."

"But starting tomorrow, your Starship Base and all of the Warren Family's foundations in Nevada will be completely cut off without any warning."

Sterling Remington placed his empty whiskey glass back on the table, the bottom of the glass making a very soft thud against the linen tablecloth.

He didn't look at the glass, his eyes pinned on Edward:

"Even if you can walk out of these doors tonight, don't think you've won."

"Longevity Faction want you dead. You won't make it out of this state."

Musk gently flicked away the glass shards on his cuff, tilted his head to look at Augustus and Sterling, his tone half sarcastic and half stating a fact:

"Your Immortalist BOSS hasn't even provided you with a single vial of potion up until now."

"Do you think they're reluctant to give it to you, or do they just think you're not worth it?"

"If I were you, I would figure this question out first."

"And then consider whether to keep working for them or leave yourself a way out."

"Let's end tonight's dinner here." Edward tugged at the residual blood on his collar and nodded toward the main table, his tone flat but carrying an unshakeable composure.

With that, he and Musk turned and walked out of the main doors of the hall together, their pace the same as when they had entered,

neither fast nor slow.

The barrels of the three hundred allied elites remained raised, but not a single person fired.

No one ordered to stop them.

Diana didn't, Sterling didn't, and Augustus didn't either.

Only a crooked main table, a few still-swaying crystal chandeliers, and scattered wine bottle shards, leftover soup on plates, and pushed-aside chair legs remained in the hall.

The banquet dispersed much faster than it had begun.

Without waiting for anyone to announce the end, the socialites and dignitaries at the tables pushed and shoved in groups of twos and threes to retreat toward the side and back doors,

some sending panicked text messages on their phones as they walked,

some being shoved into armored cars by their bodyguards at the door,

and some only remembering after getting into their cars that they had left their briefcase under their seat, but not daring to go back for it.

Within just a few minutes,

only the three people at the main table, their respective personal bodyguards, and a few trusted aides quietly cleaning up the mess on the periphery remained in the entire banquet hall.

Sterling once the last outside guest was escorted from the hall, set his empty glass on the tablecloth and suddenly turned toward Diana.

In his narrow gray eyes, the cold composure he had shown when facing the external enemy was gone,

replaced instead by an almost interrogative sharpness:

"Diana, that Immortalist official you mentioned to us—the one you call Zhang Long—has he given you any support?"

"Our three families brought all our elites into this military base, guaranteeing to Longevity Faction that we would take their two lives, and yet now three empty tubes of 'liquid zero' are lined up on the table."

"They can resurrect on the spot after dying, while the three of us here haven't even seen a single antibiotic!"

Augustus's face darkened even further.

He reached out, flicked the closest of the empty tubes in front of him, crushed the remaining fragment of the vial's neck, picked it up to examine it, and then threw it back onto the table, his voice so low it seemed pressed up from his chest:

"The Tech Faction gave them regeneration drugs."

"What about us?"

"Should we compile all the records of tonight's broken negotiations into a document and burn it for Longevity Faction to see?"

"Can you still contact that Zhang Long?"

Diana sat in the host seat, her hands crossed over her lap, her back perfectly straight, but her shoulders were wound tighter than usual.

She listened to all of Sterling's and Augustus's questions, remaining silent for a long moment before speaking.

Her voice was as cold as ever, but lacked any of the ease that came from confidence.

"I can't contact him."

"The last time Zhang Long of Longevity Faction came to Casablanca Manor, it was a one-way trip."

"He walked in, transformed into a bolt of lightning to leave, and left no way of contacting him."

"I cannot actively contact anyone from Longevity Faction right now."

She paused, looked at the row of empty syringes on the table, and added another sentence, her tone unchanged, but the wording itself was the most direct confession:

"Before we can contact Longevity Faction, I will mobilize all the resources of the Hopkins Family to first reinforce the existing defense systems of our three families."

Sterling neither nodded nor shook his head upon hearing this. He merely pushed his whiskey glass from the table to the edge of the lazy Susan in the center of the dining table, his movements slow, as if trying to calm the pressure churning inside him that he couldn't vent.

Augustus clenched his thick fists and rested them on his lap. His jaw muscles tightened, and then he muttered a low sentence, directed at no one:

"During this time, we can only rely on ourselves again."

Diana did not respond.

She looked down at the row of empty vials, and what came to mind was not the faces of Sterling and Augustus, but the image of Musk standing up after the bullet wound in the back of his head healed.

The Tech Faction had given their agents the ability to rise from the dead,

while her Immortalists had not even given her a single extra word to this day.

As one side waxed and the other waned,

if this gap in assistance continued, the Hopkins Family would definitely lose.

Panic had already set in her heart, but she did not let it show on her face.

...

Hollywood Hills, a detached villa.

Zhang Yi curled up on the Italian leather sofa in the living room that he had bought less than a week ago, his bare feet propped up on the walnut coffee table, holding a latte made with his newly purchased capsule coffee machine.

Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, the night view of the Los Angeles Basin stretched from the hillside all the way toward the Pacific Ocean, with myriads of lights flickering quietly in the dry night wind.

The curl of his lips hadn't faded since ten minutes ago,

and the notifications of incoming emotion points on the system interface were still rolling continuously.

On the FBI's side, Deputy Director Moran went from despair to loudly cursing Whitfield, and several agents shooting themselves triggered another wave of collective fear.

On the side of the three major military-industrial giants,

Diana had seen Musk and Edward resurrect on the spot after dying at the Hongmen Banquet, and her usually cold face cracked with a rare look of panic.

Not to mention Sterling Remington and Augustus Knox—the two old arms aristocrats went from calmly passing judgment when they entered to turning pale when they left, their emotional fluctuations steeper than a roller coaster.

On the CIA's side,

Heinlein caught a whiff of the President's sphincter losing control in the White House corridor, and upon returning to Langley, he was cut down to just five million in funding by Commissioner Smith's ninety percent kickback.

Throughout the CIA's seventh-floor conference room, from anger to fear and then to silence, waves of emotion points rolled in one after another.

Musk and Edward had also died once in the banquet hall and come back to life.

Although they were prepared after injecting liquid zero beforehand, the pain of a bullet piercing their skulls and the near-death experience itself were genuine emotional shocks.

Coupled with the collective cognitive collapse of the three hundred allied elite shooters at the banquet, and the ugly behavior of the socialites and dignitaries as they dispersed...

All the emotional fluctuations from this series of events finally condensed into a number on the system interface:

Two hundred thousand!