38: Chinese witchcraft at the Sihang Warehouse

British journalist Arthur Thompson felt that he must have had too much to drink.

He leaned against the balcony of his penthouse suite at the Palace Hotel, a glass of gin and tonic in his hand.

The ice cubes had already melted.

The sound of gunfire and artillery from the opposite bank hadn't stopped much since dawn.

At first, it felt novel and exciting, but now all that remained was a headache-inducing clamor.

“A bunch of barbarians.”

He raised the telephoto camera hanging from his chest as if it were a pair of binoculars, aimlessly scanning the battlefield shrouded in thick smoke.

Suddenly.

His movements froze.

He saw something.

A massive, black, bat-like object was slowly rising from the roof of that solitary warehouse building.

It had no wings, yet it flew high and steady.

“What the hell is that...”

Thompson rubbed his eyes and took another large gulp of alcohol.

It must be a hallucination.

Stay in this godforsaken place long enough and anyone would go crazy.

He raised his camera again, aiming it at the 'hallucination.'

Then, he pressed the shutter.

*Click.*

The moment he pressed the shutter, he saw that massive black 'kite' fly over the Japanese Army positions.

Then, it started to 'snow.'

Swirling white powder fell from the sky, covering the entire Japanese position.

Immediately following that were explosions.

One burst of fire after another bloomed with precision within the Japanese lines.

The glass in Thompson's hand fell to the ground with a *clatter*, shattering into pieces.

It wasn't a hallucination.

He saw it.

He saw it clearly!

A giant kite had bombed the Japanese positions!

[Hahaha, the foreign journalist is dumbfounded, his jaw is about to hit the floor.]

[If he knew this was a 'weather balloon,' would he go insane on the spot?]

[Streamer, history has taken a sharp ninety-degree turn because of you!]

[Quick! Give him a close-up! I want to see that face of his that looks like he's seen a ghost!]

Thompson rushed downstairs like a madman.

He shoved past the hotel doorman, jumped onto a rickshaw, and urged the driver in broken Chinese.

“Fast! Go to The Times office! Fast!”

...The Times, Shanghai Bureau.

Mr. Harrison, the editor-in-chief, was puffing on a cigar, reviewing a boring commentary on the 'Far East Situation.'

The office door was kicked open.

“Boss! Big news! The news of the century!”

Thompson charged in like a hunted bull, his eyes bloodshot, and slammed a still-wet photographic negative onto Harrison's desk.

“The Chinese! They! They used sorcery to defeat the Japanese!”

Harrison took off his glasses and looked at his most troublesome reporter as if he were an idiot.

“Arthur, I can smell the alcohol on you,” he said slowly. “If I remember correctly, your bar tab from last night hasn't been settled yet.”

“It's not the alcohol! It's real!” Thompson pointed at the negative, his voice trembling with excitement. “I saw it with my own eyes! A giant kite! It could fly! And it dropped bombs!”

“A kite?” Harrison's eyebrows rose even higher. “Arthur, are you sure it wasn't a bird scared witless by the shells?”

“I'm sure!”

Thompson shoved the negative into the enlarger and began developing it in a frantic rush.

Soon, a blurry, highly grainy black-and-white photo appeared in the darkroom.

The background of the photo was a hazy sky and ruins.

A giant black object, shaped like a bat, hovered in mid-air.

Below it were the faintly discernible Japanese positions where explosions were occurring.

The mockery on Harrison's face slowly froze.

He adjusted his glasses and leaned in for a closer look.

The photo was very blurry.

The details of the object were completely indiscernible.

But that silhouette was definitely not a plane, nor a bird.

It... really looked like a kite.

“This...” Harrison's Adam's apple bobbed. “What on earth is this thing?”

“I don't know!” Thompson said excitedly. “But I'm certain it's a mysterious power from the East that we've never seen before! It's Chinese sorcery!”

Harrison fell silent.

He stared at the photo for a full five minutes.

As a veteran media professional, his intuition told him that behind this photo lay an earth-shattering story.

Whatever it was, it was enough to grab everyone's attention.

He abruptly stubbed out his cigar.

“Write,” he said to Thompson, enunciating every word. “Write down everything you saw. Use the most sensational headline and the most exaggerated words!”

“I want this news to appear on every breakfast table in Shanghai tomorrow morning!”

...The next day.

A report titled 'Chinese Sorcery at the Sihang Warehouse,' accompanied by that blurry photo, appeared as the front-page headline of The Times.

The entire Shanghai International Settlement was in an uproar.

In a cafe on The Bund.

Several well-dressed British businessmen were drinking coffee while passing the newspaper around.

“Oh, God, look at this. The Chinese using kites to fight? Has Arthur Thompson gone mad?”

“I suspect he mistook the fake booze he drank last night for ink.”

“Perhaps we should give the Japanese a heads-up to watch out for kites in the sky, hahaha!”

Laughter echoed throughout the cafe.

The vast majority of people treated the report as a ridiculous battlefield rumor.

However, in an inconspicuous German-style tavern on the other side of the Settlement.

The atmosphere was entirely different.

In a dim corner.

Two men sat in silence, with that copy of The Times spread out on the table before them.

One was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, wearing a meticulous suit, his long fingers tapping rhythmically on the tabletop.

The other was burly with a full beard, his eyes sharp like a hawk's, carrying the aura of a soldier.

“What do you think? Hans.” The blonde man spoke first, his English carrying an elegant London accent.

“The photo is real.” The man called Hans had a deep voice, like a cello. “But it's definitely not sorcery.”

“Oh?”

“Look at this flight posture.” Hans pointed to the black silhouette in the photo. “It's almost stationary in the air, which doesn't fit any aerodynamic principles. Unless... it has its own power system.”

“And this.” He pointed to the few blurry bursts of flame below. “The impact points are very concentrated, falling almost vertically. This indicates that the delivery vehicle possesses extremely high hovering precision.”

The blonde man nodded, took a pen from his pocket, and scribbled a few rough formulas in the margin of the newspaper.

“A kite that can fly autonomously, hover precisely, and carry multiple bombs?” He muttered to himself, then shook his head, finding it ridiculous. “Sounds like science fiction.”

“But it happened.” Hans picked up his glass, took a sip of dark beer, and his gaze became incredibly solemn. “Whatever it is, it means that inside the Sihang Warehouse, there exists a technology completely unknown to us, one that surpasses this era.”

“Or rather,” he paused, enunciating each word, “a person.”

The blonde man fell silent.

He looked at the ridiculous 'Chinese Sorcery' headline in the newspaper, then at the blurry yet eerily informative photo.

He knew that an invisible intelligence war revolving around the 'Secret of the Sihang Warehouse' had quietly begun.

[They've got something, these spies are actually quite professional.]

[They've started analyzing! They've started analyzing! Let's see what kind of nonsense they can come up with.]

[Reporting to the organization, discovered two nobodies researching our black tech.]

[Master Xi: Thanks for the invite. I'm at the warehouse, just finished flying a kite. Actually, those weren't bombs, they were firecrackers I threw down.]

Hans set down his glass and stood up.

“I need to send this intelligence back to Berlin immediately.” He looked at his companion, his expression more serious than ever before. “You'd better notify London as well.”

“Tell them that this war in the Far East might be... much more interesting than we imagined.”