40 4.2 (1/2)

Having finished dinner, Chen Yu separated from Murong Wen and briskly returned to his dorm room, then slipped into the network login pod.

Before connecting to the data server, however, he pulled out the world's plot again. He hadn't fully concentrated on it due to the sparring session, but now he'd take some time to put together what had happened.

The story mostly rushed through the protagonist's school years, brushing on some confrontations with snobbish students and such, until it reached the fateful quarterly assessment trial. For this event, the plot thoroughly described Murong Wen's disappointment and sadness at his best friend's viciousness, along with the painful process of his rehabilitation.

But how could such misfortune befall the son of heaven without any reward?

At the mention of how the esteemed Hou family had adopted Murong Wen out of pity and approval for his perseverance, Chen Yu chuckled. En, a commoner duckling transforming into a noble swan, this was probably the point at which the protagonist halo kicked in.

The halo continued to shine, within a few years, Murong Wen was titled a sergeant for exceptional service in the face of danger.

This 'exceptional' performance was his valiant efforts in protecting Captain Hou Yi's life during an enemy attack on the Hou Jia residence. Unfortunately, the captain was forever left in a comatose state, but First Lieutenant Murong Wen's rescue attempt, which resulted in his suffering critical injuries, impressed the military so much that he was given Hou Yi's position as captain.

Thus, without Hou Yi to steal the protagonist's spotlight, following this promotion, Murong Wen continued to rise steadily. Ultimately, he went down in Federation history books as the general with the highest battle success rate.

Humming, Chen Yu smiled. Hou Yi, what an elite, really the pride of cannon fodder everywhere ah. Well, he could guess the original sequence of events, now to see if he was right.

From the data he obtained both legally and illegally on the network, Chen Yu, in passing, gained a basic understanding of the mission world's background.

Jin Yongguang was a loyal citizen of the United Federation of Taiyi Galaxy, one of the strongest powers in this quadrant of the universe. Its greatest adversary was the Shangdi Empire, which, as its name implied, was governed by a royal family. The two groups were almost evenly matched despite the Empire's larger population, because Imperial regulations precluded peasants from becoming mecha operators. Thanks to the enemy's restriction on social mobility, the Federation had maintained a slight advantage over the last decade.

Since he generally wasn't much intrigued by war, Chen Yu didn't delve further, instead he turned toward the information he'd gathered on Jin family.

As expected, Jin Yongguang's parents were weak-willed but ambitious people. After having been pressured by the elders to maintain the prestige of Jin Jia, there were indications that his father, Jin Zhong, had succumbed to temptation and begun cooperating with Imperial spies. By exchanging information with the Empire, Jin Jia didn't decline, but once their eldest son insisted on entering the military, Jin Zhong became worried that he would interfere. Therefore, he consistently tried to persuade Jin Yongguang to quit the academy or, even better, to contribute by divulging some information about rising military stars, all to no avail.

Jin Zhong's wife was even more of a coward than her husband, while she was not unaware of these matters, she chose to avoid thinking about them as much as she could, until that son of theirs caused too much trouble to ignore.

That Jin Jia had ties with the Empire, combined with Jin Yongguang's aboveboard personality, made it obvious what these parents must have done.

Right about the time Chen Yu had started this mission, when Jin Yongguang was on the cusp of graduating and formally joining the military, his parents would have given up on persuading him. So, in the plot, Jin Zhong had contacted that commoner friend of Jin Yongguang's, Murong Wen, to stage a scene during the quarterly assessments, leading to everything that took place afterwards. Although Jin Zhong and his wife didn't completely grasp the culture of those military people, anyone could predict that cold-bloodedly harming a peer in such a public arena would destroy their son's reputation.

In the end, their scheme had worked even better than they'd hoped. Not only had Jin Yongguang's image been soiled, allowing them to reasonably designate their obedient younger son as heir, but also, his body had been crippled, thereby uprooting a future threat to the Empire.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Chen Yu didn't automatically conclude that Murong Wen had conspired with Jin Zhong, or at least, he left a possibility that he hadn't done so entirely on his own. This was due not to his saintly trust in the protagonist, but instead due to the variable of Hou Yi.

The Hou household wasn't a simple one, many of its accomplishments had been attained in the dark, hunting down and eliminating traitors. Considering its capabilities, Hou Jia had likely been tracking Jin family's movements, so the instructions from Jin Zhong to Murong Wen would definitely have been noticed.

Probably, the upper ranks of the military had seen this as a chance to draw out the spies inside their government.

For that purpose, Hou Yi would have been instructed to ensure that Murong Wen seemed, to everyone involved, to have cooperated in framing Jin Yongguang, solidifying his link to the treasonous Jin Jia. Then, by adopting Murong Wen, the Hou family would be able to seize an inside source and monitor the traitors' communications.

Of course, for the sake of this plan, the military would have sacrificed Jin Yongguang, lamenting the loss of a talented seed while consoling themselves that such was the nature of collateral damage.

Chen Yu knew that, in that case, whether or not Murong Wen chose to be pummeled by Jin Yongguang, Hou Yi would have found a way to make it happen.

As for the Empire's strike against Hou Jia, it was clearly suspicious, almost certain to have been orchestrated by the protagonist. Perhaps, Murong Wen, whose senses were honed from having to tiptoe around the academy's young masters throughout his youth, had realized that the so-called adoption was merely an imprisonment and retaliated, but that wasn't really something Chen Yu cared to investigate.

Rather, Chen Yu frowned, he needed to think about whom to target.