40: Chapter 40 An Invitation Letter from the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Jiang Feng did not look back, nor did he listen to what was about to happen on the other end of the phone.

When the system reward arrived, the constant background noise in his head vanished, and the world became quiet.

Jiang Feng opened the car door and sat inside; the leather seats insulated him from the commotion outside.

Lao Chen started the car, and the black lexus lm merged smoothly into traffic, leaving that place of trouble behind.

… One week later.

Longhu Mountain Villa, the backyard lawn of Guanhu Residence.

"Hah!"

Lao Chen's voice was steady, his bronze muscles taut.

He shifted his footwork, his arm following through with a pull.

Jiang Feng only felt a great force coming from his arm, followed by a dizzying spin.

Thud.

With a dull sound, he was thrown onto the lawn, taking quite a fall.

"Damn…" He lay on the ground, sprawled out in a "big" shape, unable to move for a long time, his whole body aching.

Lao Chen withdrew his stance and stood to the side, his expression unchanged.

"Boss, your core strength is too weak, and your base is unstable."

Jiang Feng lifted his head from the grass and spat out a blade of grass.

"If I had core strength, would I still need you to teach me?" He rubbed his waist, wincing in pain.

Ever since the last mission ended, his physical condition had improved day by day.

The dull pain that had lingered in his brain disappeared, and the nausea and photophobia caused by chemotherapy had also diminished significantly.

Once a person feels energetic, they find it hard to sit still.

Watching Lao Chen practice martial arts in the yard every morning with such vigor, Jiang Feng became interested.

He didn't need to become a master, but at least he could strengthen his body so he could run a couple of steps faster in the future.

As it turned out, after practicing for a week, he hadn't even touched the corner of Lao Chen's clothes; he was just being thrown onto the lawn every day.

"This shouldn't be the life a rich person lives." Jiang Feng groaned while lying on the ground.

"Aren't rich people supposed to lie on the sofa, with a cola in the left hand, snacks in the right, watching an eighty-inch big screen?"

"Boss, that is a sign of kidney deficiency." Lao Chen replied with a straight face.

"…"

Jiang Feng stopped talking to him.

He rolled over and lay on his stomach on the grass.

The incident at the pet hospital last time had brought him unexpected benefits.

The rumor that "the tough-fated boss wants to dig a hole in a haunted house to bury bad luck," fueled by the Bald Brother and parrot incident, had already spread throughout the circles of the wealthy.

Now, all the residents of Longhu Mountain Villa knew that a ruthless person with a strange temper and brilliant methods lived in Villa No. 8.

From then on, no internet celebrities or paparazzi dared to come to his door to block him.

A few who tried to climb the wall all left their live-streaming equipment behind under Lao Chen's hands.

Jiang Feng enjoyed this hard-won peace.

Money was increasing, and his body was getting better.

Sometimes he would wonder, besides extending his life, what else could he do while alive?

Just as he was lying on the grass in a daze, the sound of an engine approached from afar and stopped outside the villa's courtyard gate.

Lao Chen's ears twitched, his muscles tensed, and his whole body entered a state of alert.

Jiang Feng also heard the sound; he propped himself up and looked toward the gate.

It wasn't a sports car or a business van.

It was a black Hongqi sedan; the car model was ordinary, but the license plate on the front was not something ordinary people could see.

The car door opened.

An old man stepped out.

He was wearing a crisp gray Zhongshan suit, his hair was gray, combed meticulously, and he wore a pair of old-fashioned black-rimmed glasses, carrying a kraft paper file bag in his hand.

After getting out of the car, the old man did not immediately ring the doorbell; he just stood by the car, looking at Jiang Feng and Lao Chen in the courtyard through the carved iron gate.

His demeanor was gentle, with no sense of oppression, but Lao Chen was highly vigilant.

Lao Chen stepped forward, blocking in front of Jiang Feng, his center of gravity sinking.

Jiang Feng patted the grass clippings off his body and climbed up from the ground.

"Lao Chen, open the gate."

Lao Chen hesitated a bit but still carried out the order.

The iron gate slowly opened.

The old man stepped inside; he nodded politely to Lao Chen and then looked at Jiang Feng.

"Mr. Jiang Feng, is that correct?" The old man's voice was very elegant, carrying a scholarly air.

Jiang Feng didn't speak, just looked him up and down.

"Please excuse my presumptuous visit." The old man smiled.

"My surname is Qian, and my given name is Li. I currently serve as a consultant for a special research group at the Huake Institute."

Huake Institute?

Jiang Feng's eyebrows moved.

The weight of these three words was much heavier than any group or media company.

"Do you have business with me?" Jiang Feng pointed toward the living room.

"Let's go inside and talk."

In the living room.

Jiang Feng threw himself into that huge sofa, took a can of ice-cold cola from the mini-fridge nearby, pulled the tab with a "pop," and took a big gulp.

Qian Li was led by Lao Chen to sit on the single sofa opposite.

Lao Chen did not leave but stood straight beside Jiang Feng's sofa, staring closely at the old man opposite.

"Consultant Qian, right?" Jiang Feng shook the cola can in his hand, his tone lazy.

"What would you like to drink? Water or tea? Although my house only has cola."

Qian Li waved his hand: "No need to bother, Mr. Jiang."

He placed the kraft paper file bag in his hand on the coffee table in front of him, not rushing to open it.

"Mr. Jiang, we have been watching you for a long time."

The first sentence went straight to the point.

"From the first divination at the entrance of the City Civil Affairs Bureau to the tarot cards downstairs at the Criminal Investigation Brigade." Qian Li's speaking speed was not fast, as if he were narrating an ordinary matter.

"From the bone reading at the kindergarten entrance to that live stream downstairs at Starlight Building."

"The accuracy of the results of every one of your predictions exceeds the scope of explanation of conventional logic and probability theory."

Jiang Feng's cola-drinking action paused.

He set the cola can aside, shrugged his hands, still wearing an indifferent expression.

"That was just me guessing blindly, just good luck."

He began his usual performance.

"You also know that I am just a dying patient, my brain doesn't work very well, and sometimes I ramble. Everyone gives me face and supports me, just treating it as entertainment."

"I am just an ordinary citizen, of no use to the country." He distanced himself completely.

Qian Li listened quietly, the smile on his face unchanged.

He waited for Jiang Feng to finish before speaking.

"Is that so?"

He reached out and pushed that kraft paper file bag toward Jiang Feng.

"We know about your illness." Qian Li's gaze fell on Jiang Feng's face.

"Glioblastoma stage four, undifferentiated. A month ago, the attending physician at Jinghai City Tumor Hospital judged that your expected survival time would not exceed ninety days."

Jiang Feng's pupils constricted slightly.

"However." Qian Li's fingers tapped lightly on that file bag.

"This is the latest medical report from three days ago that we obtained through some special channels." He paused, speaking word by word.

"The report shows that the tumor in your brain has not only not continued to worsen but has instead shown signs of calcification, and its volume has shrunk by twenty-three percent. The activity of the cancer cells is continuously decreasing at a speed that cannot be explained by existing medical theories."

Qian Li looked at Jiang Feng, the smile on his face unchanged.

"Mr. Jiang."

"You are not of no use to the country."

"You yourself are the very non-natural phenomenon we are most interested in."

This sentence made the lazy expression on Jiang Feng's face freeze.

For the first time, his cards had been revealed to someone in terms of information.

The living room fell into silence, with only the faint hum of the refrigerator compressor.

Jiang Feng slowly straightened his body from the sofa.

He reached out and took the file bag, his movements very slow.

The bag was not sealed.

He pulled out a stack of documents from inside.

The first page was a printout of a CT scan, with red arrows marking the location of the tumor in his brain.

Below it was a series of data and analyses he couldn't understand but was incomparably familiar with.

And on the last page of the report, in the conclusion column, a summary was printed in bold Song typeface.

【The reverse development trend of this case has surpassed existing medical knowledge; it is recommended to be used as a special research sample and reported to the National Biological Science Center.】

Below it was a bright red seal he had never seen before, bearing the national emblem.

Jiang Feng put the report back on the coffee table and looked down at his hands.

"What do you want?" Jiang Feng's voice was a bit dry.

"Mr. Jiang, please don't misunderstand." Qian Li waved his hand.

"We have no malice toward your body. On the contrary, we hope you can live on healthily."

"Coming to see you today is not to force you to do anything, but to represent the country and formally issue an invitation to you." Qian Li's expression became serious.

"We hope you can assist us in a special research project in the capacity of a special consultant."

"What research?" Jiang Feng asked.

"About some… things we cannot understand." Qian Li's answer was very mysterious.

He paused for a few seconds, as if organizing his language.

"Half a month ago, a batch of bamboo slips from the pre-Qin period was unearthed at an archaeological excavation site."

"The material of that batch of bamboo slips is special, and the characters on them are neither oracle bone script nor bronze script; they do not belong to any known ancient writing system. We have mobilized the country's top paleographers and deciphering experts, but they have been unable to interpret a single character."

"But that is not the most critical part." Qian Li's face sank.

"All the archaeological team members and researchers who directly touched that batch of bamboo slips successively developed varying degrees of mental abnormalities within the following week."

"The milder ones developed auditory and visual hallucinations. The more severe ones fell into long periods of stupor or spoke some nonsense that no one could understand."

"Currently, three core researchers have already been sent to a mental rehabilitation center, but no medication has any effect on them."

Auditory hallucinations? Mental abnormalities?

This scene was very similar to the students at the library of Jinghai University and the situation with Zhao Xiaoya.

"We suspect." Qian Li's voice was very low.

"What is recorded on that batch of bamboo slips may not be ordinary information."

"It may be a kind of… mental virus that transcends our existing cognitive system. A kind of information pollution that can directly infect and even rewrite human brain cognitive patterns through vision."

Mental virus. Information pollution.

"We have also investigated the incident at the library of Jinghai University." Qian Li added.

"Old Mrs. Shen asked you to go and take a look, right? We believe that may be a low-intensity, similar type of phenomenon."

Jiang Feng neither admitted nor denied it.

"You are looking for me, what do you want me to do?" Jiang Feng asked the most critical question.

"Let me go and decipher those bamboo slips?"

"No." Qian Li shook his head.

"We don't need you to decipher them."

"We just want to invite you to take a look at those bamboo slips on-site from your perspective."

Qian Li's gaze carried a sense of inquiry.

"We want to know, when we are faced with those completely incomprehensible symbols and are at our wit's end."

"What can you read from them?"

This was their true purpose.

They could not understand Jiang Feng's ability, but they had witnessed the results of this ability.

Now, they wanted to use this ability as a tool to explore another unknown field.

"What good does this do for you?" Jiang Feng asked very directly.

His starting point for doing everything was to survive.

"First, safety." Qian Li raised a finger.

"Mr. Jiang, you are very famous now. People targeting you are not just us."

"Your existence itself is a risk. But if you accept our invitation, your safety will be handled by the country's highest level."

"Second, resources." Qian Li raised another finger.

"We admit that we cannot explain the changes in your body. However, we possess this country's top medical team and biological laboratories that are not open to the public."

"Perhaps they can bring you a surprise from another angle. For example, a true cure plan."

Cure.

Jiang Feng's breathing paused for a moment.

What the system gave was life extension, a constantly extending countdown.

But what the country promised was the possibility of completely removing this ticking time bomb.

Jiang Feng fell silent.

Qian Li saw his hesitation and took out the last thing from the file bag.

It was a beautifully crafted invitation letter.

The white hard cover had a solemn national emblem printed on it with hot stamping technology.

He placed the invitation on the coffee table and pushed it in front of Jiang Feng.

Then, he stood up and straightened his Zhongshan suit.

"Mr. Jiang, we are not in a hurry." Qian Li smiled.

"The invitation is valid permanently. You can take your time to consider it."

"The country's door is always open for you."