Chapter 234: Full Cooperation, Full Threat (5k)

Wen Yan pushed a little cart and left happily, while everyone in the Yu State Scorching Sun Department looked at him with a hint of oddness in their eyes.

Aside from a few daily organizers, many of the staff working at the warehouse are actually out there doing surveillance.

Whether every item with a number is still around, whether its position shifted, whether the weight has changed, if there’s any fluctuation in energy—everything is monitored in real time, all in secret.

Don’t be fooled by how ordinary the shelves inside look; several surveillance routes are running concurrently behind the scenes, and they work together too.

The things Wen Yan picked, except for that shelf—which was truly unexpected—the other two were at least familiar to most of the people here.

There are plenty of things inside, but honestly most of them are useless junk or just a waste of space.

For example, there’s a flathead screwdriver, supposedly capable of turning any slotted screw as long as it fits, even if it’s rusted to hell—but in reality, if it’s too big or too small and can’t catch, it’s useless.

And honestly, any 2-yuan screwdriver from the hardware store can basically do the same thing under normal circumstances.

That stone sculpture Wen Yan took away had been lying there for ages—rumored to silence a room, but in reality, it’s the sculpture itself that makes noise. The only thing you hear is the sculpture, which technically means everything else is silenced, but how often do you actually need that?

At least in Divine Land, it’s not much help. The one and only time it was used was during some minor maritime skirmish, where the sculpture’s noise drowned out a sea demon’s song.

But the sound it makes... is so bad you can barely hold it together.

As for the oil lamp, a tomb-robbing gang dug it up in Guanzhong County, and after a slip-up over there, one of the robbers escaped, ran all the way to Nanwu County, and Nanwu’s Scorching Sun Department picked up their leftovers.

The other relics and such were all returned, but the oil lamp was originally held as evidence. Later, when Guanzhong County’s Scorching Sun Department people came to have a look, they just scowled and left, clearly not planning to take it back.

Apparently, those Everbright Lamps are standard in the tombs of big shots over in Guanzhong County. Not rare there at all.

The best ones, the thousand-year Everbright Lamps, three of them were even found in the mega "action figure" excavation area.

Only the country bumpkins from Nanwu County, never having seen anything, would scheme over a measly three-thousand-year-old lamp.

The folks in the Nanwu County Scorching Sun Department were so pissed that they shoved the lamp into the warehouse and wrote down its history, as if to say, "If even a small-time tomb robber could nab something and escape to Nanwu County, this lamp is the evidence."

Today, Wen Yan dug up the thing and took it away.

Adding in that last, totally ridiculous shelf—completely ordinary, not even numbered.

People started to wonder: Did Wen Yan only manage to pick two, then for the last one, just threw a fit of impulse and dragged off a generic warehouse shelf to use back home for storage?

The people monitoring all parameters went and checked again during routine inspections, still finding it pretty unbelievable. They double-checked if only three things had been taken.

And yup, one of them really did come from the regular shelf.

So, Wen Yan left, grinning, while everyone else shot him strange looks.

He couldn’t really explain it, honestly—he probably didn’t even know as much about these three things as the warehouse staff did.

He just figured, since he had no clue which to pick, he’d go for the three that, after several rounds of filtering, seemed the most valuable and weren’t dangerous.

Wen Yan was gone, but Cai Qidong, who’d been following behind, still looked a bit green around the gills.

He’d just been watching Liu Qiying’s interrogation, but honestly, they weren’t getting anything out of her.

After Liu Qiying was brought back, immediately a swarm of people, through all sorts of channels, started trying to get information from the Nanwu County Scorching Sun Department—some obvious, some sneaky.

And not just people from Nanwu County—almost half were from other commanderies too.

There was even a minister from a branch of another commandery’s Scorching Sun Department who called Cai Qidong directly to ask what the hell was going on.

The reason they gave couldn’t really be argued with either.

Liu Qiying was supposed to head over there for a meeting tomorrow to discuss cooperation. She was already deep into negotiations for a major project. If the project landed, it’d create jobs for 100,000 people over the next few years. Factor in the industrial cluster it would form, and it wouldn’t be a stretch for the impact to multiply several times over.

So, of course people wanted to know if Nanwu County didn’t want Changfeng Group to make such a big investment there?

"Come on, Nanwu County, you’re too much—hogging the whole roast for yourselves and not letting others even lick the crumbs?"

Eventually, even Cai Qidong got a headache and just bluntly said Liu Qiying had summoned a devil in the city and got caught red-handed—that finally shut them up.

The interrogation on their side was even more frustrating: Liu Qiying was way too cooperative.

She laid everything out in the open—said she wanted to recover her husband’s soul, but it was taken by a newly awakened dragon god upstream of the West River. She panicked and bought some fresh pig heads, just to see if she could summon a devil for more info.

Surprisingly, it worked—she really only asked those few questions.

She confirmed her husband’s soul hadn’t dissipated. That’s all.

She wanted to ask more, but the little demon was too greedy—she didn’t have enough offerings.

So, she got caught.

The whole story was right there, crystal clear. She was completely cooperative.

But the more cooperative she was, the bigger the headache for the Scorching Sun Department.