Days passed, and on this morning, Hiro opened his eyes with a jubilant expression.
Finally, his Daoist character broke through the Nascent Soul realm to the Origin Soul realm.
He failed the tribulation three times, delaying his advancement by three in-game days!
His current CB was at 4,399,230/92,000,000 and his realm was at the first level of the Origin Soul realm.
If he couldn't get more gems or complete sect missions to upgrade the spirit array in the future, it would take half a month at the very least for the next minor breakthrough.
To Hiro, this was intolerable. However, he couldn't sacrifice his Legend of Babylon gaming time since his character in that game determined his future prospects in real life.
Eventually, Hiro determined that his only choice was to complete the high-priority mission as soon as possible, even if it meant going against the established order and facing Broski head-on.
The only issue was that Broski's influence had long since penetrated the school and proliferated the syndicate community of the city.
After thinking about it, Hiro decided to re-establish contact with Natali, and hopefully, he could use her as a breaking point to dip his feet into the waters of the syndicate community.
No one said that he needed to join the syndicates through the school delinquent's channels; he had both the power and wealth to join the circle directly.
With that in mind, Hiro's eyes glinted with determination. To Hiro, he had no sense of belonging to this world or its humanity; hence he didn't think that the syndicates were evil, just as he didn't think that the state was righteous.
In a world of mysticism like this one, rules were just the blabbering of tens of millions of ordinary mouths.
After I've finished my current mission with Teacher Aiya, I'll go find Natali. Hiro thought to himself. It would be better if I could trigger a mission with her. I can't believe I spent such a long time on a mission of easy difficulty, but it can't be helped; I had to invest all my energy into reaching the Tier-6 standards of this world.
Hiro opened his phone to check the most recent update from Jodi's side. Presumably, they found the person who was a common contact point between the suspected teachers.
All of them would report to this person at one point in time during the week, thus successfully keeping an eye on Teacher Aiya.
However; this person was always accompanied by a powerful bodyguard, and the delinquents didn't dare get close to listen in on the conversation.
However, it doesn't matter.
All of this was pointless.
After thinking for a moment, he sent all of this information to Teacher Aiya; he included all the information gathered ever since he collected the profiles of the eight teachers.
He also included the picture of the man who was instructing the teachers from behind the scenes, as he believed that Teacher Aiya should know his identity.
At the end of the message, he simply asked if she needed help.
It was a Saturday today, and there was no school. According to the intelligence reports, Teacher Aiya should be staying home with her roommate.
Now that the person pulling the strings was exposed, she shouldn't be as scared as she used to be; as nothing was more scary than the unknown.
Hiro was about to go have his morning cold shower when he received a phone call from Teacher Aiya.
He hadn't expected her to respond so quickly, let alone call him so early in the morning.
After he answered the phone, he had yet to say anything when he heard her say that she wanted him to come talk to her at home.
After thinking about it for a moment, Hiro agreed. Anyway, there was no point in acting secretly now that they had discovered the true culprit.
Hiro planned to deal with him once and for all later, but he hadn't expected that he'd also receive a notification from the system.
[Notice: You've completed the interpersonal mission.
Mission Difficulty: Normal.
Mission: Investigate the party or parties involved in stalking Teacher Aiya and bring peace of mind to the anxious woman.
Reward: 5 gems.
…
Hiro paused. That's right; my mission was limited to investigating the people monitoring Teacher Aiya, not dealing with them.
However, Hiro hesitated a little. I already agreed to meet up with her, does this mean I'll be doing free labor from this point onwards? Whatever, I'll do a good deed this one time.
Hiro sighed. In the future, he needed to pay more attention to the contents of his missions lest he went overboard.
Moreover, the normal difficulty mission rewarded him with 5 gems, then what about easy and hard? Was there another difficulty level above hard as well?
Hiro had many questions, but this time, the system didn't answer him. It seemed that he needed to discover the answers by actively completing the missions.
"Ah, the life of a protagonist is so difficult."
Hiro shook his head again and went to have his cold shower and breakfast, and then he returned to his study.
Arabella left yesterday to liaison with the five companies and the COC. As the Handler had anticipated, the five companies terminated the contract.
At the moment, the VR helmet technology has become a mainstream industry.
Even if the quality of the reverse-engineered VR helmet was lower than the S-gear technology, the latter had no more stock in the market.
Hiro didn't have any factories or R&D facilities to mass produce the S-gear, making them a limited edition commodity; somewhat of a collectible valuable.
Hiro gave Arabella a simple mission; which was to acquire an office building that was fully under Hiro's company.
After he summoned Arabella successfully, Hiro understood that if he wanted to extract the most value out of the system, he needed to have complete ownership of everything he was invested in.
He didn't care how lavish the building was, he only needed it to belong to him 100%.
With that criterion in mind, Arabella found a building with seventeen floors in a common commercial district, and it wasn't a prime location.
Since he lost his {Business Acumen III} skill, Hiro didn't really know how to set the direction of the company.
For now, he asked Arabella to invest in research institutes that are developing VR technology, even if she had to acquire these companies by using the S-gear technology's patent as an incentive. Furthermore, she needed to acquire production factories under the company's name; Hiro didn't want his company's capital chain to be at the mercy of an external source.
In the long term, they would monitor the institutions and scout for eager talents who are pursuing knowledge and creativity.
Hiro was certain that when the time came and he dangled the bait of the VR capsule technology, these scientists would jump ship and join his R&D team without hesitation.
He wasn't worried about the patents since he had already applied for the core technology of both the capsule and cabinet.
As for the research team, it was just a formality; a smoke screen.
Hiro smiled in his study. Since they so desired to sever ties with him, he didn't care. In the future, the %5 quarterly divadance from Nebula Electronics would be more than sufficient to start manufacturing.
Hiro had time, he could wait.
As his thoughts reached this point, he opened his phone to check the next agenda on his schedule—Hiro opened the PARA app.
Then, he checked the threads in his city's region. As expected, he saw many threads requesting for Babylon by name, and the rewards varied.
Although Hiro knew that some of these were advertised by the Odin family, there was a chance that most of them were from the family's enemies.
They were most likely hoping for revenge.
Are they stupid? Hiro shook his head as he started going through the threads one by one, only responding to those that provided him with the option to chat with the thread's owner.
[Babylon]: ???
[X Smith]: I want to thank you properly for saving my wife and daughter the other day, can we meet?
[Babylon]: Didn't your wife give you my contact information?
[X Smith]: She lost it.
[Babylon]: No she didn't; she's sending me nudes everyday. It's annoying.
[X Smith]: You're dead.
Then, the thread was closed.
Hiro rolled his eyes, then he proceeded to open one thread at a time. Most of them so far were nonsense, while others were curious about who dared to interfere in the Odin'a business.
It seemed like the conflict of that day was an open secret at the moment.
Soon, Hiro opened another thread.
[Babylon]: ???
[???] : Finally, you answered me!
[Babylon]: Are you also here to thank me about saving your imaginary wife and daughter?
[???]: Actually, I'm the daughter that was saved by you… On that day, you were hidden in the cold fog, and we could only see your outline under the crescent moon. We didn't tell anyone what we saw that day, but I don't know how to prove my identity to you…
Hiro went silent for a moment.
Proof? How can something like that be proven so easily? Bella and her mother weren't the only two at the scene at that time.
This is such a headache…