To Live Again, For the First Time!

In the end, half of the investigation was for not.

The next evening, after a night of overtime from the members of groups 9 and 10, who were likely not going to be sleeping anyhow, they came out with some preliminary judgments.

"It seems that it is very likely that Mr. Xander and Mr. Levi truly boarded that plane on first class, but there were quite a number of vacant seats in first class, business class, and economy class," Liam read off the report in his hands.

That meant that it wouldn't be too hard to mask things thoroughly.

"Group 9 has confirmed that they were unable to find anything wrong with the recording feed and the two men went there alone with no other signs of company. The seats next to theirs were also empty," there was good news interlaced with bad news.

They still had no clue as to why Xander and Levi had made a stop at White City.

"Group 10 is currently headed to the airport to do their own in-depth investigations; Group 9 has already informed us that the few flight attendants that were taking care of the business class on that flight are already somewhere in M Continent. This might take a while."

Liam wasn't too worried about the flight attendants' lips as they were usually quite loose, especially if they were compensated well and believed they were helping in some kind of investigation, which they were, just not the kind they were expecting.

The only problem was the timing.

"Those mercenaries really screwed us over, with the amount of time that has already passed since that flight and with the number of flights those same attendants have gone between then and now, we would be lucky to find anything of importance."

Liam felt like this was a fool's errand and quite a waste of money.

But before he could recommend his Boss not to waste the resources on this matter, Elijah, who was fiddling with a pen in his hand, finally spoke.

"I think it's quite the opposite," he said rather casually.

Liam had question marks written on his face.

"Considering the hackers on their side… well, I don't know if I want to say their hackers are too competent or if ours are too incompetent, but if they want us to believe something by just meddling with the surveillance tape, all we can really do is get fooled," Elijah said straightforwardly, uncaring of all the feelings he had just hurt.

From his perspective, he was already quite certain it was because of their incompetence, which was also partially his own fault.

And Elijah wasn't wrong.

Emilin had the tendency to always scramble her information. Of course, she didn't travel without a trace as that would be way too suspicious, but her movements were just too clean and normal to be noticeable by a passer-by or even by someone who was trying to investigate her.

She had already cleanly cleaned off all traces of her going to the airport on that day, and made it look like she had taken another mode of transport the day prior.

No one, be it those who had met her in White city or the ones that met her in Opaque city would be able to notice any faults between the timings, even though it was all faked.

In the end, she would reach the location that she was going to at the same time, just with a different method that made it harder for people to track down her information.

"Our best chance against an opponent that we can't perceive through so many technological eyes is to use the human eye, and the human brain," Elijah said assertively, not wanting to leave any loopholes on this investigation as he proceeded with the next.

In the end, Liam could only nod and agree.

That was indeed the case with this situation.

Seeing his assistant's reaction and noting that that part of the report was done, Elijah signaled him to proceed with the next part, but Liam was hesitant.

"Boss, it's about the company…"

His voice trailed off just like that, and Elijah didn't like it.

It was a sign that what Liam was about to say was something that he wouldn't like to hear.

"They want you to make more appearances to raise the stock prices and the confidence of the employees, the board of directors, and the public."

Elijah's eyebrows scrunched up.

"Why do you sound like you are trying to convince me as well? And shouldn't such problems be stopped at Tai?"

Elijah questioned Liam's loyalty.

Tai was one of Elijah's direct subordinates who took care of his company matters as a front, but everyone at their company knew that there was a mysterious boss above him who didn't want to show himself but also made most of the more important decisions.

But unlike his "organization" where most people knew of him, at Kong Consortium no one other than Tai, knew who he was.

"Those old fogies have finally done it."

Elijah mused as they used such fancy words to get him to show himself.

"Well, surely they would be worried considering that don't even know who is the one with 70% of the shares in the company that is making most of their riches."

Elijah agreed, but that was also not his problem.

He could easily see how many more cons there were to reveal his identity, in fact, they were really all results that he didn't like.

"Why hasn't Tai stopped the requests before they reached me?"

That was the part Elijah found most unacceptable.

"Well, boss…"

Liam hesitated to sell out his comrade to their boss, but with one glare, he had to give in.

"His justification was that you kept saying that you would not attend such events because you were still too young and so he had to deal with all that, but now you're already of age," Liam knew that this was a terrible excuse and he followed to mumble something inaudible to Elijah, who was at least a good 2 meters away.

"Plus, he seems sick and tired of making excuses for you, like convincing the whole board that you are too old and traditional to attend." 

Elijah stared at Liam intently for a moment before giving the response that Liam both expected and somewhat hoped for.

"Reject it," he said coldly.

Though Liam felt quite bad for Tai, his comrade, he didn't feel bad enough that he would give himself more work just to match the man's tastes.

If Elijah really accepted, there would be another pile of letters he would have to go through, letters that would usually be used to fuel his fireplace.

Now, all he could do was to light a candle for Tai while he was at it.

After all, in the upper society of the Hé Continent, where Tai mingled due to his job as the "deputy CEO" of the Kong Consortium, one of the top 10 companies in the whole continent, he was already known as the "Excuser" by everyone who knew him.

In other words, the whole upper society.

At first, he was well known for making all kinds of excuses as to why their CEO wouldn't be able to make the attendance of any of the large annual parties, and then, it only went downhill from there.

The excuses were only getting worse and worse to the point of them being funny.

Some of the more relaxed people would ask Tai for the reason why the CEO couldn't make it just to see what excuse would be made this time and then have a good laugh at it.

Meanwhile, those who rather cared for their reputation disdained the man as they found him too arrogant.

Of course, most people still humored Tai as they wouldn't want to get on his bad side.

It also didn't help that Tai's figure was oftentimes looming over the others as he was around 2 meters tall with a huge build.

No one wanted to retort or shout his ears off for fear that the man would pull theirs off in return.

It went to the point where Tai had once said that the man, their elusive CEO, was having diarrhea and those people could only twitch their eyes in silence as if they had bought the excuse and hope the man they had never met would get well soon to keep up the act.

Under Tai's words, Elijah had already married a good 5 times, had wives that had 10 pregnancies and 10 more miscarriages, recurring colds, fevers, and failing organs every time the festive seasons came around.

One couldn't help but wonder if the man was going to die the very next day along with the rest of his family.

As for the reason why Tai had never given up giving such excuses, well, every time he made one, in his heart, Tai always had the hope that his Boss would finally come back, take this stupid company away from him and let him join back officially to the organization.

He couldn't go as overboard as to actually affect the company's procedures, but Tai felt like if he showed how bad he was at this job, he could be removed from the post, but sadly, that never happened.

How he missed the times of being tortured physically rather than mentally.

Those were the good old days…

***

Meanwhile, in another place, Emilin didn't know that her years of always taking the right amount of precautions had finally paid off.

And she wasn't the only one.

Xander was also oblivious to the fact that someone was currently investigating him so thoroughly.