Chapter 30: The Deep Dive

A few minutes after sending the invitation, Jiang Ciqiu received Lin Xia’s reply.

[@Shenshang: Okay, let’s meet at the station entrance tomorrow at one in the afternoon!]

She naturally had no way of knowing that Lin Xia had been too happy to remember to reply until now. She only glanced at her phone, and after making her first smile since getting in the car, locked the screen again.

If you don’t want to cause trouble for others, don’t chat with the driver.

If you accidentally let slip something they shouldn’t know, not only would these ordinary people have to undergo memory erasure, but the salary and bonus of a magical girl would take a hit too.

In silence, Jiang Ciqiu watched the street scenes and night slip past outside the window, and before she knew it, her eyes had closed.

When she woke, the car had already stopped in the underground garage of the Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau. The passenger door faced the elevator that required her iris and fingerprint to unlock.

[Identity verified: Hongxia, clearance: IV]

Jiang Ciqiu could complete the entire routine from the elevator up to the top-floor ring corridor operations meeting room while letting her mind go blank. The traces left in her body by those eight years could not be erased even by the Bureau’s memory deletion surgery.

She reached out and pushed open the door to the meeting room’s highest security level. Cold air rushed out from inside and called the girl’s wandering mind back.

Quite a few people were already seated in the meeting room. There were her two good teammates, and some supervisors Jiang Ciqiu didn’t recognize but could tell at a glance held level four or even level five clearance.

The look Lan Ruobing threw her still carried the sting of impatience and disgust, but compared to last time, her emotions seemed to have been diluted by something.

Ilya beside her made no attempt to hide her worry. Her hands, clasped on the table, were clenched so tight her knuckles had gone white, and her blue eyes were panicked and scattered.

“Sorry for making you come to a meeting this late, Hongxia.” Tang Yuanding still sat in the main seat farthest from the door, hands clasped under his chin.

“Not at all. I’m the one who should apologize. Making so many people waste time waiting for me.”

Jiang Ciqiu put on a formulaic apologetic smile. With her hands at her sides, she bowed slightly in the standard Sakura City sumimasen pose.

The other two magical girls frowned slightly at their captain’s reaction, but Tang Yuanding nodded in satisfaction.

“Sit. You were always meant to be the star of this meeting. As long as the results are valuable enough, making everyone wait a few extra minutes is no big deal.”

Jiang Ciqiu smiled and nodded, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

She didn’t feel sorry at all. She only thought these old geezers who were wasting her rest time all deserved to be sent to the far north to plant potatoes.

But as captain, she still had to set some example for her teammates. It wouldn’t do if she lost her temper and taught them to be bad girls.

Not to mention these old geezers were still watching Lin Xia.

“According to the recording you sent back before going offline, beneath the gymnasium where the pupa-level disaster beast ‘Young Dragon’ appeared, you encountered two humanoid lifeforms?”

Jiang Ciqiu raised an eyebrow and thought for a few seconds, then nodded.

“One was the gray weirdo I ran into the night before last, the one that can absorb disaster beast source crystals. The other I’ve never seen in the database. I could only judge from voice and appearance that it was female.”

“Neither had the fluctuations of a disaster beast?”

The girl shook her head slightly, and the people in the meeting room immediately began to murmur.

Magical girls were extremely sensitive to the energy fluctuations of disaster beasts. If even Hongxia, the active fighter with the richest combat experience, said those two lifeforms weren’t disaster beasts, then the situation was serious.

“A weirdo? Or another trick from that library?”

“Maybe a probe by the separatists…”

Tang Yuanding raised his right hand, and the discussion in the room fell silent.

As the supervisor of Shanhai City’s Abnormal Affairs Management Bureau, the man’s gaze swept over everyone present. No one dared meet his eyes for more than three seconds.

“Everyone, don’t frighten the girls. Remember, they’re still middle school students.”

“Flash Gold, Meteor Blue, undergo a Class E memory wipe after the meeting. There are some things you young people aren’t ready to fully understand. As for Hongxia…”

The superior who had just arranged everyone’s roles turned his gaze to Jiang Ciqiu.

“Transform. To ensure the authenticity of the intelligence, you need to undergo a ‘Deep Dive’.”

At the words deep dive, Lan Ruobing’s eyes flew wide open, and a flash of panic crossed Ilya’s eyes.

‘Deep Dive’ was a support technology the Bureau used to safeguard magical girls’ mental health.

Support, supposedly. In reality, it let an AI connect to a magical girl’s consciousness and directly read and translate memory fragments to judge whether the girl could continue fighting as a transformer against disaster beasts.

The reason transformation was required during a Deep Dive was that the process damaged the brain. An ordinary human body would suffer direct brain death.

But physical pain was secondary. Most transformers were still teenage girls. Handing their memories over to a group of men in their forties and fifties for inspection and judgment was painful in itself.

Jiang Ciqiu also noticed her two teammates’ worry and gave them a confident smile that said they would win.

At the same time, the captain of Shanhai City’s magical girls was screaming inwardly, ‘Black Cat, Black Cat! Get out here!’

“Don’t worry, meow. To keep you from ratting me out, I’ll handle the crappy machine you humans made later, meow.”

A sly voice sounded by her ear, and Jiang Ciqiu let out a breath.

Since this self-proclaimed almighty lord had spoken, she probably didn’t need to worry about her reincarnator identity or Lin Xia’s strangeness being discovered by the Bureau.

“But there’s no free lunch, meow. How to deal with that old monster, and how to explain it to your teammates, that’s for you to worry about, meow~”

‘Other worries?’

Before Jiang Ciqiu could think deeply about the meaning of that, Tang Yuanding had already shot her an urging look.

Fine. Things would work out when the time came. She pushed back her chair and stood up. Under the gaze of a room full of men in their forties and fifties, she walked to an empty space on one side of the meeting room.

‘…Why did it feel so awkward?’

Clearly, thirteen years ago, she could proudly shout her transformation lyrics in front of everyone.

Back then, she was a hero with her heart set on the city, believing her flames could burn away all darkness. Now the person standing here was an old office drone who had taken all the beatings society had to offer. She still had to act young and transform in front of a bunch of old geezers in suits.

Shameful. Too shameful.

She clenched her left fist at her side and stabbed her cold right hand into the upper-left void.

“Burn, heart’s fire. Transform!”

Flames lit up the entire meeting room, but the temperature was far lower than before.

When the red light faded, the magical girl Hongxia’s first move was to brace her hands on her knees and gasp for breath.

Her heart pounded heavily in her chest, as if every pump was a protest.

Her magical perception spread out, but its range had visibly shrunk. The corners that should have been clear as the palm of her hand were now only a blur.

She heard the sharp intakes of breath in the meeting room.

Ilya’s blue eyes widened abruptly. The hand she had put back under the table clutched her skirt desperately. “The captain’s magical fluctuation… what’s going on?”

Lan Ruobing’s eyes shifted from disgust to disbelief. Her lips moved a few times, and finally turned into a low, quiet demand: “Overexertion? How could she be this weak?”

Hongxia, the magical girl once called the GOAT of fire in her prime, had magical adaptability at the human limit, second only to the few colleagues who could be called ‘GOAT’ with single-digit rankings.

Now, standing before everyone, her magical fluctuation was weaker than a newly awakened Class C rookie.

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