Chapter 747: Temporal Reversion
"The time is almost right." Yun Jie glanced at the sky, then his figure silently dissolved into the air.
Bai Mo then also left the cafe.
After they departed, the cups they had drunk from, as if time were flowing backward, restored themselves to a brand-new state and spontaneously floated back into the kitchen backstage.
No one noticed anything amiss, except for a certain cat that had originally been fast asleep.
It had long since completed its demonization, and besides possessing innate spells, its intelligence had also long been on par with a normal human's, which was why it could detect that slight anomaly.
Instinctively, it headed towards the kitchen, wanting to get those two cups.
People were moving about in the kitchen, all busy waiters who couldn't stop their feet.
The large cat cautiously advanced, dodging them.
To be honest, it didn't like the environment of the cafe's back kitchen; hot liquids were everywhere, making it easy to get hurt. But there was no alternative; for those two cups, the cat had no choice but to make the trip.
Without much effort, it found the location of the two cups.
In the eyes of ordinary people, these two looked no different from the other cups, all being industrialized products of the same style. But to it, the special spirit energy radiance enveloping the cups was practically a guiding light.
Just as it twisted its body, lightly leaped onto the tabletop, and prepared to extend a paw to take the two cups...
"Tom!!!"
"Tom!!!"
"Come quick and catch the mouse!!!"
Screams echoed from the storage room.
A stout woman in a maid uniform, carrying a broom, ran out with a slightly terrified expression, shouting "Tom" as she ran.
Tom was the name the maids had given the large cat, and the stout woman was the supervisor of this maid cafe.
Today, with nothing to do, she decided to clean up the storage room. But as soon as she opened the door, she saw a mouse sneaking a snack.
The mouse glanced at the maid, then immediately dropped its food, scurried under her skirt, passed through the storage room door, and vanished without a trace, leaving her dumbfounded and terrified.
Seeing this, the large cat had no choice but to temporarily put down the two cups it had already picked up and run in the direction of the sound.
The Federation's restrictions on demonized animals were exceptionally strict. Once a self-awakened demonic beast was discovered, with the exception of a very few lucky ones who were taken in as spirit pets by important figures, all others would be captured and sent to concentration camps to undergo lengthy humanization brainwashing and enslavement education.
Life in the concentration camps was not easy, and any demonic beast with even a little bit of information wouldn't entertain the thought of entering.
They would rather hide in remote corners inaccessible to the Federation's superhumans, living incognito, no different from illegal immigrants.
Tom was one of them.
All this time, it had only pretended to be a slightly smarter cat, lounging in the cafe, doing nothing but eating and waiting to die.
If it exposed the fact that it had demonized, it would likely attract investigators who would forcefully "contain" it.
"That idiotic mouse, actually got caught stealing by the head maid, truly stupid to the core."
The mouse was another demonized creature hidden in this cafe; it had previously interacted briefly with Tom, and the two beasts had even established some rules.
They had always kept to themselves, like river water not interfering with well water.
Trotting along, Tom arrived beside the head maid and casually circled her pillar-like stout legs several times.
Of course, the mouse had long since vanished without a trace.
"Useless thing!" Looking at the late-arriving, merely posing large cat, the head maid grumbled a couple of curses, then closed the storage room door and returned to the front desk.
Although Tom could understand her words, it couldn't retort, even if a single swipe of its paw could end this human's life.
The present was unlike decades ago; the Federation's police had long since equipped themselves with a crime-solving artifact – Temporal Reversion.
For all homicides and major cases, as long as the police brought this spirit energy instrument, Temporal Reversion, they could reproduce most of what had happened at the crime scene.
In a sense, it was equivalent to an omnipresent surveillance camera; however, the longer the reversion time, the greater the energy consumption.
Temporal Reversion units typically equipped to local police stations could generally revert events that happened within a month, and only within the city limits.
To revert events that occurred within half a year, one needed to apply to a provincial-level unit.
Currently, the technical upper limit for Temporal Reversion was about one year, and such high-precision instruments could only be applied for in the capital, Marinjoa.
New technologies were always easily twisted by imaginative people for nefarious purposes.
Temporal Reversion was no exception.
From the lowest form of voyeurism, like using reversion technology to recreate bathroom and bathhouse environments to act as silent perverts, to advanced espionage, using reversion to reproduce the state of classified personnel entering passwords and stealing critical password information.
Many special abilities and technologies of the spirit energy era would be corrupted by people with wild imaginations.
Where there was a spear, there was a shield. Scientists had long discovered that strong spirit energy reactions would significantly interfere with the effect of reversion. Therefore, some experienced criminals would immediately detonate a spirit energy bomb after committing a crime to completely destroy the scene.
...
Tom clearly didn't understand all this; it only knew that Temporal Reversion could reproduce its image, and if this contraption found it to be a murderer, investigators would immediately pursue it to the ends of the earth.
"Containing" a demonic beast like Tom could earn the Federation a reward of two to three hundred thousand Federation Yuan, a sum sufficient for a family of three to live for a year in a major Federation city.
Of course, the two to three hundred thousand acquisition cost was actually nothing within the Federation's industry chain of brainwashing and selling demonic creatures. A second-tier demonic beast bodyguard, thoroughly educated for loyalty, would officially fetch at least ten million.
...
"This fat hag isn't anyone important, what's with her nagging?" Tom grumbled as it followed along, preparing to return to the kitchen and claim its own serendipitous encounter.
After centuries of effort, whether in the Federation or the Land of White, from humans to demons, from immortals to mortals, only one official language remained – the Universal Language.
This amalgamation of multiple linguistic families had become the bridge for communication for everyone, including demonic creatures. Because their social structure was too loose, they had no time to develop their own languages, so directly learning and using human languages was undoubtedly the most cost-effective approach.
"You—dead—mouse! Put it—down!!!"
When it strutted back into the kitchen, the scene before its eyes infuriated Tom.
This suicidal fellow actually wanted to take away its cups!
It was a coincidence, really. The mouse had originally been quietly eating in the storage room, completely oblivious to the arrival of two 'gods' outside.
Had it not been startled away by the head maid and, in a panic, stumbled into the kitchen to escape through the sewer, it never would have discovered those two objects, shimmering with spirit energy radiance, clearly not ordinary artifacts.
Comments