Chapter 575 - A Legendary Figure
Hailan shocked Eleven quite a bit, and Eleven’s wide-open eyes blinked in shock albeit cutely. Bai Ye broke into laughter and put his hand around her shoulder and said, “Are you shocked?”
Eleven nodded honestly. For such a young toddler to clearly cough out a coherent statement this politely as though she was an adult, Eleven was definitely surprised.
“There are many things for you to be surprised about. Let’s head to the living room and talk about them,” Bai Ye said. Cheng Anya carried Little Hailan back to their dedicated room. Since their little princess was tired and wanted some sleep, Cheng Anya also wanted to catch up with Eleven but was worried for Hailan and wanted to personally coax her to sleep.
Since she had almost lost her precious child, she was even more cautious toward her and did not dare to take any chances.
However Little Hailan was consoled, she would not budge. It was good that somebody showed concern for her.
As Bai Ye talked about Hailan in detail, Eleven recovered from her shock and gasped at how implausible things could be. It was out of the world. The Ye family, whose members were nothing short of exceptional, truly stood out.
While the child was also a cyborg, she was extremely different from Kahn.
Bai Ye was concerned about how she had been in the past half year, and Eleven described what happened in detail. When she returned to the island, she wanted to have Old Witch intimidate Kahn and resolve the feud from many years ago. Since the conflict between the Top Terrorist Organization and the Mafia had been set ablaze, Kahn joining into the mix would lead to unthinkable consequences. Since Kahn wanted to get back at them, his vengeance was something the Mafia could conveniently exploit.
Old Witch had gone into seclusion for many years and ignored the happenings in the world. Her only focus was on training the new children so that they would eventually become talented and join the terrorist organization in time to come and hence flexed their strengths. She could not care the least about these conflicts.
She also said that if they couldn’t settle these issues by themselves, all they had learned those years back had gone to naught and they should return for a few years of re-education before starting all over again.
When Eleven heard her, she dispelled the idea of convincing her.
Old Witch would call a shovel a shovel and she was exceptionally cold. Once the children became familiar with her, they could talk about anything under the sun with her and climb over her head brazenly to the point of cursing her for her mean streak as she would not bother. That said, once she spoke, everybody would obey her without fail. All the children on the island, obedient or rebellious, would yield to her and never talk back to her.
They could not.
Eleven, Ye Wei, and company were no exception as they never talked back at her. She would never repeat what she said.
Eleven and Ye Wei had discussed this in person and had no idea why Old Witch resisted living away from the sea. Ever since she stepped foot on the island, it had been twenty-over years of isolation and seclusion from her past.
Nobody could locate her.
This return was different, and Eleven also told Beauty Su about Su Ruhua. While Beauty Su was her best friend, she was still the closest to Old Witch. She told Su Ruyu what she did not tell Su Man and Su Ruhua, and that included the Mo brothers.
Old Witch, in utter weirdness, asked her in return why she should be concerned with these worldly things.
As she had asked Su Man and knew that Su Ruhua had a twin sister who looked almost like her, Eleven was shocked. When she was about to leave, she could infer, from Su Man’s words, Su Ruyu’s character and age, which uncannily coincided with those of Old Witch. She was certain that Old Witch was Su Ruyu, Beauty Su’s sister.
She honestly told her about Su Ruhua and even how she resembled Su Ruhua, along with how Su Ruhua weirdly looked around the world for her. She told Old Witch almost all that she knew.
Old Witch, weirdly, said that she did not know Su Ruhua or even Su Man, and even the fact that she did not go to Riyadh and did not know the Su family.
Eleven was utterly lost and did not know what exactly happened. They all knew that Old Witch hated lies. Ye Wei was extremely playful back then, but she was smart enough to complete the task Old Witch assigned to her and used the remaining time for fun. As she was afraid of being punished by Old Witch, she lied before Old Witch when she was caught once and was harshly punished by her. Old Witch warned them against lying.
They hence developed a habit, for good or worse, to never casually lie despite how bad the news was.
As that was Old Witch’s character, she would certainly not lie to her. If she claimed that she had no idea, she really had no idea.
Eleven, however, could never believe that it was mere coincidence. She hence discovered something that had never been discovered before. Old Witch had no memory of her life before she stepped on the island.
She did not know where she was from and what her name was. She did not even know who her kin was and that she came with Wolf. She was not the master of the island, and she worked with Jason, Chu Li, Black J, and company to take down the original operative organization before they could claim the island as theirs and turned it into her home. She had no idea about anything else.
Eleven then learned why she was so indifferent toward Blue Wolf. She had been listening to Wolf all along. Her memories were all from Wolf.
She had not the slightest feeling about it. After she lost her memory, Wolf chased her and she allowed him to have his way despite rumors abound as she did not care about anything.
That was the reason why nothing happened in those ten-over years.
Since nobody dared to ask Old Witch about her past, nobody knew that her memories of the first half of her life were wiped away from her. She, despite her incredible medical skills, was hapless. That could only mean that nobody could help her regain her memory.
And she did not want to regain her memory.
As Eleven told her about Su Ruhua and Su Man, she learned that her memory was wiped clean and told her all her thoughts about how she could have been Su Ruyu because Wolf called her Yu-er. She could not have been too far off the truth.
Old Witch did not rebut her but said that she had had a splitting headache for the past twenty-over years. While her head would ache terribly on some special days, fragments of her memories would surge into her mind.
Her tone became cold, and she said that the memories were either painful or hopeless toward her. Apart from these memories, she did not see any good memories.
Since that was the case, whether she regained her memories was no longer important.
Despite not having memories of before, she still lived a good twenty years.
Eleven really wanted to ask in return whether she had lived well.
It was afraid that she would never have been able to answer the same question herself. She, at least in the opinion of her disciples, had lived a lonely life for the past ten-over years. She, alone, had nobody to talk to.
While she was the closest to Ye Wei, they were a generation apart and there were things she would never tell them as though they were like mother and daughter. If that was not the case, they would have discovered something amiss with her memory. When they were in the spring, telling them a bit more would have led to them realizing it.
While she knew well that her memories had been wiped and how she could regain her memory, it was… how the memories were so painful that she chose to ignore them and give up her past altogether.
Perhaps the memories from before were too painful, too deeply etched in her mind. Despite the void, she could still remember some events.
She ignored worldly affairs, so she did not particularly worry herself with Ye Wei’s affairs. In her words, everybody had their own fates and lives to tend to. Since Ye Wei had made her choice, they should respect her.
Ye Wei had to bear the good and bad that came from it.
One could not simply experience only the good in life. There were naturally times one struggled. As Ye Wei never asked for help, there was no need for them to interfere in her life.
Old Witch doted on Ye Wei the most, so Ye Wei naturally could not say anything else.
The only thing she cared about was her body. In the past half a year when she returned, she checked her up personally and concocted a comprehensive rehabilitation plan for her and made reasonable nutritional arrangements for her. She would force her to eat regardless of her appetite.
She naturally took effort and knew how to allay her worries and have her cooperate with her.
In the span of three to four months, her body was in much better shape, but Old Witch had yet to completely analyze the virus in her and hence did not allow her to leave. She wanted to know how Mo Ye was, but the island had no equipment to communicate with the outside world and nobody was allowed to leave the closed training base. She really missed the outside world, and Old Witch could tell that she was distracted and asked if she had somebody on her mind. Eleven honestly replied.
Even so, she did not allow her to leave. Old Witch, wanting to shift her attention, arranged for her to train a few children. Given Eleven’s experience and combat experience, she did not have the slightest problem training a few children. She gradually found her youth despite the challenging yet fulfilling times. It was even more so when she learned that she was improving day by day.
Old Witch assigned her a few new children. The children who were able to appear at the training base had passed layers of selection and were extremely gifted from the onset. They were new to the island, and they were still children at heart and more innocent. Eleven had a whale of a time with the children. She was extremely familiar with the coaches on the island as well, who had not changed much in ten-over years. She put effort into developing the children both intellectually and physically.
Most of the children were willing, like them before, to endure the suffering that stemmed from the brutal training on the island. Once one began training, one could not call it a day as and when they wanted to. Unless something happened to one’s body, the training continued.
There was now a group of teenagers who were combat-ready. Old Witch was considering giving them an opportunity. As Eleven was their senior, many came to her for advice daily.
They passed fruitfully and she did not miss them as much. Time naturally passed quickly until Old Witch prepared a complete report for her to pass to Bai Ye.
She could do nothing about the virus for now, but she knew that Eleven wanted to leave and did not particularly insist on holding her back. While she could continue on part of the research, the rest of the problems were in the report that Eleven had to pass to Bai Ye. Bai Ye would naturally know what to do.
Eleven did try to ask her whether she could hope to regain a normal life, but Old Witch only told her to give her some time before she would regain her previous self. While her body was in too bad a shape, she had a fifty percent chance.
When she heard that, Eleven was relaxed and bade farewell to her, the coaches, and the children, and immediately left the training base.
In the moment, she tried to ask Old Witch whether she had to tell Beauty Su about her. Old Witch shook her head and flatly told her not to.
Since she had given such clear instructions, Eleven would naturally never tell Su Man or even Bai Ye about it. Since Bai Ye had no inkling about the incident, things would be better off if they remained as such. She hence directly told him about what Old Witch felt about Ye Wei and about her virus.
This thick, almost 100-page, report had a longer research time and was much richer in experience compared to Su Man and Bai Ye. There were many domains that Su Man and Bai Ye never understood.
To them, the document was extremely hard to come by as Old Witch had even specified Bai Ye’s future research direction and provided precise figures in each area.
While she had no means of curing Eleven for the time being, she managed to grasp the general direction, which made her much stronger than Bai Ye and Su Man as the latter two had no inkling of how to take the treatment forward.
Su Man secretly wondered why he had never heard of somebody who had such a thorough understanding of viruses in the world.
There was only a Su Ruyu twenty-over years ago, and he had heard of extremely few experts save the Su family. As this was his domain, Su Man had a somewhat good understanding of top talents in the field. He had even personally visited those in seclusion but had never encountered somebody who understood even more and had even more experience than him.
Just who was their master?
Their master was not only an expert in diseases, viruses, and medicine but also a gifted pugilist. Their master was indeed adored by god.
“What’s your master’s name?” Su Man suddenly asked.
“We only know her as Old Witch. We do not know her actual name,” Eleven said.
“How does she look?” Su Ruyu asked with a weird feeling. Save Su Ruyu and Mo Shitian, he had never heard of anybody with such talent. Even Su Ruhua had never reached that level.
“Old Witch… Her face will scare a three-year-old to death. That said, we are used to it and we will never badmouth our master.” Bai Ye smiled and raised his eyebrows and asked, “Beauty Su, are you not content? She is really strong. Back then, Ye Wei, Eleven, Jason, Black J, Chu Li, Ross, and I could only battle her to a stalemate. Eleven is now different. Oh, yes, Eleven, did you spar with Old Witch when you went back?”
Eleven nodded and broke into a rare smile. “I won!”
Although she won, it was because of the virus mutating in her body. When they initially wagered with Old Witch on what would happen if they won, it meant that she had to turn up for their weddings. Old Witch, extremely confident of her abilities, agreed.
Little did they expect Eleven, because of external circumstances, to transform into a cyborg and win against her.
Even she, who had predicted many things accurately, would not have expected such a dramatic twist.
The young kid asked with a little trembling, “If the seven of you couldn’t overcome her, won’t I get smashed into a pulp?”
A smile flashed through Eleven’s eyes, and Bai Ye and Third Young Master Ye could not help but break into laughter. The young kid’s analogy was so adorable that Bai Ye was getting stitches from laughing.
“We were once pulp too,” Eleven said.
When Eleven said the cold joke with a stony face, it was so humorous that Bai Ye and Third Young Master Ye broke into laughter again. The young kid imagined the hellish days that awaited him and secretly mourned for himself.
Bai Ye laughed and said, “Eleven, stop scaring him. If Ning Ning is unwilling to go to the training base, you are toast.”
Old Witch knew about Ning Ning from long ago. As she extremely treasured talent, she really looked forward to nurturing an exceptionally gifted child and had been long urging them to send him over.
It’s just that too many things happened in this period of time and they were delayed.
“Ning Ning, don’t bother about us. Hailan is safely delivered, so you might as well prepare for your next journey. We will be able to handle ourselves.” Bai Ye laughed. That was the original plan anyway.
He looked at Third Young Master Ye quizzically, and Third Young Master Ye shrugged before calmly saying,” I have a daughter, so do whatever you wish to my son.”
“Daddy, is that even human talk?” The young kid despised Third Young Master Ye with all his might. Was there a father who would forsake his son because he had a daughter? Was his life that bitter?
‘Darling son, you are eventually going anyway. If you are going to fight with me for Hailan, booting you earlier saves me trouble so that nobody will get to fight with me for Hailan.’
Actually, Third Young Master Ye had already completely let go once he acquiesced to him joining the Top Terrorist Organization. Whatever decisions they made were internal affairs and he, as a member of the Dragon Gate, had no say.
Eleven nodded too. “Ah, yes, that was Old Witch’s intention too, for you to go earlier. Your combat fundamentals are too weak, and you will only suffer more if you start later.”
Cheng Anya, who had just coaxed Hailan to sleep, reached the great hall. Once she heard of it, she agreed with Bai Ye and Eleven’s decision.
The young kid deeply felt that ever since Baby Hailan was born, his position in the family had fallen immensely. He was no longer the only child in the house.
This was indeed an extremely unfair world.
Eleven said, “Since you happen to be leaving Riyadh, I’ll leave with you.”