Chapter 1: The Enormous Commission (Part 1)

  "It's so boring......" Zhang Fan stretched out his legs, staring at the ceiling, and let out a depressed sigh. "Ah Xue, have there been any interesting commissions recently? Staying like this every day makes people dull!"

  "Less came!" A young beauty who was wearing glasses and clearing mines looked up at Zhang Fan's decadent appearance with disdain: "You count yourself, how many commissions have you pushed away since you returned last time? You need to rest for at least three months after completing a commission, and you still have the nerve to say it's boring!"

  "Tsk, tsk, Xiaoxue, take a look at these requests yourself. They're all about catching cheaters, being bodyguards, and finding lost items... These requests are even more boring than sitting in the office doing nothing!" Zhang Fan's face was filled with disdain: "I'm a somewhat famous private detective, if I were to take on these kinds of requests, that would be truly embarrassing!"

  "You yourself said that as long as there's money, even if it means selling your life to Wu Tenglan, you'd do it?" Xiaoxue sneered. "These people are very wealthy, the prices they're offering aren't small amounts!"

  "That's Wu Tenglan!" Zhang Fan spread his hands and revealed a very "manly" smile: "Wu Tenglan is at least a beauty, but take a look at the person who hired a bodyguard? Brain full of fat, this kind of person can't compare to Wu Tenglan? As for catching an adulterer... it's even more unnecessary to say, they themselves are ugly, their wife wouldn't dare to have an affair, it's simply unreasonable! As for that person looking for lost items... no matter how poor I am, I haven't fallen to the point of helping a middle-aged woman look for her pet. That middle-aged woman might have been a beauty twenty years ago, but that's all in the past."

  "You pervert!" Xiaoxue cursed in a huff: "You can just rot there!" As she said that, she lowered her head and continued to sweep for mines, but her emotions were slightly more turbulent than before, and the force of her mouse clicks was noticeably greater.

  "Sour grapes, that's a woman's patent!" Zhang Fan let out a long sigh and continued to study the fine lines on the ceiling to see if it was due to the quality of the house or the negligence of the decoration.

  "Knock, knock, knock", suddenly, a light knocking sound started.

  "Who?" Zhang Fan furrowed his brow, suddenly popping up from his seat, while giving Xiaoxue a signal with his eyes. This place was quite out of the way, and he didn't want any unrelated people to come and disturb him - in fact, ninety-five percent of his commissions were directly accepted online.

  "Excuse me, is this the Fang Xue Detective Agency? I have a case that I'd like to entrust to Mr. Zhang Fan." The voice outside the door was warm and pleasant, a very nice male tenor. "May I come in and discuss it further?"

  Zhang Fan waved his hand at Xiao Xue, and after seeing her quickly hide in the back room, he pressed a button on the table and said aloud: "Please come in, the door is not locked." Those who can find their way here are generally people with some skills. Xiao Xue was just an ordinary person, if something unexpected happened, it wouldn't be good.

  The door opened and a middle-aged man walked in.

  "Are you Mr. Zhang Fan?" the middle-aged man asked with a smile. He was an ordinary person without any distinctive features, the kind of person who would blend into the crowd and not make anyone feel like there was anything out of the ordinary.

  "I am." Zhang Fan nodded: "May I ask who you are? How did you find this place? To be honest, I usually only accept online commissioned business."

  Zhang Fan sized up his opponent at the same time, and his opponent was also sizing him up. Zhang Fan noticed that when his opponent looked at him, a hint of surprise flashed in his eyes involuntarily.

  "How can you not believe my identity?" Zhang Fan smiled slightly, knowing that the other party was surprised at what. Compared to ordinary private detectives, he himself was a bit too prominent. This prominence was not because of his good looks: although compared to ordinary people, his appearance could be considered above average, barely making him a handsome guy, but absolutely not reaching the point where people would sigh in admiration. What stood out about him was a unique temperament that couldn't be put into words, yet it allowed people to pick him out from a crowd at a glance.

  For a private detective, being too eye-catching is absolutely not a good thing. "This guy really is a professional." Zhang Fan directly defined the opponent's identity.

  "Yes, Mr. Zhang is indeed very different from my understanding." The other party nodded. "As for how to find this place..." He smiled and took out a certificate from his pocket and handed it to Zhang Fan.

  "Please sit down." Zhang Fan scanned the black document with his eyes, and his heart couldn't help but skip a beat. After inviting the other party to sit down, he casually flipped through the document and handed it back.

  "Director Li Lan, if my memory serves me right, I've never had any dealings with the National Security Bureau, have I?" Zhang Fan's voice was laced with a hint of wariness. "How did you find me? And to be honest, if the national security system can't solve something, it's unlikely that I'll be able to either."

  Kidding, what's the National Security Bureau? To be honest, this can be said to be the most mysterious department in the entire country. If you get involved, it's a whole heap of trouble. — He didn't have the audacity to think that he could solve problems that national institutions couldn't with just a wave of his hand. This kind of trouble might even involve political intrigue and entrustment, so if possible, he wouldn't take it on.

  Not touching politics has always been his creed.

  As for Li Lan's true identity, he didn't have any doubts. The national security agency's ID was specially made, and even the paper and photo were extremely difficult to fake. —— As a private detective, in order to make things convenient when doing business, he often had several very useful IDs on him, of course, some were real and some were fake, but even if they were fake, they were absolutely fake to the point where they seemed more real than the real ones.

  At that time, he also had the idea of making a fake ID for the National Security Bureau, but soon gave up. Let alone him, even Chen Tian, who claimed to be the world's number one master thief, said: "Fang Ge, this is not something that can't be made, but it would take at least three or four years and cost a lot of money. And the National Security Bureau's ID cards are basically changed every six months, so making one would be useless!"

  "If it were a domestic matter, I wouldn't have come to you. Anyway, the National Security Bureau still has some confidence in this regard." The other person furrowed his brow, apparently the entrusted matter was very thorny: "Moreover, Mr. Zhang, rest assured that I and Zhang Shuai are old friends of many years, and you were personally recommended by him to me. He also told me about your taboos, and this matter has nothing to do with politics."

  "What does this have to do with politics? And it happened abroad?" Zhang Fan's interest was slowly piqued - although the National Security Bureau's influence abroad was not as strong as at home, it still had some clout. If even the National Security Bureau couldn't solve the problem, what made Zhang Shuai think he could? As for how Li Lan found this place, Zhang Fan also figured it out: even without using the National Security Bureau's influence, Zhang Shuai's connections would have been enough to find him. Zhang Shuai was one of the few clients who could directly come to Zhang Fan's office. "What exactly is the commission?"

  "You should know Professor Ouyang Tianyi?" Li Lan's face gradually turned solemn.

  "Professor Ou Yang? Didn't he go to Switzerland twenty days ago for an international seminar?" Zhang Fan was of course familiar with this renowned scientist. Ou Yang Tian Yi was a neurology authority with considerable influence internationally, who two years prior had proposed a theory that shocked the world, suggesting that it was possible to grant consciousness to cloned organisms if conditions were sufficient. —Although out of moral considerations, Professor Ou Yang only said "organisms", anyone with common sense knew that apart from humans, what other cloned creatures needed consciousness?