Morris and Daisy spent three or four days preparing.
After Daisy acted cute and coaxed Morris’s parents, they finally relented and agreed to let them travel to Hong Kong.
As for Jessica, though she didn’t say much, spending so many days together had forged a deep affection within her for this family funding her college education.
This home was truly warm.
Moreover, her relationship with Morris gave her someone to rely on.
Even though Morris had only unlocked the inventory bag and attribute synchronization features for her so far, her growth had already been massive.
As for skills, she was already very familiar with many of them in the game.
She believed that one day Morris would treat her just as he treated Daisy, allowing her to bring her in-game skills into reality.
Therefore, to join them on this trip to Hong Kong, she specifically quit her temp job and submitted a formal request to Daisy, making it quite official.
After making all their preparations, the three of them boarded a flight to Hong Kong on the first day of August.
Upon arriving in Hong Kong, Morris immediately went with the two girls to apply for investment and tourist visas for Mainland China.
Through a bit of maneuvering from Daisy, within three days Morris received VIP treatment at HSBC, which helped him hire a professional manager to handle all the paperwork for investing in the Mainland.
Half a month later, Morris’s company in China was successfully registered in Shanghai, officially launching the first investment of his life.
As planned, Morris’s initial focus was real estate.
However, land prices in Shanghai far exceeded his expectations—he wondered if it was because this was the Marvel universe.
Fortunately, prices in several cities in southern Jiangsu Province were still within his budget.
Out of necessity, Morris immediately adjusted his strategy and shifted his focus to the Sunan region.
Luckily, before the start of the school year, Morris’s first investment had successfully landed.
As for future operations, Morris left them in the hands of a professional manager named Hu Changhong.
Recommended by HSBC, he had talent enough to manage the company’s early growth.
Of course, Morris also recruited a general manager in China to handle the company’s day-to-day operations.
During his month in China, while he was busy, it wasn’t overwhelming—most of the time was spent waiting.
As a result, Morris had plenty of free time.
While in the country, he also looked into information regarding the extraordinary.
Marvel’s China was surprisingly tolerant of supernatural phenomena; Shanghai and Beijing openly ran two extraordinary martial arts academies.
Morris even took time to visit both institutions.
They were fairly similar: martial arts here were divided into three disciplines—Internal Energy, Qigong, and External Training.
Internal Energy resembled the cultivation found in high-fantasy martial worlds, though its system was incomplete, appearing to have suffered a historical rift.
Emitting true qi externally or forming true qi protective barriers allowed them to perform many extraordinary feats.
Qigong was similar to Iron Fist’s Qi.
To Morris, it looked more like a superpower discipline, where each person’s Qi produced different effects under specific activation conditions.
In terms of combat capacity, it wasn’t particularly powerful; to Morris, it felt more like a support discipline, especially given its surprisingly miraculous healing functions.
Finally, External Training focused on unlocking human potential.
Its rank structure was especially familiar to Morris: Mingjin, Anjin, Baodan…
It gave Morris the surreal feeling of fiction coming into reality.
Among the three disciplines, External Training had the largest number of practitioners.
There were numerous private kung fu schools, and many public academies offered related majors that were quite popular.
Morris also assessed the strength of External Training martial arts and found it far stronger than expected.
Based on Morris’s preliminary judgment, a top practitioner at the Mingjin stage could match the strength of protagonists from Marvel spin-off shows, like Iron Fist.
As for Anjin, it was roughly on par with Captain America holding his shield.
As for the Baodan realm, Morris couldn’t judge.
Ordinary people rarely got to see ruthless powerhouses of that level in action.
Internal Energy practitioners had an advantage in agility and stamina compared to External martial artists, but in close-quarters combat, External martial arts had the upper hand.
Especially in the early stages, the power gap was quite noticeable.
A Mingjin practitioner could crush a third-rate Internal Energy fighter and comfortably match a second-rate one.
An Anjin practitioner was comparable to a peak first-rate internal artist, while a Baodan practitioner was likely equivalent to the Xiantian realm of Internal Energy.
Unfortunately, the heritage of Internal Energy was incomplete; otherwise, Internal martial artists would likely be even stronger.
China was almost identical to the country from his past life, so he understood the Chinese government’s mindset.
If these martial arts were being openly displayed to the public, then whatever was hidden behind the scenes…
Morris stopped overthinking it.
He had come to China to invest and make money, while also securing a safe fallback location for his family.
Therefore, the stronger China was, the safer he felt.
With his goals now crystal clear, he carefully laid out the company’s growth strategy before returning to New York with Daisy and Jessica at the end of August.
Inside her family’s martial arts dojo, Colleen Wing stared numbly at a message on her phone.
It was the exact warning Jessica had sent her before.
Now, almost every detail had come true, leaving only the final statement for her to verify.
But that single statement filled her with despair.
“The mastermind is Bakuto.
On the surface, he’s the principal of a private charity school in Queens.
In reality, he’s a leader of The Hand and one of its Five Fingers.
Reason for targeting the Wing family: Colleen’s father discovered Bakuto’s secret, so he had to be silenced!”
Jessica’s message was straightforward and easy to understand.
The preceding section briefly explained The Hand’s background and detailed Bakuto’s plot against the Wing family.
Now, her parents had indeed died in a suspicious accident just as predicted, and the crime scene had been tampered with before Colleen could arrive.
Her master, Bakuto, had offered an explanation that seemed flawless at first, but when viewed alongside this message, it was riddled with holes.
After exchanging a few hesitant messages with the girl named Jessica, Colleen looked at the final text sent to her.
“I agree!”
Colleen hesitated for a long time, but ultimately couldn’t resist her thirst for the truth.
Besides, all this girl named “Jessica” was asking was for her to play a game.
Having just landed at the New York airport, Daisy turned on her phone.
Seeing the satisfying response, Daisy opened the message and held it up to Jessica’s face.
“See?
I told you this Asian girl would be easy to talk to!”
Her voice overflowed with smug pride.
Looking at the still somewhat bewildered Jessica, she felt a strange sense of intellectual superiority.
It took Jessica a moment to react, a complex feeling washing over her.
*We’re going to have another sister from now on,* she thought.
Having read the previous text exchanges, she knew Daisy hadn’t mentioned the prerequisite for entering the game at all.
“Daisy, sometimes you really give off villain vibes,” Jessica said meaningfully, ignoring Daisy’s question.
Meanwhile, Morris played dumb on the side, embarrassed to speak up.
After all, he had tacitly approved of Daisy baiting Colleen.