Yama Rising

Due to the fact that Usonia had only been founded relatively recently when it came to the context of history, the nation was suffering from a certain degree of cultural inferiority, and as a result, many supposed cultures arose, such as highway culture, car culture, rock music culture, etc.

It would be like some from ancient Cathay pointing at a horse-drawn carriage and saying: "This is our carriage culture, it comes in 16-seat and eight-seat models."

Foreign envoys: ???

For those living in this nation, it was inevitable to come into contact with these pseudo cultures. Usonians were convinced that they were the light of the world, and all people who had lived in Usonia were most likely very familiar with this aspect of Usonian culture, and Qin Ye was experiencing this right now.

It was a long and straight road to the Hollywood Hills, and he was listening to melodious country music, watching the surrounding mountains and greenery flash past his window.

The driver was a black man, and along the way, he had been constantly talking to Qin Ye. After all, Qin Ye currently had the appearance of a Caucasian Usonian. Qin Ye remained stoically uninterested in the driver's attempts to initiate conversations, and 20 minutes later, the driver fell silent and began to bob his head while humming to the music. Furthermore, it was a Taylor Swift Song...

From a distance, the Hollywood Sign presented a spectacular sight to behold. Any movie enthusiast would definitely be struck by a sense of reverence and excitement at the sight of this monumental landmark, but Qin Ye had no interest in it.

Just you wait until I get my hands on electricity! We'll be able to shoot films depicting humans and ghosts without even the need for costumes, makeup, or CGI! We'll blow your movies right out of the water!

In reality, Hollywood wasn't an area. Strictly speaking, it was a city, and it even had its own honorary mayor. It belonged to the Greater Los Angeles Area, but was also independent of it.

At this point, the hype around Hollywood had already died down long ago. It was a symbol for movies in Usonia and even movies worldwide. Out of the six major movie producers back in Hollywood's heyday, only one, Paramount, still had large shooting locations in Hollywood. There were once over 600 movie companies here, yet only a handful of those remained. Most of them had become venues for award presentations, such as the Dolby Theater, while all of the top-notch movie companies had already set up shooting locations at sites with better environments.

Even so, this was the spiritual holy land of the movie industry, and it was still constantly being visited by movie lovers and tourists from all over the world. The small towns constructed around the Hollywood Hills ensured that there were always places for tourists to stay, and one could even pay to enjoy a horse ride on the hills.

Thus, as soon as Qin Ye emerged from the taxi, he was greeted by the sight of over 100 people already gathered in the car park. There was even a Cathayan tour guide waving a small red flag as he yelled, "Tourists from the Heaven Tour Group, please gather here..."

There were people of all races gathered here, and he had to admire how thoughtful Lee Jung-sook was. After learning that he wanted to do something in the Freemasonry, she had organized for him to meet her people at the closest location to him with the most diverse and highest number of visitors. They could meet in any one of the countless cafes here, and there would be no way for anyone to track him.

At the same time, the fact that even the queen of Samsung was being so cautious was a clear indication of just how fearsome an organization the Freemasonry was.

Right at this moment, a voice rang out beside him. "Excuse me, are you Mr. Qin?"

Qin Ye turned to discover an Asian man speaking in fluent Mandarin. Qin Ye nodded at the man, who extended a respectful bow toward him, then opened a video call on his phone, upon which Lee Jung-sook's face appeared on the screen.

Lee Jung-sook took a glance at him, then ordered, "Get rid of him."

The smile on the Asian man's face instantly faded, and he had already reached a hand into his own pocket. Qin Ye was stunned to see this, and only now did he realize that he had forgotten that he was using another person's body!

"Susa Boy!!" he hurriedly said, and at the same time, the man had already pulled a gun out of his pocket.

"Hold on," Lee Jung-sook instructed in a placid voice.

She was initially quite calm, but her calmness instantly turned to disdain as soon as she saw Qin Ye.

"It's him."

After that, she immediately concluded the video call. A respectful smile reappeared on the man's face, and he put his gun away as if nothing had ever happened. He then made an inviting hand gesture and said, "My car is just over there, and it's definitely safe. Please come with me, Mr. Qin."

Qin Ye followed the man to a completely unremarkable Tesla car parked on the side of the road. After getting into the car, the man offered Qin Ye a laptop and said with a serious expression, "Mr. Qin, you will only have three hours to go through the contents of this laptop after you open it. In three hours, the laptop will automatically format itself, and its hard disk will be completely destroyed. I'll be waiting for you outside."

How thoughtful...Qin Ye nodded in response, then exited the car to purchase a cup of coffee from a nearby cafe. He then made his way back to the car and leaned against it, concealing Qin Ye from any prying eyes that may have been looking into the car from outside.

Qin Ye rubbed his hands together before opening the laptop, and he was quickly greeted by the Windows 10 interface. There was no cursor on the screen, and a video soon popped up.

It was a video of Lee Jung-sook.

"You're very brave." She was seated in her office with the city of Hanyang as her backdrop, looking as if she were the queen of Daehan. She cocked her head slightly to the side as she looked directly at Qin Ye through the screen and said, "It's been a very long time since I've seen anyone brave enough to plot against the Freemasonry. There are some things that can't be explained through words alone, so I'll keep this short. I've collated all of the information I have on the First Usonian Bank and everything I've heard in the Master Mason circles into this laptop."

In the image, the light in the room that Lee Jung-sook was seated in changed slightly, and immediately thereafter, the floor-to-ceiling window behind her transformed into a giant projector screen. However, the screen was currently filled with nothing but inky darkness.

Lee Jung-sook continued in a grim voice, "Firstly, I don't know where you heard this name from, but it's extremely difficult to find on any website. Even if you do manage to find instances of the name on the internet, most of those instances will only consist of a single sentence. This is because no one dares to mention its history. I know about it due to its unique nature, and I'm sure you've already gathered some information about it from the rough accounts provided on some Usonian websites. This is a bank that allows influxes of foreign funds and has the right to print its own Usonian currency. For all of the powerful consortiums all over the world, it provides extremely alluring opportunities. Prior to its merger with the Chase Bank, it had already lost its right to print Usonian currency, but it had retained the right to accept foreign investment. Back in 1990, I had already completely taken over Samsung, and I wanted to enter the Usonian market. The first banks that I tried to contact were those that granted large loans and could even help me do some things. An example of this was the First Usonian Bank, which was already known as the First Bank of Usonia at the time."

She picked up her cup, then took a sip of coffee before continuing, "However, in order to do that, I had to face a fearsome enemy: the Rothschild Family. At the time, they had already taken 70% of all of the bank's shares, and it was virtually impossible to beat them. The first strategy I considered was to strike through the deposit service."

Qin Ye's eyes narrowed slightly upon hearing this.

"I bought all of the shares I could from the bank's minor shareholders to give myself some speaking rights, then made a request to the board of directors to manage the item deposit service. This was a service that not a lot of people paid attention to, and it was also a grey area that was rife with lawsuits. My plan was to take control of that area of the bank's services, then slowly continue to expand my influence."

She tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ear as she said in a cold voice, "However, much to my surprise, they absolutely refused to relinquish this right! Several of the Rothschild Family's direct lineal descendants even came to Daehan in person to try and persuade me to give up on this idea."

"Did you agree?" Qin Ye asked as he raised an eyebrow, only to shake his head in a self-derisive manner upon making the realization that she couldn't hear him.

"You must be wondering whether I agreed or not, right?" Lee Jung-sook seemed to be able to read his mind as she smiled and continued, "Giving up has never been my style. On the surface, I agreed. At the time, I was already a minority shareholder in the First Usonian Bank and had some speaking rights. My first suspicion was that my actions were conflicting with someone's interests, and I wondered if there were important items belonging to figures such as powerful military officials or oil tycoons being held in the bank under the storage service. However, I found that to be quite unlikely. Firstly, the First Usonian Bank wasn't all that renowned, and no prominent figure would choose to deposit their belongings with a bank like that when there were so many superior alternatives. How poor would one have to be to deposit their belongings with the First Usonian Bank, and what items of value could people that poor possibly be able to deposit?"

Qin Ye fell silent upon hearing this.

He felt personally offended, even though Lee Jung-sook hadn't been referring directly to him when she was talking about poor people.

The fact that she had said that in such a matter-of-fact way without any disdain or emotion made him feel even more anguished.

"Thus, I was very confused." The smile of a sly fox appeared on her face as she continued, "Theoretically speaking, there was no way that any important items would've been deposited with the bank, so it shouldn't have been an important service. In that case, why was the Rothschild Family refusing to relinquish that right? In the end, I decided to send out three commercial spies. They were professionals who were ranked extremely high in the world. Of course, it would greatly tarnish my reputation if this were to be leaked, so I planned to silence them after they gave me the information I wanted."

Her smile faded as a grim look appeared on her face. "Through their investigation, they discovered that the First Bank of Usonia had no security vault! Their security vault, which was the same one that the First Usonian Bank had used, had never been moved, and no one knew where it was! In order to verify this, I asked the moving company that had helped the First Bank of Usonia move at the time. There was still a survivor among them, and... Oh, I forgot to mention this."

A cold smile appeared on her face as she said, "Coincidentally, after the moving company completed this job, it filed for bankruptcy within a year, and all of the workers who were involved in transporting the security vault were dead. They had either died from car accidents or diseases, and there was even one who was just walking on the street when he suffered a sudden aneurysm! Another coincidence was that one of the workers just so happened to have welcomed a son into his family within this year, and he was very happy to have been able to take on this lucrative job, so he filmed a DVD to show his newborn son later in his life. If it weren't for that DVD, I most likely wouldn't have ever discovered all of this."

As soon as her voice trailed off, she picked up the remote control and pressed a button, upon which a video finally began to play on the black screen behind her.

The video depicted a white Caucasian male who appeared to be in his forties, and this was already the tail-end of the video. The man wore a wide smile as he said, "Fortune always favors those who are prepared! My dear son, your dad just took on the most lucrative job last year, and we didn't even have to do anything! All we did was show up, and we earned a massive sum of money! I couldn't believe it! I had no idea that there was such a massive underground church in Philadelphia, and we didn't even need to transport anything..."

Right at this moment, the image began to warp, then faded into static before turning completely dark.

"Did you hear that?" Lee Jung-sook asked with a smile. "If you want to find some leads, then the best place to go is below Philadelphia. All I know is that there's an underground church there, but I don't know exactly where it is. Not long after the aforementioned events, the Freemasonry extended an invitation to me, and their condition was that I give up on my ambitions toward the First Bank of Usonia. I agreed."

Qin Ye's heart was thumping violently.

For some reason, the First Usonian Bank hadn't transported its security vault anywhere. Instead, it had only hired some workers and put on a show, and there was a very good chance that Xu Fu's notes would be situated right under Philadelphia.

He didn't immediately continue watching. Instead, he frantically slid back the progress bar on the video to see the footage again.

Soon, the video was reversed back to the footage of that Caucasian man.

"Fortune always favors those who are prepared..." Qin Ye leaned down slightly as he stared intently at the image.

If his eyes weren't playing tricks on him, then in the instant before the image had faded into static, something else had appeared in it!

This piece of footage had captured something that it shouldn't have recorded.