After three silent seconds came the shrill screams of the henchmen.
They have already started fighting? Zhuang Zhuoyi rubbed his chin, beginning to calculate the time. He wanted to see how long this skilled worker would take to deal with those four brothers. Before his attention had wandered for even a minute, he suddenly heard someone say behind him: “Who are you?”
The person had appeared without a sound, like a ghost. Covered in a cold sweat, Zhuang Zhuoyi whipped his head around, and this single look made it impossible for him to pull his gaze away.
The man stood well over 183 centimeters tall, with a lean build and a slightly tanned face. His facial features were sharply chiseled like carved stone, radiating a masculine beauty. Yet Zhuang Zhuoyi paid no attention to this face; what he stared at was the man’s shock of white hair.
The scorching sunlight cast the man’s long shadow upon the ground, and he stood there like a lifeless sculpture. Zhuang Zhuoyi could feel an invisible wall of resistance pressing against him, causing him to involuntarily hold his breath with caution.
The man’s indifferent gaze swept past Zhuang Zhuoyi and he turned to leave. Zhuang Zhuoyi suddenly sprang forward in pursuit, his fingers tapping swiftly against the man’s back a few times. The man froze in place.
Zhuang Zhuoyi smiled faintly. “How about a private chat?”
This time, the man did not refuse. He led the way back into the makeshift house, and Zhuang Zhuoyi, following closely behind, told the injured henchmen to leave first.
Outside, the sound of a car driving away echoed through the air. Zhuang Zhuoyi looked at the man, who was sitting steadily on the bed and eating a cheap steamed bun with big bites, and said, “I felt it was strange the moment I came in. All the trash in the room looks chaotic, but if an intruder were to walk in, they would have to step around this noise-making debris to approach your current position. However, after taking three steps, I realized that the path navigating around this trash leads directly to an optimal attacking position.” As he spoke, a smile touched his lips. “Your optimal attacking position.”
The man ignored his lengthy speech and continued to bury his head in eating his bun. Zhuang Zhuoyi walked up to him and added, “There is not a speck of dust under the bed. Brother, you have never slept on this bed; you have always slept underneath it. The only kind of person I can think of who would do such a thing is…”
Hearing this, the man finally raised his head to look at him.
Tilting his head, Zhuang Zhuoyi sized up the man’s expressionless face. “You are a special forces soldier.”
The room was dead silent, and Zhuang Zhuoyi waited for the special forces soldier, now cornered by his deductions, to make a move. To his surprise, however, the man set down the paper wrapping the bun and raised his hand.
Zhuang Zhuoyi only felt something flash before his eyes. Before his brain could react in time, he lost his balance and was slammed heavily onto the bed.
The flimsy wire-mesh bed creaked in protest. Zhuang Zhuoyi found his shoulders pinned, his knees pressed down by the man’s foot so he could muster no strength. This entire sequence of events had taken no more than two seconds. Damn it, this guy is a top-tier special forces soldier.
Zhuang Zhuoyi felt a tinge of regret for being overly hasty, but matters had already progressed to this point. Apart from persuading this man as quickly as possible, there was no other way out. Therefore, maintaining a surface composure, he looked up at the man hovering over him and asked, “What did you do? Why so tense?”
The man remained silent. His originally blank gaze suddenly deepened. He slowly leaned closer to Zhuang Zhuoyi, staring directly into his eyes. One of his hands clamped onto Zhuang Zhuoyi’s neck, and Zhuang Zhuoyi felt his carotid pulse nearly merge with the man’s hand. As those deep eyes drew closer and closer, they actually began to induce a sense of drowsiness.
“You…” Zhuang Zhuoyi struggled to find that he could barely speak. Realizing something was terribly wrong, he vaguely heard someone asking: “What is your name?”
“Zhuang Zhuoyi.”
“Profession?”
“Private detective.”
A look of distinct confusion crossed the man’s face, followed by another question: “Who are you looking for?” After the question, no answer came. The man furrowed his brows, lowered his upper body further until he was nearly pressed against Zhuang Zhuoyi. Fixing his eyes on Zhuang Zhuoyi’s, his gaze shifted with subtle complexity. In a deep voice and flat tone, he asked again: “Who are you looking for?”
Suddenly, Zhuang Zhuoyi’s eyes widened in fury. “You are hypnotizing me! Get off!”
This angry roar made the man pause slightly, and it was precisely this split second of distraction that allowed Zhuang Zhuoyi to seize the opportunity and throw a punch. Evading the strike, the man nimbly stood up.
“What do you want?” the man asked.
Sitting on the bed in a slightly disheveled state, Zhuang Zhuoyi gasped for breath. With a mild case of germaphobia, he immediately stood up, unwilling to linger in the filthy space a moment longer. Flexing his legs, he judged from the sensory feedback in his pressed knees that the duration of his unconsciousness had not been long. While feeling a sense of relief, lingering dread remained. Once upon a time, several psychologists had attempted to hypnotize him to recover his lost memories, and every single attempt had ended in failure; they couldn’t even successfully hypnotize him in the first place. Yet the man before him had achieved it by cutting off his blood circulation to induce cerebral hypoxia, employing an unknown form of hypnosis to effortlessly drag him into an unconscious state. Staring at him in astonishment, he suddenly realized his judgment had been wrong: the person before him was definitely no ordinary special forces soldier!
Thrilling! It has been a long time since I encountered such a formidable opponent!
Pulling his scattered emotions back into order, Zhuang Zhuoyi deployed a roundabout tactic. “How did you discover someone was locked in the warehouse?”
Without a word, the man picked up a tattered backpack from the corner and walked toward the door. Zhuang Zhuoyi suddenly called out: “Running away?”
“Do not look for trouble with me,” the man dropped a final sentence and walked out without looking back.
A playful smile surfaced on his face. For reasons unknown, rather than feeling angry at this man, Zhuang Zhuoyi felt a surge of immense interest. He rarely chased after anyone, but this time, he followed closely in the man’s footsteps for a long distance.
One walked ahead with his head buried, while the other followed behind with keen interest. After a while, the man finally grew thoroughly annoyed by the tail!
“If you want to know about the warehouse, go investigate it yourself. Stop following me.”
“I am hiring you.”
The man froze for a moment, struggling to keep pace with the other’s rhythm. With his hands buried in his trouser pockets, Zhuang Zhuoyi stepped forward. “The person you saved is implicated in a murder case, and the police do not yet know of your existence. If they find out, do you think they will hound you relentlessly the way I am doing right now?”
A flash of murderous intent crossed the man’s eyes. Yet Zhuang Zhuoyi showed no fear, pointing at the ground with his finger. “If you truly intended to shake me off, you shouldn’t have let those brothers go. In doing things, one must cut the weeds and root them out. Now that you have left a tail behind, unless you cooperate with me, the police will track you down sooner or later.”
“You were prepared from the start.” The man showed no surprise; his flat tone merely reiterated a factual truth.
The cunning fox smiled triumphantly, having accurately gauged that this man dreaded inviting trouble onto himself. He had therefore made up his mind: such a man must either be his enemy or his pawn.
Afterward, that is, a very, very long time later, Zhuang Zhuoyi would often look back and think: if he hadn’t set his sights on this man back then, he and this man could never have become so hopelessly entangled for a lifetime.
His white hair appeared somewhat dazzling under the sunlight. Like a stubborn mute, the man stared at Zhuang Zhuoyi without uttering a word, his gaze so cold it made Zhuang Zhuoyi feel slightly uneasy. But who was he? He was Young Master Yi, a man who devoured flesh without spitting out the bones. Would he take such a small matter to heart? Stepping right up to the man, he lifted his chin and smiled: “Be my personal bodyguard, responsible for protecting me twenty-four hours a day and assisting with my work. No rest days, no statutory holidays, no right to resign automatically, and no right to rebut me. As for the monthly salary, let us say ten thousand. You are worth that price.”
Not a single change registered on the man’s wooden face, save for his gaze growing increasingly icy. Instead of backing down, Zhuang Zhuoyi pressed on with redoubled audacity: “You can try hypnotizing me again, or kill me. Of course, provided you can get used to living the rest of your days hunted by the police and squeezed by the Zhuang financial group.”
A sweltering wind swept past, carrying dry dust. The triumphant fox covered his mouth with a hand, his eyes curving into smiling crescents as he scrutinized the sullen-faced man.
“I am not the person you need.” The man suddenly spoke.
“That is for me to decide.”
He spoke with complete nonchalance, fully aware that this defied all conventional logic. Who would hire someone they had known for less than an hour as an assistant? Especially when that person was extremely dangerous. But Zhuang Zhuoyi was precisely such an irrational person; he never played by the book and stood miles apart from standard thinking. His leaps of logic and aberrant code of conduct left him with few friends. He was more than happy to indulge himself in this manner, reveling in the sheer amusement of it all. Thus, while others would find this move erratic and incomprehensible, to him, it was endlessly fascinating.
It was difficult to measure precisely how long their standoff lasted. Gradually, the portion of Zhuang Zhuoyi’s face bathed in sunlight flushed an abnormal red, sweat trickling down his smooth forehead to hang from his long eyelashes. He stared unblinkingly straight into the other’s eyes, enduring until his legs ached, his head swam, and his vision blurred before the man finally deigned to speak: “I can answer your questions about the warehouse. After that, stop pestering me.”
Zhuang Zhuoyi looked quite disappointed by the man’s proposal, but he quickly shook off the negative emotion, flashed the man a carefree smile, and extended a hand: “Very well, we will cooperate just this once.”
Hesitating for a split second, the man looked at that seemingly relentless hand and finally stretched out his own.
Zhuang Zhuoyi tilted his chin up slightly, a half-smile playing on his lips. “What is your name?”
“Qi Junyang,” the man replied.
“A good name.” Pulling out his phone, Zhuang Zhuoyi dialed a number as he turned back the way they came, calling out over his shoulder, “Let us go, Junyang. Let us go take a look at that warehouse.”
Watching the back of the man calling on his phone ahead of him, Qi Junyang suppressed the murderous intent lurking deep within his breathing.
Walking back to the small warehouse where Liu Tie had been imprisoned, they found one of the doors half-open. Zhuang Zhuoyi crouched down and pulled out his portable notebook, which contained a thumbnail-sized brush and a packet of white powder.
He evenly dusted the powder over the inner handle of the door, waited about ten seconds, and then gently swept away the white powder with the brush. Immediately, a set of complete yet slightly smudged fingerprints materialized. Carefully lifting them with a transparent piece of oil-absorptive film, he stored the sample securely away. Then, covering his nose and mouth, he stepped inside the warehouse.
The heavy odor of mold hanging in the air made him furrow his brow. Noting that the warehouse was not particularly large, Zhuang Zhuoyi spotted its sole small window. Outside the windowpane was a sheet of iron nailed shut, while the floor beneath the window was covered by a neat sequence of newspapers laid edge to edge.
Crouching down to examine those newspapers closely, he chatted idly with Qi Junyang: “Are you familiar with the city’s Zhuang financial group? Have you heard of Haotian Group?”
Was this showing off or probing? Qi Junyang searched Zhuang Zhuoyi’s indifferent expression for any trace of suspicion, finding none. He therefore replied flatly: “Never heard of them.”
“Oh.” Flipping aside a newspaper, Zhuang Zhuoyi inspected the floor. “My family has been in commerce for generations. By my generation, the family fortune is quite substantial. My eldest brother is the chairman of Haotian, and several of my uncles hold positions in the business and political spheres. How did you manage to discover Liu Tie?”
The sudden shift in topic did not seem to fluster Qi Junyang. Glancing sideways at Zhuang Zhuoyi, he chose not to answer.