Self-rescue has a clear goal, but the process doesn’t necessarily have to be: escape, and don’t let them catch up.
It could also be using the cage as a protective room.
Su Li had considered that the three of them were a group, and there were two adult men; she might not be able to outrun them. So she would rather protect herself this way.
But she was ruthless too; she also trapped the three of them firmly in here.
She had no intention of making peace with them.
Lin Zong and the other two were practically showing their fangs. They went at the lock, kicking and striking it. Even Lin Zong, this “kind old man,” spewed filthy insults.
Zhang Cheng narrowed his eyes and sneered. “This lock isn’t made of steel, little girl. You’d better be sure we can’t break it, or else…”
In the darkness, you couldn’t see his expression, but his voice was eerie and cruel, carrying that lowest kind of male malice toward a woman.
An ordinary person would panic just hearing the thuds of the lock being kicked.
The more arrogant you were before, the more panicked you’d be now.
But Su Li wasn’t.
She only said faintly, “That’s why I’m saying you’re idiots.”
“There wasn’t a breaker trip sound just now; that means there’s still power. You don’t know that?”
And then—
A scream.
Lin Zong’s scream.
That old bastard had just been kicking the lock.
But it was live.
It turned out Su Li had pulled the wire out in the dark. She used her insole to hold the wire and touched it to the iron bars.
Conductive.
Go on, kick it.
“Also, my insoles are really good quality.”
“Pure rubber. They didn’t lie to me.”
“Really, you get what you pay for…”
Huang Xiuling and Zhang Cheng both recoiled in fear, not daring to attack the lock again.
Lin Zong had collapsed. No one knew if he’d been electrocuted to death.
In any case, the darkness finally fell into absolute silence.
Only their heavy breathing remained.
A stalemate…
After a while, Zhang Cheng said, “Actually, this is like we’re killing each other. There’s no need for this. Miss Su, maybe you misunderstood us. If you hadn’t broken free first, looking like you were about to do something, the three of us might not have attacked you.”
“Have you considered that, in our eyes, you might also look like a two-faced, sly bad person?”
“We were protecting ourselves too.”
Su Li said, “Is that so? Then tell me this: why were you swapping occupations and hiding your identities? You started lying from the beginning. If you were really ordinary nobodies, what was there to hide?”
“Like anyone would care enough to investigate you.”
Huang Xiuling said, “We didn’t lie.”
Su Li said, “Is taxi business in Changlin easy? You’d get hemorrhoids easily, right? That’s why you changed sitting positions several times in one minute, and in the end you chose to lie down.”
“Old man Lin, you said you’re a Chinese medicine practitioner, but your liver fire is strong and your breath stinks. Are you a quack?”
“Fatso, you said you’re a teacher. That ‘85, that ‘90—you could follow my words and throw in a few lines. You weren’t exactly wrong; the logic can even match up. But you borrowed Old Man Lin’s history and forgot the age gap between you two. At your age, you can’t fit into those years’ reforms. You acted so long you started believing it yourself?”
Huang Xiuling shut up. Lin Zong was in no condition to speak. Zhang Cheng said, “I just look young. I’m not actually that young.”
Su Li said, “Then I’ll give you a question. What subject do you like teaching?”
That move pinned him in place.
He couldn’t answer at all.
Total wipeout.
Zhang Cheng spoke again with unwillingness and malice, his voice turning sinister. “Fine, your logic sounds reasonable. But have you ever thought—if we truly meant you harm, we wouldn’t choose to do it here. And you—now you’ve made it like this, sure, you’ve avoided contact with us. But have you thought about it? Our real opponent is that old gentleman.”
“Dying together with us like this; do you think it’s worth it?”
Su Li laughed.
It was that classic rich-pretty-girl laugh: arrogant, contemptuous, looking down on people.
Like a villain.
“The doors are locked. Before, we couldn’t catch him or hurt him. What did we rely on? The outer sealed iron gate. Otherwise, Old Man Lin could’ve untied himself long ago; why didn’t he fight back?”
“Same logic. What protects him can protect us too.”
“I want to see how a cripple gets in.”
In the darkness, the atmosphere fell into another deadlock.
Zhang Cheng had nothing to say either.
In their current situation, Su Li was absolutely safe. They were safe too. But once the police arrived…
Huang Xiuling suddenly started crying.
“I really didn’t mean it. I’m too poor, Miss Su. My kids at home need money.”
“If I hadn’t been dragged here, when I went back I’d definitely lose my job. I have no other income. I can’t raise my kids. So I could only… You’re too rich. I thought if I could get money from you, even if I went to prison, I’d be willing, as long as I could raise my kids.”
“Do you think I wasn’t a good person before? If I hadn’t been bullied and couldn’t stay in school, I wouldn’t be like this now.”
Su Li said, “The one who bullied you?”
Huang Xiuling said, “You’re the type with money and power. You should know very well—no matter what you people do, there will be others who protect you at any cost, even covering up your mistakes, even finding scapegoats for you.”
“I always felt their family business wasn’t clean. When I was in school, my best friend… disappeared. A lot of people said she was taken by traffickers. The last person she had contact with was her.”
“But the school didn’t dare do anything to her. The police came and went through the motions. She was fine. And because I reported her, I was targeted. I couldn’t keep studying. My grades used to be very good… Miss Su, sometimes I really envy you.”
“Maybe us ordinary poor girls are just born with this kind of fate. From birth to disappearance, we’re as unnoticeable as snowflakes.”
“If it wasn’t for her, my life probably wouldn’t have ended up like this.”
“She ruined my whole life.”
“I even suspect she might be in on it with that masked old man, just to silence me.”
Su Li said, “What’s her name?”
“Liu Mei.”
The moment she said it—
In front of the TV screen, Zhen Wuyu, holding pen and paper and writing notes, jerked upright.
Liu Mei?
Liu Mei from the Liu family?
She was driving Liu Duan to the next factory right now.
If she was working with that masked old man…
Damn it!
Was this case really this twisted?
Zhen Wuyu’s head had been full of the tape’s information and the changing situation, but the name “Liu Mei” threw everything into chaos.
He immediately dialed his phone…
No answer, no answer…
Right then, a voice that had been gone for a while suddenly came through the TV.
“You’re really good at making trouble.”
“Very interesting.”
“But did you ever think… this world has something called a generator?”
The three people in the dark jolted.
The broadcast still worked. The Saw Grandpa sighed.
“Even though I’m satisfied you gave me a good show, it’s a pity; you broke the rules too.”
“I don’t like people lying to me.”
“But I am a cripple. I can’t rush in and hit you. And besides, I can’t open the door.”
“It’s so cold; I’ll release some gas to warm you up.”
Not only Su Li and the others—Zhen Wuyu in front of the TV also heard the hiss.
He suddenly remembered the masked man’s threat to Chen Qing and Luo Hong in the earlier tape—five gas canisters venting together, poisoning them through the vent.
So it really had been arranged like that.
It was over.
Inside, the three were terrified and furious.
“You’ve been lying to us the whole time?! You never planned to let us out alive!”
“You freak!”
“Let us go!”
“Please, let us go…”
“Why? Why are you killing us?”
They all panicked. Some cried, some begged.
Su Li stayed calm. She covered her mouth and nose and said weakly, “Do we have to die?”
The Saw Grandpa said, “You’ve seen me. Who would let witnesses live?”
Zhang Cheng shouted, “You’re wearing a mask. We don’t know you!”
The Saw Grandpa said, “Then you deserve to die even more.”
What?
What did that mean?
Had they offended him? Was it because of what they did before? Zhang Cheng’s eyes were vicious, but also desperate.
He knew that if it was about those past things, the enemy they’d provoked would be a life-and-death grudge. There would be no negotiation.
He tried to slam himself into the iron gate to break it open, but it was useless.
A trapped beast’s struggle!
Su Li said, “If we really have to die, I want to make one last request—transfer money for me.”
It was unexpected.
Even the Saw Grandpa was surprised. Su Li, barely breathing, continued, “Send money to Huang Xiuling’s account. Two hundred thousand.”
“For her children.”
The Saw Grandpa said, “You really believe her… She wanted to kill you.”
Su Li said, “If it’s true, it’s for her kids anyway. It has nothing to do with her.”
“Children are innocent.”
Huang Xiuling was stunned, her breathing unstable. Zhang Cheng snapped, “Xiuling!”
This fat man was the most cautious and most cunning of the four. He seemed to be warning her about something. But with the real gas in the air, Huang Xiuling didn’t know what she was thinking. In the end, she still weakly gave an account number.
“This one. Send it to this one.”
“Thank you…”
“Please save my children. Give them money, let them grow up well.”
Zhen Wuyu tightened his grip on the pen as tape 04 reached 100%.
Finished.
The runtime wasn’t short, but it wasn’t long either.
But the time left for him was very, very short—how long before gas poisoning kills?
Fifteen minutes to over half an hour could lead to heart failure or brain death; longer than that threatens life and ends in death.
The TV went quiet. Outside, there were voices from factory workers and government staff talking about local employment and restarting production, mixed with the sound of wind and snow.
Zhen Wuyu looked at the notes he’d written on paper.
1. The knotting method was a bit special. Su Li used quick thinking, but Lin Zong could undo it—and the other two, Huang Xiuling and Zhang Cheng, could as well. They just weren’t as practiced as Lin Zong, which was why they came out later.
Unfortunately the video wasn’t clear enough to reconstruct the knot. Otherwise he would really want to draw it and later pass it to people in the system to identify—see if it meant something, whether it was tied to another case, maybe trace the “unclean” past of this four-person group.
2. Su Li mentioned her family background—her tycoon father was secondary. The key point was her bureau chief mother. That identity was the most sensitive. Logically, even if the group of four wanted to kill her, under the masked man’s threat, Su Li’s identity should have been a protective charm, something that would bring strong police support. Even if those four had done something back then, they were now wearing “safe” identities; before being exposed, getting out of the current trap should have been the most urgent. But they didn’t seem to care at all.
Unless… they didn’t just know Su Li. They already knew her biological mother’s identity, and even knew that identity was no longer effective. That brought it back to the earlier clue: Su Li came back to Baimu Town to pay respects to a very important relative. That relative should be her mother—a bureau chief. And perhaps that bureau chief’s death was classified inside the system. That matched Liu Duan and the Baimu Town chief’s evasiveness about Su Li’s identity, and also matched why Su Li’s identity search permissions were blocked.
3. Whether Luo Hong was dead, whether Chen Qing was alive, and the masked man’s real purpose—before he set up this case, why did he deliberately tie it to the Qi Meijuan 315 case?
These had been the hard mysteries to solve, but now they had to be pushed back. Those cases were in the past. The current case and human lives mattered most. The priority was to find the location—where Su Li and the others were being held.
Other than that, there didn’t seem to be more clues left. There was no way to narrow down the location further.
The situation was urgent, but Zhen Wuyu was even calmer. He replayed the video, still seeing nothing new.
Su Li hadn’t left a physical clue, but what she said…
Some of it seemed worth paying attention to.
Insoles? Rubber—yes, that was good. It was her quick thinking, and a method she had planned out.
But it wasn’t enough for her to mutter three lines in a row praising her insoles.
She wasn’t a chatterbox.
At least, ever since Zhen Wuyu first knew her, he knew she wasn’t a chatterbox.
On the day the teacher was taken away, the day everyone pointed at her, she stood behind the railing on the third-floor skybridge between buildings, arms crossed over her chest, looking down from above. That pretty face that had once been innocent and youthful only carried the faint curve of a smile at the corner of her lips.
Cold. Proud. A desire to win she never said out loud.
When she was pleased, she was the quietest.
Later, as he grew up and became a rising star in police circles, after seeing too many powerful people and “upper-class” successful figures, he realized it was their natural way of being—when power is in your hands, you don’t show joy or anger on your face.
She was like that even when she was young. He didn’t believe she’d grow up and become low-grade instead.
So… she was saying it for “someone else” to hear.
The person hearing it now was him.
Zhen Wuyu’s fingers moved. He quickly wrote down a word.
Shoe?
Then he thought a bit, and added another character after it.
Last.
Shoe last.
Leather shoe manufacturing needs shoe lasts, and those require wood—wood of fairly high quality. Leather shoes weren’t low-end daily goods; they were higher value. In that era, it would have been a famous big factory, with strict management, maybe even foreign investment. If it was a brand operation, the requirements for setting up the factory would be high in every aspect.
He remembered: among the five factories they had circled, one was a shoe factory, invested by a Hong Kong brand.
Was it that one?
He didn’t have much time left. If he went to the wrong place, then even if they found the right place later, the people would already be dead.
Was he being overly suspicious and guessing wrong, or had she really used those three lines to tip him off? For that to be true, the premise had to be: how could she tell it was a shoe factory?
To save time, Zhen Wuyu had already packed up and left the room. He found the person in charge and took the snow vehicle key.
He got in, and the search results on his phone finally loaded. He saw the brand name of the broadcast speaker in the search bar.
An expensive foreign brand, this year’s new model.
But its internal capacity was large. To open it up and install a camera inside, it wasn’t just the technical work; even arranging the circuitry would be complicated.
First, this masked man had to be skilled in this kind of technology. Second, this area had to have strong network signal equipment, enough to support this level of technical sensitivity.
In a blizzard, to record video successfully and keep it smooth the whole time with no lag, the device was one thing and the network strength was another. So this factory either added such equipment during renovations, or it was near a base station.
In his memory, that shoe factory was called Hongfeng Shoe Factory. It used to belong to a Hong Kong brand. The factory was close to the mountain, and there really was a telecom base station platform on the mountaintop.
Su Li’s family was rich. She likely knew the local commercial layout and history. By judging the difficulty of filming with a camera installed in the broadcast speaker in this region, she could infer that this place was likely Hongfeng Shoe Factory.
Zhen Wuyu made his logic internally consistent through guessing, and decided to gamble. He also set a timed message to send to Liu Duan.
Send after fifteen minutes.
——The accompanying L accomplice in the 315 case may have a problem. Recheck it. You can have the informant lead you to the suspected target location: the shoe factory.
Then, while the signal still held, he immediately called the bureau and demanded a thorough check of three things.
First, the shoe factory’s files. Second, whether the power system near the shoe factory had abnormal fluctuations within a two-hour window. Third, whether Liu Mei and Huang Xiuling had attended the same school, and whether they were linked to any female disappearance case or human trafficking case.
The first two were support measures. If he learned something was wrong on the way, he could still change routes.
The snow vehicle shot out at high speed. Snow sprayed up. The commotion was so big that the workers and government staff outside all stared in shock.
“Going that hard? This weather isn’t suitable for driving like that.”
“The police came to investigate a case. Maybe they found something.”
“What case is so urgent lately?”
“Are you out of your mind? You forgot Changlin’s 315? And I heard yesterday a female tourist went missing in our Baimu Town too—abducted. Scary. No idea if it’s the same criminal. My mom heard about it this morning and told my daughter not to run around. She said more than ten years ago, Baimu Town had a really vicious case too, called…”
A government staff member frowned and cut him off, telling him to talk about the work.
The workers didn’t continue. After the discussion ended and the government staff left, the workers looked around and started whispering again. Two keywords came up again and again.
Baimian Chang.
Snow Spirit Path.