Just then.
The men carrying weapons arrived as well.
A dozen or so men came rushing over with hoes and sickles, surrounding them and completely blocking the courtyard gate.
“Put the child down!”
At their head was a burly, dark-skinned man clutching a sharp sickle. He glared fixedly at Lin Yan.
Lin Yan looked at them coldly without saying a word.
He adjusted how he was holding Panpan.
He rested her little head against his shoulder, trying to minimize the jostling.
“Why waste your breath on him? Get him!”
Another man holding a hoe roared and charged forward first.
The hoe came crashing down hard toward Lin Yan’s shoulder.
Lin Yan shifted to the side, easily dodging the hoe, then raised his leg.
“Thud!”
A muffled impact rang out.
The man went flying and slammed into the earthen wall.
“Hubby!”
A woman shrieked and rushed over.
The other men were both shocked and furious at the sight.
They exchanged glances, then charged all at once.
Lin Yan held Panpan securely in one arm while his other hand blurred into a streak.
“Thud! Thud! Thud!”
A series of muffled impacts and pained cries rang out.
The men who charged at him went flying one after another, crashing to the ground and groaning in pain.
Hoes and sickles lay scattered across the ground.
In less than half a minute,
all the men were sprawled on the ground.
That was enough to make everyone behave.
The women backed away in terror.
The men groaned on the ground, and no one dared step forward to stop him.
The entire courtyard fell silent, with only Fugui’s intermittent sobs breaking the quiet.
The villagers could only watch helplessly as Lin Yan carried Panpan toward the courtyard gate, one step at a time.
At the edge of the crowd,
the old man from the village shop was there too.
He’d heard the commotion and come over to watch.
When Lin Yan passed by him, the old man shuddered in fright and instinctively shrank back.
Lin Yan stopped and looked at him.
The old man’s heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might leap from his chest. He thought this menace was going to settle accounts with him.
Unexpectedly,
Lin Yan simply nodded to him.
“Thank you, sir.”
With that, he carried Panpan through the crowd without looking back and headed toward the village entrance.
The villagers stared blankly as his figure disappeared at the end of the dirt road.
After a long while, someone finally asked in a trembling voice,
“W-who... who was that?”
“Shufen... is Shufen still alive?”
“Hurry and check!”
The old man stood where he was, gazing in the direction Lin Yan had gone and murmuring,
“What a terrible sin... truly a terrible sin...”
He turned around, clasped his hands behind his back, and slowly ambled back to his village shop.
...
...
Lin Yan had just carried Panpan out of the village.
The place was so remote that the ambulance wouldn’t arrive anytime soon.
He grew more and more anxious,
while Panpan’s breathing grew weaker and weaker in his arms, and her body temperature was frighteningly low.
Each faint rise and fall seemed as if it might stop at any moment.
Just then,
a sharp siren wailed in the distance, growing closer.
Two police cars sped toward them and screeched to a halt across the road.
Seven or eight police officers jumped out.
Leading them was a stern-faced veteran officer in his fifties.
He immediately spotted the child in Lin Yan’s arms, then noticed the conspicuous scar on Lin Yan’s face. He raised a hand and shouted,
“Police! Don’t move! Put the child down!”
The other officers quickly spread out, their hands resting on their holsters.
Lin Yan stopped in his tracks and understood at once.
The villagers had called the police.
Seeing that he wasn’t moving, the veteran officer slowly drew his service pistol with his right hand.
“I’ll say it again: put the child down and take out your ID!”
The report they’d received had been very clear:
a strange man with a scar on his face had violently snatched a child.
The man before them fit the description exactly.
Lin Yan pulled Panpan closer to his chest and met the veteran officer’s gaze.
“Officer, this child is my comrade-in-arms’ daughter. Her own aunt locked her in a pigsty with chains and abused her. I came to save her.”
The veteran officer’s gaze quickly swept over Panpan.
The child was emaciated, her exposed calves covered in bruises and scars. A ring of raw, bloodied marks around her ankle was horrifying to see.
The officer’s eyelid twitched.
God damn it, if this was true...
But he didn’t let down his guard. His voice softened slightly.
“Let the child come to us first. If your account checks out, we’ll handle this and get her to the hospital.”
“No. I have to take her there myself.”
The veteran officer’s expression darkened.
Just then,
the villagers caught up from behind.
The moment Li Shufen saw the police, she collapsed to the ground, slapped her thighs, and cried, “Officer! That’s my child! This kidnapper broke into my home and stole her, and he even beat people!”
“That’s right, Officer! He’s vicious!”
“We all saw it!”
“He injured several people, too!”
The male villagers Lin Yan had knocked down shouted even louder:
“A kidnapper like that deserves to be shot! Officer, hurry up and shoot him!”
Lin Yan whipped around, his icy gaze sweeping across the crowd.
A wave of Killing Aura spread silently.
The loudest villagers immediately shrank their necks, their words catching in their throats.
The scene reached an impasse.
Cold sweat beaded on the veteran officer’s temples.
Shoot?
Absolutely not. The child was still in the man’s hands.
Let him go?
Even less possible.
If this was mishandled, it would become a major public scandal.
He took a deep breath and tried one last time to persuade him.
“Young man, I promise you as a police officer that if you hand the child over to us, we’ll take her to the hospital immediately and thoroughly investigate the abuse. Please believe...”
“I don’t believe you.”
Lin Yan cut him off, his voice as cold and hard as iron.
“I have to take the child there myself.”
Before he could finish,
“Woo-woo! Woo-woo!”
The ambulance siren finally sounded.
An ambulance raced over and stopped behind the police cars.
The doors opened.
Several emergency doctors had just climbed out with a stretcher when the tense scene before them stunned them.
The police had their guns trained on a scar-faced man holding a child...
This wasn’t an emergency scene—it was an arrest in progress!
“What are you doing here?”
the veteran officer asked, turning to them.
The doctor leading them stammered,
“W-we got an order saying there was a little girl here who urgently needed resuscitation...”
The veteran officer’s thoughts stirred, and he looked at the child in Lin Yan’s arms.
Could it be...
He was telling the truth?
When Lin Yan saw the ambulance, half the weight lifted from his heart, but then it tightened again.
He could barely feel Panpan breathing, and her little face had turned ashen.
She had to get into the ambulance immediately!
He had just started to move when several shouts rang out at once:
“Don’t move!”
“Move again and we’ll shoot!”
Lin Yan’s gaze sharpened.
He held Panpan tightly against his chest with his left arm.
At some point, a short sword gleaming with cold light had appeared in his right hand.
His figure flashed.
“Ah!”
“Ugh!”
Several short cries of pain rang out.
The officers felt a chill at their wrists, and their service pistols fell from their hands.
The veteran officer hadn’t even seen what he did; everything had simply blurred before his eyes.
Lin Yan had already slipped through the encirclement and was standing steadily beside the ambulance.
“Hurry!”
Lin Yan growled at the stunned doctors,
“The child’s dying! Resuscitate her now!”
The doctors went pale.
They looked at the man who had taken down several police officers in an instant, then at the frail child in his arms.
Not one of them dared move.
“Damn it!”
Lin Yan cursed, the veins at his temples bulging.
A bunch of useless fools!
He wanted to slap every one of them awake.
Just as the standoff continued,
one doctor’s phone suddenly rang.
He fumbled it out, glanced at the screen, and jolted.
It was the Dean.
“Hello... D-Dean?”
“Have you got the patient? What’s going on?!”
The Dean’s roar nearly blasted through the phone.
“W-what patient? Dean, things are a little complicated here. Let me explain...”
“Explain my ass! I don’t care how complicated it is! If that little girl doesn’t make it, I’ll skin every one of you alive! Now! Save her! That’s a direct order! Do you hear me?!”
The call was abruptly cut off.
The doctor held the phone and stared blankly for two seconds.
Then he jolted, and professional instinct instantly overpowered his fear.
“Quick! Take the child! Get her in the ambulance! Prepare for emergency treatment! Hurry!”
His shout jolted the other medical staff out of their daze.
Several of them came to their senses, rushed forward, took the weightless Panpan from Lin Yan, quickly placed her on the stretcher, and carried her into the ambulance.
The monitor, oxygen mask, IV line...
A series of procedures unfolded rapidly in the cramped ambulance.
Lin Yan followed close behind, stepping into the ambulance in one stride.
The doors slammed shut.
The siren blared again as the ambulance turned around and sped back the way it had come.
All that remained were the stunned police by the roadside and the villagers, still unable to recover from the sudden turn of events.
The veteran officer watched the ambulance’s taillights rapidly disappear into the distance.
He slowly holstered his weapon and spoke solemnly into his radio.
“Command Center, this is the scene at Wang Family Village. The situation has changed. There may be severe child abuse and violent resistance to law enforcement involved. Requesting backup, and please contact the hospital to verify the situation.”