Volume 12
Chapter 20: A Barrage of Gunfire (Part 3)
“Little Qiao? Little Qiao!” No matter how Lu Li called, Zhu Qiao no longer responded. Her faint, shallow breaths pulled at Lu Li’s heartstrings. He really hated clichéd, tragic dramas, where the male and female leads go through countless hardships, only to be met with a cruel and indifferent ending, and in the end, are sighed over by others as being unlucky. Why couldn’t everyone just have a happy, harmonious reunion? Why must they be so resigned to the arrival of suffering?
“Little Qiao, you’ve thanked me too soon,” Lu Li said, carrying her on his back as he moved through the corridor dappled with bamboo shadows. The sound of footsteps behind him was getting closer. “You haven’t even played my new game yet, and I still promised to take you to push the iron hoop again. By that count, you still owe me two ‘thank yous.’ You can’t just leave like this.” Lu Li arrived at the emergency exit of the Red Ocean Hall and found that the doorknob was bound by a thick iron chain.
Lu Li fired a few shots at the chain. His technique was rather inexperienced, and his aim wasn’t very accurate. It took four shots to break the chain. It was only after the gunshots rang out that a man’s voice with a northwestern accent came from the main door behind Lu Li. “Over here!” That assassin hadn’t expected Lu Li to have a gun. He rashly rushed into the room where Lu Li was and was shot by Lu Li at close range, once in the shoulder, once in the chest. When he finally aimed for the head, the bullets happened to run out.
Watching the assassin writhing in pain on the ground, Lu Li was still hissing and sucking in sharp breaths. In that split second, his heart had been pushed to its limit. He hadn’t been this nervous even when he was surrounded by the wolf pack in the snow. His thoughts just now had been simple: to protect Zhu Qiao, he had to first limit the opponent’s right hand, so the first shot was aimed at the assassin’s right shoulder. But that wasn’t enough. The opponent could counterattack at any time. Lu Li wasn’t confident he could hit the head, so he switched to aiming for the left chest, only aiming for the head after the opponent had completely lost the ability to fight back.
Perhaps it was some kind of fateful coincidence, but in the end, Lu Li hadn’t been able to kill someone with his own hands. His soul still shaken, he picked up the assassin’s gun and glanced at the man squirming on the ground. It seemed the latter was not dead. Lu Li’s marksmanship still needed improvement; at such a close distance, he had missed the vital spot even when aiming for the left chest. Perhaps, for Lu Li, not hitting the vital spot was a blessing. He was not prepared to take another person’s life.
Taking advantage of this gap, Lu Li rushed out of the hall with Zhu Qiao on his back, running wildly down a certain road according to his rough sense of direction.
Zhu Qiao was now as light as a piece of paper. If Lu Li didn’t hold on tight, it seemed she would be blown away by the wind at any moment. From the Red Ocean Hall to the ancestral hall Zhu Xi had mentioned was not a short distance. Lu Li looked back and could see a group of colorful people at the end of his vision. They were firing in Lu Li’s direction, the crackling of gunfire like the sound of village children setting off firecrackers. Perhaps some mysterious force was at work; these out-of-range bullets did not land on Lu Li. As a price, Zhu Qiao’s breathing had almost stopped.
At a certain moment, a sharp pain shot through Lu Li’s left thigh. His leg gave way, and he half-knelt on the ground. Zhu Qiao, on his back, also fell pathetically to the ground. A stray bullet had entered his left thigh before, and he hadn’t had time to deal with it. Lu Li ignored his own injury and crawled to Zhu Qiao’s side on his hands and knees. “Little Qiao, are you okay?”
Of course, there was no reply.
Lu Li turned Zhu Qiao over and saw that the girl’s face was as pale as gold paper, completely bloodless, no different from a dead person. The girl from his memory, with sparkling eyes, a sweet smile, who followed him around calling him “gege” nonstop, was constantly moving further away. A kind of pain called “loss” engulfed him.
Lu Li, not believing in fate, carried the cold girl on his back and gritted his teeth, continuing toward the ancestral hall. He could see that past the street ahead, a simple, siheyuan-style building stood at the end, with no nameplate. That must be the ancestral hall, the place where Zhu Qiao grew up, the starting point of her life, and it might also be the end of her life.
At the final moment, Lu Li chose to believe Zhu Xi and brought Zhu Qiao to the ancestral hall instead of a hospital.
When Lu Li was only a short distance from the main gate of the ancestral hall, he began to shout for the door to be opened, but there was no movement from within. Lu Li dragged his bleeding left thigh and was about to crash into the heavy wooden door when a bullet crater suddenly appeared by his foot.
“Mr. Lu, another move, and you and the girl on your back will die without a complete corpse,” the middle-aged woman’s voice said. “Now, put down the weapon in your hand and slowly turn around.”
Lu Li swallowed hard. His eyes were bloodshot. He did as the woman instructed. When he turned around, he found that the assassins had already surrounded him, the dark muzzles of their guns no more than a hundred meters away from him.
“Do you know you’ve harmed Yan Rujun’s granddaughter?” Lu Li’s throat was dry, as if it were smoking. “If she finds out, you will all have to pay with your lives.”
“Mr. Lu, you don’t need to worry about that,” that woman said with a cold laugh. “All our orders are received from the Matriarch.”
Lu Li’s heart went completely cold. He couldn’t understand, couldn’t understand why the people of the Yan family would also be after Zhu Qiao.
He vaguely remembered his past life. He had never heard that the poison princess had a younger sister in his past life. Maybe… maybe it wasn’t that his level wasn’t high enough to have come into contact with her, nor was it that Zhu Qiao hadn’t left the ancestral hall, but…
Poison princess. Poison princess.
Zhu Xi had said that Zhu Qiao was her other half. If Zhu Qiao were to die, to what extent would Zhu Xi go mad? Would the current Zhu Xi still exist?
From beginning to end, Zhu Xi had overestimated the bottom line of some people.
At this point, there was no turning back. This wasn’t the first time Lu Li had kissed death. He was particularly calm and serene this time. He had some regrets. One was that he regretted not being able to apologize to Zhu Xi; he had misunderstood her a lot. Second was that he regretted not having a child with Baili. Third was that he had disappointed others in the end, especially his Yibao.
“Mr. Lu, do you have any last words? I will pass them on to Her Royal Highness the Fourteenth Princess.”
As the woman spoke, Lu Li shifted from carrying her on his back to holding her in his arms, letting Zhu Qiao lie in a more comfortable position. He didn’t pay any attention to her words, as if he weren’t a trapped beast surrounded, but a leisurely host sitting in a warm living room.
Just then, a small car honked and rushed over, forcibly breaking a gap in the encirclement.
“Is there something you have to say? Wouldn’t it be better to tell me in person instead of having it relayed?”
A tall figure got out of the front passenger seat. Zhu Xi, with her short hair, looked coldly at the armed assassins. “What? You’re pointing your guns at me?” As she spoke, she walked in front of Lu Li, facing dozens of deadly weapons alone.
More and more small cars stopped outside the ancestral hall. Bodyguards in black suits silently took out weapons from their trunks.
The assassins indeed hesitated and lowered their muzzles. Of course, they wouldn’t dare to open fire on Zhu Xi.
Zhu Xi didn’t look back at Lu Li. “You with the surname Lu, take Little Qiao inside. I’ll be there in a moment.” As if anticipating Lu Li’s words, she added, “Don’t be dramatic. I’m a hundred times safer than you. Get the hell inside.”
Lu Li smiled silently. He didn’t know what he was smiling at. “Thank you.”
Carrying a strange emotion in his heart, Lu Li pushed open the main gate of the ancestral hall and arrived at this place where it all began…
