Li Yuan pushed open the old wooden door and stepped out onto the office building’s rooftop.
It was a cramped rooftop. Enormous pipes took up most of the space, and the middle had been sectioned off into several small, tofu-like plots of land. They were planted with things Li Yuan couldn’t identify—perhaps vegetables, or maybe just flowers and plants. They grew with a gratifying lushness, verdant and thriving, and simply looking at them lifted one’s spirits considerably.
Beyond the rooftop stood a silent forest of towering steel skyscrapers. They were hard, cold, and their colors were dull, like a group of silent giants looming in and out of sight amidst the increasingly heavy smog—taciturn and gloomy. Looking at them, Li Yuan had the sudden, fleeting illusion that those tall buildings were surrounding this tiny vegetable patch.
She shook her head, casting the strange thought aside, and carefully stepped past the plants. Rounding one of the giant pipes, she saw a man’s back as he leaned against the railing.
“Something on your mind?” she asked, walking up and leaning against the railing beside him.
The man seemed to only just notice her arrival. He shook his head helplessly and delivered news Li Yuan had never anticipated: “Qi Xin’s mother, Li Wanying, has disappeared.”
Li Yuan froze. “Wasn’t she locked up…” she said, a trace of disbelief in her voice.
“She vanished from her room. The handcuffs were intact, the surveillance had a brief power outage, and the person guarding her was Zhou Liao, who is now being resuscitated in the hospital,” Yu Mi cut her off, his tone grim. “If things don’t go well, Zhou Liao might be spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”
Li Yuan was speechless for a long moment before murmuring, “But in the previous tests, she was clearly a regular person…”
Her mind was still reeling, completely unable to reconcile the Li Wanying in her memory with the deeply cunning and ruthless woman Yu Mi described. In her memory, Li Wanying was a fierce-looking but inwardly weak, arrogant, and utterly detestable middle-aged woman. When she sat in the interrogation room, she was scared out of her wits, yet her voice still trembled as she threatened to sue them in court, to make them lose their jobs and pay until they were utterly bankrupt… How could such a buffoonish character suddenly turn out to be like this?
“I know. All physiological indicators were normal, and the instrument tests were passed—but clearly, the facts say otherwise. She must have received excellent counter-interrogation training,” Yu Mi said quietly. “It seems Qi Jianguo wasn’t the only good actor. Like husband, like wife, as they say. We shouldn’t have underestimated her from the start. She’s far more cunning than Qi Jianguo. This was my negligence.”
Li Yuan opened her mouth, then lowered her head somewhat ashamedly. Relying on past experience had been their downfall; she hadn’t harbored the slightest suspicion toward Li Wanying.
There wasn’t much that could be done about it, because Li Wanying had seemed so utterly normal. She was selfish and vain, arrogant yet insecure. She passed every evaluation and test, and the trivial, gossipy, neighborhood-watch-vibe she gave off was so overwhelmingly strong that it made one think she couldn’t possibly have any problems—not to mention her utterly disastrous marital relationship with Qi Jianguo. It turned out the buffoon wasn’t Li Wanying. People like her, who had been completely fooled and had thought so highly of their own judgment, were the true fools.
“What about Qi Xin? Does Qi Xin know about this?” Li Yuan suddenly realized.
Yu Mi shook his head. “She’s unaware. Li Wanying made no attempts to rescue her. I suspect Qi Xin and that Qi Ran really might know nothing. Li Wanying and Qi Jianguo didn’t tell their children anything. They might have planned to use the children as a smokescreen from the very beginning.”
“You need to build a good relationship with her. She trusts you now, and you must solidify that trust further. It might become our opportunity,” Yu Mi assessed.
“Is it possible… that this is also just a smokescreen?” Li Yuan ventured cautiously. “That she escaped alone without Qi Xin just to make us drop our suspicions of her?”
“Pointless,” Yu Mi dismissed the guess. “Because doing this will only make us treat Qi Xin with greater caution from now on. She could have easily taken Qi Xin with her when she escaped yesterday—if she could deal with Zhou Liao so effortlessly, dealing with you would have been just as easy.”
As if noticing his phrasing was a bit off, he added, “After all, like Zhou Liao, you had absolutely no guard up against her.”
Li Yuan felt her face burn. She knew this was just Yu Mi’s usual summarizing style, not passive-aggression or deliberate targeting. During post-mortems, he always let his thoughts drift and often spoke his mind without filtering them—which was why he always preferred to think alone, to avoid unnecessary trouble.
Unpleasant as it was, it was the truth. The gap between her and Zhou Liao wasn’t that large. If Li Wanying could defeat Zhou Liao so easily, she would have met the same fate. The thought sent a chill of lingering fear through her.
“What I’m wondering is, why did she show her hand now?” Yu Mi mused, lighting another cigarette. “Why didn’t she just escape the moment we captured her, instead of waiting until last night to suddenly reveal herself and flee? We were already completely fooled by her. What could be so important that she had to tear off her disguise and force her way out of our custody?”
“Is Qi Jianguo still in the ‘hospital’?” Li Yuan asked.
Yu Mi nodded. “Qi Jianguo has no means of contacting the outside world. She couldn’t have had any chance to communicate with him. I have a premonition—a bad one—that the reason she tore off a disguise she’d worn for over a decade is likely far more significant than I can imagine… Has there been any big news in The Circle recently?”
It was then that Li Yuan remembered why she’d come to the rooftop in the first place. “There’s a message from the Bai Family.”
“Bai Family?” Yu Mi shook his head. “That’ll be Li Siwen.”
Li Yuan nodded. “There are two things. One is reporting the address of an unknown location. The other is…”
She paused slightly, her expression turning awkward. “A report that someone from the Song Family attacked an ordinary employee under him—ordinary person Qi Ran. He says he hopes we, the Law Executors, will severely punish this vile act that violates the rules. He’s also posted the matter on the Forum, publicly denouncing the Song Family. That post is getting quite popular, because he also threw in a snide remark about that Song Family young master’s arrest for solicitation… Should we have it taken down?”
Yu Mi sighed, rubbing his aching temples. “What a fine ‘ordinary person, Qi Ran’… Don’t take it down. That will only make things worse. Just leave it be. That old fox wants to stir up muddy waters, so let him stir. Don’t create extra complications—anyway, muddying the waters isn’t a bad thing for us at the moment.”
“Understood.” Li Yuan nodded, turning to leave.
“—Speaking of which, how’s your illness progressing?” Yu Mi seemed to recall something, hesitated, and then asked.
“Same as always,” Li Yuan replied, slipping her hand under the hem of her shirt and slowly rubbing her flat stomach. “But after a few treatments, there’s been some effect. At least it doesn’t hurt anymore now.”
On that smooth skin, her fingertips could clearly feel a hideous scar. It was deep and wide, horrifically uneven, as if a small strip of flesh had been gouged out.
Yu Mi nodded, saying a bit dryly, “Take it slow. Healing is a persistent process. A full recovery is just a matter of time.”
Li Yuan smiled faintly, offering no comment on Yu Mi’s clumsy attempt at consolation.
(——————)
“Ding-dong.”
Jiang Zhique pressed the slightly old-fashioned doorbell, producing a clear, crisp sound.
Following Qi Ran’s directions, she had arrived at this residential complex. The complex looked quite old. The corridors were narrow and cramped, the wall plaster peeling away to reveal shocking red brick beneath. Advertisements were plastered everywhere like stubborn skin diseases across the dust-covered couplets on the doors—it didn’t look much better than that rundown shack Qi Jianguo lived in according to the intel.
After a moment, seeing no movement from the security door whatsoever, she pressed the doorbell again, an uneasy feeling growing in her heart.
When there was still no response, Jiang Zhique’s expression became slightly grave. She turned to Qi Ran beside her and asked, “Do you mind if I just unlock it and go in?”
