Chapter 72#
Nie Xu gave him a long, deep look, but said nothing.
The operation was drawing to a close.
The entire East Coast had settled into the wind-down period that followed chaos. A police officer came over and cuffed Zhao Yuan. The officer in charge walked over to them and extended a hand to Nie Xu. “Mr. Nie, the case has made tremendous progress today, and that’s all thanks to you.”
“You’re too kind.” Nie Xu shook his hand.
The officer surveyed the surroundings and remarked, “When this case first happened, I was still a rookie intern at the station. The local police in Fanzhou coordinated with us for a cross-provincial manhunt, but in the end we came up empty. Everyone assumed the goods had already been shipped overseas. Now, to recover them at such a small dock—and it turns out to be connected to the Qiming from all those years back—this is no small matter. It’ll definitely be reported up the chain.”
Nie Xu nodded. “Understood. There aren’t many Nie family members left, and they’re all overseas. I can help make contact.”
“That would be wonderful.” The officer smiled. After a moment’s hesitation, he patted Nie Xu’s shoulder. “Digging up an old case—I hope it won’t be too painful for you.”
Nie Xu: “It won’t. If anything, I should be the one thanking you.”
When the police carried Zhao Yuan away, bits of wood shavings still clung to his ashen hair, making his already craggy face look even paler. As he passed by them, his cloudy eyes fixed on Ji Yang for two solid seconds, and a smile of unclear meaning curled at the corner of his mouth.
“Young Fourth Master,” he rasped, struggling twice against the officers until they stopped. He looked at Ji Yang and said with a cruel grin: “I, Zhao Yuan, called you ‘Young Master’ all those years, yet you never knew you should have been dead long ago.” He glanced at Nie Xu and burst into a mad cackle. “You—all of you—I, Zhao Yuan, have ended up like this! To be taken down by you young people! I can’t accept it!”
Nie Xu furrowed his brow and pulled Ji Yang behind him, shielding him with his arm.
His own eyes were locked on Zhao Yuan. “What did you mean by ‘should have been dead’?”
“You want to know?” Zhao Yuan’s voice came low, scraping from his throat. “Go ask your parents in the underworld.”
Nie Xu immediately lunged forward.
Ji Yang grabbed him. “Don’t listen to his bullshit.”
As someone who’d transmigrated into a book—who had already died before, no less—how could I not already know that?
Jiang Lei also hurried to intervene. “That old geezer is obviously doing this on purpose. His words aren’t necessarily reliable.”
The officer from earlier signaled his colleagues to get the man moving. “People like this, once they see no way out, they’ll say anything. Don’t worry—even though this case spans nearly twenty years, we won’t let a single clue slip.”
The officer said this, but inwardly he felt he hadn’t quite hit the mark.
After all, as a professional, his instinct told him that the cultural relic theft case was itself only a beginning. The way it had unraveled to implicate the Qiming—it all seemed to have been within this man Nie Xu’s calculations all along.
The reason Nie Xu had lunged forward seemed to have something to do with the person behind him.
What exactly was their relationship?
The officer took this question with him as he wrapped things up.
After the officer left, Ji Yang pulled Nie Xu’s arm away.
Only now did he turn his attention to the crates of cargo being sealed, growing more impressed the more he looked.
“Whatever this is, it’s worth a firing squad,” Ji Yang remarked. “And it happened all those years ago.”
Jiang Lei watched as the items were carried away, crate by crate. “Anyone in the smuggling business would gladly take a bullet—or even a bomb. The further back you go, the more lawless it was. Network and tracking technology back then was nowhere near what we have today. Otherwise, those goods couldn’t have stayed hidden this long.” Jiang Lei sighed. “Come to think of it, if you Yi Yuan hadn’t won the bid—”
Jiang Lei suddenly stopped. Ji Yang noticed it too.
“Where’s Zhao Changgen?”
As Zhao Yuan’s accomplice in crime, Ji Yang realized he hadn’t seen the man since everything started.
“Ran off?” Jiang Lei frowned. “On the cultural relic case, he was only an accessory to concealment. But in the conspiracy involving the entire Lanjiao Village—he absolutely cannot be allowed to get away!”
Ji Yang felt a chill run through him. “Lin Yue and the others are still at the village homestay!”
He turned to run, but Nie Xu seized him.
“Don’t panic yet.” Nie Xu said. “It’s nighttime. Zhao Changgen doesn’t move that fast. And even if he did, Lin Yue and the others wouldn’t be his first priority. First—tell me how you figured out he was coordinating with the entire village.”
Ji Yang immediately produced what he had on him and handed it over.
Nie Xu took it, flipped through it a couple of times, then looked at Ji Yang.
“Where did you get this?” Nie Xu asked.
Jiang Lei interjected, explaining it was in the ship’s cabin lounge, and then recounted Ji Yang’s whole chain of reasoning.
Nie Xu: “The logic is sound, but something this important, hidden right there in the cabin—and they deliberately lured you straight to it?”
“We moved up the schedule. He didn’t have a choice,” Ji Yang said.
Nie Xu nodded. “That’s plausible, but not entirely right.”
Ji Yang frowned. “What do you mean? Are you saying this thing is fake?”
“It’s real,” Nie Xu said. “But there’s a high probability Zhao Changgen planted it deliberately.”
Ji Yang thought about it. “He wanted to use our hands against Zhao Yuan? But that way, wouldn’t he be caught too?”
At this point Jiang Lei said, “I’ll go look around.”
The moment he finished speaking, and Jiang Lei had barely taken two steps, a deafening boom erupted in the distance.
“BOOM—”
An explosion. Fire blazed into the sky.
Even the ground beneath their feet shuddered.
Two hands clapped over Ji Yang’s ears from either side. He was pulled close and could feel the person beside him shielding him with their own body.
But that orange-red, mushroom-shaped column of fire burning into the night sky—it was seared vividly into his vision.
Right over there, where the cabin had been just moments ago.
The air was thick with the mingled stench of everything burning. Sparks and debris were scattered by the blast wave, drifting over here and falling lightly through the air, their last embers fading into nothing.
After a brief, deathly silence, the surroundings plunged back into chaos.
Someone was shouting: “What happened—?”
Someone else asked: “Is anyone hurt? How many people were over there? Get someone to check right now!”
And another voice: “We need to call 119! The fire’s too big!”
All of these voices reached Ji Yang as though through layers of glass—muffled, distant, impossibly far away.
A stabbing pain erupted in his head, as if something had been driven straight through.
The same scene. Similar firelight.
This time it wasn’t the half-real, half-false landscape from his nightmares. This was clear, vivid, as though it were happening right before his eyes.
On the deck, amid the flames, he could see not only screaming figures engulfed in fire—he could see one person after another jumping into the water.
He could see firelight filling the sky, turning half the horizon over the sea crimson.
His line of sight, once very low, suddenly rose.
The arms holding him seemed to belong to a man and a woman.
The man’s voice was urgent. “There’s no time. We can’t let anything happen to this child.”
The woman’s voice, by contrast, remained calm. “There’s a small boat at the stern. A-Yu said he’d come for him.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the man said: “You take the child and go.”
“No!” The woman refused firmly. “We’re both too conspicuous—we absolutely cannot make it to shore. It would only put him in danger!”
Her calm voice wavered at a certain point, even trembling.
She kept repeating: “How did he get here? How is the child here?!”
The man soothed: “It’s all right, it’s all right. He’s just knocked out. Hurry—don’t say any more, let’s put them aboard first.”
Ji Yang couldn’t make out the man’s or the woman’s face.
He only knew that he himself had been crying and wailing without end.
He was put into a life jacket and placed into a tiny, tiny boat—so small that only one person could lie down and one could sit.
He reached out his hand, wanting the woman to hold him.
The woman comforted him: “Yangyang, be good, okay? You go with your brother. The wind tonight will carry you to shore. If your brother doesn’t wake up, you have to run on your own, understand? Be good.”
Ji Yang shook his head over and over, but he couldn’t stop the boat from being pushed away, drifting farther and farther, dissolving into the black sea of night.
A sea of fire devoured that ship.
Ji Yang forgot to cry. He just stared, blankly, continuously staring.
Until he turned and saw that the person beside him had, at some unknown point, sat upright.
He couldn’t make out who it was, and he didn’t recognize them. It just felt like a lifeless stone statue had been placed beside him.
It started raining over the sea.
Neither of them spoke.
This memory had not been suddenly shoved into Ji Yang’s mind, yet it was no less difficult to digest. So—was what he’d seen in his dreams truly the Qiming? Was this a memory of this body?
Ji Yang’s head split with pain.
His stomach churned violently.
He pushed the person beside him away, lunged toward the shore, grabbed the rope railing, and retched.
Jiang Lei was startled by the sudden reaction. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
He was asking Nie Xu.
Nie Xu stared at Ji Yang’s back, then glanced at the scene in the distance. His eyes were deep and unfathomable, like a pool of ink that could never be diluted.
Nie Xu immediately said to Jiang Lei: “Go find some water.”
“Okay.” Jiang Lei hurried off.
A roaring filled Ji Yang’s ears. The cramping in his stomach was different from the spasms brought on by low blood sugar—this was something he was experiencing for the first time, the feeling of consciousness completely detaching from the body, both mind and flesh rebelling in violent resistance.
As though he was himself, and yet also not himself.
He couldn’t describe the sensation. He only knew his body, as if on instinct, had begun producing external reactions. While vomiting, just like during his previous blood sugar episodes, his hands shook so badly he could barely hold the rope.
A pair of hands braced him from behind.
Hands on his back, one slow stroke after another, smoothing him down.
Nie Xu’s voice was steady as well. He spoke quietly: “Remember how I taught you on the Zhou Ling boat when you were seasick? Breathe deep.”
Jiang Lei returned with water. “Damn—was the explosion too close? Brain concussion?”
Nie Xu took the opened bottle and offered it to Ji Yang.
After confirming he shook his head, he said: “No.”
Jiang Lei twisted the cap back on while studying Ji Yang, clearly anxious: “Then isn’t this reaction a bit extreme? He looks like he can barely even hear us when we talk. And—about the explosion—they say nobody got hurt, but Zhao Changgen is nowhere to be found.”
“It should be acute stress disorder,” Nie Xu said succinctly. He turned Ji Yang around and pulled him firmly into his chest.
Ji Yang’s nose and mouth were pressed against Nie Xu’s shoulder, his breathing forced to lengthen. Once Nie Xu confirmed it had steadied, he bent down and lifted Ji Yang into his arms—bridal carry. “Let’s go.”
Inside Ji Yang’s mind, a battle raged between heaven and man. His thoughts were a complete mess.
That sudden sensation of stepping into empty space—of being lifted off the ground and finding no ground to land on—it made him feel as though he had shrunk tiny again, back aboard the ship.
He heard the woman’s words.
Ji Yang closed his eyes and murmured them, his voice blurred: “Brother.”