112: Chapter 112 The Cause and Effect Between the Two

Night fell.

An off-road vehicle drove smoothly out of the neighboring villa's garage.

"Boss, it's confirmed." Old Chen stood before the floor-to-ceiling window in the living room, turning to look at Jiang Feng, who was sitting on the sofa.

"Where did she go?" Jiang Feng was fiddling with the antique Tarot cards in his hand.

"There's activity on the Secret Service's internal communication channel. She's under direct orders from superiors to go to Safehouse No. 7 to submit a top-secret supplementary report regarding the accident at the Northwest Deep Well Base."

Old Chen walked back to the coffee table, stuffed his device into his pocket, and spoke rapidly.

"The security checks and reporting procedures at the safehouse are extremely tedious. The villa next door now has a full two-hour window of vacancy. There's not a single soul inside."

Jiang Feng's fingers stopped, and he flipped over a Tarot card depicting 'The Hanged Man'.

He looked at the card and tapped his fingers lightly on his knee twice.

For the past few days, the look in that woman's eyes back at the Deep Well Base had been playing over and over in his mind.

Most critically, that fragment of the scorched and shattered antique copper coin was currently lying in her laboratory.

That thing was stained with his blood and even retained the karmic aura from when the [Belongs to Me] mark was annihilated.

Letting her take that copper coin to mess around with so-called scientific tests was no different from washing his own neck and delivering it to someone's blade.

Waiting for death was never Jiang Feng's logic for survival.

"Old Chen." Jiang Feng stood up, stuffed the Tarot cards into his pocket, and patted his trouser legs. "Grab your gear."

"Let's go next door for a visit."

The two avoided the main roads of the residential area, hugging the shadows of the green belts, and silently arrived at the back wall of Lu Cheng's villa.

The perimeter of this villa was covered in miniature infrared cameras and acoustic sensors.

Any sound exceeding a certain decibel level would immediately trigger the alarm system.

Old Chen displayed the terrifying expertise of a top-tier veteran scout.

He took an object resembling a spray can from his backpack and sprayed a circle around several extremely well-hidden cameras at the corner of the wall.

A colorless, odorless chemical mist quickly condensed on the sensor surfaces, interfering with the acoustic reception frequencies.

Afterward, Old Chen stepped onto the external drainage pipe and, with a few nimble maneuvers, flipped onto the second-floor terrace.

He threw down a tactical rope with a silent hook and pulled Jiang Feng up.

The second-floor floor-to-ceiling windows were tightly shut, and the red light on the fingerprint password lock blinked rhythmically.

Old Chen crouched before the lock and pulled a portable liquid nitrogen spray gun from his backpack.

White cold air sprayed onto the password lock's sensor panel, and then he took out a specialized thin tool and sliced into the frozen, brittle plastic gap.

A "click" sounded.

The door opened.

The entire process took less than three minutes and didn't trigger any alarms.

Jiang Feng followed Old Chen into the house.

The layout here was exactly the same as Jiang Feng's home, but the interior arrangement made one feel completely uneasy.

There was no redundant furniture; everything presented an absolute symmetry and minimalism.

"The study is at the end of the hallway." Old Chen made a gesture in the darkness, his footsteps falling on the carpet without a sound.

The two pushed open the door to the study.

A large glass desk sat in the center, with nothing on it except a computer.

The surrounding walls were entirely covered in bookshelves, densely packed with academic works.

Old Chen turned on a tactical flashlight, its faint white light quickly sweeping across the bookshelves.

Jiang Feng walked to the desk, his gaze drifting over the cold equipment.

He knew Old Chen was better at finding clues than he was.

The flashlight beam suddenly stopped at the middle section of a bookshelf.

"Boss, look at this." Old Chen lowered his voice.

Jiang Feng walked over.

Sandwiched between a pile of rigorously bound academic works was an extremely discordant thin booklet.

The cloth on the spine was worn and frayed, and the edges were yellowed.

Old Chen, wearing tactical gloves, pulled the book out. The flashlight beam hit the cover.

It was a very old children's storybook.

the little prince.

The appearance of such a book on Lu Cheng's shelf was as jarring as putting a piece of bloody raw meat into a sterile operating room.

Old Chen flipped through the pages, which had become somewhat brittle due to moisture.

When he turned to a certain page in the middle, an old photograph slid out from between the pages and fell onto the carpet.

Jiang Feng bent down to pick up the photo.

By the light of the flashlight, he saw the image on the photo clearly.

There were two girls in the photo.

The girl on the left was about five or six years old, wearing the old clothes uniformly issued by the orphanage.

Despite her young age, her gaze toward the camera held none of the innocence a child should have, only an utterly hollow calm.

It wasn't hard to guess that it was Lu Cheng as a young child.

On the right stood a young woman of seventeen or eighteen.

She was wearing a simple floral dress and smiling very gently.

One of her hands was resting lightly on little Lu Cheng's shoulder.

Jiang Feng flipped the photo over.

On the yellowed photo paper, two words were clearly written in pen: Wan Qing.

Jiang Feng stared at those two words, his breath stopping for two seconds.

An extremely absurd shudder rushed from the soles of his feet straight to the crown of his head.

Wan Qing.

On the high-seas cruise ship, that underground tycoon Mr. K, who controlled a massive drug trafficking network and killed without blinking.

The 'white moonlight' that he couldn't let go of even in death.

Was also named Wan Qing.

Are these two Wan Qings the same person?

If they are the same person, then what the hell is the connection between this high-IQ scientist Lu Cheng, who lives under a special national department...

...and the head of an international drug trafficking syndicate?

And what shameful secrets were burned away in the fire at the Xiangyanghua Orphanage?

This scoop was too big—so big that Jiang Feng felt a bit of a stomachache.

Causal Vision!

Jiang Feng didn't hesitate; this might be the closest opportunity to the truth.

Instantly, in Jiang Feng's vision, the photograph changed.

A flash of red light appeared in Lu Cheng's hand, tightly entangling Wan Qing.

Similarly, a black thread in Wan Qing's hand bound Lu Cheng tightly.

What does this mean...

Did Lu Cheng kill Wan Qing?

"Boss." Old Chen's flashlight beam shifted to the desk.

Jiang Feng collected his thoughts, tucked the photo back into the little prince, and returned it to its original place.

Old Chen hooked several A4 sheets out from an extremely well-hidden drawer gap under the desk.

It was the laboratory report Lu Cheng had just brought back today.

Jiang Feng took it and browsed quickly.

The report was full of physics terminology he didn't understand, pages of energy band analysis and spectral comparisons.

But on the last page of this report, in the conclusion section, two lines were printed in bold.

[Sample substance (fragmented copper coin) structure exhibits anti-thermodynamic phenomena, suspected of having undergone absolute negative energy collapse, inconsistent with existing physical common sense on Earth.]

[Recommendation: Classify this sample as an S-rank unknown substance.]

[To further analyze its energy collapse mechanism, it is necessary to extract a live tissue biopsy from the energy conductor (Jiang Feng) for high-precision comparison.]

Fuck!

Jiang Feng broke out in a cold sweat.

He guessed Lu Cheng wouldn't let him go, but he never expected this woman's train of thought to be crazed to this extent.

A live biopsy comparison!

In the eyes of this machine-like person devoid of empathy, he really wasn't a human anymore, but an alien biological specimen in human skin.

Once the recommendation in that report was approved by higher-ups, what he would face would no longer be Lu Cheng's personal probing.

But a legitimate dissection table!

This was a life-threatening threat.

The panic in Jiang Feng's eyes receded rapidly within a few seconds, replaced entirely by a ruthlessness born of being pushed to the edge of a cliff.

He slapped the lab report back onto the desk, his jaw clenched tight.

Old Chen immediately put away the flashlight; he knew the boss had made up his mind.

The two restored every trace in the study to a state of perfection and retreated from the villa the way they had come.

After returning to his own living room, the mechanical voice of the system rang out in his mind, as if perfectly timed.

[Ding!]

[New Mission Issued]

[Location]: Xiangyang Street, Old Town District, "A Cup of Spring" Old Teahouse (near the original site of Xiangyanghua Orphanage).

[Time]: Daily 16:30-18:00.

[Method]: Brew tea and perform Character Divination.

[Domain]: Breaking Obsession.

[Objective]: Receive three customers and successfully break their inner obsessions.

Jiang Feng stared at the mission details, lost in thought.

He knew the system's "in-your-face" mission logic all too well.

From the location being the original site of the Xiangyanghua Orphanage, he could see that the system was handing him the key to uncovering Lu Cheng's background directly.

Using the hand of fortune-telling to dig out the truth behind that fire and Wan Qing.

To destroy Lu Cheng's pathological logic from its root.

This was the only chance for a counterattack and an absolute opportunity to break the deadlock.