Chapter 173: Smoke and Mirrors

When Xiaotao and I got out of the sofa, I noticed that the man had left one more pill on the table. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand.

Xiaotao made a signal to me and we headed to the front room together. The two men had cut off Yuanchao’s pants and tied a tourniquet to his thigh. They were just about to saw his calf off.

“How did you…?” Kong Hui was startled when he saw us.

The faceless slave quickly grabbed a scalpel and aimed it at Yuanchao. Xiaotao shot his wrist, making him scream in agony. The scalpel flew out of his hand and across the room.

“Run!” screamed Kong Hui. He dropped the hacksaw in his hands immediately and ran out of the room. The faceless slave followed him close behind.

I shoved the Mind Clearing Pill into Yuanchao’s mouth and hurried over to chase the two men with Xiaotao. When we got outside, we saw the two men scrambling away in panic. Xiaotao fired at the sky and shouted, “Freeze or I’ll shoot!”

They did not stop at all. I could hear a roar coming from a distance and a bright spot of light slowly approaching in the dark. It turned out that there was a railroad track in the area, and a train was fast approaching us.

The two men were about to cross over to the other side of the railroad tracks. Xiaotao stopped and aimed her gun at Kong Hui, then she shot him in the leg. Once he was shot, he immediately slowed down, and the distance between us got shorter and shorter. He kept turning around in panic too, so in no time at all I started catching up to him.

When he was within my grasp, I jumped at him and threw him to the ground. Kong Hui bared his teeth and pulled out an extra scalpel.

“Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into, boy?” he taunted. “You’ve made a big mistake provoking us!”

He was about to stab me. I was so close that there was no way for me to dodge the attack, and thus I pushed my fingers into the gunshot wound on his leg. He screamed in pain, and I grabbed a brick on the ground nearby and hit him on the head with it, making him faint straight away

I breathed a sigh of relief, although my heart was still beating like a drum.

While I was fighting with Kong Hui, the faceless slave had fled to the railroad tracks. The train was about to arrive, and if he got to the other side just in time, we would never catch up with him. Then, just as he was on the tracks, a gunshot sounded, and the faceless slave was stopped for a fraction of a second. Due to that, he was hit by the oncoming train and turned into an amorphous pulp!

My jaw dropped. I turned around. I saw that Xiaotao hadn’t shot her gun. In fact, she was just as shocked as I was. About twenty meters behind her was Yuanchao, holding a smoking gun in his hand.

It turned out he noticed that the faceless slave was about to escape, so he took his aim and shot him from that distance. It was an impressive feat indeed. Realizing that the man was dead, Yuanchao pulled out a silver canister from his jacket and took a sip.

Xiaotao ran over to me and put handcuffs on the unconscious Kong Hui. “This case is over now, right?” she sighed.

“Are you okay?” I asked Yuanchao.

He was bleeding a lot due to the cut on his leg, but because the effect of the anesthetic hadn’t worn off yet, he couldn’t feel any pain.

“I’m fine,” he answered.

When Xiaotao saw that Yuanchao’s leg was practically soaked in blood, she gasped and shouted, “You’ll die if you lose any more blood! Sit down right now and don’t move! I’ll call 120!”

Not long after, the ambulance arrived and the police followed soon after. Kong Hui was taken away. At present, Dali’s whereabouts were still unknown. Xiaotao borrowed one of the police cars and we both hurried back to my dorm.

It was now one o’clock in the morning. Xiaotao and I barged into my room, startling my roommates. One of them asked me, “Where’s Dali, dude? Why’s he not with you?”

“Something just happened,” I answered. “Did you notice anything unusual about Dali recently?”

“Well… yeah, yesterday he told us he just received a text saying he won some money and that he was going to buy us a nice meal. But then he returned and told us the text was a scam after all.”

“When was this?”

“Last night,” my roommate replied. “You both went to the library after that!”

There was only one place where you could withdraw money in our college—the ATM machine. Xiaotao and I rushed there. The machine was covered with glass walls on all sides, so it was impossible to hide a body near it. Then I noticed that there was an ‘In Maintenance’ sign hanging on it.

I knocked on the ATM machine repeatedly, but Xiaotao pointed to the surveillance camera in the corner and argued, “Won’t that capture them if they really hid Dali in there?”

I looked around. There was a manhole nearby and it looked like it had been opened recently.

“Let’s open that!” I cried, pointing at the manhole. It was made of iron and it took us a lot of effort to pry it open. I looked down into the hole and Xiaotao asked me, “Is anybody down there?”

“I think there is…”

I climbed down the ladder. In a dark corner I saw Dali with his hands and feet tied up. He was sitting in the sewer and his mouth was stuffed with a piece of cloth. He was stripped of all his clothes. The minute he realized that it was me, Dali screamed his lungs out.

I untied the ropes. Dali hugged me and sobbed uncontrollably. I had to comfort him for a good few minutes before managing to calm him down.

He told me that he received the text message yesterday, so he hurried to the ATM to check his account balance. Then someone came up from behind and covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief. The next thing he knew, he found himself in the dark surrounded by stinky water with rats scurrying around him. It scared him so much that he almost fainted again.

Dali had been there for almost a whole day. His body was considerably weak now. I had to carefully carry him out of the sewers. Xiaotao couldn’t hold in her laughter when she saw the state that Dali was in.

“You’re such a meanie, Xiaotao-jiejie!” he cried. “How could you laugh at me?”

“How do you feel?” I asked him. “Should we take you to the hospital?”

“I’m hungry!” he replied.

“Let’s go then!” I put my jacket on Dali and we went to a nearby food stall. Dali was clearly starving. He gobbled up a mountain of food like a vacuum cleaner. Then Xiaotao checked her watch and said, “I’m going back to the station now. You two should go to bed soon.”

Before she left, Xiaotao and I simultaneously reminded each other, “Stay safe!” and that made us both laugh.

“What happened when I was gone?” asked Dali, puzzled. “What’s going on between you two?”

“I’ll tell you later!” I replied.

A few days later, Xiaotao called and told me that they found an ATM card in Kong Hui’s house with a large amount of money in the account. There was so much money in there that it would make a corrupt politician blush. This was clearly the reward Kong Hui received from the ‘organization’ for his work.

“Do you have access to the account’s activities?” I asked after a brief contemplation.

“Yeah,” replied Xiaotao.

“Then check the dates of each payment transferred into the account,” I said, “and find out the cases that occurred right before and after the dates!”

“Ah, what a brilliant idea!” exclaimed Xiaotao. “I should’ve thought of that! Thanks again, Song Yang!”

This proved to be an extremely laborious task, and it took several days for Xiaotao to complete it. I was shocked to hear her discovery. It turned out that there had been more than twenty cases in the last ten years where the captured criminals were substitutes who had been operated on by Kong Hui.

As for the whereabouts of the real criminals, nobody knew, and it seemed that they were all under the protection of the ‘organization,’ so it was probably too late to track them down now.

The only hope we had left was to get some information on the ‘organization’ from Kong Hui. My guess was that he was just a minor figure in the organization, and he probably received an order from them to find a way to make some people ‘disappear’ without a trace. He thought of turning human beings into pigs through plastic surgery. But in order to do that perfectly, he needed to experiment and practice his skills, so he decided to use his old crush who had just spurned him as the subject of his experiments. That way, he could vent his anger on her too.

The next day, Xiaotao called me and asked me to go to the police station. She told me that Kong Hui would not reveal anything even after long sessions of interrogation.

I met Kong Hui in the interrogation room. He had been detained in the cell for a few days at that point. His complexion had turned sallow, his hair was messy, and his eyes were swollen. I asked him a few questions, and he kept answering me with a simple “I don’t know.” I scrutinized his micro-expressions but saw no signs that he was lying.

It then dawned on me. I asked the officers to check the gunshot wound on his leg, and it was obvious that it was fake. I knew this because I had pushed my fingers into the gunshot wound, so it could not have been that small.

I leaned back into my seat and asked him, “Who are you?”

“I’m Kong Hui,” he replied.

“No, you’re not!” I shot back. “You’re his substitute! When did you switch with him? Where is the real Kong Hui?”

The fake Kong Hui grinned and calmly answered, “How would I know? I’m just one of their pawns.”