The screen of the guest’s phone, encased in a pink shell and placed on the bar, lit up. Before Jenny, who was wiping a glass, could see what flashed across the screen, a hand with gaudy, rhinestone-adorned nails covered it, put the phone into a bag, took out a red banknote, and placed it on the bar. Out came a small mirror as well, and its owner began to tidy her appearance in it.
Sisi said, “Check, please.”
Ji Xun had just left for the restroom. Out of goodwill, Jenny reminded her, “Why don’t you wait for the gentleman who was sitting here? He ordered the drink for you; he’ll pay for you when he gets back.”
However, the woman looking in the mirror curled her lip in contempt.
“He’s not coming back,” Sisi said. “Men are all like that, ditching you by pretending to go to the bathroom.”
After speaking, Sisi put the mirror back in her bag, stood up, and swayed into the crowd. Not long after she left, a “clang” sounded from a corner of the bar. An iron chair was kicked over, causing a commotion, but soon, the fallen chair was picked up and put back in place, accompanied by a series of apologies to those nearby:
“Sorry, our friend is drunk, sorry.”
Jenny stretched his neck to look over. He did indeed see a few men supporting a companion. Their companion was probably very drunk, supported by one person on each side, with a jacket draped over his head, completely covering his face.
But having worked in a bar for a long time, he had seen all sorts of drunkenness. This was considered relatively civilized.
Jenny lowered his eyes and continued wiping the glass in his hand.
As he wiped, he slowly felt something was amiss:
Why hadn’t Ji Xun returned yet? Even if he usually slipped out the back door to avoid harassment, this time he had actively ordered a drink for a lady. He should have at least come back to settle the bill, right…?
Ji Xun sat in a car. The phone he had been holding, of course, had long been taken from him. In addition, his head was covered with a black hood, and his hands and feet were tied. Perhaps afraid he would get bumped or bruised, these people had even fastened his seatbelt—of course, that was thinking on the bright side. On the dark side, it was much like strapping a pig into the seat.
His vision was reduced to almost nothing. What remained to perceive his surroundings were hearing, touch, and smell.
He smelled a fragrant scent coming from the front of the car; Sisi was sitting in the front seat.
Both of his arms were under someone’s control. The men he had seen in the restroom were tall and large, but the three of them squeezed into one row didn’t feel cramped. This was a spacious van.
Other than that, the car windows were closed, so he couldn’t smell the outside; the music inside the car was turned up very loud, possibly to prevent him from shouting. Ji Xun had no other choice but to wait patiently for the car to reach its destination. In the meantime, a very real worry emerged:
He had an appointment to go to Qin City with his editor tomorrow. It wasn’t going to fall through again, was it…?
The car ride was very long. After Ji Xun had silently counted for over an hour, the car stopped. His seatbelt was unfastened, and the hands holding his arms tightened like steel clamps again.
He was escorted out of the car and walked for a distance. First, he felt the slippery grit of sand grinding against the soles of his shoes, then he smelled what seemed to be barbecue in the wind. In between, he went up a few flights of stairs, and finally, he was pushed heavily onto a wobbly wooden chair with a broken leg.
Then, his vision brightened. The hood that had covered his head for the entire journey was removed, and his darkened eyes could finally see again. However, the first thing that caught his attention was not the environment, nor the kidnappers surrounding him, but the person appearing on the projector in front of him.
The projector’s light cast a blurry image on a simple white wall, as if the resolution was poor.
The first thing Ji Xun saw was the person’s signature yellow hair and a large mole on their chin.
Yellow Hair.
Truly no surprise at all.
Ji Xun continued to observe. Yellow Hair was sitting with his legs crossed in what looked like a studio apartment, with an English calendar hanging on the wall behind him.
English…
The person had already fled the country? Not surprising. Xiao Man’s sudden death in the KTV probably scared Yellow Hair; otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed to find someone to defile the corpse as a stand-in. And they had found Sisi through Xiao Man. Sisi must have told Yellow Hair about their interrogation afterward. Yellow Hair had already dealt with them twice and was afraid they would investigate further, so he hastily went abroad…
Since he was already abroad, where the law couldn’t reach him, he would naturally become arrogant and unrestrained, seeking revenge for any grudge. He simply hired people to kidnap his enemy to vent his hatred.
Ji Xun, looking thoughtful, quickly pieced together the ins and outs behind tonight’s sudden kidnapping.
“Surprised or not surprised? A pleasant surprise, isn’t it?” Yellow Hair jiggled his leg. “Do you know what’s going to happen next?”
“To be honest, it’s not very surprising.” Since these people hadn’t gagged him, Ji Xun’s mouth wasn’t idle. “Anyone with a normal IQ would know you’re behind Sisi.”
As he spoke, he didn’t forget to observe his surroundings.
In the first moment his vision cleared, he had focused too much on Yellow Hair. Only now did he see clearly that he was in an unfinished apartment that had only been supplied with water and electricity and had its walls painted. It should be on the second floor because he hadn’t climbed many stairs while blindfolded. The windows were blocked, so he couldn’t see outside, but his initial judgment was that it was a newly built residential complex that had not yet been officially handed over.
A new residential complex about an hour’s drive from the Raccoon Bar…
Ji Xun tried to determine his possible location, but to no avail. In the three years he had been out of the loop, buildings in Ning City had been demolished and rebuilt. The map he had memorized was now useless.
His gaze finally fell on the people in the room. The four men who had cornered him in the restroom were all here. Beside them, under the projector, stood Sisi in her white dress. Sisi smiled at him with pursed lips, her mouth bright red. At some point, she had reapplied fresh, vibrant lipstick.
The light from the projector also stained the hem of her dress, with colorful, flowing shadows dancing wildly on it.
Ji Xun’s gaze simultaneously dropped, landing on a splash of green at the bottom of the white wall.
He saw it. His confiscated phone was placed right there, at the bottom of the wall, by Sisi’s feet.
He hadn’t heard a shutdown sound earlier. Maybe my phone hasn’t been turned off. Ji Xun thought. But this was unusual. Weren’t they afraid someone would call him? Weren’t they afraid the police would notice something amiss and track his phone’s location? And Huo Ranyin, it had been two hours, why was there no movement from him at all? Unless…
“Still looking at your phone?” In the projection, Yellow Hair’s leg was jiggling so much it seemed about to fly to the ceiling. He suddenly leaned forward, his face close to the camera, a huge face that almost took up the entire white wall. His originally decent features became extremely grotesque when magnified several times. “Still hoping that cop you’re with will come? Counting the seconds? Racking your brains for how to stall for more time? Stop dreaming. Even if you could stall for a lifetime, your message will—not—get—through, Sir!”
As expected.
With the suspense gone, Ji Xun relaxed his body, making his hands, tied behind his back, a little less uncomfortable.
“When did you hack my phone?” Ji Xun asked back.
To be able to set up an ambush at the bar so quickly meant they knew his whereabouts. They were either staking out the Raccoon Bar or tracking his phone’s location. There was only one recent strange incident involving his phone, which was easy to guess, so Ji Xun answered his own question the next second: “Was it when I scanned the code at the high-speed rail station to get the little yellow chicken? I was wondering why the micro-business vendor was so unprofessional. A pity, that little yellow chicken was quite cute.”
“You’re already tied up and you’re still talking so much, worrying about these trivial things,” Yellow Hair laughed sinisterly. “Aren’t you curious about what will happen to you later? Why don’t you beg me? If you make me happy, maybe I’ll let you off the hook?”
Ji Xun fell silent. He sized up Yellow Hair for a long time. Just as Yellow Hair was showing impatience, he finally smiled:
“What, you still want to kill me?”
“Still talking tough when you’re about to die!” Yellow Hair was enraged by Ji Xun’s indifferent attitude. He violently kicked the coffee table in front of him. The heavy wooden table shot forward, and the items on it flew everywhere, clattering to the floor.
“Nice kick,” Ji Xun said fearlessly, offering a critique. “You must have trained it by being chased a lot. You’ve already run all the way abroad with your tail between your legs. If you had this kind of energy back then, you wouldn’t have been huffing and puffing in the alley next to Liang Jing Jing for so long, only to be caught and pinned against the wall by me—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up! I’m going to kill you, I’m definitely going to kill you!”
The Yellow Hair on the projector had already started roaring furiously. It was easier to provoke this person than Ji Xun had imagined, and his voice was also louder than Ji Xun had expected. This was the second floor, close to the ground, with a draft. The windows were probably not tightly closed, only covered by curtains for show. Ji Xun was sure Yellow Hair’s voice could travel outside, but whether anyone was passing by to hear it, and whether the person who heard it would find it strange and call the police… that was up to fate. Sometimes, whether a person lives or dies depends on a bit of luck.
Ji Xun had already started to seriously try to save himself.
Yellow Hair yelled in the projector for a full three minutes. During these three minutes, the men who had kidnapped Ji Xun stood aside with numb expressions, showing no intention of coming over to teach Ji Xun a lesson. Only Sisi stood by the projector, comforting Yellow Hair in a delicate voice.
Are these guys borrowed? Or more directly, were they just bought with money?
Not his own men, so they were indeed lazy to do anything extra… Ji Xun thought, looking pensive.
At this point, Yellow Hair finally calmed down. He stared at Ji Xun for a few seconds, then turned back to pour himself a glass of red wine.
“You’re tough. Let’s see you stay tough later. Which hand did you use to pin me down?” Yellow Hair said to Ji Xun. “Right, your right hand. I’ll take your right hand first.”
He raised the wine glass. At the bottom of the transparent glass, red wine pooled like fresh blood.
He took a sip of the wine, and his parted lips were stained with the color of blood.
“You guys, chop off one of his arms first.”
The men standing by with numb faces, as if they were robots that had just received a command, came to life one by one. The leader’s baseball bat had been replaced with a watermelon knife.
He walked over step by step, holding the watermelon knife.
With every step he took, Ji Xun’s eyelashes trembled, and his heart trembled along with them. A wave of numbness from his ventricles had already begun to spread through his blood to his limbs.
Maybe it would be better to close my eyes now.
Ji Xun thought.
But that would make his verbal taunts seem weak, and right now, he had to rely on this protagonist-halo-infused verbal taunt superpower to save himself.
He had no choice but to keep his eyes open, staring at the knife’s tip that he didn’t want to see. The tip of the knife blurred his vision; everything he saw was a blur, as if thousands of dots were twinkling before his eyes. It wasn’t until he blinked uncontrollably and the blur in his eyes slightly receded that he realized he had broken out in a cold sweat at some point, and the sweat was dripping into his eyes.
Ji Xun forced himself to calm down, not letting anyone see that he was in a dizzy state as if he had just spun around a hundred times, and continued to speak:
“Beating me up versus causing injury or even death carry completely different sentences. My friends, although you were hired to do this, I’m afraid you’re not one hundred percent prepared to be executed for murder, are you? I happened to have an appointment with my editor tonight. If I don’t send him a message on time, he’ll definitely come looking for me like a grim reaper to chase me for my manuscript. If he can’t find me, he’ll call the police soon. The police station is very familiar with me; they can trace me to the Raccoon Bar within 1 minute. It wasn’t wise of you to choose to kidnap me there, but you had no choice. I’ve been with the police for the past few days, so you could only get me there, I understand that. But Jenny saw me go to the restroom, and I secretly hid your biological evidence during the fight in a place my little police buddies will definitely find. And you didn’t wear gloves, your fingerprints, tsk—”
In just a few short steps, the leader had arrived in front of Ji Xun.
He stopped, frowning, seeming to think about what Ji Xun had just done.
Ji Xun grinned, licked his dry lips, and pressed on: “You took me out through the main entrance of the Raccoon Bar. There’s a camera on the right side there that’s sure to have gotten a clear shot of your car. The car and license plate owner will be identified, and then they can find this place by following the license plate. It must be tough for you to have such an unreliable and show-off of a boss. Who kills someone and still connects to WiFi for a video call? Just ask the telecom company which phone the WiFi hotspot belongs to, ah—I hope you didn’t use your own ID to register the phone.”
Sisi let out a cry of alarm.
Ji Xun sighed: “So it was your phone, you silly girl. If they kill me, you won’t get off easy either. Think about it, you and I chatted at the bar for over an hour. Do you think the police won’t look for you? If I’m killed later, you can’t escape being an accomplice. That’s at least ten years to start. But that’s the good outcome. The police know you’ll be caught by them, and these men know it too. Compared to the police putting you in jail where you’d still be alive, it’s more likely that these men whose faces you’ve seen will just silence you along with me—”
The leader seemed to have finally decided to just take the money and do the job.
He raised his hand high, the psychedelic light of the projector illuminating the knife. The knife swung down—
“Wait!” A sharp scream suddenly rang out in the unfinished apartment. Sisi’s high-pitched shriek halted the execution.
The blade stopped just on Ji Xun’s clothes.
Ji Xun’s arm was still there, but his bones and sinews seemed to feel a bone-chilling cold and spasmed violently.
Ji Xun rolled his eyes and looked at Sisi. Sisi was also looking at him, giving him an awkward yet polite smile.
