FY - 44

Sister Hong was quite surprised to see Si Wen again. Zhou Yan had explicitly said she wanted to see clients, so why would Si Wen come back? Weren’t they done? Were they just having a fight? Was that a possibility? Did Si Wen get serious?

She had to once again marvel at Zhou Yan’s abilities. This little woman was a real piece of work.

This meant that Zhou Yan’s plans to see clients would have to be postponed, or perhaps, they wouldn’t happen at all.

Especially after seeing Si Wen kick that out-of-town boss into a urinal, she had to re-evaluate Zhou Yan’s status.

Si Wen gave her two million yuan, telling her to arrange a room for Zhou Yan where she could be seen but not touched. But the money she made from one night should be the same as the highest-paying room, and if it wasn’t enough, he would give her more.

Sister Hong was extremely deferential, saying she would keep an eye on Zhou Yan’s every move at Candy and ensure that no one had a chance to touch her.

After giving these instructions, Si Wen picked up a surveillance earpiece, but Zhou Yan was no longer at Candy.

He frowned and got up to leave.

He walked out the west door along the corridor, looked left and right, but saw no one. He took two steps forward. Diagonally ahead was a small alley, dark and spooky. He didn’t think Zhou Yan would go there, but he walked over anyway.

As soon as he entered the alley, he was kicked in the shin.

The feeling was too familiar. He instinctively pushed the assailant against the wall and hugged her tightly.

It had been three days, and he hadn’t held her body. Listening to other men say vulgar things to her, he was going insane.

Zhou Yan was hugged, but she calmly lifted her knee and hit Si Wen in his groin. He grunted, and his grip loosened.

Taking advantage of his distraction, Zhou Yan escaped.

She just wanted a quiet place to be. Was there no quiet place without Si Wen?

Seeing him approach, she kicked him without a second thought. He had no shame, just came over and hugged her. Did he think she was still the little fool he had kept? That she would open her arms and show her breasts the moment he came near?

It was ridiculous.

She got away and turned onto the next street, blending into the crowd.

When Si Wen came out again, Zhou Yan was gone.

He looked down at his hands. He had only held her for three seconds.

Three days, three seconds.

He also walked into the crowd, not with the intention of finding Zhou Yan. He just wanted to walk the path she had walked, but he still saw her.

This time, he didn’t blindly approach. He followed her from a distance, trying not to be discovered.

Zhou Yan really didn’t notice him.

She was wearing headphones, bought a bottle of peach-flavored fruit wine from a nearby convenience store, and drank most of it because it was quite tasty. She swayed onto the bridge, then stopped at a street vendor’s stall, squatted down, and put a bunch of plastic flower rings on her hand. She held up her hand, looking at the flashy, cheap accessories. “Zhou Yan! From now on, you’re my woman! Pick whatever you want! I’ll buy them all for you!”

The vendor saw she was drunk and seized the opportunity to rip her off. “Miss, do you want rings? These are all crushed diamonds. Look how they sparkle. Twenty yuan each, or fifteen if you buy a lot. Do you want them? I’ll bag them for you.”

Zhou Yan heard that she had to pay, so she took them off, walked over to him, reached for his neck, and whispered in his ear, “I have no money.”

Vendor: “...”

Zhou Yan said, “My Siyuan is sick and needs a lot of money. He’ll need a lot for school, too. I have to save up for him while I still can earn. Do you know Siyuan? He’s such a good boy. Let me tell you...”

The vendor pushed her away. “Get out of here. If you’re not buying, go be a drunk somewhere else.”

Zhou Yan lost her footing, stumbled back a few steps, and hit the bridge railing with her back. She gasped in pain and then continued walking.

Si Wen came up and kicked the vendor into the river. He used the mat the vendor had laid out to scoop up all his plastic trinkets and threw them into a trash can. The vendor could have avoided this, but he had brought it on himself.

The vendor stood in the river, the water up to his waist, but he was in no hurry to get out. He just wanted to see who was foolish enough to do that.

When he saw it was the infamous figure everyone in Qizhou had been talking about, his anger instantly vanished.

Si Wen’s eyes never left Zhou Yan as he followed her out of the night market.

Zhou Yan finished her wine, threw the bottle into a nearby trash can, and continued to walk forward, swinging her arms.

The fruit wine she bought was not very strong. It just made her feel a little floaty and her voice a bit louder, making her seem out of it. But she was sober and knew where her home was.

She walked from the main road to a side street and then a small alley. She crossed a few streets, and when she was close to her neighborhood, three men blocked her path.

They first asked her, “Where are you going, Miss?”

Then, “Been drinking? And quite a bit, huh?”

As they spoke, they eagerly tried to smell the alcohol on her breath and reached out to touch her arms and waist.

Zhou Yan had only been drinking, not drunk. She was past the age of being careless when she went out. As she took out her phone, she dialed 110, put it on speaker, and said to the men, “There are two security cameras behind us. The police station is a left turn ahead. My apartment complex is a right turn, and my husband is waiting for me at the entrance. If he doesn’t see me in three minutes, he’ll come looking for me. If you’re not afraid of dying, feel free to do something to me.”

After speaking, she glanced at the time. “Two minutes have already passed.”

The three men were stunned and didn’t know what to do for a while.

The police dispatcher on the phone was still talking: “Hello? This is the Yingbin Road Police Station in the Sanfan District of Qizhou.”

The men snapped out of it, looked at each other, and quickly walked away.

After walking a couple of steps, they felt something was wrong. They were bad guys. Why should they care if her husband was waiting for her or if there was a police station nearby? What news story about an attacker against a woman showed a bad guy having a sudden realization?

Thinking this, they turned back. Zhou Yan had already taken off her high heels and was running barefoot toward a more open area with pedestrians.

She didn’t believe there were many good people in this world, so she didn’t think her words would deter someone who wanted to harm her. She took the opportunity to run for her life. Whether she could escape or not was a different matter; running was the right thing to do.

The three men saw that she was already far away and debated whether to chase her and catch her, or just forget about it and find a better target next time.

But one of them, who was persistent and proactive, ran after her, with the intention of catching her, pinning her to the ground, and having his way with her. While he was at it, he’d also slap her a few times to make her realize who she had offended.

He had only run a couple of steps when someone kicked him from behind, sending him tumbling to the ground. His nose and mouth were bruised, and blood flowed out.

He got up and turned around. The man was silhouetted against a streetlight, so his face was unclear, but he could see that he had broad shoulders and long legs, with the intimidating aura of a fighter.

They hesitated for a few seconds. The same impulsive and irritable one kicked at him.

The man was Si Wen. He grabbed the attacker’s ankle, pulled hard, hit his temple with his other elbow, and stomped on the man’s kneecap. They heard a loud snap, followed by a scream.

The two remaining men were enraged, thinking that two of them should be able to handle him.

Nearby was a small construction site. A bank had burned down there a year ago, and a new owner had bought the ruins to rebuild. Inside the construction fence, industrial materials were scattered everywhere, and any one of them could be a weapon.

Si Wen jumped in, grabbed a steel bar, and stabbed both of the men’s hands.

The screaming chorus gained two new members.

Looking at their bleeding hands, Si Wen finally began to wonder: Did this hand touch Zhou Yan just now?

No, it couldn’t be, he had disabled the wrong hand.

That’s okay. Buy one, get one free. The other hand could share in the pain.

Thinking this, he kicked the stomach of the man closest to him and then stabbed his other good hand with the steel bar. The man next to him was not spared either.

By the time he was finished, Zhou Yan should have already made it home.

He turned around and walked back the way he came.

________________________________________

The next evening at work, Zhou Yan heard that two men had their hands disabled and another had his leg broken near her home yesterday.

What made the whole Candy club talk about it all day was not how unlucky these three men were, but that they were the same three suspects who had been involved in the recent serial rapes and robberies in the slums, specifically targeting lone, drunk women in the middle of the night.

Because they acted at night and in the slums, most people adopted a “mind your own business” attitude. It wasn’t that they lacked a sense of justice; it was that the cost of upholding it was too high. They were still struggling to make their own lives run smoothly, so they were unwilling to get into trouble.

Regardless of whether their small effort would be useful, they simply couldn’t bear the consequences if they were targeted for revenge.

Because of these and other reasons, the police’s enforcement efficiency had been low, and these three men had been at large for two months.

Now, things were better. The three men voluntarily reported to the police, saying that someone had deliberately injured them. When the police took their statements, they noticed that the men’s characteristics were similar to those of the previous suspects. They took their DNA and it matched the DNA from the semen samples provided by the women who had reported the crimes earlier.

They had walked right into the trap.

The young women at Candy all wanted to know who the vigilante was. Zhou Yan, however, had no interest.

She knew it was Si Wen. She had seen him.

She also knew that Si Wen didn’t have the heart to be a vigilante.

________________________________________

Criminal Investigation Team One.

Wei Li’an had just come out of the interrogation room and fell asleep at his desk.

Cases had been piling up recently, and there weren’t many people on the team. He had to make the final decision on everything, so he was stretched thin. Fortunately, Zheng Zhi had joined his overtime crew and was willing to stay up late with him to handle cases, so he wasn’t fighting alone.

Zheng Zhi entered the case into the system. With a moment of free time, he looked at the previous investigation into Si Wen again. There was nothing new, not a single flaw. He even donated tens of millions of yuan, perfectly fitting the persona of a great philanthropist.

But was he really?

As he was looking, he suddenly remembered a familiar figure, sat up straight, and as if a light bulb had gone off in his head, he quickly woke up Wei Li’an.

Wei Li’an had a splitting headache and wasn’t happy about being woken up. “You have nothing better to do?”

Zheng Zhi couldn’t wait to tell him: “Remember when we went to the Medicine Valley and passed a woman, and I said she looked familiar?”

Wei Li’an thought about it. “I think so. Why?”

Zheng Zhi excitedly slapped the table several times. “Zhao Youjin! Zhao Youjin! That female pharmaceutical representative in Qizhou! Director Feng’s wife!”

Wei Li’an also sat up straight, frowning. “Are you sure you’re not mistaken?”

Zheng Zhi shook his head. “There’s a difference between Zhao Youjin’s eye sockets and a regular person’s. Her eyes obviously had major surgery. To be associated with a figure like Si Wen, and to have a pair of eyes worth hundreds of thousands, who else could it be?”

If it was Zhao Youjin, could his previous suspicions be confirmed?

Wei Li’an became uneasy.

He suspected that Si Wen was Fan Chang, who had escaped all those years ago. Halfway through his investigation, Feng Zhongliang came to stop him, and it seemed like he was protecting Si Wen. Of course, he was only suspicious, not certain.

But if what Zheng Zhi said was true, and Zhao Youjin had a close relationship with Si Wen, could it mean that Feng Zhongliang and Si Wen were actually in cahoots? Or, could it mean that Si Wen was Fan Chang, and there was no cousin He Yi at all, and all of this was a cover he had created for himself? And the reason he was able to escape back then was because Feng Zhongliang had secretly helped him.

If this hypothesis held, then it would also make sense that Zhao Youjin was able to achieve such great success in business.

For a woman in a strange place like Qizhou to have accomplished what she has today is truly not easy. Everyone knew she was Feng Zhongliang’s wife, but no one thought Feng Zhongliang had provided her with any convenience, as he was highly respected in the anti-drug community.

But now, it seemed this might just be a disguise.

A chill ran down Wei Li’an’s spine. He didn’t want to accept that Feng Zhongliang and Si Wen were in it together, but the unfolding truth was truly shocking.

Zheng Zhi also thought of this and became serious. “If Director Feng is really on Si Wen’s side, what should we do?”

Everything was in chaos. Their past actions had been so confident because they had a good leader like Feng Zhongliang to set an example. Now, being told that he might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Wei Li’an panicked. “Don’t leak anything. Keep a close eye on them and see what their next move is.”

Zheng Zhi nodded and asked him, “If Si Wen is still trafficking drugs and Director Feng is his protector, what do we do?”

Wei Li’an pursed his lips. “Handle it according to the law.”

No matter who it was, a crime must be met with legal punishment. Even if it was the highly accomplished Feng Zhongliang, there would be no exception.