Chapter One Hundred and Ten: One Night

Leng Tang’s gaze remained fixed on the severed limb. As a professional assassin, his powers of analysis were sharp. The Scorpion Blade was still clutched tightly in Leng Sha’s hand; even with his right arm blown off, the blade had not fallen. There was only one possible explanation: Leng Sha must have been dead before the blast reached him. Only in death, when the body stiffens, could the knife have remained in his grip through the force of such a terrifying explosion.

Following this line of reasoning, only one person could have triggered the bomb: Leng Tu. A grim premonition washed over Leng Tang. It was likely that both brothers, Leng Sha and Leng Tu, had met their doom.

"Search! Find that boy's body!" Leng Tang shouted urgently. He was haunted by a worst-case scenario: that the kid might still be alive.

Ten full minutes passed. The five men searched the hundred-meter radius three times over, but they found nothing. The boy they were hunting seemed to have vanished into thin air, leaving no trace.

"Brother Tang, that kid... do you think he was blown to bits, leaving nothing behind?" the young subordinate who had fallen into the pit asked.

A brutal kick from Leng Tang was his only reply.

Blown to dust? What a ridiculous notion. Even if caught in the blast, a body wouldn't simply disintegrate. No matter how powerful the high-explosive bomb was, it wasn't a nuclear weapon.

There was only one conclusion: the boy had survived and escaped. It was the only possibility Leng Tang could conceive, though the lack of any trail left him deeply unsettled.

After a long moment of thought, Leng Tang shook his head in frustration. "Let’s go. We need to leave now. The explosion will surely draw the police. Plus, those five officers were killed; they’ll be here soon. We must retreat."

As if to confirm his words, eight police cruisers could be seen speeding up the mountain. The authorities were using satellite tracking to locate their missing colleagues.

The five men scrambled up the hillside. It took them ten minutes to reach their vehicle; luckily, they weren't too far away, or the police would have arrived before they could even reach their car. Without another word, they piled in and sped toward the summit.

"Kill the headlights," Leng Tang whispered to the driver, fearing they might attract the attention of the police cars climbing the mountain.

By the time Leng Tang and his men reached the peak, the eight police cruisers were still three minutes away from the spot they had just abandoned. Because the mountain road was narrow and spiraled upward, and because they had driven without lights, they managed to slip away unnoticed.

*Screech.* The discordant sound of eight police cars braking shattered the heavy silence of the dark night.

*Clang.* Doors flew open, and the sound of frantic movement echoed as nearly twenty heavily armed officers stood at the site where the Porsche SUV and the Volkswagen had collided.

The officers' expressions turned grim when they saw the five policemen lying in a heap, killed by gunfire. To murder police officers in such a brazen manner—it was the work of utter monsters.

After a brief moment of shock, they regained their composure. In their line of work, they were no strangers to death, often living life on the edge.

"Xiao Wei, check it out." The order came from a man of about thirty-five, with prominent phoenix eyes and a distinct handlebar mustache. If not for his uniform, one might easily mistake him for a thug.

The leader reached into his pocket for a cigarette, and a young officer quickly stepped forward to light it.

"Yes, Bao-ge." The young officer named Xiao Wei approached the overturned Volkswagen with his weapon drawn, moving with extreme caution.

Within a minute, he returned. "Bao-ge, it's empty. Whoever was inside has been moved or silenced."

"Empty?" The lead officer, Zhang Bao, frowned. They hadn't seen any vehicles pass them on the way up, yet the suspects were gone. He scanned the dark mountain road, his gaze following the pitch-black slope all the way to the summit. He vividly recalled seeing no headlights on their way up, which left him caught in a frustrating loop of logic.

His eyes then caught sight of the crater caused by the high-explosive bomb, and his gaze sharpened. The other officers followed his look, their eyes widening at the two-meter-deep pit. It was clearly fresh. Following the trail of destruction upward, it was evident that a fierce battle had taken place.

"Let’s go down and take a look," Zhang Bao said, his voice deep. He climbed over the guardrail and made his way down the slope.

Using their flashlights, they found numerous bullet casings and several bodies. They ordered the team to bring the six corpses up to the road. Aside from a few severed limbs, the Scorpion Blade, Leng Tu’s Wusha Blade, and the throwing knife buried in Leng Sha’s heart, they found nothing else—not even a trace of Lin Yang beneath the soil.

After a thorough search yielded no further results, the group returned to the road.

"Bao-ge, the fatal wounds on these six bodies are very strange," a young officer who had some experience with forensic investigation reported, his brow furrowed.

"Strange how?" Zhang Bao asked, walking toward the corpses.

"The injuries are peculiar. They were all killed by throat-slitting strikes, but the weapons used were different, as were the sizes of the wounds," the young officer explained.

He began to categorize them: three bodies showed wounds consistent with shards of ceramic, two were caused by Lin Yang’s throwing knife, and the final one was inflicted with Leng Tu’s own Wusha Blade.

Unlike the others, the corpse killed by the Wusha Blade was in a sorry state. Its skin was a deep, purplish-black. Even though the man had been dead for some time, the discoloration continued to spread. The toxins from the Mamba snake venom were virulent and fast-acting, and the body had begun to emit a sickening, fishy stench.

Poisoning.

It was undeniable. Any observer could see that the body had succumbed to a horrific toxin.

After documenting the scene, the police withdrew. The two cruisers that had been sent to patrol the summit returned as well.

"Bao-ge, we didn't find any suspicious vehicles," the officer reported. When he saw the six bodies laid out on the road, he stammered, "Bao-ge... were these found down there?"

"Obviously. Since there's nothing else, let's head back and sort this out at the station," Zhang Bao ordered. This was the most vicious case he had ever seen. The attackers had used not only cold weapons but also advanced silencers and an unknown type of explosive. He would have to consult an expert to identify what kind of bomb could create such a massive crater.

They had arrived with twenty men, but they were leaving with eleven additional bodies, making the eight cruisers feel cramped.

As the police sirens faded into the distance, Lin Yang remained buried in the mud, unconscious.

The surroundings returned to a deathly silence. The cold wind howled, kicking up dust and rustling the branches, but the terrifying scent of the slaughter remained. The only things left behind were the nauseating smell of blood and stains that had yet to dry.

It was an unsettled night for Jiangning, even in the desolate Qiqi Mountain.

With two of the Leng family’s top-tier assassins dead, the already fragile house of Leng faced an even greater crisis. Moreover, the hurried nature of Leng Tang’s departure had left behind too much evidence, pointing the finger of justice directly at one of Jiangning’s most powerful families.

And the other protagonist of this tragedy remained unconscious in that two-meter-deep pit.

The next morning, the sun shone brightly, but the late autumn air remained bitingly cold, especially in the northern city of Jiangning.

Under the harsh glare of the morning sun, a blood-stained right hand struggled to reach out from the depths of the crater on the hillside. Had anyone seen this at night, they would have surely screamed of ghosts.

As the soil shifted, a figure covered in blood and tattered rags crawled out. He shook his body to dislodge the clinging dirt and cursed in frustration.

"Damn it! It's a good thing I'm clever enough to bury myself, or I'd be meeting the King of Hell by now. Damn, they're ruthless—daring to use a high-explosive bomb like that."