Chapter Ninety: Four Kills

Around two in the morning, Liu Chang opened his sleeping eyes and sat up from the cold floor. As he did, the little girl beside him, who had been sleeping pressed against him, also stirred awake.

“Brother, are you going to get the gun?” she asked.

“Yes. The military is after me. Without that gun, I’m done for.” He stood, brushed the dirt from his pants, and then noticed a note tucked into a corner beneath the table.

It was placed close at hand, in a conspicuous spot; anyone could tell at a glance that someone had deliberately left it there. Liu Chang picked it up and saw a neat, graceful hand on the paper.

“Their base is in the row houses in the garden complex across from the street.”

The note was brief, with a simple map sketched in a few strokes, but every line pointed to exactly what Liu Chang most wanted to know.

After reading it, he tore it up without a second thought and bent down to the little girl. “I’m leaving first. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Don’t you need me to come with you?” the girl asked.

“It’s not a jungle. There aren’t so many unpredictable dangers. I don’t need to kill all of them; I just need to take my gun back.”

“But wouldn’t that make your目的 too obvious?” Xiaojing asked again.

“It’s fine. I’m not a professional, but I’ve watched enough movies about arson, murder, and robbery to know not to make it that obvious. Don’t worry.” He patted the girl on the head and left the room.

After leaving, he first went to the room where he had hidden when he first entered the complex, found the bow-gun he had stashed there, then stripped off his clothes and put on the bulletproof vest so thin it was almost like paper. He also found a set of black clothes in the wardrobe of the empty house, wrapped a scarf around his head so that only his eyes showed, took the bow-gun and the dagger, and set out fully armed.

Outside the building and into the wider world, the night was still a world of insects and their cries.

Without the little girl with him this time, he moved much faster. He ran through the darkness with remarkable speed. Every footfall landed at the best point to drive him forward; every step was executed with the most precise and scientific efficiency. Racing down the street, he dodged broken stones, tiles, and the wild weeds and trees before him with an ease that felt almost effortless. His strength had not increased, but his speed was clearly far greater than before. And because his footwork was so economical, the same amount of stamina now carried him much farther than it used to. In truth, the rise in his computational ability was effectively a comprehensive improvement in both endurance and speed.

Silently savoring the precision in his mind, Liu Chang had barely been running two minutes before he cleared the street and entered the neighboring district, which also meant he had entered the area of his destination.

The place was easy to spot: right in the center of the district, a complex of row houses stood out at a glance.

Once inside, the world outside no longer had the power supply of the research facility. In truth, in this world, whether you lived in a villa or a slum, there was no electricity.

Liu Chang slipped into the pitch-dark villa and, relying on his sharp sense of smell and hearing, accurately located the place where people were hiding among the buildings. A dozen, even dozens of people living in one house, no matter how large, would still leave many telltale signs.

For example, shoes piled in a dirty heap on the floor. For example, scraps and trash left behind after eating. For example, the foul stench from a toilet that was far too inadequate for the number of people using it.

All of these led Liu Chang to the right place, guiding him like a nimble cat as he crept up to the window.

The window was locked, and so was the door.

Sealing up doors and windows was the habit of people nowadays. Not to mention these men who were always fighting and killing; even ordinary people in this era would not dare sleep with the windows open. But these underworld enforcers were a little different from ordinary groups. They all slept crowded together in a single hall. With profit came cost, and they were afraid of revenge.

Seeing the iron bars outside the window, Liu Chang hung from them and, using all his strength, bent the two softest prongs until they curved open. Then he squeezed through the bars, smashed the glass window with his body, and jumped into the villa.

Crash!

The broken window let out a sharp, ringing sound. Along with the shower of glass shards on the floor, Liu Chang successfully entered the villa.

That crisp noise naturally startled everyone inside. The villa was large, three stories in all. Since the first floor was the main hall and clearly held the most people, Liu Chang had climbed to the second floor and leapt through a window there. Inside was a bedroom, where four men and one woman were sleeping, all five of them naked.

The sound of the shattered window woke them instantly. When the woman saw a figure completely wrapped up from head to toe, she screamed in terror at once, while the four men instinctively reached for weapons by the bed.

But of course Liu Chang would not give them that chance.

With a light leap, he landed in the center of the bed and plunged into their midst. Then his dagger flashed. With a single stroke, a perfect arc appeared in the air, curving neatly through the center of all four men’s throats and severing each of their windpipes in one clean motion. The line was beautiful, decisive, and swift.

The blade cut through flesh with a faint hiss, and blood burst from the men’s necks. Yet Liu Chang, kneeling in the middle of the bed as the cause of it all, managed to avoid the spray entirely.

The half-naked woman beside them, however, was not so fortunate. Blood from two of the four men splashed all over her face and body. Terrified, she screamed even more frantically, and the shock also loosened her bladder. At once, a pungent stink filled Liu Chang’s nose.

“Three seconds. Stop crying, or you’ll end up just like them.”

Frowning, Liu Chang spoke a single sentence that immediately silenced the woman’s screams. After waiting two seconds for her to steady herself, he asked again, “Three questions. How many people? How many have guns? Where is your boss?”

“At the third floor! I don’t know how many have guns. There are probably sixty or seventy of them!” The woman clutched her head and answered at top speed. “Don’t kill me. I was taken from the neighborhood. I haven’t done anything…”

She kept shouting and pleading for herself, but when she lifted her head again, the man was already gone.

Liu Chang opened the bedroom door and headed straight for the third floor. In his view, among everyone in this black-market gang, only the few men with guns could pose a threat to him. The rest could be ignored completely. Since he had already confirmed that the boss was on the third floor, and since his own pistol was also on the third floor, there was no reason to waste time dealing with the underlings below.

And as he went upstairs, the woman’s screaming and the crash of the broken window had already set the entire villa ablaze with alarm. By the time Liu Chang was racing upward, he could already hear a chaotic mix of doors opening, hurried footsteps, and the clatter of people scrambling for weapons in panic.

He was not in the least afraid. In a world without light and shrouded in a red mist, these “blind men,” whose sight reached barely more than a meter, posed no threat to him at all.