Fei Du lowered his head slightly, throwing his bloody hair out his eyes, putting it out of sight and out of mind. He nodded to the newcomer. "Are you unwell?"
The man in the wheelchair looked at Fei Du with a gaze full of interest, motioning for the woman behind him to push him closer. The barbarian driver immediately walked over to stand beside him and protect him to the death, like an utterly loyal dog, glaring menacingly at Fei Du—Fei Du could only smile at him very helplessly, demonstrating that he was an invalid who could only be kicked around; he didn't have the ability to leap up and bite someone under these circumstances.
They were in a long-abandoned underground parking lot, perhaps in an unfinished building or a disused factory. Fei Du's perspective was limited; he couldn't tell.
Both the nearby cement floor and the suspended ceiling were undecorated, with years of accumulated dust on them. A few power cords reached from somewhere and hung precariously, a couple of lightbulbs tied to the copper wires. There was barely adequate light. At the least movement, the lightbulbs shook. Looking at it too long was dizzying.
Under the disorderly light, the flickering human shadows came and went. In every direction, the corners hid an unknown number of people. The echoes of footsteps rose and fell. Among these people were probably the fake security guard from the Longyun Center, Wang Jian, and the fake patrolman from the Drum Tower…and so on, and so on. They normally hid in corners others couldn't see, like unspeaking human props. No one knew how much unremovable hatred you would find if you opened their chests.
Fei Du could almost feel the gazes of those people watching him. They were ice-cold—the icy cold of judgment. If not for the fact that he was still useful, they probably would have wanted to raise a stake and imitate the citizens who had burned witches in the Middle Ages, roasting him into a skewer on the spot.
"Teacher Fan," Fei Du said to the man, "thirteen years ago, I saw you at home once, but it was too long ago. I'm not quite sure—I do have the right person, don't I?"
"You're more cool-headed than Fei Chengyu, more patient than him, more composed. And you can camouflage yourself better," the man in the wheelchair said. He spoke slowly, and his voice was quiet, as if he didn't have enough strength, full of a sense of sickness and weakness. "So young. You really are too frightening."
Fei Du seemed somewhat astonished to hear such high praise. He tried to move and felt a sharp pain beneath his ribs. He suspected that the driver had broken a rib with that kick just now. Fei Du relaxed his breathing as much as he could and found himself a more comfortable position. "I'm a captive. How frightening can I be?"
Fan Siyuan beckoned, and a few people came over pushing a hospital bed. There were some pieces of simple life-preserving equipment on the hospital bed, wrapped around an old man who had been lying down for three years. This was Fei Chengyu, who had mysteriously vanished from the sanatorium.
Fei Chengyu wasn't moving at all. His muscles had atrophied. His arms, merely skin and bone, lay at his sides, the deathly pale skin very slack, the texture of a rotten pancake. Fei Du looked at him absently and quickly looked away, not feeling any surprise that Fei Chengyu would appear here.
"You were unconscious the whole way, so now you must not know where this is. We've removed all the tracking devices on you. You're all alone and in my hands, but you aren't panicked or afraid." Fan Siyuan looked at him calmly and pointed at Fei Chengyu. "This person has the closest blood relationship to you. He used the techniques of abuse to mold you, shackle you, but there isn't any hatred in your gaze looking at him, I could even say no movement, as though you were looking at a piece of expired meat. You don't know fear or pain, so you can be precise and ruthless. Fei Chengyu didn't amount to anything in his life, but cultivating you may be a redeeming quality. You really are an ideal monster."
Fei Du laughed silently, reservedly displaying that he accepted this praise.
"We still have a while to wait," Fan Siyuan said. "A crucial figure hasn't arrived yet. I can speak to you a little. What do you want to say?"
Fei Du at once rudely asked, "Where is this place?"
Fan Siyuan smiled without speaking.
"Oh, I see, I can't just say anything." Fei Du thought about it, then asked, "I see you aren't in good health. What's going on?"
"A tumor. At first it was lung cancer. Now it's metastasized. There's nothing to be done, only chemo. Chemo is very painful. At my age, I don't plan on continuing to torment myself," Fan Siyuan answered frankly. "I'll give you some advice from an old man. Smoking is bad for your health."
"I don't have that bad habit. If these subordinates of yours could be as pleasant to deal with as you are, Teacher Fan, perhaps I can remain healthy a little longer," Fei Du said politely. Then he sighed rather sadly. "Zhang Chunling really is useless. He's not dead himself, but he's gotten flustered and left such a large opening."
"If not for that, how would I have known that you, the innocent President Fei, were the oriole at the center of the web? We old fellows have all been duped by you. You really are too deep," Fan Siyuan said. "But now that I mention it, I don't think it's surprising. After all, you are Fei Chengyu's son. There was poison in your bones from the moment you were born."
"Teacher Fan, that's very unfair of you to say. If I hadn't gotten mixed up in this and driven the Zhang brothers thoroughly to the end of their ropes, would your people have been able to invade the enemy's interior so easily? The two of us are natural allies to start with. It's very unfriendly of you to talk about me like that."
"Shut up!" Before Fan Siyuan could say anything, the driver standing guard beside him became enraged. "Who's your ally? Trash! Sinner!"
Fei Du shrugged, an unspeakable craftiness permeating his smile. "You collaborated closely with my father over a decade ago, and now we've finally taken down Zhang Chunling and his gang… Of course, I've only put in a little force in this. Most of the credit goes to you. Teacher Fan, you're the elder. Just say the word, and of course I'll offer up that old dog Zhang Chunling with both hands."
Hearing how he planned to take a share of the spoils without taking part in the plot, the driver was beside himself with rage. Likely he thought he was polluting the air by breathing here. Agitated, he said, "Teacher has done this to…"
Fan Siyuan waved a hand to interrupt his subordinate's speech. "I'm not interested in controlling anyone, and I don't want Zhang Chunling to become my dog. From the start, I've only wanted to destroy them."
Fei Du raised his eyebrows, feigning astonishment. "Teacher Fan, you aren't going to tell me that you're an undercover police officer? Killing six people in a row is too high a threshold for going undercover."
"Those scumbags deserved their punishment!" These words came from some believer's mouth. The words "deserved their punishment" echoed in the empty underground room. It was ghastly.
"While I'm not a police officer, most of those who trained to be police officers back then were my students. I understand them," Fan Siyuan said. "In a certain sense, the police are only mechanical props, following a rigid institution, obeying a rigid sequence. And most of them are only using it as a job to feed their families. They're powerless. Fairness, righteousness? These things…"
At this point, Fan Siyuan laughed coldly. Behind him, all of his believers were filled with stereotyped righteous indignation. Their righteous indignation was unusually pious. Fei Du simply felt that he'd wandered by mistake into the den of some cult.
"But I couldn't see back then where this colossus was, and I wasn't in a position to investigate it. They had eyes in the City Bureau. They were everywhere. If I lightly touched the edge of it, I would have ended up like…" Fan Siyuan's words came to an abrupt halt, the rest of what he was going to say disappearing. After a good while, he went on: "There was nothing to be done. If I wanted to get close to it, I had to descend into the shadows myself, descend into the abyss, become one with them… There was nothing I could do.
"Destroying one person, one family, is too easy. You think these malicious pieces of garbage should die, but they can easily evade retribution. And even if one victim has the luck to have the demon put to death, so what? Most killers don't have to pay with their lives. Most of those who ought to die only eat and drink for free in prison for a few years. The price they pay isn't enough to atone for their crimes."
This time, there was no need for Fei Du to pretend. He displayed a very natural "Are you crazy?" expression. "Oh… So you're an unpaid volunteer judge?"
Fan Siyuan ignored him. The old man's gaze passed over his head, passed through the cement walls and the suspended ceiling, seeming to fall on a very distant place. "Much of the time, studying criminal psychology makes you very unhappy, because the more you know, the more you understand that those people—especially those guilty of heinous crimes, the most demented ones—even if they're arrested and brought to justice, they don't know regret at all. Some people are even pleased with their own control over others' lives. Like you, President Fei."
Fei Du felt that it would be best for him to keep his mouth shut at this time. Thereupon he could only smile.
"The more you understand these things, the more hopeless you feel. But sometimes there will be a few people who give you consolation, make you think there's still hope for the world, that there are still things in this system that you're reluctant to part with, that not everything you're doing is a futile effort."
Fei Du said, "You wouldn't be talking about Gu…"
A bullet instantly brushed past him. Fan Siyuan raised his eyelids. "I don't especially want to hear his name from your mouth."
Fei Du shrugged carelessly and shut his mouth.
"After that fire fourteen years ago, the only meaning left in my life was to make sure those who deserved to die got what was coming to them."
Fei Du seemed to be silently digesting for a while. "Zhang Chunling and the others took in wanted criminals, so you turned yourself into a wanted criminal, succeeded in infiltrating them. But after you'd infiltrated, you found that this organization was more enormous that you'd imagined, and you were at the outskirts. So you and Fei Chengyu, each with your own sinister designs, hit it off easily and used each other—he wanted to weaken the organization and control it himself, and you wanted them all to die… Teacher Fan, I really admire your type of psychopath."
"Teacher Fan." The woman pushing the wheelchair looked at Fei Du with a hateful gaze. "This sort of trash isn't worth you making a mental effort."
Fei Du raised his eyebrows at her slightly coquettishly. "Hey, young lady, have I offended you?"
The gaze of the woman pushing the wheelchair was like a knife, instantly stabbing a hole in Fei Du. "A scumbag who owes a debt like you ought to have sentence passed upon him!"
"Owe a debt? Whom do I owe?" Fei Du smiled as he looked at her, peach blossom eyes curving, plump lower eyelids emerging naturally under his eyes. "I never owe debts to beautiful young ladies, unless…"
Before Fei Du finished speaking, a bullet came from above, piercing through his ankle.
The sharp pain twisted through him. Fei Du groaned, all the blood in his body seeming to turn to cold sweat and pouring off of him. He curled his legs up painfully, leaving a long trail of blood on the ground. The change in the tempo of his breathing aggravated the injury to his ribs. Fei Du couldn't maintain in his sitting posture any longer. He sat collapsed on the ground.
Fan Siyuan raised his head. High up, there was a man with friendly, good-natured features holding a gun. "Teacher, you see it. This sort of person doesn't cry until he's seen the coffin!"
These words of his nearly brought out the "people's wrath." All around was a babble of voices—
"They don't know remorse at all!"
"What's the use of the law? It can't distinguish between good and evil. This sort of person might only pay a bit of a fine and then get away clean, go on being powerful and entitled, continue to harm people."
"He doesn't count as a person at all!"
"I spit!"
"Shooting is too good for him, he ought to be executed by dismemberment!"
Fei Du had never expected that he would one day face this sort of universal contempt. After he had endured the worst of the initial pain, he laughed breathlessly. "Doesn't cry until he's seen the coffin… Pft… Haha, ladies and gentlemen, I don't mind telling you, I won't cry even if I do see a coffin."
Fan Siyuan's believers had become the embodiment of "a tooth for a tooth." Nothing else could fit in their minds. Hearing that he could still spout nonsense at a time like this, they were overcome with rage, planning to swarm up in a crowd and trample him.
"Teacher Fan." Fei Du turned over amidst the public wrath, casually setting aside his injured ankle, lying there relaxed, idly half-closing his eyes. Amidst the clamor of those wanting to peel off his skin and rip out his sinews, he unhurriedly said, "Could I trouble you to take some care? I would die very easily. If you touch me again, I won't be able to hold up to you judging my crimes."
As soon as he spoke, the surroundings quieted at once.
"You all fantasize every day that you're righteous judges, and the climax comes when others weep bitter tears in front of you, kneeling on the ground in repentance, hopelessly and regretfully waiting for you to unfeelingly pronounce your unforgiving judgement—isn't that right? How can a sinner be allowed to die a natural death? How can he meet death easily? How can he die privately, without undergoing your trial and sentencing? A dead person can't feel anything, isn't that right?" Fei Du carelessly turned his head and spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva from biting the inside of his cheek, but the smile at the corners of his mouth was increasingly obvious. "Only a sadist can know what a sadist feels. How about it, do I understand you all?"
Fan Siyuan was looking at him expressionlessly.
Just then, urgent footsteps suddenly broke through the silent confrontation. A middle-aged man charged in, bent down, and said something to Fan Siyuan. The next instant, the sound of gunfire came from outside.
Fei Du raised his eyebrows. "Oh, the long-awaited guest arrives—do you think he'll kill you or me first?"
Two people came over, one on each side, and roughly hauled him up.
Yan City's city center—
Howling police sirens surrounded the former location of The Louvre. This place had changed hands and been renovated many times. It had become a combination movie theater, supermarket, and eating, drinking, and merrymaking complex.
As soon as he saw it, Lu Youliang felt there was something wrong.
The on-duty staff member in charge totteringly followed after the police, looking bewildered. "Officer, we only open at ten, there's no one here. There are just these few nighttime security guards, and they're all here. What are you looking for?"
"Security cameras. All the security cameras in the area!"
The security camera records for the mall, the underground parking lot, and all the traffic cameras and surveillance cameras within a kilometer radius were requested. Everyone hurriedly searched through them, sweating—there was nothing.
The night was as calm as water. They went through the security camera records several times on fast-forward…
Fan Siyuan and the others had never been here!
Lu Youliang's scalp went numb. He'd heard that Fei Du was a very reliable person, and when he'd come into contact with him, he'd also thought that, apart from being too deep a thinker, there was nothing else wrong with him. He was much steadier than these youngsters who would drop the ball at the critical moment. He hadn't expected to become the first person to be landed in a hole by him!