Chapter 173: Smoke and Mirrors (1/2)

When Xiaotao and I got out of the sofa, I noticed that the man had left one more pill on the table. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand.

Xiaotao made a signal to me and we headed to the front room together. The two men had cut off Yuanchao’s pants and tied a tourniquet to his thigh. They were just about to saw his calf off.

“How did you…?” Kong Hui was startled when he saw us.

The faceless slave quickly grabbed a scalpel and aimed it at Yuanchao. Xiaotao shot his wrist, making him scream in agony. The scalpel flew out of his hand and across the room.

“Run!” screamed Kong Hui. He dropped the hacksaw in his hands immediately and ran out of the room. The faceless slave followed him close behind.

I shoved the Mind Clearing Pill into Yuanchao’s mouth and hurried over to chase the two men with Xiaotao. When we got outside, we saw the two men scrambling away in panic. Xiaotao fired at the sky and shouted, “Freeze or I’ll shoot!”

They did not stop at all. I could hear a roar coming from a distance and a bright spot of light slowly approaching in the dark. It turned out that there was a railroad track in the area, and a train was fast approaching us.

The two men were about to cross over to the other side of the railroad tracks. Xiaotao stopped and aimed her gun at Kong Hui, then she shot him in the leg. Once he was shot, he immediately slowed down, and the distance between us got shorter and shorter. He kept turning around in panic too, so in no time at all I started catching up to him.

When he was within my grasp, I jumped at him and threw him to the ground. Kong Hui bared his teeth and pulled out an extra scalpel.

“Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into, boy?” he taunted. “You’ve made a big mistake provoking us!”

He was about to stab me. I was so close that there was no way for me to dodge the attack, and thus I pushed my fingers into the gunshot wound on his leg. He screamed in pain, and I grabbed a brick on the ground nearby and hit him on the head with it, making him faint straight away

I breathed a sigh of relief, although my heart was still beating like a drum.

While I was fighting with Kong Hui, the faceless slave had fled to the railroad tracks. The train was about to arrive, and if he got to the other side just in time, we would never catch up with him. Then, just as he was on the tracks, a gunshot sounded, and the faceless slave was stopped for a fraction of a second. Due to that, he was hit by the oncoming train and turned into an amorphous pulp!

My jaw dropped. I turned around. I saw that Xiaotao hadn’t shot her gun. In fact, she was just as shocked as I was. About twenty meters behind her was Yuanchao, holding a smoking gun in his hand.

It turned out he noticed that the faceless slave was about to escape, so he took his aim and shot him from that distance. It was an impressive feat indeed. Realizing that the man was dead, Yuanchao pulled out a silver canister from his jacket and took a sip.

Xiaotao ran over to me and put handcuffs on the unconscious Kong Hui. “This case is over now, right?” she sighed.

“Are you okay?” I asked Yuanchao.

He was bleeding a lot due to the cut on his leg, but because the effect of the anesthetic hadn’t worn off yet, he couldn’t feel any pain.

“I’m fine,” he answered.

When Xiaotao saw that Yuanchao’s leg was practically soaked in blood, she gasped and shouted, “You’ll die if you lose any more blood! Sit down right now and don’t move! I’ll call 120!”

Not long after, the ambulance arrived and the police followed soon after. Kong Hui was taken away. At present, Dali’s whereabouts were still unknown. Xiaotao borrowed one of the police cars and we both hurried back to my dorm.

It was now one o’clock in the morning. Xiaotao and I barged into my room, startling my roommates. One of them asked me, “Where’s Dali, dude? Why’s he not with you?”

“Something just happened,” I answered. “Did you notice anything unusual about Dali recently?”

“Well… yeah, yesterday he told us he just received a text saying he won some money and that he was going to buy us a nice meal. But then he returned and told us the text was a scam after all.”

“When was this?”

“Last night,” my roommate replied. “You both went to the library after that!”

There was only one place where you could withdraw money in our college—the ATM machine. Xiaotao and I rushed there. The machine was covered with glass walls on all sides, so it was impossible to hide a body near it. Then I noticed that there was an ‘In Maintenance’ sign hanging on it.

I knocked on the ATM machine repeatedly, but Xiaotao pointed to the surveillance camera in the corner and argued, “Won’t that capture them if they really hid Dali in there?”

I looked around. There was a manhole nearby and it looked like it had been opened recently.