Chapter 163: Seven Men

Chapter 163: Seven Men

Ding Ruilong sounded as though he had lost his mind.

“Young Master, if this becomes an outright murder case, there could be trouble,” Jiang Chuan reminded him.

“I’ll handle the trouble! You just do as I say! Wu Chen dies today!” Ding Ruilong roared.

He sounded crazed, and yet there was a kind of reason under it.

The best way to kill a man was to make it look like an accident.

A “suicide.” A traffic collision. Methods of that sort.

With a flawless setup, nobody would ever prove anything. Take a traffic accident: if the hit-and-run driver vanished afterward and was never found, the case became nearly impossible to trace.

It was an “accident.”

No trouble.

And no trouble was precisely what Jiang Chuan had come to Donghai to achieve. If the job could be done clean, there was no sense making a mess and inviting complications.

But now Ding Ruilong was ordering him to simply send men to hack Wu Chen down.

That would be murder.

Donghai was not Ding-family ground. If the case blew open, investigators could follow the threads and implicate a great many people. They would never trace it all the way back to Ding Ruilong—but unless every attacker fled at once and got out of the country, someone would have to come forward and take the fall.

And Ding Ruilong wanted it done anyway.

In truth, he was being “rational.”

That rationality rested on a single premise:

Wu Chen had to die.

Once that premise was absolute, Ding Ruilong understood very clearly that after today, Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai would never hand him a second chance at Wu Chen.

Donghai was Li Ruotai’s ground.

So—

It had to be now.

Hack Wu Chen down immediately.

Before the Li siblings finished arranging things. Before they put Wu Chen under full protection.

Act now.

There would certainly be a price.

But Ding Ruilong believed he could bear it.

And that it was worth bearing.

“All right, Young Master. I’ll arrange it…” Jiang Chuan agreed.

Once the call ended, Jiang Chuan strode out of the villa’s living room onto the balcony, pulled the glass door shut behind him, and only then made his next call.

What he was about to arrange was of the highest importance.

The fewer who knew, the better.

It connected quickly.

“Hello, Old Dao…” Jiang Chuan said.

“Master Chuan…” The voice on the other end was deep and heavy.

“The men on the operation were all taken by Li Ruotai,” Jiang Chuan said first.

“What?” Old Dao sounded startled, then hesitated. “Then I… fuck…”

He seemed at a loss and settled for a curse.

There was not much to say.

They lived by the blade. A day like this was bound to come sooner or later.

Strictly speaking, the men who had been taken were not Jiang Chuan’s at all.

They were Old Dao’s.

Because coming to Donghai carried enormous risk, Jiang Chuan had brought in outsiders for the job.

Old Dao’s group had been fetched from the border region of Yun Province. They had deep ties to illegal organizations in the areas bordering Myanmar, and the two sides had worked together before.

“I’ll pay you double,” Jiang Chuan said, then turned straight to it. “Where are you now?”

“Xinmao Shopping Center. Parking garage. In the car… I’ve already got a man inside keeping eyes on the kid,” Old Dao said.

“Did you bring knives?”

“Yeah. No guns, though… I can have some brought over.”

“Hack the kid down right now! I don’t care how you do it—keep it as clean as you can, and leave the moment it’s done,” Jiang Chuan said rapidly. “And no guns. We can’t have a firearms case.”

The instant a shooting occurred—once a body turned up and was confirmed killed by gunfire—it became a major case.

The authorities above would come down on it hard.

Jiang Chuan would never use a gun in Donghai.

He was afraid desperadoes like Old Dao’s men would do something reckless for money, then vanish and leave every bit of the mess to the Ding family.

“No guns, definitely. I understand,” Old Dao said, still sounding faintly hesitant. “But… Master Chuan, you’re…