Chapter 166: You’re Going to Kill Ding Ruilong?!

Chapter 166: You’re Going to Kill Ding Ruilong?!

In the villa’s living room, Jiang Chuan was still waiting for a call.

He sat on the sofa with a faint frown, not particularly anxious. He did not believe a professional like Old Dao would fail.

What occupied him now was how to get Old Dao and his men out afterward, and how to keep the authorities from tracing anything back.

There would be trouble, certainly. But as long as Old Dao and the others were not caught, no investigation could reach Jiang Chuan, let alone implicate the Ding family.

In fact the greatest problem was not the cleanup.

It was Old Master Ding.

If the old master learned the young master had done something like this again, punishment would be unavoidable.

And Ding Ruilong would not be the only one to suffer for it.

Ding!

Jiang Chuan’s phone chimed with an incoming message. He picked it up, and before he could open it the ringtone for a call followed.

The number was the temporary one Old Dao had been using since arriving in Donghai.

Jiang Chuan answered at once.

“Is it done? Where are you now?”

“Did you see the picture?”

A young man’s voice came through the phone.

Jiang Chuan froze. His expression changed.

“Who is this? That phone—”

“Jiang Chuan, weren’t you the one who sent men after me?” There was a faint, teasing smile in Wu Chen’s voice. “You had people break into my home, too. You don’t know who I am?”

“You—”

In that moment Jiang Chuan’s face could only be described as stricken.

“Wu Chen! You—it’s you!”

“Forward the picture to Ding Ruilong for me.” Wu Chen was still easy, still smiling. “And pass on a message while you’re at it. He doesn’t have many days left. Tell him to treasure what’s left of his life.”

“You—”

Jiang Chuan still had something to say, but the line went to a busy tone.

Wu Chen had hung up the instant he finished.

Jiang Chuan looked at the screen, then switched straight to his messages and opened the text Wu Chen had just sent from Old Dao’s phone.

He saw the photograph.

Blood everywhere inside the elevator. Seven masked men sprawled and slumped across the cramped floor, filling nearly every inch of it. Every one of them cut. One with a hand clamped over his neck as the blood came through.

A chill went down Jiang Chuan’s spine.

The photograph told him one thing outright.

Old Dao and his men had ambushed Wu Chen in the elevator—

And lost.

There was no room in an elevator for many more bodies. Old Dao’s side was seven men; with Wu Chen that made eight. So even if Wu Chen had help, it could not have been much.

What frightened Jiang Chuan more was Old Dao himself.

Old Dao had lost too.

They called him Old Dao because of what he could do with a blade.

With guns, Old Dao was no match for Jiang Chuan.

But with knives only—

Jiang Chuan knew that even he had no chance whatsoever against Old Dao one on one.

Old Dao was a top killer, renowned along the Yun Province border, and he had been trained by an armed organization in the Myanmar border region.

And he had lost.

In the photograph Old Dao had taken at least three wounds. His knife hand was ruined, and there was a cut near his heart.

How had the fight gone?

How had it ended like this?

All seven looked as though they were going to die.

And from the way Wu Chen had spoken, it sounded as though he had known from the very beginning—

The longer Jiang Chuan thought about it, the colder he felt.

Only after a long while did he stride toward the balcony and call Ding Ruilong.

—

In the elevator in Xinmao Shopping Center’s underground garage, Wu Chen finished the call and tossed the phone back onto Old Dao.

He stepped out again and looked at Zhou Huan.

“Did you call an ambulance?”

Zhou Huan turned and stared at him.

An ambulance?

Was there any point?

Every one of them had taken a fatal wound. Not dead yet, but dying. Could they possibly be saved?

And why save them?

As hostages? For interrogation?

What Zhou Huan did not know was that only four of the seven were certain to die.

Wu Chen knew exactly where he had struck.

He had deliberately left survivors.

They were useful.

Extremely useful.

“Him.”

Wu Chen did not bother explaining. He gestured back at the unconscious Old Dao.

“I want him alive.”

Old Dao specifically had to survive.

The others did not matter—minor players Wu Chen had scarcely paid attention to even during the loop, men who had simply been sent along with Old Dao for this particular job.

Old Dao alone was different.

He was extraordinarily special.

In fact, one reason Wu Chen had deliberately forced Ding Ruilong into an extreme move today was precisely Old Dao.

Wu Chen could not be certain the man would come.

But he knew Old Dao handled the Ding family’s blackest work.

Whenever the stakes were high, whenever the dirty work required that someone absolutely had to die, Ding Ruilong handed it to Jiang Chuan, and Jiang Chuan went to Old Dao.

They had worked together many times.

So Wu Chen knew the odds were very good that Old Dao would come.

And because Old Dao did the Ding family’s blackest work—

He knew far too much.

He was not merely a crucial witness to two other pieces of lethal evidence against Ding Ruilong.

He also had extremely deep ties to a certain organization outside the country.

Wu Chen needed a living Old Dao as both intermediary and hostage.

But making Old Dao cooperate was exceedingly difficult.

The phrase fearless in the face of death might have been invented for a man like him.

Try to take him directly and he would fight to the death. Guns would not solve it. If a crowd truly managed to overpower and seize him, he would show every one of them exactly what it meant to be unbreakable.

During the loop, Wu Chen had captured Old Dao before.

He had tortured him for information.

Old Dao said nothing, right up to the moment he bled out and died.

Before that, Wu Chen had only seen such people in films and television—people who would not speak no matter what was done to them, all the way to death.

In reality, Old Dao was the first he had ever met.

But late in the stretch of the loop when Wu Chen had been working against him, he found a way to make Old Dao talk.

That method required not only knowing him well enough and saying certain specific things to him.

It also required—

Defeating him first.

…

Zhou Huan did not know why, and he did not ask.

He made another call.

Donghai had private hospitals with close ties to the underworld, places that could treat even gunshot wounds in secret. If these men were to be saved, it had to be somewhere like that.

So Zhou Huan called Li Ruotai again and asked him to arrange it.

When the call ended, Zhou Huan directed the others to move the men out of the elevator and load them into the vehicles for now.

He handled Old Dao himself, and with great care, afraid the man would die on him.

He could not see how anyone stabbed near the heart could possibly be pulled back, so he examined the wound more closely.

And what he found shocked him.

The angle was off.

Judging by the entry point, the blade had passed extremely close to Old Dao’s heart—but it had not gone into it.

Perhaps by a centimeter.

And—

It had missed the aorta.

An extraordinarily precise cut.

A fraction from fatal.

Zhou Huan thought of Wu Chen.

Once again his understanding of the man shifted.

He even felt this was something he needed to report to Miss Li in private.

The bodyguards kept working.

Li Ruotai, having received the news, made his arrangements while already on the road to Xinmao Shopping Center.

Wu Chen and Li Ruobing returned to the Bentley Continental.

Wu Chen was soaked in blood and would ruin the interior, but nobody cared about that now.

Inside the car—

“You really aren’t hurt?”

Li Ruobing was already tugging at his clothes, trying to get the jacket off him so she could see whether he had been cut.

“I’m not.” The blood was gone from his face now. Wu Chen smiled at her. “That worried about me? Do you think I’d do something I might lose control of?”

Li Ruobing said nothing.

She only kept pulling at his clothes and inspecting him from head to foot.

Wu Chen watched her, smiling.

After several seconds of silence he said, “In a couple of days I’ll be leaving Donghai for a while. I’m going south.”

“Hm?”

Li Ruobing’s head snapped up. Her gaze sharpened and the words came out before she could stop them. “You’re going to kill Ding Ruilong?! Don’t go!”

“Afraid I’ll die?” Wu Chen smiled.

“Wu Chen!”

She seized his hand and stared into his eyes.

“Don’t go!”

Then she leaned across from the driver’s seat, hooked an arm around his neck, kissed him on the mouth, drew back a little, and looked into his eyes again.

“Don’t go. All right?”