Chapter 167: That’s Impossible! Impossible! Impossible!

Chapter 167: That’s Impossible! Impossible! Impossible!

Li Ruobing was genuinely afraid something would happen to him.

Today he had overturned everything she thought she knew about him all over again.

Before this, she had made every kind of guess about his identity, but all of them had turned on knowledge, learning, intelligence-gathering.

Today, though—

Wu Chen had seemed hardly human. Some other order of being.

How could anyone fight like that?

And even after seeing it, Li Ruobing was still afraid of him going after Ding Ruilong.

Of course she did not care whether Ding Ruilong lived or died. Over the past few years she had cursed him in her heart more times than she could count. She would have been delighted if he dropped dead on the spot.

Ding Ruilong suddenly dying would be wonderful.

But murdered—that was another matter entirely.

Li Ruobing even believed that with Wu Chen’s intelligence and his fighting ability, if he went south alone he could absolutely kill Ding Ruilong.

Ding Ruilong was not the problem.

The whole Ding family was.

The Dings were a great house on equal footing with the Lis, and Old Master Ding was still alive.

Of all his grandsons, the old master favored Ding Ruilong most.

That had to do with certain things from Ding Ruilong’s childhood.

So if Wu Chen killed him, the entire Ding family would come down on him like a breaking wave.

And the Li family—

Li Ruobing did not know how much Wu Chen had told her father, or what position her father had finally taken. She knew only the first part of their conversation. She did not know what her father would decide after learning that Ding Ruilong’s fatal secret ran through the Dong family.

Under those conditions, Li Ruobing believed that if the Dings moved against Wu Chen, the Lis—

Would almost certainly stand clear of it at first.

She and Li Ruotai would be restrained by their own family. Their authority to mobilize men might even be stripped from them.

They might be forcibly brought back to the family.

Made to sever their ties with Wu Chen.

Li Ruobing did not want that.

She did not want any of it.

A great family would never offend another great family for the sake of some minor figure.

It always came down to gains and losses.

It simply would not be worth it.

“Don’t go. Promise me you won’t. All right?”

She kissed him again, then stared into his eyes.

“Did I ever say I was going to kill Ding Ruilong?” Wu Chen smiled.

He did not want her imagining things and worrying too much. He liked seeing her worry over him like this, but in the end it did her no good.

“Then what are you going to do?” she asked.

Wu Chen smiled and did not answer.

“You’re really not going to kill Ding Ruilong?” she asked again.

“Of course not. Do you think I’m the sort of man who acts without regard for consequences, creates an enormous problem for himself, and then has no way to solve it?” he said, smiling.

He was telling her the truth.

Anything Li Ruobing could think of, he could think of. And he could think of things she could not.

From the very beginning Wu Chen had understood that his opponent was never Ding Ruilong.

To put it bluntly, he did not consider Ding Ruilong qualified to be his opponent. Without a grandfather who indulged him so heavily, then given everything he had done over the years, however capable and calculating he was, he would have been dead long ago.

Wu Chen’s true opponent was the whole Ding family, led by Old Master Ding.

So he would not let the situation slip out of his control.

By his plan, the day something happened to Ding Ruilong would also be the day that great and powerful house began to collapse.

“Then what exactly are you going to do? Why can’t you tell me?” she asked again.

Wu Chen only smiled.

Li Ruobing seemed to grow angry. Her face cooled.

But after a silence she said, “I don’t care what you’re going to do. Can you promise me that this time you definitely aren’t going after Ding Ruilong?”

“Beg me,” Wu Chen said, smiling.

“Yes. I’m begging you.” She nodded without hesitation.

“I promise.”

He said it smiling, but his eyes were serious.

Being with someone meant compromising with them.

This time Li Ruobing had lowered herself far enough to beg him.

So Wu Chen gave her his promise.

Of course—

He had never intended to go after Ding Ruilong in the first place.

He had only been teasing her.

The second the words were out, Li Ruobing put her arms around his neck again and kissed him.

For a long time.

More than twenty minutes later.

Li Ruotai reached the underground garage of Xinmao Shopping Center with more than a dozen vehicles full of men. Wang Zhuangyuan and the others had come along and stayed at his side.

The entire garage had been sealed off by Li Ruotai’s people.

The elevators were shut down.

Staff who worked in the shopping center and the occasional customer could still come down for their cars—they simply could not get anywhere near the elevator doors. A dense wall of men blocked everything. Nobody could see what lay inside.

Before he arrived, Li Ruotai had already called ahead and arranged the hospital. The ambulances reached the shopping center slightly before he did. Old Dao and the others who could still be saved were treated in the ambulances first, then taken away.

Not long after Li Ruotai arrived, the head of the corporate group that owned the shopping center turned up as well.

Donghai’s business circles were full of Li Ruotai’s friends. Some close, some not.

But as a rule they would all give him face.

An enormous case had taken place inside the shopping center today.

And from the owner’s point of view, this was something he would want buried in any event.

Otherwise he could forget about keeping the place open. Word of a major case with multiple deaths would cause a nationwide sensation.

Seen one way, the matter was extremely serious.

Seen another, it was not so serious at all.

Old Dao and his men lived in the shadows to begin with.

If they suddenly disappeared, the outside world would never know. No relatives would report them missing. Nobody would investigate on their behalf. Once the blood was cleaned up and the bodies removed unseen, the whole thing could be treated as though nothing had happened.

By noon.

Wu Chen returned to his home at Honor · Donghai Mansion.

Li Ruobing and Li Ruotai both came with him, along with their people. Li Ruotai had even brought specialists who went over the villa thoroughly with metal detectors and signal detectors.

On the way back, Wu Chen had told him the house was bugged.

So Li Ruotai arranged a full sweep.

At the same time—

Sixteenth floor, Donghai CBD Tower 3.

A recording studio called Ripple Studio.

Song Xuan sat on a sofa in the staff lounge, staring at the laptop on the coffee table.

She loved music. Music was what she lived for. The studio belonged to friends she made music with; for the past two years she had come here whenever she recorded a song, and even when she was not recording she came to talk over and study every aspect of music with them.

“That’s impossible! That’s impossible! That’s impossible!”

Song Xuan stared at the screen, saying it over and over. Her eyes grew wider each time, and without noticing it her voice climbed higher.

“Xuanxuan, what’s impossible?”

Wang Xiaomei, one of the studio’s employees, came over with coffee and sat down beside her as she asked.

Song Xuan seemed not to hear her.

She only stared at the screen.

Wang Xiaomei looked at it too.

The page showed the various charts on Penguin Music. Wang Xiaomei knew Song Xuan had released a song some time back, and that for days now she had been checking the charts to see whether it had made them—even at number one hundred, at the very bottom.

It never had.

Wang Xiaomei assumed she had been discouraged again, and offered comfort.

“It’s all right, Xuanxuan, it’s all right. You’re still a university student. There’s no rush. You’ll definitely make it one day!”

The reassurance had no effect at all.

Song Xuan went on staring at the computer as though she were possessed. She could not tear her eyes from it.

“Stop thinking about it, Xuanxuan.”

Wang Xiaomei tried again, then changed the subject.

“Oh—right. Have you heard the song at number one on the weekly chart? It blew up out of nowhere. I noticed it before bed last night. It’s really good, especially that male opera-style passage in the middle—it has such a feel to it. You should listen. Maybe it’ll give you some inspiration.”

Song Xuan turned sharply to stare at her.

Because the song Wang Xiaomei meant, the one at number one on the weekly chart—

Was “Antidote for the Soul.”