Chapter 483: They Had Crossed Wu Chen
by cnwebnovelsChapter 483: They Had Crossed Wu Chen
“Apparently they were taken in for questioning yesterday afternoon, and the arrests were formally approved today. Hu Benping told me. It’s already online…” Lu Guangnian said, tapping at his phone a few more times.
Liu Daohe knew who Hu Benping was: a Modu real estate magnate who was also due at Lu Guangnian’s wedding today.
They were all in real estate. Liu Daohe had never partnered with Hu Benping on a project, but he had worked with Lu Guangnian in the past, and he knew Hu and Lu had done deals together too.
People in the same circle always knew something of each other’s background, even if they weren’t close.
“Boss Hu said so? They’ve actually been formally arrested?” Liu Daohe was shocked all over again.
For an ordinary person, a formal arrest was serious, but not as serious as it sounded. The investigation might well end by establishing that the suspect was innocent.
People were arrested and later released after being cleared all the time.
For the Qi brothers, whose fortunes ran into the tens of billions of yuan, it was terrifying!
Without hard evidence, no one could have touched them!
Even with hard evidence, they might not have been arrested! Given the brothers’ power and connections in Modu, no one would dare lay a finger on them unless the Xiang family gave the nod!
And there had been no word of any falling-out between the brothers and the Xiangs.
Then this, out of nowhere!
The likeliest explanation was that someone was going after the Xiang family and starting with the Qi brothers. Or else the brothers had offended someone even mightier than they were, someone prepared to go to war with the Xiangs just to destroy them!
Was some great family about to go to war with the Xiangs?
The move had been made in Modu itself. Was it another of Modu’s great families?
Who?
Lu Guangnian soon found the news. As it happened, the hottest story online today wasn’t the Qi brothers at all, but An Menglan and Morning Mist.
The internet had been fighting over them for days. The storm was slowly dying down, but it hadn’t blown over.
Still, the Qi brothers had made the trending-search list.
—Billionaire Hires Hitmen to Commit Murder
—Shuangqi Real Estate Bosses Arrested
The two topics sat seventh and ninth, drawing a fair amount of discussion. In truth, though, to the general public and the vast majority of internet users, Shuangqi Real Estate meant very little, and so did the names Qi Min and Qi Jun.
The rich people the public knew were usually the handful at the very top of the national rankings. The country’s richest man was famous, naturally, but a local richest man like Su Ruiwen was a nobody online.
Even so!
Netizens had a peculiar appetite for peeking into the lives of billionaires. Violent crime drew attention anyway, and a man worth tens of billions hiring killers made for an even juicier headline!
Lu Guangnian started reading.
Liu Daohe searched on his own phone.
And because Lu Guangnian was the focus of the whole event, many of the people around him took out their phones as well, looking it up and talking it over with whoever stood beside them.
Plenty of the wedding guests were in real estate, and Donghai’s own super-rich were there as well.
Seven of Donghai’s ten richest had come. The other two hadn’t stayed away out of any bad blood with Lu Guangnian; business had taken them out of Donghai, and they couldn’t make it back in time. Their families had come in their place.
Once you reached a certain level of wealth, you had more or less heard of Qi Min and Qi Jun, or at least of Shuangqi Real Estate.
A Modu real estate heavyweight getting arrested was bound to grab the guests’ attention and give them something to talk about!
News of the arrests soon spread across the main grounds.
Some guests from Modu even slipped off to quiet corners to call acquaintances and find out what was going on!
A few of those present were personal friends of Qi Min and Qi Jun.
They were stunned too. The brothers had been taken away yesterday afternoon, and even their friends hadn’t heard. Clearly they’d been taken in secret, and it had only been made public today.
Su Ruiwen took out his phone as well and glanced through the reports.
It had little to do with him. He didn’t know the real estate world well. He’d met Qi Min once, at a charity banquet in Modu several years back. They’d exchanged business cards and never been in touch since. Nodding acquaintances at best, nothing more.
Yet even as an outsider, Su Ruiwen could sense that something big was about to happen in Modu!
The Qi brothers’ fall might be only the beginning.
People drifted from group to group.
Guests clustered in twos and threes, talking.
Many of the real estate men had gathered around Lu Guangnian to discuss it with him. Su Ruiwen stood a short way off with several Donghai billionaires, chatting idly.
He still seemed distracted.
Every so often, his eyes strayed to Li Ruobing. He had things on his mind. Modu didn’t interest him much; it was none of his business. But Wu Yurong and Wu Chen…
He had no obligation to keep Wu Chen’s secrets. But Wu Yurong was a good friend, and he wasn’t the type to speak ill of people behind their backs. And then there was his suspicion that Wu Chen was involved with his own daughter.
Having discovered what was going on between Wu Chen and Wu Yurong, he was all the more inclined to believe that Qingying and Wu Chen really might be involved!
Because Wu Chen clearly knew how to handle women!
That he could make even Wu Yurong act like that was proof enough!
And Qingying and Li Ruobing were best friends…
It genuinely had Su Ruiwen stumped. He couldn’t do nothing. But he also knew that if he mishandled it and set his daughter and Li Ruobing against each other, there would be real trouble!
Li Ruobing and Su Qingying had stepped aside by now.
They were talking alone. Not even Mu Qianqian had come along. She was busy playing the good daughter at her father’s side and couldn’t very well tag after them.
Li Ruobing was looking at her phone with a very odd expression. Something was clearly bothering her.
She’d seen the posts. Someone had anonymously laid out, in full detail, how Qi Min had hired killers years ago, right down to where the body was buried. The post also described how Qi Jun had caused a woman’s death back then, with Qi Min’s son, Qi Chenghong, involved as well.
The arrests had been confirmed. Modu’s official Weibo account had posted a notice. It gave no details of the cases, saying only that investigations were ongoing, but it confirmed to the public that Qi Min, Qi Jun, Qi Chenghong, and others had been arrested.
That lent considerable weight to the anonymous allegations!
But none of that concerned Li Ruobing!
Her expression was odd because she knew the Qi family had crossed Wu Chen! It had begun with Zhuang Xiaodie. Over that affair, Wu Chen had killed three of the Qi family’s bodyguards.
The Qi brothers had suspected Mao Rusong and made an enemy of him!
Then, the night before last, Mao Rusong had been in a car crash. It had quickly been established that the brothers weren’t behind it. But the only reason Cao Liangpeng had dared go after Mao in the first place was that word of the feud had spread. He’d figured he could make the Qi brothers his scapegoats, and only then had he dared to act!
It was all one chain of cause and effect!
Wu Chen had never said what he meant to do about the Qi brothers afterward. So now Li Ruobing felt a faint chill of alarm. How many days had it been since the feud began?
He’d only been back in Donghai three days!
And the Qi brothers were already under arrest?
Clearly Wu Chen had put them there!
She was sure of it!
What she couldn’t work out was what he’d set up in Modu.
Modu wasn’t Wu Chen’s home turf! Donghai was, for now! And the Qi brothers had the Xiang family behind them. Touching them was hard enough, and the fallout would be severe… Did Wu Chen mean to go to war with the Xiangs?
That couldn’t be it!
The Xiang family was a great family on a par with the Li family!
Families like that weren’t easily shaken. Even with the older generation retired, their connections reached all the way to the top! And judging by how Wu Chen operated, he sought perfection, absolute control, and maximum gain. He never charged into anything whose risks he couldn’t control!
Otherwise he’d have gone to war with the Ding family long ago.
So…
There was nothing online about who had put the Qi brothers away, nor was that the sort of information that would appear online. Li Ruobing had no way of telling what Wu Chen had actually arranged!
“Ruobing, what’s wrong?” Su Qingying asked suddenly beside her.
“Hm?” Li Ruobing lowered her phone and turned.
“You look so strange,” Su Qingying said softly. She’d only asked because she’d seen Li Ruobing’s face change as she read. She stole another glance at the phone, then tilted her head closer and whispered, “Do you know what’s really going on?”
“No.” Li Ruobing shook her head, then leaned in and whispered, “But I do know this probably has something to do with our Mr. Wu.”
“Hm?” Su Qingying froze, her head still turned, and blinked several times.
“A few days ago, they crossed our Mr. Wu,” Li Ruobing murmured. “Over Zhuang Xiaodie.”
Now Su Qingying’s face changed too.
When Li Ruobing had said Wu Chen was connected, Su Qingying had assumed he was involved somehow, linked to it in some way. But now Li Ruobing said the brothers had crossed him.
The subtext was plain: Wu Chen had put them away!
That was a different thing entirely!
Su Qingying was young and had never had any dealings with the Qi brothers. Her business network was made up either of people tied to Jinfu Group or people her father, Su Ruiwen, had introduced her to…
But the posts online explained who the brothers were.
And everyone around them was talking. Su Qingying already knew the brothers were Xiang-family people!
She was even more alarmed than Li Ruobing.
“Then what exactly…” Su Qingying was about to ask more when she broke off.
She and Li Ruobing turned their heads at the same moment. They’d both caught the talk around them.
“Second Master Tang?”
“That’s right! I just called to ask. It’s all over Modu already. Second Master Tang made the move. And I hear it’s not just the Tang family, the Gu family’s in on it too. Gu Ruibo’s been very close to Second Master Tang lately…”
“You’re kidding… How did Qi Min manage to cross Second Master Tang?”
“Is the Tang family about to break with the Xiangs?”
As she listened, Li Ruobing’s expression grew subtle. Now she understood whose connections Wu Chen had used. What she still couldn’t understand was how big a payoff Tang Jingbin must have received to go to war with the Xiang family on behalf of a “junior” like Wu Chen!
What else had Wu Chen done during those two days in Modu?!
A short distance away, Su Ruiwen was listening too.
“Tang Jingbin…” He frowned slightly. He knew of Tang Jingbin but had never met him. Tang Jingbin moved at a higher level than he did: one of the core power holders of a great family, beyond anything a mere businessman could match.
Lately, though, Tang Jingbin had left a particular impression on him.
Because of Wu Chen.
Rumor had been going around Donghai that Tang Xinbao had nearly died there, that the Tang and Li families had almost become enemies over it, and that Tang Jingbin had even come to Donghai in person…
According to the rumors, Wu Chen had defused the whole thing, and had even saved Crooked Zhao, who had nearly been sacrificed to appease the Tangs.
“Gu Ruibo…” Su Ruiwen murmured, and his gaze drifted to Li Ruobing.
He’d heard Gu Ruibo and Li Ruotai were good friends, very close in private.
Still, he didn’t put anything together. It simply struck him as a coincidence that both Tang Jingbin and Gu Ruibo had ties to the Li family.
Just then…
“What are you all talking about?” Wu Chen had finally come back. He called out as he approached the fountain.
Li Ruobing and Su Qingying turned at once.
“Shuangqi Real Estate. The Qi brothers, Qi Min and Qi Jun, have been arrested,” Li Ruobing said.
“What’s there to talk about? It’s Brother Lu’s big day. Talking about something like that is bad luck,” Wu Chen said softly with a smile as he came to her side.
“We’d only just heard, so we were chatting about it,” Su Qingying said.
“Where’s Ms. Wu?” Li Ruobing asked.
“Touching up her makeup. She’ll be along in a bit,” Wu Chen said with a smile.
The three of them traded a few casual words.
All the while, Su Ruiwen watched from nearby, paying particular attention to his daughter and to every reaction she showed now that Wu Chen was there.
Ring, ring…
Wu Chen’s phone rang.
He took it out, glanced at the screen, and answered. “Boss Tang…”
It was Tang Jingbin!
“Boss Tang?” Su Ruiwen, watching closely, went still.