A Cute Little Kitten

"Mm, you should be careful too..."

After learning this lead, Chen Xia rode off.

He had come out this time to investigate the Evil Cult. He stood to gain a lot from it.

First, there was Jiang Xinglan's assignment; then there was the Evil Technique; and finally, he might even earn merit and get promoted. It was a chance to kill three birds with one stone.

With Chen Xia's current strength, ordinary people were no match for him. If he ran into danger, he could always just run.

Next, he wandered around the mall for a while, then bought a makeup face mask from a shop.

A makeup face mask was a new kind of facial disguise. It wasn't expensive, costing only a few dozen yuan, and didn't require any advanced makeup skills. You just stuck it straight onto your face, and your appearance changed, making it convenient to move around.

After buying it, he went to a public restroom and took everything out of the bag in his hand to change into.

When Chen Xia came out of the restroom, he had changed his outfit. He wore a black jacket, blue jeans, and a pair of gray sneakers. He put a black baseball cap over his blue head, and the whole getup made him look like an undercover agent.

Chen Xia had prepared all of this in advance. He put his changed clothes in a locker in the public area, then left looking like a casually dressed young man.

At night, Yijiang City was a sea of high-rises as far as the eye could see, filled with colorful signs. Streetlights, cars on the road, and pedestrians made for a bustling urban scene.

"Wooo, vroom, beep beep, bang bang..."

Chen Xia passed through the streets lined with nightclubs and the arcades in Entertainment City. His ears filled with the gunfire of shooting games, the engines roaring in racing games, and the thuds of fists and feet colliding in fighting games. The dazzling sights made his eyes swim. The crowd inside was a mixed bag, gathered together in an atmosphere thick with the stale stench of sweat and the sharp, choking smell of smoke.

With nothing better to do, Chen Xia went up and played a couple of rounds himself. When night had fully fallen, he glanced down at his electronic watch. It was nine o'clock in the evening.

"It's getting late. Time to go take a look!"

After finishing his last round and knocking out his opponent, Chen Xia got up and left. He pulled his black baseball cap low and headed for the restaurant Zhang Feng had mentioned, Ke Lai Xiang Restaurant, in Alley 12 on Xingou Street.

Soon, he arrived.

The place was far from the busy city center. There were fewer people around, though a few still wandered about, and people getting off work at night passed by now and then.

He saw that there really was an alley to the left of the restaurant. According to Zhang Feng, this was where he'd seen a red figure appear inside.

"I wonder if I'll run into it?"

Chen Xia didn't think it was very likely. He glanced into the darkness within but didn't go in. Instead, he stood by the nearby bus stop and looked at his phone.

His hearing was keen. If anything happened inside, he'd notice right away.

Chen Xia was also holding out a faint hope.

He waited for a while but saw nothing like what Zhang Feng had described. He was about to go straight into the alley to look around when he heard a sound beside him. Then he saw a black kitten emerge from inside.

A cat?

Chen Xia noticed it was a stray from the city, filthy-looking and still a kitten. He didn't pay it much mind. The outskirts of the southern part of the city were mostly Old Town, with lots of low, run-down houses. Stray dogs and cats surviving in the alleys were perfectly normal.

The stray cat reached the alley entrance, mewing pitifully as it paused there.

"Little kitten..."

Just then, a young woman by the roadside spotted the cat. She wore high heels and a long, spaghetti-strap dress, with a long down coat over it.

The woman was heavily made up. She carried a brown Guyi designer handbag in her right hand, and her black hair fell loose, covering both sides of her face. When she saw the kitten, a smile suddenly spread across her face. She took a bag of bread from her purse, opened it, and fed the cat.

"Come on, little kitten. You must be hungry..."

"Meow..." As if it understood her, the kitten rubbed against the hem of the woman's clothes, looking sweet and well-behaved, then began to eat.

Seeing this, Chen Xia thought the woman was kindhearted. Judging by her makeup and the fact that she was out in the middle of the night, he guessed she probably worked at a nightclub. Of course, that was only a guess.

Chen Xia had been about to walk toward the alley, but before he could move, he noticed that the woman had somehow picked up the kitten and was heading inside too.

Hm? Chen Xia immediately sensed something was wrong.

From the way the woman had been walking, she'd been heading straight ahead. And although she seemed kindhearted, the kitten was filthy. Holding it against herself would obviously dirty her clothes, but she didn't seem to care. She turned and headed into the alley.

Glancing over, Chen Xia noticed that the cat in the woman's arms—unless he'd imagined it—had a faint reddish gleam flicker through its pupils. The woman seemed as if she were in a trance, walking with a blank expression.

"I'll follow and take a look. There's definitely something wrong..."

Chen Xia quickly followed after the woman, keeping more than ten meters behind her.

Clouds blotted out the moon, leaving the alley pitch-dark. Dozens of meters away, an old-fashioned lightbulb hung on a wall, casting a faint yellow glow over the ground and the scattered discarded boxes and heaps of garbage at their feet.

Chen Xia held his breath and followed close behind the woman. As they went deeper into the alley, he could feel the air around him growing damper than it had been out on the street, and a rotten stench drifted toward him.

"Meow..." As if it had sensed Chen Xia behind them, the cat in the woman's arms suddenly poked its head over her shoulder. Its gleaming pupils fixed on him with a threatening look. Then it meowed, its fur standing on end as if warning him not to come closer.

But Chen Xia didn't care about the cat and kept walking. After they'd gone over thirty meters, the surroundings grew even darker. All that remained was the sound of the woman's high heels echoing along the silent path.

Whoosh!

Suddenly, the cat in the woman's arms sprang at him.

The cat moved like a phantom, impossibly fast. It leapt high into the air and lunged straight at Chen Xia's face, jaws open to bite.

Chen Xia dodged to the side, but the cat kept coming. In the end, he caught it in one hand and threw it away. The cat seemed dazed, but after getting back up, it didn't attack again. It ran off into another alley.

"This cat was obviously being controlled by something. Is this... the work of the Evil Cult?"

Chen Xia had never seen such a fierce cat before.

Once the cat had been dealt with, the woman slowly turned her head, revealing a pale face. She said nothing and continued walking.

She kept her face turned toward Chen Xia as she walked, but the strange posture didn't affect the steadiness of her steps at all.

"He's here... Wait, it seems someone followed him..." A low, hoarse voice suddenly came from the right side of a fork in the alley.

"Kill him," another voice said.

When the woman walked farther inside, Chen Xia stopped moving. Two tall men suddenly emerged from the right.

They held gleaming, long broadswords. Their faces were fierce, and they seemed to think Chen Xia had stuck his nose where it didn't belong. They attacked him with two slashes right off the bat.

If an ordinary person ran into this, they'd probably be done for. But Chen Xia was skilled and bold, and as a captain in the Patrol Inspection Office, he couldn't help wanting to test himself against something that threatened public safety.

This was different from the group that had intercepted him last time. The men in front of him might be the truth behind the missing-person cases.

Clang!

Chen Xia instantly pulled the hand he'd had tucked against his chest free and swung his broadsword, blocking both attacks.

The two blades were sent flying by the impact. The men clearly weren't even Grade 1 martial artists—at most, they were at the Eighth Stage of Ningyuan. They had no real fighting strength against Chen Xia.

Their faces changed drastically. They shouted that they'd run into a tough one and turned to flee. But Chen Xia could move dozens of meters per second. He caught up in an instant and kicked one of them in the back. The man flew four or five meters like a cannonball and slammed into the wall, passing out on the spot.

Chen Xia struck the man in front with a punch to the back of the heart. He hit the ground, spitting blood.

Chen Xia had already been through two battles. Yu Banshou hadn't died by his hand, but Hu Biao had undeniably been beaten to death by him.

He was no longer a greenhorn at fighting to the death. After taking care of the men, he followed the woman ahead to see what she was up to.

The woman walking farther up the alley had stopped. The corner of her mouth curled upward in that same strange expression. Her face, cold and blank only moments earlier, now wore a smile as she stared at Chen Xia.