Cross Tracking

Night gradually fell. An autumn breeze swept across the Wangcheng Bridge. As Qing Chen ran, he stretched out his body, and the wind blew the hem of his clothes behind him.

Perhaps his state of mind had changed. He felt as though...

The shackles imposed on him by his family and environment were slowly coming undone.

Qing Chen ran faster and faster.

Pedestrians on the bridge occasionally turned to look at him. Everyone could sense that inexplicable youthful energy, impulsive yet overflowing.

Yinrun Central Garden was one of Luo City's most expensive residential complexes, as well as a famous neighborhood for the wealthy.

So Qing Chen was not surprised that Huang Jixian, as the son of a wealthy family, lived here.

Security at the complex was relatively strict. Residents needed to swipe a card to enter or leave.

Qing Chen circled around to the back entrance, intending to see whether there was a way in from this side.

However, before he could figure out how to get inside, he saw six men in black suits emerge from the small road by the complex's back entrance.

Their backs were ramrod straight, and they looked as sharp and imposing as bayonets.

As they walked, the six kept perfectly in step. The timing of their steps and the distance they covered seemed as if they had been measured with a ruler.

Wait. Qing Chen froze, because he saw that they were escorting a teenage boy among them... Huang Jixian!

Huang Jixian looked bewildered, muttering incomprehensible words under his breath: prison, machinery, monsters...

They swiftly boarded two black SUVs outside the back entrance. One of them seemed to sense something and turned from the passenger seat to look in Qing Chen's direction.

Qing Chen immediately turned away and casually played with his phone.

The other man did not seem to pay much attention to him. The two black SUVs sped away into the night.

Qing Chen stood motionless outside the complex gates, staring at his phone without saying a word.

Who were those people?

Why had they taken Huang Jixian away?

Could it be because Huang Jixian was a transmigrator?

It had to be because of that. Qing Chen did not believe in coincidences.

He turned around and headed home.

Along the way, he pondered the identities of the men in black, but gradually, he realized something was wrong.

A young man in a black hoodie had silently followed him for five blocks.

That inexplicable sense of familiarity... Qing Chen had seen him before.

In an instant, every muscle in Qing Chen's body tensed. An invisible pressure was eroding his sense of security.

It was as if a wild beast had fixed its gaze on him.

He remembered. When he had encountered the men in black at the back entrance of Central Garden, this man had been standing nearby, looking at his phone. Yet while looking at it, his fingers had never moved across the screen.

Qing Chen could not analyze everything he saw every second; that would be too mentally exhausting. But he could retrieve memories.

With that thought, Qing Chen casually pretended to pick up his phone, then stopped where he was and lowered his head as if making a call. "Hello, I'll be home for dinner later..."

His baseball cap concealed his face in shadow.

After Qing Chen stopped, the young man in the black hoodie kept walking past him without slowing down.

Qing Chen kept the other man locked in the corner of his eye, but the man never looked back even once.

That left Qing Chen somewhat puzzled. For a moment, he even wondered whether he had been overthinking things.

Amid the bustling traffic, the man in the black hoodie quickly vanished from sight. Qing Chen hung up and continued onward.

Fortunately, he had gone home and changed out of his school uniform, putting on a cap. Otherwise, the other man would have known at a glance from his uniform that he was a student at Luo City Foreign Languages School.

Before Qing Chen could relax, he spotted another familiar face among the crowd waiting at the traffic light at the next intersection.

It was someone he had seen at the front entrance of Central Garden.

This was no coincidence.

It was cross tracking.

Each person assigned to follow him only covered a section of the route. Everyone had to ensure they looked like an ordinary passerby and went unnoticed. If the target stopped, the tracker had to continue walking ahead as though nothing had happened, while another member behind them took over.

This was one of the safest tracking methods.

Qing Chen was grateful that he had read so many miscellaneous books, useful and useless alike.

He finally understood that the moment the person in the SUV had looked at him, he had been marked.

There had been more than six of them. Others were hidden in the shadows.

Was this some secret organization? They were so well-trained and so concerned with matters related to transmigrators.

Qing Chen suddenly felt that he might not have been part of the first batch of transmigrators. Perhaps he was in the second batch, or even the third.

Otherwise, even if someone had learned about transmigrators today, they could not have reacted so quickly on the very same day.

These people had come prepared.

The boy's black eyes were dense and deep. Night joggers approached him on the sidewalk; an uncle by the roadside sold candied hawthorns; a slender woman clicked past in high heels; and the shadows cast by the yellow streetlights shifted around him.

He committed every detail to memory and reminded himself that he could not make a mistake.

There were still twelve seconds left on the light.

The man in black who had passed him earlier had likely already begun circling back behind him, preparing to take over the next round of cross tracking.

Based on the route he would need to take along Wangchunmen Street, Zhenghe Road, and Kaiyuan Avenue, it would take at most ten minutes at an adult's running speed.

If Qing Chen wanted to shake the tail...

Now was the time.

The light turned green. The watcher lifted his foot to cross the street, while Qing Chen suddenly turned around and walked back the way he had come.

The tracker continued across the street as if nothing had happened and said quietly, "The target did not cross the street. He turned back. How much longer until you are in position?"

He appeared to be talking to himself, but anyone looking closely would have noticed a translucent earpiece tucked into his left ear.

"No. I still need two minutes to reach the tracking position."

In an instant, the tracker crossing the street sensed that something was wrong. He abruptly turned around to search for Qing Chen, but no matter how hard he looked, the boy was nowhere to be found.

"Lost him," the tracker at the intersection sighed.

The young man in the black hoodie, sprinting at full speed in the distance, replied with a laugh, "How embarrassing. Two people watching one person, and you still lost him."

"You were the one who insisted on watching him."

The young man in the black hoodie smiled. "Then tell me, do you think he noticed we were following him?"

A voice sounded through the earpiece. "I'm certain he noticed. He's an expert."

The young man in the black hoodie thought for a moment and said, "That boy looked no older than seventeen or eighteen, probably still in high school. If he really noticed we were following him, then he's far too monstrous. And did you notice? He handled it very naturally too. The first time he stopped to make a call, I didn't even think he had noticed me. Otherwise, I would have controlled him directly right then."

"I'm curious. Why did you suddenly decide to follow him? We have quite a few tasks today. There's no need to waste time on a passerby."

"It wasn't exactly a sudden decision. When the captain and the others escorted Target 009 out, I noticed that he avoided the captain's gaze."