"Why leave? I want to hear what Liu Dezhu has to say!" Nan Gengchen muttered.
Qing Chen glanced at him. "What's there to hear? Are you a Time Walker? If not, there's no use listening."
Nan Gengchen choked on his words. "But this is firsthand information about the Inner World. What if you... what if we both travel through in the future? It could come in handy."
"Not interested," Qing Chen said casually.
"Traveling through is so interesting," Nan Gengchen said. "If we both travel to the Inner World, we could become extraordinary people, or replace our bodies with mechanical limbs and become superhumans. Then you and I could form a League of Fatherly Sorrow. Sounds awesome."
Qing Chen: "..."
The reporters were ultimately blocked downstairs by a group of teachers. School was a place for studying—how could they let outsiders run wild?
During the first break, a figure quietly climbed over the school wall.
He stopped a student on the athletic field and asked, "Which way to Class 4, Grade 2?"
The student was visibly startled by the Sichuan accent, but still pointed him in the right direction.
The middle-aged man thanked him and headed for the classroom.
At that moment, Liu Dezhu had just returned from the Academic Affairs Office. Before his classmates could surround him, someone suddenly rushed up to him. "You're Liu Dezhu? I'll give you money. Talk it over with Li Shutong and get me released, all right?"
Everyone was stunned.
The classroom fell silent for only a second, but that one second of silence seemed especially jarring amid the previous commotion.
"That's... Jian Sheng! He's still in Luo City! Hurry, get a teacher!" a student cried out.
Jian Sheng had not left Luo City after coming here on business, because he still had unfinished matters to handle.
When he saw the news on Weibo today, he immediately rushed to Luo City Foreign Language School.
Actually, Jian Sheng was not sure whether Liu Dezhu was the person he was looking for, but everyone was saying so now...
Standing at the door of Class 4, Grade 2, he asked, "Which one of you is Liu Dezhu?"
The students by the classroom door took a while to process it. "You mean Liu Dezhu?"
"Yes, yes, Liu Dezhu!" Jian Sheng slapped his forehead.
The student pointed him out. The moment Liu Dezhu saw this, he sensed trouble and got up to run.
Jian Sheng rushed forward, grabbed him, and said urgently, "I know you're a big shot in Prison No. 18. Even that extraordinary person who interrogated me followed behind you. Your status must be very high!"
Liu Dezhu panicked. "Not me, you've got the wrong person!"
"Damn it, don't worry, I won't expose you..." Before Jian Sheng could finish, the two teachers who had just arrived dragged him out of the classroom. "I'll give you money!"
Jian Sheng's curses echoed through the corridor as the students all turned to look at Liu Dezhu...
Liu Dezhu was on the verge of collapse. He had truly never expected that one lie would cause so much trouble.
To be honest, what he wanted most right now was to find the third Time Walker in the prison!
He wanted to see who exactly had made him carry such a huge burden!
At that moment, Qing Chen, the one who had dumped the burden on him, sat in the classroom as though the commotion outside had nothing to do with him.
When he saw Nan Gengchen take out a computer programming textbook, he asked, "Why are you suddenly reading that?"
"N-Nothing," Nan Gengchen said. "I just want to learn a skill. What do you think about getting close to Liu Dezhu? If we build a good relationship with him, we might get quite a few benefits in the Inner World."
"No need," Qing Chen replied. "I'm not a Time Walker."
But at that moment, he suddenly lowered his head in thought.
Of course, he knew Liu Dezhu was a fake, but Time Walkers like Nan Gengchen did not.
There were probably already more than ten thousand Time Walkers across the country. Would anyone be drawn to Luo City by Liu Dezhu's "identity"?
After all, based on the known information, this was the easiest way to find a "reliable teammate" in the Inner World.
He Xiaoxiao had suggested that everyone form teams and stick together in the Inner World, but there was a vast difference between useless teammates and reliable ones.
Still, there was something Qing Chen could not understand.
Such a huge incident had happened today, so why had no one from Kunlun appeared even now?
Could it be that Li Shutong's inheritance was not enough to draw attention? Definitely not.
There had to be a problem here.
Even by the time evening self-study was about to begin, Qing Chen had not seen anyone from Kunlun. He kept feeling that something was about to happen, yet he did not know what.
At 9:20 p.m., the Grade 2 and Grade 3 students of Luo City Foreign Language School poured out of the campus.
Under the dim yellow streetlights, the campus at night possessed a unique kind of beauty.
Students in school uniforms walked along the paths in pairs, chatting. One bicycling classmate after another said goodbye to everyone before racing into the darkness.
Girls walked ahead while the boys secretly crushing on them chased and roughhoused with their friends behind them, trying to catch their attention.
Perhaps this was what youth was supposed to look like.
After saying goodbye to his classmates, Liu Dezhu pushed his bicycle out of the bike shed and rode toward Xinglong Gardens.
He thought back over everything that had happened today. The more he thought about it, the more wronged he felt, but after thinking for a long time, he still had no idea what to do.
Just as he passed Yellow River Road, he suddenly sensed that something was wrong. A black van was rapidly approaching beside him.
He turned his head and saw that both people in the front seats wore sunglasses. The person in the passenger seat was even looking directly at him.
Liu Dezhu inwardly cried out in alarm.
Just as they were about to enter an underpass with no surveillance cameras.
The driver of the black van suddenly jerked the steering wheel toward Liu Dezhu, using the vehicle's body to ram straight into him.
He frantically swerved his bicycle toward the sidewalk, but the black van mounted the sidewalk and sent both Liu Dezhu and his bicycle flying.
The shriek of tires scraping against the ground rang out alongside Liu Dezhu's scream.
The black van came to a crooked stop against the curb. With a clatter, its sliding door was pulled open, and a man's cold voice came from inside. "Make it quick. Take him."
Two people in sunglasses jumped out of the vehicle and charged at Liu Dezhu without hesitation.
They looked fierce and hardened, like ruthless gangsters from a Hong Kong action movie.
But most importantly, Liu Dezhu could clearly see that both of them had mechanical limbs!
"Help!" Liu Dezhu was scared out of his wits as he screamed with all his strength.
In an instant, a blinding beam of high beams lit up from behind, shining over everyone.
The roar of an engine drew nearer like rolling thunder, as if an iron beast were tearing down the concrete road...
With a deafening crash, a black SUV brutally slammed into the rear side of the black van!
The black van was sent rolling away!
The two gangsters who had gotten out earlier changed expression and immediately pounced toward the black SUV. Two long blades sprang from the mechanical limbs on their arms, but before they could reach the SUV, a blurred figure leaped down from the twenty-foot-high overpass above them.
Someone had been waiting here all along!
The figure fell fast and hard, landing directly atop the two gangsters' heads in the blink of an eye.
Steel-forged legs stomped onto the gangsters' shoulders and drove them heavily into the ground.
Blue sparks flickered as the mechanical limbs on the gangsters' shoulders shattered, exposing the electronic components inside.
The figure that had descended from above turned to Liu Dezhu and asked, "Are you all right? Hello, nice to meet you. I'm Zheng Yuandong, the person in charge of Kunlun."
Before you continue