Liu Chang'an walked over to close the door.
The lackeys understood at once. Without waiting for Zhong Qing to signal them, they stepped forward and blocked Liu Chang'an from closing the door, though they didn't immediately attack him.
Liu Chang'an quietly watched Zhong Qing.
The night sky was veiled in thin clouds, and neither stars nor moon gave off any light. The construction site's lamps shone brightly, with piles of building materials stacked like mountains. Nearby, a towering crane loomed like a mechanical giant, lying in wait in the darkness.
Liu Chang'an switched on his flashlight and swept its beam straight ahead. Zhong Qing felt a tug on her hand and realized the Rottweiler had broken free. She cried out, then heard a shrill bark that quickly turned into a low whimper after a furious growl. Then it fell silent.
Liu Chang'an switched off the flashlight. The bodyguards and Zhong Qing gradually regained their vision. They saw a dead dog lying in front of Liu Chang'an. The Rottweiler named High Templar had stopped breathing and lay motionless on the ground.
Silence fell. The bodyguards, especially, instinctively backed away from their encircling formation. They watched Liu Chang'an warily, their gazes cold and alert. Zhong Qing could clearly see the muscles in their backs tensed, while the veins around their ears and necks throbbed violently.
Even as a layperson, Zhong Qing could tell Liu Chang'an had shaken the people she'd brought with her. One bodyguard near her lowered his voice. "Miss Zhong, this man is too dangerous. We can't act rashly..."
"Can't you beat him?"
"The dog's skull isn't cracked, and there's no blood around its mouth or nose. That means it was killed by a direct strike of inner force. We're not much stronger than that dog. One punch each, and we'd end up the same way."
Zhong Qing took a few steps back and adjusted her glasses, stunned. Could this penniless migrant worker, who'd been dining with a brothel madam, really be this terrifying?
No, that couldn't be. How could he be involved with a brothel madam...? It seemed she'd misjudged him. Only now did Zhong Qing finally shake off her assumptions.
"Keeping vicious dogs is prohibited in this city. If a dangerous dog breaks free of its leash, killing it carries no liability." Liu Chang'an picked up the dog. Junsha had similar laws, along with regulations for dealing with motorcycle snatch-and-grab robberies. Junsha had been among the first to put up signs saying, "Shoot motorcycle robbers on sight."
"Liu Chang'an!" Seeing him about to leave, Zhong Qing couldn't help calling out, her fear still suppressed in her chest.
"What is it?" Liu Chang'an turned back and switched on his flashlight.
The flashlight beam blinded everyone, leaving them unable to open their eyes. Dogs were different from people: they could quickly adjust to bright light, while people couldn't. Being dazzled by a sudden flash of light made them see spots. The bodyguards could only hurry to surround Zhong Qing based on where they remembered her to be, hoping he wouldn't use the same tactic to suddenly attack them. They'd been far too confident before coming here, completely unprepared to handle such a difficult target.
"Turn off the flashlight first." Zhong Qing shielded her eyes and spoke to Liu Chang'an from the side.
Zhong Qing's silhouette was curvaceous, its beautiful contours outlined by the harsh light. Liu Chang'an didn't turn off the flashlight. "If that's all, I'm leaving."
"Come with me to meet Third Miss Zhu. We mean you no harm. She just wants to see you," Zhong Qing said quickly. She hadn't expected High Templar to go berserk after being hit with the bright light. If it had been an ordinary person, things could have gone badly. Thankfully, Liu Chang'an had killed it... Though now that she'd seen how astonishingly skilled he was, that didn't exactly feel like a relief.
"I have one condition."
Money? That was Zhong Qing's first thought. But remembering the little tricks he'd used to grope her, she suspected his demand might be even more outrageous. So Zhu Juntang had wanted her to seduce Liu Chang'an because she'd already figured him out to some extent. And now, was she still supposed to use that kind of tactic? She should have listened to Zhu Juntang and arranged for a few high-end escorts to satisfy him.
"Go ahead," Zhong Qing said through clenched teeth. If his demand was too outrageous, she'd have to abandon tonight's plan. They couldn't beat him, and using force was out of the question.
Zhong Qing now understood that Liu Chang'an was not someone they could easily deal with. They couldn't scare him just by putting on a show. If he could kill a vicious dog like that with one punch, the people she'd brought were probably no match for him at all.
High Templar weighed over sixty kilograms, as much as an average adult man—far heavier than Zhong Qing. And a vicious dog was far more ferocious than an ordinary person.
"Can I have the dog?" Liu Chang'an asked, a little embarrassed. By the old customs, a dog he'd killed would naturally count as his prey.
"Y-you can have it..." Zhong Qing thought Liu Chang'an was a lunatic. She stared at him in disbelief. What on earth was going through his head? In that respect, he was a little like Zhu Juntang.
Liu Chang'an dragged the dog behind the wall and hid it there. Only then did he follow Zhong Qing away from the construction site, flashlight in hand.
Liu Chang'an walked on Zhong Qing's shadow. This woman's waist was so slender. In ancient times, women with narrow waists often had narrow, flat hips too, because they were usually malnourished—or else were courtesans who made their living with their looks. Ordinary women tried to keep both their waists and hips full, which made childbirth safer—in other words, made them more fertile. Back then, giving birth wasn't as easy as it was now; for a woman, it was like walking through the gates of hell... Modern women were strange, though. Their waists were so slim, yet their hips had become fuller. Was that a kind of evolution, one that satisfied men's preference for slim waists and full hips while also protecting women during childbirth?
The bodyguards stayed downstairs. Only Zhu Juntang herself, Zhong Qing, and guests she'd invited could use her private elevator. The other servants and security staff had to take the elevator on the opposite side.
"Why wouldn't you agree before, but you're willing tonight?" Zhong Qing had already made her judgment. Zhu Juntang wanted to see Liu Chang'an because he had something worth seeing—for instance, his impressive martial skills, which Zhong Qing hadn't known about before. When had Zhu Juntang met Liu Chang'an, and what had made her take an interest in him? This was a failure on her part, and she wouldn't know how to explain it to Third Mistress Zhu. Remembering Third Mistress Zhu's methods, Zhong Qing felt both embarrassed and flushed. She couldn't help frowning.
Riding a sightseeing elevator at night was a beautiful experience. Even though Junsha wasn't a city known for its light shows, Liu Chang'an replied, "I didn't agree before because I didn't want to. Tonight I felt I couldn't avoid it, so I decided to meet her."
"Is it really that simple?" Liu Chang'an's thoughts and words always surprised Zhong Qing.
Perhaps they came from different worlds, making it hard to communicate. Zhong Qing's current assessment was that Liu Chang'an was a young man who'd learned martial arts at home and had since fallen on hard times.
"Also, I want that dog. This may not be the best season for eating dog meat, but your dog is well-fattened, glossy, and plump. It'll taste good. I can't eat it all by myself, but I can sell some to the neighbors and make at least a thousand." Liu Chang'an did the math. A thousand was definitely doable. The people of Junsha didn't have customs like a dog meat festival, but just like in most parts of China, they had a habit of eating a bit of dog meat during the dog days of summer.
Zhong Qing didn't want to talk to Liu Chang'an anymore. They were on completely different wavelengths.
The elevator stopped. Zhong Qing resumed her cool, aloof manner as an elegant assistant and turned sideways in a polite bow.
Liu Chang'an walked down the long corridor, as if he were in a modern art gallery. The artworks on either side all featured Zhu Juntang as their subject: large photographs, oil paintings, colored illustrations, sculptures, and more.
Zhong Qing led Liu Chang'an up the stairs on the other side. As expected, Zhu Juntang had chosen the place where they first met.
The sky was cloudy that night, and there was little wind. Only the quiet of the night and the lights twinkling in the distance remained. The straight streets seemed to have been strewn with countless grains of gold, glittering brightly.
Zhu Juntang wore white, square-heeled pumps. Her straight, shapely legs were sheathed in pure white stockings, whose sheer material began ten centimeters above the knees. Together with her skirt, they outlined an eye-catching expanse. The skirt billowed with delicate lace, quivering faintly like a butterfly perched on a flower-laden branch.
"Qingqing, you can go down first," Zhu Juntang said coolly.
Zhong Qing glanced at Liu Chang'an, then went downstairs.
"Last time, we were talking about how Liu Bang had locked me up." Liu Chang'an walked over to Zhu Juntang and gazed at the dark sky in the distance. "People say Ying Zheng called himself the First Emperor because he dreamed of a dynasty lasting for thousands of generations. But Liu Bang was the same. Since he couldn't live forever himself, he hoped his descendants would. He wanted the Han imperial house to last for thousands of generations, and he left behind a so-called method of attaining immortality. By the time of Liu Che, what he later regretted was that he'd let me go as soon as he took the throne. When he grew old and his dream of immortality became too powerful to restrain, he could no longer find me..."
Zhu Juntang turned around. The same place, the same night, the same person. At last, that dreamlike scene had returned to tell her that it had truly happened. The extraordinary man who'd leaped from a four-hundred-and-fifty-meter-tall building hadn't died from the fall or been smashed into a pulp. He had appeared before her again, whole and intact, talking calmly about immortality.
This time, Zhu Juntang wouldn't dismiss his words as nonsense.
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