Operation 1

In the stairwell, the motion-activated lights flickered erratically, as if something had gone wrong. The shifting light and shadows gave the place the feel of a horror movie.

Wang Yiyang pressed the elevator button, but nothing happened. A sheet of white paper had been posted beside it.

"Elevator out of order. Repairs scheduled for four tomorrow afternoon. We apologize for the inconvenience to our tenants."

With the elevator out, Wang Yiyang had no choice but to climb the stairs, one floor at a time.

The little building he rented in was one of the cheapest places in the surrounding area.

This building and the two next to it formed a tiny residential complex called Green Tree Home.

Rumor had it that two small-time property developers had scraped together enough money to build it, hoping to cash in on the recent real estate boom.

The developers had been short on funds, so Green Tree Home's communal facilities were abysmal—practically nonexistent.

Even the property management company had given up after the residents kept refusing to pay their fees.

In time, the residents had formed their own committee to manage the complex.

But they all had jobs and other things to take care of. They couldn't spend every day managing the property.

And so, over time, Green Tree Home had become the worst-maintained complex in the area. There was no contest.

Take the broken motion-activated lights in the stairwell, for example. No one had arranged to fix them, because repairs cost money.

That money came from the residents' shared fund, and every time the committee wanted to use it, more than half of the residents' representatives had to agree.

That made everything incredibly tedious and complicated.

As a result, unless most of the complex's communal facilities were broken and needed repairs all at once,

there was no way to get individual problems like this one fixed.

Wang Yiyang climbed the stairs toward his apartment on the fourth floor, number 401. By the time he reached the second floor, he was already a little out of breath.

"I'd better find somewhere else to live soon. I've got plenty of money, yet I'm still living in a place that costs a few hundred a month. I'm just wasting my own time."

By the time he reached the third floor, Wang Yiyang had decided to buy an apartment tomorrow.

He reached the third floor and was about to head up to the fourth in one go when he spotted a slender girl sitting on the landing.

She had shoulder-length black hair and wore a short white dance dress, white tights meant for dancing, and a small white backpack.

With her head bowed and legs together, she sat on the steps, rapidly tapping away on her phone with her pale hands. She seemed to be chatting with someone.

Wang Yiyang recognized her. Her name was Li Ran, and she was the daughter of the family living in apartment 301, directly below his.

The people in 301 used to argue and fight so often that they'd keep everyone awake with all the banging in the middle of the night. He'd gone down a few times to talk to them.

He later learned that Li Ran's father had been caught cheating several times, but had refused to change his ways. After that, the couple fought almost every day.

What Wang Yiyang remembered most clearly was the time Li Ran had come home from school to find her parents fighting. Her delicate little face had been blank as she stood in the doorway, watching her father yank her mother around by the hair and slam her against the wall. Blood spattered the walls.

She was in her third year of junior high. She wasn't some little kid who didn't understand what was going on.

The blank look on Li Ran's face had left a deep impression on him.

After that, whenever trouble broke out at home, Wang Yiyang and the neighbors nearby did what they could to help.

"Why are you out here alone again?" Seeing Li Ran on the steps, Wang Yiyang sighed inwardly and asked in a low voice.

Li Ran looked up, revealing a badly swollen right cheek. Her eyes were a little vacant.

"It's nothing. I forgot my keys. You can go on home, Yangyang. I'm fine. My mom will be back soon." She smiled, apparently unaware of how badly her cheek was swollen.

Wang Yiyang could see the stubbornness in her eyes, but he didn't say anything. At a time like this, quietly leaving was the best way to respect her pride.

He said no more. He walked past Li Ran and soon reached the door of his rented apartment.

He took out his key, unlocked the door, walked in calmly, then closed it behind him.

In the living room, a blond man with a full beard and sharp eyes immediately stood up from his chair.

"Boss." The man nodded gravely. "I've got the results. You can ask any questions in real time."

The man was Jian, the leader of one of the several teams currently investigating the Yuekong Martial Arts Hall case.

For the sake of confidentiality, Security Department personnel generally called Wang Yiyang "Boss" when they were out in public or in any unsecured setting.

Wang Yiyang wasn't surprised. He had told Jian to let himself in and wait.

Otherwise, anyone could tell something was up if a blond, blue-eyed foreigner waited outside the apartment of an ordinary office worker for that long.

"Go ahead." Wang Yiyang glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 7:40.

"Yes." Jian quickly took a portable projector from his jacket pocket, then attached a miniature antenna, a mobile communications unit, an encrypted auxiliary component, an interference shield, and several other parts.

When he had finished assembling it, he tapped the projector. It beeped, and a white screen appeared in the air, two meters in front of Wang Yiyang.

A sealed underground interrogation room quickly came into view on the screen.

The room was stark white, almost painfully bright. A silver metal chair stood in the center.

Dada, the man who had tried to assassinate Wang Yiyang, was now tied to it.

His head hung low as tears, snot, and drool streamed down his face.

Wang Yiyang wanted to ask what had happened to him.

But when he glanced at Jian, he saw that the man looked perfectly calm, as if this were all normal.

That held back Wang Yiyang's question, and he continued watching.

"We gave him triple the usual dose of an organ-failure drug, along with the latest Truth Serum. We used special methods to question him repeatedly and verify the key intelligence.

"You can ask him whatever you like now. He won't hide anything. But please finish within half an hour. Once the drugs react too strongly, his brain will suffer irreversible damage." Jian spoke calmly.

He handed over a printed sheet of paper, densely covered with writing.

"This is what we got from the interrogation. Please take a look."

Wang Yiyang nodded slightly and accepted the paper.

He quickly scanned it from top to bottom, and his expression soon grew grave.

The first half of the interrogation notes was more or less the same as what he'd found in his previous life.

But the latter part was a lot more troublesome.

After reading the report, Wang Yiyang fell silent for a moment, then asked Dada Jian several questions through the screen.

Dada answered each one blankly.

According to the interrogation results, Dada belonged to an assassination organization called Mantis.

Strangely enough, even Mister's intelligence network had learned very little about Mantis after investigating it.

Mister's intelligence network mainly focused on business, but the fact that it had come up empty meant Mantis was even more secretive than Wang Yiyang had imagined.

Thinking back, he'd been incredibly lucky to uncover information about Mantis in his previous life. He'd stumbled across one coincidence after another.

"Mantis..." Wang Yiyang gripped the paper, his gaze growing distant.

"Dada's gone missing?"

Inside an underground casino in Yingxing City.

In the general manager's office, a muscular old man with waist-length white hair stood bare-chested, wearing only a pair of black trousers. He slowly turned three black metal balls in his hand.

With his back to his three disciples, the old man gazed through a one-way glass wall, quietly surveying the vast casino below.

Beneath the lavish decorations and chandeliers, faces of every sort wore all kinds of expressions. Looking down from this vantage point gave him the exhilarating feeling that he had everything under control.

"Yes, Teacher. We asked Zhong Can. Dada was last supposed to be near the bus station in Guixi Town," one of his disciples said in a low voice. His eyebrows were red.

"Dada may be useless, but he's no ordinary opponent. Someone must have interfered," another disciple added. She had a curvaceous figure and a bewitching face.

"Zhong Can's taking a long time to act. Could he have turned against us? We'll need to be on our guard," Red Eyebrows said again.

"I did manage to find something. An international capital group has been secretly investigating our organization lately," the third disciple—a young man in a gray robe and glasses—said quietly.

"Oh?" The old man turned his head slightly to look at him. "Who are they?"

The bespectacled man lowered his head and replied respectfully, "Their full name is the Mister Pharmaceutical Group."

"Mister?" The old man narrowed his eyes.

He knew of them. On the surface, Mister seemed to be a perfectly respectable pharmaceutical company.

But in certain darker circles, the group's reach was enormous. They were extremely dangerous to cross.

They might not operate in the same circles, but once an organization reached a certain size and level of power, its influence carried across boundaries.

At any rate, they were certainly not people to trifle with.

The rumors about Mister in certain circles were all unpleasant.

They were a genuine behemoth, a vast conglomerate of interests.

"What does a pharmaceutical company want with us? Why can't they just make their money and—" The only female disciple looked contemptuous.

"Quiet."

Red Eyebrows cut her off, his gaze sweeping over her like a blade. Her face paled, and she fell silent at once.

After silencing his junior sister, Red Eyebrows turned back to the old man.

"Teacher, please give us your next instructions."

All three of them turned their attention to the old man.

"Find Dada and get to the bottom of what happened. After that, proceed with the original plan." The old man paused. "As for Mister Pharmaceutical, send someone to investigate and make contact. If they really did capture him, kill the people who took him as a warning."

"Yes!"

After seeing Jian off, Wang Yiyang finished reading the report, lit it with the gas stove, and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

Then he opened a window to air out the smell of burning paper.

When he was done, Wang Yiyang boiled some water. He found ginger and brown sugar on the kitchen shelf, then simmered a little ginger and brown sugar tea in a small pot.

The temperature difference between day and night had been large over the past few days. During the day, it could reach seventeen or eighteen degrees, while at night it could drop to three or four.

He checked the time. It was 9:19.

By the time he'd read the report and finished the interrogation, two hours had passed before he even noticed.