"Ding-"
The elevator doors opened slowly with a soft chime and the faint sound of machinery sliding. The sound seemed to make the air even tenser, briefly arresting the already somewhat dull atmosphere in the room.
Su Bai raised his eyes and looked at the man coming in.
The newcomer wore rimless glasses and looked refined, neat, and scholarly. Yet his arrival was accompanied by a metallic clatter as he casually pushed a supermarket cart into the room. The dull noise echoed through the quiet space, as though breaking through some boundary of silence.
As soon as the man entered, Lin Xiao'an and Kong Rui, who had still been struggling to make conversation, seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. The slight tension on their faces immediately eased, as if the support they had been waiting for had finally arrived.
If Su Bai was not mistaken, this had to be Jiang Hong, whom Lin Xiao'an and the others had kept mentioning.
Looking at the man's cart, he saw a human figure curled up inside. Layers of crude transparent tape wrapped the slender limbs and torso, binding the person's face and limbs like merciless ropes and leaving no room to break free. Even the outside of the cart had been wrapped in a layer of tape.
Despite being restrained like this, the human figure in the cart still struggled weakly, occasionally making faint rustling sounds. But with so many layers binding the figure, those sounds were almost inaudible, disappearing as quickly as bubbles sinking into water.
Lin Xiao'an abandoned her husband, Kong Rui, almost immediately and hurried toward the man beside the cart. Once she reached him, she introduced Su Bai in a deliberately loud, emphatic voice. "Jiang Hong, this is him, Mr. Su Heng!"
Lin Xiao'an's voice nearly drowned out