A sudden downpour had just passed.
Sitting in the jeep, Lian Youming watched as it drove on without stopping, carrying him and Tian Dayong toward the Northeast.
Judging by the light, they had spent roughly ten hours on the road.
It had been early morning when they left Cangzhou. Now it was already five or six in the afternoon.
The sky was gray, the rainy air thick and damp.
What Lian Youming had not expected was that, after turn upon turn, the jeep would leave the city far behind and finally stop before a row of unremarkable brick buildings. Built against the mountain, they resembled an enormous courtyard compound, forming a square around an open center. They looked utterly ordinary from the outside, with all kinds of slogans written on their aging walls. Some sections were charred black, as though burned by a great fire, while others were practically ruins, overgrown with weeds and strewn with wreckage. Could anyone still live here?
As he looked around, full of questions, his whole body suddenly tensed, every hair standing on end. His eyes snapped toward the depths of the rainy haze, not at the brick buildings before him, but higher up in the mountains.
His gaze flashed. He actually spotted two cold, black gun barrels aiming down at him from above.
Sniper rifles?
For a moment, Lian Youming felt as though needles were pricking his back. It was deeply uncomfortable.
Only when Tian Dayong got out and entered the brick buildings did that strange feeling recede like a tide.
"This is the prison? Why does it look so deserted?"
The driver stopped the jeep and smiled as he lit a cigarette. "Obviously. It'd be a miracle if a prison were lively. Let me introduce myself. My surname's Huo, the same Huo as