The headlights pierced the darkness of the country road, the gravel road making the chassis creak and groan. Ye Mo's left hand rested on the steering wheel, his right hand on the edge of the passenger seat, his knuckles tapping lightly every now and then, as if keeping time. Actually, he was counting his heartbeats—the heat source 300 meters away had been following him for seven minutes, its speed unchanged, even its bumpy rhythm perfectly matched.
"I'm really not afraid of getting tired." He muttered, pulling the vehicle-mounted detector closer to his chest. The screen was still lit, and the red spot in the southeast direction was pulsating like a pulse.
He was still twitching at his right temple, as if someone was slowly grinding it with a small drill. The Molecular Anchoring at the end of the last chapter had taken a heavy toll, and his head was a little heavy, but not to the point of crashing. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he had taken off his glasses and thrown them onto the center console, lenses facing down, not letting in any reflection.
The car slowly pulled over to the side of the road, the tires sinking into the mud, the sound immediately becoming muffled. He didn't turn off the engine, but simply turned off the headlights and set the engine to its lowest idle speed. The car was so quiet that you could hear the faint sound of the air conditioning vents. In the rearview mirror, the road ahead was empty, with only the shadows of bushes swaying in the wind, like a group of people crouching down.
He closed his eyes, drawing his consciousness inward.
The perspective has changed.
Red and blue intertwine, warm and cool tones are layered. The roadside grass is dark purple, the soil is bluish-gray, and the air currents bring out light yellow veins. Three hundred meters away, deep in the bushes, a human-shaped heat field lies prone, its body temperature 1.8°C higher than the surrounding area. Its outline is low, and it is adjusting its angle little by little, as if it is about to re-align itself with the direction of the factory area.
"Quite professional." He didn't even lift his eyelids, thinking to himself, "They know how to switch positions and reconnect the observation line."
This wasn't ordinary tracking. Ordinary thugs who follow tails either get too close or frantically adjust their equipment. This guy, after leaving the depression, leaped directly to the edge of the forest, hiding deeply, moving steadily, even keeping his breathing extremely low. If it weren't for his fine thermal vision, he would have been easily missed.
He opened his eyes and glanced at the map. Three kilometers away was an abandoned pumping station, an old facility of the old water system, which had been shut down in the 1990s. It was enclosed, with underground pipes, and the roof could even support an antenna. If Darren wanted a place to curl up and work on data, that was the perfect spot.
But here's the problem: Thermal Vision has a maximum range of 500 meters; beyond that, it's all guesswork. He's currently standing some distance from the pumping station, separated by a gentle slope and a drainage ditch. Force a scan? That would only worsen his headache.
He touched his forehead; the sweat that had just broken out was now cooled by the night breeze. He couldn't delay. The other party was changing locations every ten minutes, which meant they were extremely vigilant. If he didn't act soon, the trail would be lost once they moved to a new hideout.
He recalled the scene from the previous chapter: the truck had been modified, the back seats removed, and signal jammers and analyzers placed inside. This kind of equipment needs power and heat dissipation. In places like pump stations, no one uses them, but if there is electricity, there will definitely be condensation at the pipe openings, and there will also be slight heat dissipation from the roof.
He closed his eyes again, zoomed out his thermal vision, and scanned the area in front of him piece by piece.
Three hundred meters, four hundred meters... five hundred meters. The edges began to blur, the colors distorted. But he kept his eyes fixed on the cluster of buildings three kilometers away, waiting patiently. One minute, two minutes. Finally, on the west roof of the pumping station, a very faint orange stripe flashed by—a trace of heat dissipation from the metal surface, 0.7°C higher than the surrounding area, lasting less than three seconds.
Immediately afterwards, a plume of white mist shot out from the north drainpipe, once every twelve seconds, as regular as a heartbeat.
"There's electricity, people, and they're still running the equipment." He opened his eyes, his lips twitching. "Well, you're something else, hiding in the old sluice gate like a mole."
The coordinates are locked.
Instead of moving, he sat up straight, fastened his seatbelt, took out his phone from his bag, unlocked his contacts, found the name " Scott," and dialed.
The phone rang three times before being answered.
"Hello?" Scott's voice was a little hoarse, and there was the sound of fans running in the background, so he was probably still at the factory guarding the controller.
"The floodwaters from yesterday's rain haven't receded yet," Ye Mo said calmly, as if he were reporting the weather.
There was a pause on the other end. "Huh? What rain? It didn't rain today."
"I saw a fox disappear into the old sluice gate," Ye Mo continued, his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. "Its fur was grayish-brown, it had a missing piece on one ear, and it walked with a limp."
Scott paused for two seconds, then said, "The old sluice gate? You mean... that abandoned pumping station?"
"Hmm." Ye Mo nodded, as if he could see it from across the room. "There's a footprint on the third page of your report that wasn't wiped clean."
"Damn!" Scott's voice suddenly rose, then fell back down, "You mean he read my log?!"
"He didn't just look at it," Ye Mo said, "He also memorized the outline."
I heard the sound of a chair being moved on the other end of the phone, followed by the rustling of things being rummaged through. "I'll delete the history right away."
"Don't delete it," Ye Mo interrupted. "If you touch the system now, it will only expose your fear. He's already baiting you; the more panicked you are, the more he'll dare to advance."
"What am I supposed to do? Just sit here and wait for him to break in?"
"Don't go anywhere right now," Ye Mo said. "Lock the doors, seal the windows, and disconnect all electronic devices from the internet. Put the controller in the shielded bag and don't turn it on. Wait for my next instructions."
"And you? Are you going to raid his hideout?"
"I'm not going." Ye Mo looked out the window. "I'm on my way, but I'm not going any closer. If he can intercept signals, he can also set traps. We shouldn't alert him now."
"So you're just going to make me wait here?"
"You're not waiting," Ye Mo said. "You're making him think you are."
There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the phone.
"Okay," Scott said in a lower voice, "I'll do as you say. But you have to promise to keep this under wraps."
"I promise," Ye Mo said, "As long as you don't secretly change the controller protocol again."
Scott chuckled dryly. "That was an accident."
"An accident can be fatal." Ye Mo hung up the phone and stuffed it back into his pocket.
He didn't start the car immediately. Instead, he leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and took a moment to recover. The Thermal Vision scan had taken a toll on his brain, which felt like a tightly wrung towel, throbbing with each beat. He pulled a sports drink from the glove compartment, unscrewed it, and gulped down half of it. The smell of electrolytes made his nose sting, but it did help him regain some energy.
He glanced down at the detector. The heat source in the southeast was still there, but its movement frequency had changed—it used to move every ten minutes, but now it shifted several degrees every five minutes, as if it had sensed something.
"You felt it?" He opened his eyes, staring at the screen. "Or... were you waiting for my reaction all along?"
He didn't activate the Thermal Vision again. One more use and he'd be bedridden tonight. What he needed to do now wasn't to keep chasing, but to hold the line.
He turned on the navigation, entered a coordinate—a backup location, five kilometers from the pumping station, an abandoned agricultural machinery warehouse, with shelter, power supply, and the ability to set up remote monitoring. He set the route and was about to start the car when he suddenly caught a glimpse of the detector screen flashing.
The heat source in the southeast direction has disappeared.
It's not a mobile signal loss; the signal is completely cut off.
He frowned, quickly switched back to infrared mode, and manually zoomed in. The temperature distribution of the bushes 300 meters away had returned to normal, with no abnormally hot areas.
"They're gone?" He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. "Or... did they turn off the heat camouflage?"
He didn't rush to leave. When people are nervous, their first reaction is to run away. But someone like Darren wouldn't easily give up the established observation system. Unless he realized he had been exposed, or... he never intended to hide for that long in the first place.
Ye Mo reversed the car two meters, hid behind a crooked tree, then turned off the engine and removed the key. He didn't get out of the car; instead, he lowered the seat, sinking into the shadows and leaving only a slit to watch the road coming from.
He took out a folding telescope from his bag, attached the night vision module, and gently placed it on the windowsill. The lens swept across the bushes, the drain, and the hilltop—everything seemed normal.
But he knew that the heat source had vanished too completely. Professional infiltrators leave behind some residual warmth when they leave, such as the heat marks from rubbing clothes together or the slight warming from trampled grass. But now that area was as cold as an icebox, as if no one had ever been there.
"Reverse interference?" The word popped into his head. "Using a cooling device to suppress body temperature? Or... did they switch people?"
He didn't want to gamble.
He reopened his phone and pulled out the satellite image of the pumping station he had saved earlier. It was an old building, a concrete structure with thick walls on the north and south sides, a ventilation shaft on the west side, and an underground culvert on the east side. If someone was indeed stationed there, the most likely location would be the power distribution room in the northwest corner, where there was an independent power outlet and shelter from the wind.
He marked the coordinates on the map and set up an automatic alarm: if a moving heat source is detected within three kilometers for more than two minutes, the alarm will immediately vibrate.
Only after doing all this did he restart the car.
The engine roared, and the car slowly started moving, gliding forward along the country road. He didn't turn on the headlights, only using the fog lights to illuminate the road ahead, like a cat on the night.
In the rearview mirror, the bushes were completely hidden in darkness.
He didn't turn around.
His fingers remained resting on the passenger-side bag, where, besides the stun gun and detector, there was also a steel nail and a folding crossbow.
He knew that Darren was probably already looking at his tire tracks.
He also knew that the other party might not be alone.
But he knew one thing even more clearly—
The fox has come into trap's line of sight.
The issue now is not whether to catch them or not, but how to get the fox to come out on its own.