Chapter 364
Chapter 364
Brother Liu woke up.
He wiped the tears from his face, looking confused.
“I think I saw my old man…”
“I must’ve zoned out just now.”
He muttered to himself, then suddenly froze, sprang from the chair, and grabbed me.
“I remember! I remember everything!”
“An Yutong lied. She conspired with a man to kidnap Liang Yi. He carried Liang Yi out of the building in a travel bag. That same man called me outside that night and somehow erased everything on my flash drive!”
I made him confirm it again. “The man who took Liang Yi was the one you met that night? You’re certain?”
Brother Liu nodded. “Of course. I’m a cop. Identifying criminals is part of my profession. He wore a mask and hat in the footage, but his physical features, the length of his stride… I know it was the same man.”
Seventh Master and I agreed.
The man’s features were vicious and cunning. He was extremely dangerous.
Brother Liu asked, “What should we do next? Where do we start?”
“Why are you asking me?” I stared at him. “You’re the cop. Investigations are supposed to be your specialty. I was about to ask you where we start.”
Brother Liu frowned. “I don’t even know how that man hypnotized me. He’s obviously someone from your world. I’m just an ordinary guy… I’ve got a family depending on me… This is dangerous…”
I sighed helplessly.
What a slippery old bastard.
He ran fast when money appeared and even faster when danger did.
Since the man had called him, I suggested tracing the number and identifying its owner.
Brother Liu checked his phone. It was an out-of-province number, obviously routed through a virtual internet service. Useless.
“The only thing I can do is have our police sketch artist draw him from my memory, then compare the portrait against the internal database,” Brother Liu said. “If we’re lucky enough to get a match, we’ll know his identity.”
Then he added, “And that little brat An Yutong. A young woman with her whole life ahead of her, and she goes around kidnapping people! If the evidence hadn’t been destroyed, I’d drag her into the station and interrogate her properly.”
“You’d better not,” I warned. “The key evidence is gone. You can’t prove she did anything. She’s calculating. Be careful she doesn’t turn it around on you.”
Brother Liu sighed. “I’m not stupid. My career and my life belong to me. Everything else is external. If we can’t solve it, then it stays a missing-person case.”
“But we still need to investigate her. I can’t touch the bastard who hypnotized me, but I refuse to believe one little girl can stir up that much trouble.”
I stopped listening. Everything he said was useless.
Then I remembered something.
“Investigate An Yutong’s car. She told me someone scratched it a while ago, and people accused Liang Yi. Now she says it broke down and is being repaired.”
There was nothing obviously suspicious about that, but I didn’t know where else to find a crack in An Yutong’s story. We had to investigate whatever occurred to us.
If I hadn’t asked Brother Liu to replay the footage today, we might never have discovered his hypnosis.
We still had work to do, so we prepared to say goodbye to Seventh Master.
He walked us to the door. Without a car, getting anywhere was inconvenient, and I would probably be running all over the city for the next few days. I asked to borrow his car.
Seventh Master generously handed me the keys.
Before leaving, I remembered the string of signs I had seen and asked whether they had really been omens.
Seventh Master considered it. “You study divination. You cannot doubt your own result. Casting hexagrams differs from fortune-telling. Fortune-telling has concrete data, while a hexagram displays heavenly secrets through its signs. You must believe before it will reveal anything. Doubt means your heart lacks sincerity.”
“Doubting yourself also creates unnecessary worry.”
“As for seeing two hearses, that truly was a bad omen, one of great danger. Be careful. The man who knows the Mind-Capturing Art is dangerous.”
“But the missing dog dying and the missing child are things you happened to witness. They do not correspond to the missing girl, so they have no value as omens. Perhaps they were only coincidences.”
“The missing child should be fine. They can find him by the grave. Call Xiao Meng later and confirm.”
The moment I left Seventh Master’s house, I called Meng Yifan.
Everything happened exactly as Seventh Master had said. They had found the child at the grave.
The boy said he had been sleepy during the descent and somehow became separated from the adults. He panicked, couldn’t find the path, and wandered farther away.
Halfway along, he met the deceased relative. Terrified, he froze.
The dead relative told him not to wander, led him back to the grave, and instructed him to wait.
The boy waited until he fell asleep. Meng Yifan’s group eventually found him and brought him home.
Knowing he was safe lifted a weight from me.
If something had happened to him, it would have been a genuine tragedy.
Seventh Master really was remarkable. His words proved accurate. The signs I had connected earlier were probably coincidences after all.
But the hearses were genuinely ominous. I needed to be careful.
Before parting with Brother Liu, I told him to be careful too. If he encountered the Mind-Capturing Art practitioner again, he should run.
I meant it kindly, but he became inexplicably upset and told me not to say such things.
When I asked why, he said people always got into trouble after someone said that on television.
“Hurry up and say it again, but don’t say it to me. Are you trying to curse me?” he demanded.
I was speechless. “Is that really necessary? How childish are you?”
He insisted.
I snapped, “Fine! I was talking to a dog. I told the dog to be careful!”
Brother Liu grinned. “Much better.”
Then he drove away.
I took Seventh Master’s car to investigate Liang Yi.
An Yutong was connected to her disappearance, but Brother Liu was already investigating An Yutong.
An Yutong had problems. So did Liang Yi.
Why had Liang Yi voluntarily gone to see her?
I still couldn’t understand it.
If I couldn’t understand, I needed to investigate Liang Yi too.