Chapter 166
Chapter 166
Back then, Zeng Qingfeng wasn’t a wealthy boss, but an ordinary street thug in Fubei County’s urban center.
One night, he went drinking and eating a late-night meal with several of his buddies. A trivial matter led them to argue with the people at the neighboring table.
Neither side consisted of good people, so a brawl naturally erupted.
Zeng Qingfeng was young, hot-blooded, and vicious.
He casually grabbed a beer bottle and smashed it against the other man’s head…
Crash!
The blow put the man in the hospital in critical condition with severe injuries!
Zeng Qingfeng was frightened too and fled immediately.
In those days, security cameras didn’t exist, and nights were chaotic. No one knew where he had gone.
He fled to a place southwest of the county seat called Sangsong Town and hid there, surviving on odd jobs.
By chance, Zeng Qingfeng rescued a strange man!
He remembered that night vividly. Rain poured from the sky. After washing dishes at a small restaurant, he was preparing to return to the dilapidated shack he rented outside town for a few dozen yuan.
Then he spotted a person in a roadside drainage ditch in a remote area outside town!
The man lay in the ditch, plainly suffering from severe injuries.
Zeng Qingfeng was no saint. He was a street thug hiding after critically injuring someone, so naturally, he didn’t want to invite trouble by rescuing a stranger.
He was about to quicken his pace and leave when a cold voice sounded beside his ear.
“Help… help me, and I’ll give you wealth… and an entirely new life.”
“Who?!”
Zeng Qingfeng was terrified and swept his gaze around.
The rain-shrouded night was empty. Not a single figure stood nearby!
Where had the voice come from?
Zeng Qingfeng shuddered.
He might have been a fearless gangster, but he still feared ghosts. Just as he prepared to hurry away, the voice sounded beside his ear again.
“I’m in the ditch beside you. Help me up.”
“What?!”
Zeng Qingfeng was stunned.
He whirled and stared in horror at the figure in the roadside drainage ditch, shining his flashlight down.
The man lay in the ditch wearing a coarse linen Daoist robe and a mask over his face.
He looked strange and sinister.
While Zeng Qingfeng hesitated…
The voice sounded beside his ear once more.
“The scent of blood clings to you, along with a heavy baleful aura. Heh-heh-heh. You and I are the same kind of person… Meeting me is your good fortune. You don’t want to spend your entire life hiding like a rat, do you? Cough, cough…”
At that point, Zeng Qingfeng calmed somewhat.
He vaguely guessed that he might have encountered one of the extraordinary individuals from legend!
How else could a man lying in a drainage ditch make his voice sound directly beside Zeng Qingfeng’s ear?
And see through his background at a glance?
Zeng Qingfeng ultimately decided to gamble!
He carefully descended into the drainage ditch, which was more than six feet deep, and exhausted all his strength before managing to rescue the “strange man.”
Then he took the man back to his rented shack, gave him hot water and food, and went to the local clinic to buy medicine for him…
The man seemed so badly injured that Zeng Qingfeng assumed he would need a long time to recover.
Unexpectedly, the stranger could move normally the next day.
He also displayed several supernatural methods before Zeng Qingfeng.
Deep at night, he even took Zeng Qingfeng to a graveyard, casually captured a wandering ghost, and showed it to him!
Afterward, he swallowed the ghost into his stomach.
The sight frightened Zeng Qingfeng until he trembled, but it also convinced him that he had experienced incredible fortune and rescued a powerful expert.
What happened next was easy to guess.
The mysterious so-called “expert” killed the police officer who had been investigating Zeng Qingfeng’s case.
When another officer took over, he killed that one too!
After two officers died–and even their autopsies couldn’t determine the precise cause–the authorities finally grew fearful.
At the same time, the mysterious man used magical arts to control the person Zeng Qingfeng had critically injured, making the victim personally write a letter of forgiveness stating that he would not pursue Zeng Qingfeng’s responsibility…
Thus, Zeng Qingfeng cleared his record without difficulty.
Then the mysterious man obtained money from some unknown source and gave it to him to start a business. He also used feng shui to make Zeng Qingfeng’s store turn a quick profit.
In return, Zeng Qingfeng not only had to give the mysterious man money from time to time, but also perform certain tasks for him.
Most of those tasks were far from good!
Zeng Qingfeng understood perfectly well that this mysterious man, who always wore a coarse linen Daoist robe and mask, was no upright expert–he had to be a rogue occultist from the esoteric world.
But Zeng Qingfeng didn’t care!
What upright cultivator would ever think highly of him?
If he encountered one, they might try to kill him on sight.
How could they possibly cooperate so happily?
Zeng Qingfeng knew himself well. Only villains working with villains could make each other happy.
Although he was little more than the rogue occultist’s dependent subordinate, his life over the past decade had been incomparably free and pleasurable. A single additional year was happier than his first twenty years combined!
Then, not long ago, Zeng Qingfeng decided to open a brickworks in Lianghe Town. But environmental pollution and problems with various qualifications kept the permits from being approved.
He brought Zhao Jiao gifts in hopes of using her connections, but she not only rebuked him mercilessly, she threw his gifts out.
In a fury, Zeng Qingfeng decided to ask the mysterious man behind him to kill her entire family in revenge.
But this was no longer ten years earlier.
As society developed and investigative methods improved, direct murder had become troublesome. A method that left no trace was naturally preferable…
Thus, after Zeng Qingfeng spent heavily to cultivate connections in the county seat and finally built the brickworks, the mysterious rogue occultist helped him arrange fire-form baleforce against the Yao family!
Afraid a single fire-form baleforce might not be powerful enough, he also deliberately instructed the owner of the appliance store on Lianghe Town’s main street to erect a billboard near the Yao home.
The billboard was deliberately positioned to create another fire-form baleforce. With that, the Yao family was certain to suffer catastrophe!
The fire-form baleforce created by the two roads truly wasn’t the work of Zeng Qingfeng or the mysterious rogue occultist. That had been a coincidence–simply bad luck for the Yao family…
But one fire-form baleforce alone wouldn’t have caused such intense effects.
The main force came from the two that Zeng Qingfeng had the mysterious rogue occultist deliberately arrange. When the three fire-form baleforces merged, they unleashed a murderous feng shui configuration of tremendous power.
…
…
Zeng Qingfeng more or less finished his confession and gave considerable detail.
Yao Tianlin and Wang Dachun both found the story unbelievable.
Could two villains truly have such good luck?
Indeed.
Whether Zeng Qingfeng or the mysterious rogue occultist, if they hadn’t met ten years ago, one would have been arrested and imprisoned long ago, while the other would have died from severe injuries in that drainage ditch.
Sometimes, when villains came together, snakes and rats could form a den and cause even greater harm!
Zeng Qingfeng looked at me pitifully and spoke with extreme caution.
“Young fellow… Young master! I’ve confessed everything honestly. You’ll keep your word, won’t you? You won’t kill me?”
I gave him an ambiguous smile.
“I fear you haven’t confessed everything. What about the crimes you committed yourself? Hiring killers for business, for example, or carrying out forced demolitions.”
Zeng Qingfeng could only describe his own evil deeds in detail.
The mysterious rogue occultist wasn’t his father and couldn’t handle everything for him. Zeng Qingfeng had hired people to carry out many crimes himself.
He had begun as a street thug, gained the backing of a rogue occultist, and become rich!
Recruiting a group of enforcers was incredibly easy.
As Zeng Qingfeng spoke, Yao Tianlin secretly gave me an admiring look–because before coming here, I had already told him to prepare a recording device and keep it in his pocket!
He began recording as soon as Zeng Qingfeng started describing his crimes over the past decade.
Unexpectedly, the longer the recording went on, the more horrifying it became!
Four or five deaths were directly connected to this man alone…
Far more people had been injured or disabled.
At last, Zeng Qingfeng reached recent events.
More than a year ago, the mysterious rogue occultist appeared again. He gave Zeng Qingfeng a bazi and ordered him to find a matching woman, take her to the Chuan River, and drown her!
That was why Zeng Qingfeng began searching for and dating large numbers of women…
Finally, around half a year ago, he found an unmarried woman whose bazi matched the mysterious rogue occultist’s requirements!
She happened to have returned from working in the city and no longer fit in with the town’s ordinary men. Naturally, she got along with a wealthy man like him.
Zeng Qingfeng deliberately entered a relationship with her. That lowered her guard while making sure no one noticed anything unusual.
Suppressing my agitation, I asked indifferently, “So you took that poor woman, who believed she was in love with you, to the Chuan River and drowned her?”
An awkward smile appeared on Zeng Qingfeng’s face. Bowing and scraping, he carefully explained.
“Well, you can’t say I was entirely responsible for her death. I was only following orders. One night, I took her to the Chuan River north of town, where the mysterious man was waiting. He used some magical art and probably confused her mind. She walked into the river herself and drowned. That should count as suicide, shouldn’t it?”
Grief touched my heart.
“What was the woman’s name?”
“I think her surname was Zhou… As for her given name, let me think… Zhou Min! That’s right, her name was Zhou Min. She was very naive and easy to deceive. She believed everything I said.”
It really was her!!!
My heart jolted violently, and the cloud of doubts before me suddenly cleared.
I had searched everywhere without finding her, only to stumble upon the truth without effort!
The nether covenant I had formed with the female corpse Zhou Min required me to investigate the truth behind her death and help her take revenge.
All this time, I had searched bitterly and even asked Li Miao to help with corpse retrieval twice, yet found no clue whatsoever.
I had never imagined that attending Yao Nan’s birthday party would lead me to discover the fire-form baleforce arranged against her home, drawing me into a whole series of events…
And by sheer accident, I finally uncovered the truth behind Zhou Min’s death!
The affairs of the world could be wondrous and bizarre, yet every link still connected to the next.