Ling He had not fired at all, nor would he be stupid enough to create an irreversible bloodbath in a situation like this.
In fact, what he had been holding was not even a gun. It was simply a metal tube used for self-defense. The terrified You Jinglian had automatically assumed that Young Master Ling was aiming a long firearm at him.
Shooting You Jinglian at this exact moment, preventing him from speaking the truth and so brazenly and violently stopping him from surrendering. The purpose of that bullet, and the intentions behind whoever had ordered it, could hardly have been more obvious.
Chaos erupted inside Tide-Watching Villa. Lamps and shadows swayed wildly at the boundary between life and death, throwing deceptive silhouettes across floors and staircases. Several figures burst from hiding places in different rooms and rushed toward the assassin who had fired from the darkness. Naturally, Ling He had not come alone and defenseless. His people had already secured every entrance and exit in the building. So how had someone managed to slip inside beneath their noses and disrupt the entire plan?
This century-old colonial building truly was an excellent fortress. Its interior terrain twisted and turned in a bewildering maze. Ling He stood near one corner of the stairs on the top floor, while the shot had come from somewhere on the fourth level. From that angle, the shooter could observe movement on the upper floor from below.
Inside the building, every whisper of wind seemed like danger. Shadows flickered everywhere. Feints drew attention east while attacks came from the west, figures pursuing one another back and forth. It was like a widescreen espionage-action film playing out through the old fortress.
Ling He used a method his opponent never anticipated. He climbed onto the ornate openwork iron staircase, planted both feet on the railing, and launched himself across a gap of seven or eight meters over the atrium. He kicked the fleeing black shadow off balance, sending the other man’s weapon clattering to the floor.
The instant Ling He landed, pain made him stagger violently. He gritted his teeth and forced himself upright. His injured ankles still constrained his movement. The possibility that today’s entire plan might fail enraged him beyond measure, and inwardly he bitterly cursed the bastard who had injured his feet in the first place…
The ambusher fled like a routed soldier, stumbling toward the stone corridor connecting the two fortress towers. The man suddenly twisted sideways and seemed to vanish into some sort of vertical shaft or hidden passage, slipping away at astonishing speed.
The sudden attack completely disrupted Boss Ling’s deployment. The entire building was plainly under his control, every front and rear entrance guarded. How could someone come and go freely beneath his eyes and still ruin his plan?
This building had to contain concealed, little-known passages that allowed someone with ulterior motives to enter and leave unseen and reach the fourth floor directly. A century-old seaside fortress like this would naturally have hidden doors and secret tunnels. Someone who knew the layout this well was either a caretaker or cleaner, or a person who had visited often before. What kind of person that might be was already rather obvious.
You Jinglian ran madly into the rainy night, staking everything on escape. The sparse trail of blood behind him was quickly diluted by the rain until every trace disappeared.
Ling He gripped the stair railing. Fury at having come so close only to fail made him unconsciously tighten his hand around the cold iron until his knuckles went bone-white…
This was Ling He’s first time here. He was not familiar with Tide-Watching Villa’s maze of passages, which could easily make a person dizzy.
It was also Yan Xiaodao’s first proper time crossing the threshold of the old building. Like Ling He, he was a directionally challenged man whose internal GPS could malfunction rather easily. He had once gotten hopelessly turned around during that chase at Red Square.
Strictly speaking, Yan Xiaodao had been here once before, acting as a “local guide” while entertaining out-of-town bosses touring Linwan’s scenic landmarks. He had bought their tickets, escorted them inside, walked around the first floor once, found the whole thing excruciatingly boring, then wandered back outside to smoke at the entrance. A born-and-raised local who had never seriously toured the most famous protected historical attraction near Linwan Deepwater Port. His cultural cultivation really was rather lacking.
He parked his car openly inside the courtyard and entered through the front door in broad daylight, taking the proper road instead of sneaking around obscure corners like rats and foxes. He wanted to see exactly how many ghosts were hidden inside this building.
Master Qi often wore this royal-blue cotton Chinese jacket when going out during spring and autumn. The color was especially conspicuous in the dark and could easily make someone assume Qi Baoshan himself had gladly arrived for the appointment.
The entrance hall and living room were brightly lit. Yan could even faintly smell Russian food. The scent made all thoughts of flashing blades and gunfire seem like fantasies, as though at any moment a male servant in white might walk out and respectfully present the honored guests with creamy mixed salad, pot-braised beef, and borscht.
Yan Xiaodao kept one hand loosely hidden inside the front of his jacket as he moved slowly through the first-floor hall. Reflected light cast several long, sighing shadows of him in different directions as he passed from room to room. His concentration sharpened around his brow and ears, unwilling to miss even the sound of a needle hitting the floor. Calm and cautious, he soon sensed metal tubing somewhere in the shadows lightly striking furniture, and what sounded like somebody quietly working a gun bolt.
He still had no idea what had already happened inside the building. He did not know that at least three separate groups of people had entered Tide-Watching Villa, each pursuing its own agenda and collectively on the verge of blowing the place apart. Sooner or later tonight, all of them would clash head-on.
By the time he followed the stairs to the third floor, the lighting had gradually dimmed. That was where the attack finally came.
At that moment, Yan Xiaodao truly possessed the calmness of a man who had already decided to risk everything. Since he had come alone to this dangerous meeting, he had never planned to leave himself a retreat.
You Jinglian was afraid to die. Yan Xiaodao was not. He was not afraid that he might enter and never leave.
Subconsciously, he hoped to encounter Ling He and hoped that the men attacking him belonged to Ling He. If so, he would at least not have made this trip for nothing. No matter how many men the other side brought, Yan alone would shoulder it. If spilling three feet of his own blood tonight could settle the old debt between both sides, he did not care whether he gave his life for his godfather or gave it for Ling He.
Never before had he dissected his own feelings this plainly. He could not bear to let Master Qi fall into an ambush and capsize in a gutter, but neither could he bear to watch Ling He walk like a lamb into a tiger’s mouth and smash an egg against a rock. He could not abandon either side.
The iron club that came down toward his shoulder from behind might as well have been attacking a man with eyes in the back of his head. Yan deliberately waited for his opponent to move first. Then he twisted his spine away and reached backward in an almost unnatural posture, deflecting the heavy strike. Years of training had made his waist exceptionally flexible. The six-inch light blade in his hand slipped through the danger like a hand passing among flowers and brushing aside willow branches. Four ounces redirected a thousand pounds, and the iron club flew from the web of his opponent’s hand.
The strike had targeted his shoulder rather than the back of his skull. In the instant he countered, Yan quickly assessed that his attackers intended to disable his resistance rather than kill him. Their intentions were not excessively vicious.
Unknown men dressed in black surged from the darkness, every figure lean and fit. They advanced and retreated in excellent order, apparently obeying strict commands from somewhere unseen, clearly well trained. No one fired secretly from the shadows or used lethal moves. Their obvious goal was capture. Within the third-floor hall, Yan Xiaodao moved with cutting force yet agile footwork, facing many men alone without the slightest fear. The knife in his palm drew a streak of white light that repeatedly forced his opponents back. Yet none of them fled from the fight. They endured and followed their plan, attacking him one after another in sequence.
Oil paintings on the walls swayed gently whenever the struggle caught them. The tip of Yan’s knife struck a chandelier with a sharp metallic cry.
Yan fixed on one opponent and launched a rapid combination. Amid flashing knife-light, the other man could not even see the movements clearly enough to defend himself. Then everything before Yan suddenly went pitch-black, as though a black curtain had fallen from the ceiling. A wire net barely large enough for one or two people slammed over him from head to toe. Several men yanked hard on the clasps and ropes around the edge, tightening it like hunters drawing in a fishing net and trapping him securely inside.
The heavy wire mesh struck his elbow painfully. Bound solidly from every direction, Yan Xiaodao became a trapped beast, dark red forced into the depths of his eyes.
A wall lamp suddenly brightened. The man at the front was slender and moved with quick agility, a baseball cap concealing most of his face. But when he looked at Yan Xiaodao, he very obviously coughed once. His eyes showed utter disgust mixed with a strange sort of helplessness.
Yan Xiaodao had walked straight into an ambush. If these men wanted his life, taking it would have been easy. Yet the moment his face became clearly visible beneath the light, the entire group seemed to collectively collapse into an expression that said, Oh for fuck’s sake, why is it you again? They rolled their eyes at him as though tonight’s entire operation had just been wasted.
Apparently every one of them knew who he was. And none of them actually wanted to hurt him.
Yan Xiaodao understood instantly. “Where’s Ling He?”
He had thrown out the question as a bluff, and clearly he had hit the right road. The thin, pale lips of the cap-wearing leader curled arrogantly, plainly saying, You think I’m telling you?
“Tell Ling He to come out and see me! I have something to say to him!!” Yan Xiaodao growled.
The hunters exchanged glances. Yan Xiaodao could neither be killed nor butchered, and they barely dared hit him hard. What the hell were they supposed to do with him? Fine. Leave him alone. Withdraw.
“Don’t go!!” Yan Xiaodao shouted urgently.
He immediately realized he had sounded too desperate and too domineering. Right now, he genuinely wanted nothing more than one chance to see Ling He. His sixth sense had begun producing a delicate, hazy awareness that the two of them had to be extremely close. He could almost smell the faint trace of Ling He having passed nearby. And if Yan’s guess was correct, the cap-wearing brat leading this little hunting party was the same bastard who had once helped him outside the Red Square meeting room before escaping through a window with that ridiculously stylish wall-climbing stunt.
If the man trapped here tonight had been Qi Baoshan, a gun would have been useless. He truly would have had no choice but to surrender or wait helplessly for death. Unfortunately for the net, the man inside it was Yan Xiaodao. It seemed fate had decreed that this thing would meet its tragic end in Lord Blade’s hands. Bad luck.
Yan Xiaodao poured strength through his arm and palm and unleashed a violent crash. The supposedly tough wire net proved no more durable than a rag. An astonishing tear split through it in an instant. A few more slashes and the whole thing practically disintegrated.
Then, with a bang! like a firecracker, the gunshot exploded like a firecracker, startling everyone inside the building.
Yan Xiaodao’s face changed. He tore the wire net aside and forced his way free, paying no attention to the sharp edges cutting messy lines of blood across his forehead and hands. That unexplained gunshot struck directly at his mind and his weakest point.
Ling He.
…
The shot Yan Xiaodao heard was the same one that had been fired at You Jinglian.
Yan had entered through the main door and stepped into the first floor of the southern tower of the paired fortress, where one group had been waiting to trap him. Lord You’s private tribunal under the lamps had been taking place at the very top of the northern tower. Yan and Ling were inside the same Tide-Watching Villa, yet countless staircases, rooms, corridors, and stone passages separated them. The maze twisted so deeply that it gave a person the bewildering sense of being lost within a mountain, clouds too deep to reveal where anyone else might be. The two men had nearly passed each other without ever meeting.
The castle had become a chessboard locked in a violent middlegame, two separate dramas playing simultaneously. Then the transition beat struck and the players changed stages. At that exact moment, both leading men came down with the same incurable disease of shared intuition and, without consulting one another, rushed toward the stone corridor connecting the two towers.
Yan Xiaodao appeared at one end of the pitch-black passage. Outside the windows, the gale roared and waves wailed as they battered the black, demonic reefs. In a flash, their shocked gazes met once again in midair. They stood at opposite ends of the long corridor, staring at one another in pain, with what seemed like an entire raging sea between them.
That exquisite face Yan could recognize even if it had been burned to ash. Long hair tied back. A pair of long legs hidden partly in shadow. When Ling He raised his head, the deep vortex naturally present in his eyes swept every emotion out of Yan Xiaodao and dragged it inward. Even breathing and heartbeats became difficult.
For several seconds, Yan Xiaodao felt as though lightning had struck him. His heart softened completely.
Ling He was wearing his old clothes. The linen shirt, riding trousers, and long boots fit this man so perfectly. They had once carried Yan Xiaodao’s body heat. By now, they had to be carrying Ling He’s instead…
Yet when Ling He saw him, grief seemed to strike so deeply that the whole world before him might have collapsed. He looked trapped in endless fury and helplessness.
Ling He lifted his face and let out a long sigh. For a moment, his neck slowly tipped backward beneath an emotion he could not control, revealing his Adam’s apple and the most vulnerable part of his throat in one drawn-out frame. Yan Xiaodao, go ahead. Cut me.
Yan could not bear it. He called softly, “Ling He.”
Ling He raised his eyes and stared at him. His thin lips were pressed so tightly together that the words had to force their way through his teeth. “Xiaodao, back then I deliberately spread the news and laid a trap aboard the Cloudtop, waiting for the big fish Qi Baoshan to bite. In the end, Qi Baoshan never came. The person I waited for was you… Today I set another Hongmen banquet here at Chaotou Reef to meet Qi Baoshan, and once again he didn’t come. Why didn’t he come?! The person who came instead was… you again… Yan Xiaodao!”
Elio’s Notes: The Hongmen Banquet was the famous banquet where Xiang Yu’s camp plotted against Liu Bang. In later Chinese usage, the phrase came to mean an invitation or gathering that conceals hostile intent.
Xiaodao, did you come here to cut me down?