In a sparsely populated street somewhere in the new district of Jinchuan City.
Qi Licheng pulled his car over in an inconspicuous spot by the roadside. The designer shirt he was wearing had been ripped, and there was a cut on his neck from a tree branch, burning with pain.
“Damn it! Damn it!”
Qi Licheng slammed his fists against the steering wheel again and again, venting his rage.
It had been two hours since he had fled the warehouse in a panic.
For those two hours, he had been hiding and dodging pursuit, driving all the way to this remote street. Only after making sure no one was following him had he dared to stop and catch his breath.
A Jiu had been captured, and the dozens of men he had taken to the warehouse had all been wiped out.
At that moment, he was no different from a stray dog driven from its home.
“Dragon Alliance! Dragon Alliance! I’ll kill every last one of you!”
Qi Licheng roared through clenched teeth, punching the steering wheel once again.
He had never suffered such humiliation in his entire life.
In Jinchuan, he had always been the one bringing people to surround and beat others. When had anyone ever dared to turn the tables on him?
If he hadn’t reacted quickly and slipped away amid the chaos when both sides began fighting, he would probably have been captured by the Dragon Alliance along with that useless bunch led by A Jiu.
Yet whenever he thought of Zhao Tianyi’s smiling, treacherous face behind those gold-rimmed glasses, and the group of Dragon Alliance enforcers dressed in black standing behind him, Qi Licheng felt a chill spread through his heart.
He had always thought the Dragon Alliance was merely an outsider trying to muscle in. No matter how much money or manpower they had, they shouldn’t have been able to make waves on his territory in Jinchuan.
Only now did he realize that they weren’t some outsider trying to cross the river into his territory. They were a pack of despicable schemers!
“No. I can’t let this go!”
Gnashing his teeth, Qi Licheng pulled out his phone and dialed another number.
At that moment, there was only one thought in his mind:
Revenge! Revenge! And more revenge!
He would make the Dragon Alliance pay!
Yang Xin, Xu Shishi, and the lawyer surnamed Zhao would all pay as well!
Qi Licheng called Akun, a minor boss at one of his establishments.
The moment the call connected, he began screaming into the phone like a madman.
“Akun! Get everyone together immediately. Bring weapons and go to the Dragon Plaza construction site. Smash the place up! Break the workers’ legs! I’ll take responsibility for whatever happens!”
To his surprise, Akun began crying on the other end of the line.
“Young Master Cheng, we can’t! We can’t get out at all. There are police everywhere, checkpoints all over the roads, and they’re searching for you one by one.”
“What did you say?!”
“The police are looking for me? Why the hell are they looking for me?”
“Young Master Cheng, you’ve been put on the wanted list.”
“The police just issued a notice asking for assistance in your capture. They say you’re suspected of unlawful imprisonment, intentional assault, provoking trouble, and… and drug trafficking. The entire city is searching for you. The train station, bus station, and highway entrances have all been sealed off. The brothers are hiding in the wooden cabins at the mine and don’t dare go outside!”
Buzz!
Qi Licheng’s mind instantly went blank.
A wanted notice?
He was wanted?
Clatter!
The phone slipped from his hand and fell beneath the car seat.
How could this be?
How had it happened so quickly?
He had escaped the warehouse less than two hours ago. How had the police already issued a wanted notice? And how had they even uncovered the drug charges?
It had to be the Dragon Alliance!
It had to be that damn lawyer, Zhao Tianyi!
So the evidence he had claimed to possess was all real.
Qi Licheng’s teeth ground together with a harsh clicking sound. Even now, he still couldn’t figure out where things had gone wrong or how he had ended up being wanted by the police.
“No. I have to call my father. My father can definitely handle this. He practically rules Jinchuan. He can make this go away!”
“That’s right, that’s right! I have to call him! He’s the only one who can save me!”
Qi Licheng hurriedly bent down and groped beneath the seat for his phone. It took him quite a while to retrieve it.
He opened his contacts and found his father Qi Tianhu’s number. His finger hovered over the call button, but he hesitated and couldn’t bring himself to press it.
His father had warned him long ago that he absolutely must not touch that powder. Once he did, it would be a dead end. He had also warned him to wait until they had secured the lithium mine before dealing with those insignificant nobodies, and not to create unnecessary complications for now.
But Qi Licheng hadn’t listened to a word.
He had treated all those warnings as if they were nothing. He had touched everything he shouldn’t have touched, and provoked everyone he shouldn’t have provoked.
Now he had backed himself into a corner and even ended up on the police’s wanted list.
He didn’t dare imagine what his father would do once he found out.
In the end, Qi Licheng still didn’t make the call. Instead, he hugged his legs and curled up in the driver’s seat, trembling all over. He looked like a little dog that had lost its fangs and been left with nothing but fear.
He was surrounded on all sides, and he couldn’t even run.
Just as Qi Licheng sank into despair, his phone suddenly rang. His entire body jolted, and he thought the police were calling.
But when he looked closely, he saw that it was the person in charge at the mine.
He let out a sigh of relief.
“Hello? What is it?”
“Young Master Cheng, something’s happened! Something huge has happened! There’s been an incident at the mine!”
Qi Licheng’s heart sank again, and the ominous feeling in his chest grew stronger.
“Why are you panicking? Take it slow. What exactly happened?”
“It’s that idiot. It’s… it’s about that idiot! The new idiot at our mine—he was pretending! He’s a journalist! An undercover reporter!”
“That guy spent more than three months undercover at the mine and filmed everything that was happening there. We only discovered him this morning.”
Boom!
Qi Licheng’s vision darkened. It felt as though a massive hammer had slammed into his chest, leaving him gasping for breath.
One disaster after another! Disaster after disaster!
He was already in trouble himself, and now something had gone wrong at the mine as well.
Apart from several legitimate mines operated openly by the Qi family, they also had several illegal coal mines.
Those illegal mines had no extraction permits, no safety certifications, and no protective measures of any kind. They relied on intellectually disabled young men and vagrants as illegal laborers, exploiting them ruthlessly.
Over the years, at least eight or ten people had died in those mines. Every one of them had been quietly disposed of.
If this came to light, not only would Qi Licheng be sentenced to death, but his father, Qi Tianhu, would be in serious trouble as well.
The entire Qi family might even be destroyed.
“Did… did you catch him?” Qi Licheng asked in a trembling voice.
“We caught him, but we searched him from head to toe and found nothing. He didn’t have anything on him. He must have already sent the evidence out. And he’s incredibly tight-lipped. Even after we used force, he still refuses to tell us where the evidence is.”
“You useless bunch! You’re all completely useless!”
Qi Licheng finally broke down.
“What the hell am I paying you for? You actually let a journalist infiltrate the mine!”
“Young Master Cheng, we never expected it. He played an idiot too convincingly.”
“I don’t care what method you use. Force the truth out of him. You absolutely cannot let him reveal where the evidence is. Do you hear me?!”
“Yes, yes, we understand!”
“…”
Qi Licheng viciously ended the call, then began pounding the steering wheel like a madman once more.
“Ahhh!”
He threw back his head and let out a hysterical roar.
Half an hour later.
Qi Licheng finally stopped, resting his forehead against the steering wheel as he forced himself to calm down and think of a way out.
Yet the more he thought about it, the more desperate he became.
The wanted notice, the drug allegations, the illegal mines, the undercover reporter… Any one of these would have been enough to ruin him. Now, they had all exploded at once.
It was a completely hopeless situation—a certain death sentence with no way out.
At that moment, he finally saw the truth clearly. From the very beginning, he had fallen into the trap laid by the Wanlong Society.
Wumao was a mole, Jia Dan was a pawn, and even he himself was nothing more than a piece on the other side’s chessboard, used to bring down the entire Qi family.
He had thought he was the hunter, only to discover that he was merely the prey—a useless fool!
He remained silent for a very long time, so long that darkness had fallen outside the car window.
At last, Qi Licheng made a decision.
He started the car and drove to a small supermarket at the end of the street. Lowering his head, he went inside and bought some paper and a pen.
When he returned to the car and locked the doors, he spread the sheet of paper across the steering wheel. Then he picked up the pen and, with trembling hands, wrote two words at the very top of the blank page.
—Suicide Note!
