Trap? No, this is my best opportunity

Full two hours passed.

The last garbage truck slowly drove away.

The large pieces of corpses had all been cleaned up, though scraps and bloodstains were inevitably left on the ground or inside the building, which could not be completely avoided. Fortunately, the leaders in charge at the scene were quite humane and did not make excessively harsh demands on the cleanup, nor did they pursue a superficial face-saving project where one could wipe a finger across the surface and find it spotless.

Zhou Jian led his team away. Before leaving, he nodded to the Special Envoy and left Wang Yilin with a parting remark: "If there are any future operations to purge [Destiny], the Investigation Corps will be glad to help."

Wang Yilin nodded knowingly, truly grasping the subtext this time.

"Special Envoy, shall we withdraw as well?" Wang Yilin asked the Special Envoy.

Upon hearing this, the corners of the Special Envoy's mouth curled into an intriguing arc, and he said softly, "Indeed, everyone is gone now, let us leave too."

After a while.

Deep inside the diagonal alley, Feng Mu first watched as the Investigation Corps lifted their lockdown and cordon, forming up and leaving.

Immediately following them, the detectives from the police station also emerged and departed into the night.

Because the night was too deep, Feng Mu could not clearly see their faces, making it difficult to confirm whether Feng Ju was among them.

He was not particularly concerned about Feng Ju's survival; rather, he was using this to judge whether the police station had genuinely withdrawn entirely, or if they had merely pretended to pull back a portion while actually leaving undercover lookouts behind.

Spy thrillers from his past life always played out this way—it was a cliché trick.

Feng Mu had his own way of confirming it. He stepped out slightly from the alley and cast a sidelong glance at Wang Xiuli.

Sure enough, he saw the latter making a phone call. It went without saying who she was calling.

Wang Xiuli covered her mouth lightly: "As long as you're safe... What's inside is... Oh, alright, I won't ask. Are you still going back to the police station? Good, I understand. I won't go into that residential compound; I'll go straight home and wait for you."

Watching Wang Xiuli's departing figure after she hung up the phone, Feng Mu knitted his brows slightly.

Naturally, he could not hear what Wang Xiuli had said on the phone, but she had left alone, and Feng Ju had not even come out to meet her for a moment.

Is the police station an organization with such strict discipline?

Feng Mu curled his lip and sneered inwardly: "The probability of it being a trap is over fifty percent."

Dark Two certainly did not think so. Watching from the shadows as both the Investigation Corps and the police station withdrew, he slowly stepped out from the darkness of the corner.

Burning with anxiety, he rushed toward the residential compound.

The ground felt damp underfoot, and the air carried a mixed scent of disinfectant and blood, creating a bizarre, clean fragrance.

Dark Two paid no attention to any of it and headed straight for Room 702 in Building 4.

"Everything is as the Special Envoy predicted; someone has indeed come."

Taking everything in, Wang Yilin said to the Special Envoy with heartfelt admiration.

This time, he didn't foolishly ask whether the person was simply showing burning anxiety because their family lived in the compound.

In a residential compound where a massacre had just taken place, if it were your relatives inside, and you looked at the residual blood on the ground and the strange odor lingering in the air, would you rush in without hesitation?

Of course, one couldn't rule out that such a possibility existed, but it was better to kill by mistake than let anyone slip through—Wang Yilin had already grasped the true essence of this philosophy.

Without the slightest hesitation, he asked, "Should we kill everyone who enters?"

The Special Envoy watched as several more people successively entered the compound, though their movements were noticeably much more hesitant and slow. Of course, one could not rule out the possibility that some were intentionally putting on an act.

"Law enforcement shouldn't be so crude. If they don't resist, arrest them and interrogate them; if they resist arrest, then kill them."

Losing the concealment of the dark pillar, the Special Envoy skillfully switched to another expression and said righteously,

"We will never let any bad person go unpunished, but neither will we ever wrong an innocent person."

Wang Yilin took this lesson to heart. With a glance, he signaled Feng Ju, who hurriedly led the lurking detectives rushing down.

Although he was still just an ordinary detective, Feng Ju could feel his status among the detectives rising. The bureau chief clearly valued him, and the other detectives would now subconsciously gather around him.

"I'm going to get promoted. During the team leader evaluations at the end of the year, I might even have a chance."

Feng Ju felt a surge of heat in his heart. He assigned a portion of his men to arrest the few people who had entered later, while he himself took the lead and charged straight into Building 4.

Room 702.

Dark Two entered the room swiftly. His eyes swept over the residual blood on the ground—there was no corpse of Zhang Gao, nor any sign of a fierce struggle.

There was blood.
There was no corpse.
There was no sign of a struggle or resistance.

Based on these clues, one could deduce...

Dark Two did not possess that kind of brainpower. He walked quickly toward the bedroom, opened the wardrobe, and knocked open the hidden compartment behind it.

A briefcase was hidden inside the secret compartment. Opening it, he revealed a row of black cores arranged neatly.

The quantity was not large, but each one was several times the size of a normal black core, and their surfaces seemed to have been polished and repaired, showing very few cracks while emitting a deep, metallic luster.

At the bottom of the case sat a silver instrument.

Seeing that the black cores were still there, Dark Two let out a long breath of relief. Then, his ears twitched as he heard hurried footsteps echoing up the stairs.

He hurriedly tossed the briefcase back into the hidden compartment, closed the wardrobe, pulled the ant-stick from his trouser pocket, and let a cold light flash in his eyes.

Outside the door, a detective had just kicked it open and charged in when his eye socket suddenly turned pitch black.

Feng Ju watched in horror as a wooden stick pierced through the back of the leading detective's head, white brain matter spilling out.

Thud.

The corpse collapsed to the ground.

Dark Two used his fingertips to pull out the eyeball stuck on the end of the stick, stuffed it into his mouth along with the white-paste-drenched ant corpse, chewed twice, and swallowed it down his throat.

"Step aside, or die!"

Dark Two's tone was entirely sincere, and paired with his unhurried chewing and swallowing, a scalp-tingling, ferocious aura burst forth.

Feng Ju's pupils constricted slightly. Without a moment's hesitation, he judged Dark Two to be a heinous extremist of [Destiny]. No other reason was needed; just this ferocious momentum alone proved he wasn't being wronged in the slightest.

"Shoot him dead!" Feng Ju ordered, sidestepping at the same time to clear the way.

A dozen detectives blocked the doorway, their pitch-black gun barrels pointing inward. The next second, gunfire erupted.

In the cramped bedroom, a dozen pistols fired continuously, leaving virtually no blind spots for evasion.

Yet Dark Two stomped hard on the floor, the muscles in his thighs bulging in a circle as he lunged forward, pressing low to the ground. The moment his feet kicked off, his entire body shot forward like a flying plow.

The floorboards behind him were plowed away, and wood splinters sprayed wildly into the walls. In the blink of an eye, he appeared at the doorway. His arms transformed into blurring sickle-like afterimages, and instantly, six or seven severed feet flew off while three or four detectives screamed, their bodies abruptly dropping by half a head's height.

The detectives blocking the door scattered in terror, and Dark Two seized the chaos to burst out of the bedroom.

Panicking, Feng Ju opened fire in rapid succession, instantly emptying his magazine and splashing a string of blood droplets across the fleeing man's back.

"Pursue him! He's been shot, he can't get away!" Feng Ju roared.

Though Dark Two had taken a bullet in the spine, his movements did not slow down in the slightest, acting as if unaffected. He merely glanced back over his shoulder and hurled the short stick in his hand.

Whoosh—

With quick eyes and fast hands, Feng Ju casually pulled a nearby detective toward him. Caught off-guard, the man's body tilted, and his throat was pierced and shattered by the wooden stick.

Feng Ju released his "savior," the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end as he realized the wooden stick that had punched through was less than a centimeter away from his adam's apple.

"Pursue him! He must not escape, the Special Envoy is watching~"

The ruthless streak in Feng Ju's heart was thoroughly stimulated. He holstered his pistol, drew his standard-issue short saber, and charged downstairs like a mad dog while letting out low growls.

The detectives with severed feet shrieked on the ground, while the one with the wooden stick through his throat was breathing in more than he breathed out. The remaining detectives exchanged glances and all followed behind Feng Ju, though they each subconsciously lagged a step or two behind him.

Dark Two rushed out of the building. Freed from the constraints of the cramped terrain, he was immediately like a fish entering the sea or an ant crawling into the grass; his form and speed instantly became several times more agile.

The detectives hastily attempting to encircle him outside simply could not track his movements, and their bullets could only chase after his shadow.

"As expected, without terrain confinement or advance ambushes to trap the target, firearms still pose too little threat to martial arts masters."

The Special Envoy felt a slight pang of regret for letting the Investigation Corps withdraw completely. He simply hadn't expected to hook such a big fish again.

"Originally, I just wanted to cast a net and see what I could catch, but it turns out this fish seems only slightly less ferocious than that scarred-face woman."

The Special Envoy rolled his neck, and under Wang Yilin's stunned gaze, he took a single stride, stepped a few times in succession, and flashed past the group of detectives in an instant.

The air echoed with the Special Envoy's bantering voice: "I'm going to stretch my muscles. Have your men thoroughly search the room that fellow just returned to; he didn't bring his briefcase out."

Dark Two, who had been fleeing all the way and had remained unflustered even when surrounded and shot, suddenly felt his heart thump violently in his chest. He finally realized he had made a colossal mistake.

He shouldn't have left the briefcase inside the secret compartment.

No, his real mistake was that he shouldn't have gone to track Feng Mu today~

Dark Two was overcome with burning anxiety, his escaping footsteps stumbling for a fraction of a second. He desperately wanted to turn back and kill his way through, but just because his brain wasn't sharp didn't mean he was completely brainless.

Returning meant death; the police station had too many guns and too many men, and he couldn't slaughter them all by himself.

Moreover, the person now following closely behind him gave him an overwhelmingly dangerous sensation.

What Dark Two did not know was that, at this very moment, another person lurking in the gloom was feeling just as anxious as he was.

"The police station really did set a trap. Damn that dark-faced idiot, he's stupider than I could have imagined. If the black cores fall into the police station's hands, getting my hands on them again is going to be difficult~"

Feng Mu furrowed his brows tightly. Without hesitating much, the muscles on his face twitched bizarrely.

The most terrifying hunter in the ambush circle had been lured away by the dark-faced fool.

The remaining hunters had also suffered heavy losses, and they surely wouldn't expect yet another wave of attacks to come. Right now was their moment of greatest laxity.

This was his best opportunity to acquire the black cores!

Feng Mu drew a deep breath and slowly stepped out from the shadows. As he emerged from the darkness and revealed his form, a grim, bone-white mask was already affixed to his face...