Chapter 113

On the night that they were pursuing Zheng Kaifeng, Fei Du had vaguely mentioned some power behind the Zhou Clan to Luo Wenzhou—and some secret and horrifying connection to the case of three generations of the Su family trafficking and murdering female children.

The Zhou Clan case, the death fleet, the kept wanted criminals…

There was also the Zhou Clan's Yang Bo; Yang Bo had been valued by Zheng Kaifeng for no reason, clearly a good-for-nothing covered in fake gold leaf, but he'd been Zhou Junmao's personal secretary. And Yang Bo's father had also died in an unusual car crash, supposedly hitting and killing a team working on a project, and the greatest beneficiary had been an invisible shareholder called the Guangyao Fund, which just happened to be the owner of the usage rights to the patch of seaside land where Xu Wenchao had disposed of the little girls' bodies.

Luo Wenzhou had remembered this afterwards and in fact had made a simple investigation along those lines, but there had been too many things going on then and the investigation had only been half-hearted; he hadn't gone in depth.

And there was also Fei Chengyu's unusual car crash, delicately coinciding with the old criminal policeman Yang Zhengfeng's time of death. Tao Ran had once guessed that when it came to the enormous undercurrents and countless links behind all this, Fei Du must be the one who knew the most.

Now, like a thousand-year-old clam spirit, he'd finally opened up a crack and revealed a corner of that dark world; it was already enough to make you tremble with fear.

Luo Wenzhou asked, "This parasitic beast you're talking about, is that the Guangyao Fund?"

"The company is only a shell, one leg of a centipede, one ring of a spider's web. It has no value. Rather, if you touch it rashly, it could easily warn the enemy in advance, and the people behind it could easily make a cunning escape," Fei Du said quietly. "Keeping wanted criminals, assassinations, even building a colossal network of social connections, all of it requires a great sum of money—Fei Chengyu made donations to them at fixed intervals and used his connections for them, supported them, and these people committed all manner of crimes to help him clear away obstructions."

Luo Wenzhou had had contact with Fei Chengyu in the early years, when he'd been investigating Fei Du's mother's suicide. His impression had been of a cold and refined man of elegant carriage; regarding his wife's death, however, aside from the initial shock, his reminiscences and sadness had been insipid. He'd seemed rather unattached.

But Luo Wenzhou remembered that the old criminal policeman who'd come in to assist had advised him that under these circumstances, Fei Chengyu's sort of reaction was in fact the normal one, because a perpetually distraught woman would bring lengthy torment and suffering upon her family. When there were no blood ties or other yokes between a husband and wife, they were like two birds in a forest that would scatter each in their own direction when disaster hit. That Fei Chengyu, with his vast property, hadn't abandoned his wife and child but had only stayed away from home, throwing himself into his business, was already rare good conduct. Hearing that his wife was dead, it was human nature to feel he'd been freed—if he'd instead displayed excessive grief, that would have been rather worthy of suspicion.

Now it seemed that Fei Chengyu's each and every move had been precisely planned; he had even pulled the wool over the eyes of an elder who'd been on the job over twenty years!

The room was as warm as spring, but Luo Wenzhou's back was covered in a layer of cold sweat. "How do you know these things? Fei Chengyu didn't hide them from you, either?"

Fei Du struggled free of the scarf binding his hands and sat up rather wretchedly on the couch. He didn't pay any mind to his shirt, which Luo Wenzhou had pulled open. He casually smoothed his messy hair. His expression was so calm that his eyes were like two pieces of glass inlaid in his eye sockets, clear, ice-cold, as if the turbulent emotions just now had all been an illusion, not leaving behind a single trace.

Then he simply stood up, opened a cabinet door, and looked inside.

Luo Wenzhou's breath was suspended, because making Fei Du speak was too difficult; perhaps under his coercion he would reveal a few inklings, then come around and retreat once more. Whether he said anything, how much he said, would depend entirely on luck. Luo Wenzhou was afraid that if he breathed too loudly, he'd blow the luck away.

He was inwardly anxious, but he didn't dare to say anything to hurry him, only lightly asked, "What are you looking for?"

Fei Du frowned. "Is there wine?"

Of course there was wine. During the New Year and other holidays, no one could avoid making visits to family and friends and exchanging some gifts of bottles of red wine, but Luo Wenzhou, looking at Fei Du's reeling figure, really didn't especially want to give him anything to drink. He fumbled around for a while, then pulled out a bottle of wine that was supposed to have the highest sugar content and lowest alcohol content. He poured a glass and gave it to him.

The warm alcohol quickly flowed through Fei Du's blood and spread to his limbs and bones, slightly dispersing the indescribable chill, while his brain, seemingly mired in ice cold mud, cleared a little.

Fei Du held onto the empty glass, but he didn't ask for a second one—he naturally knew when to stop.

"I'm sorry, I've never told anyone these things. It's rather complicated. I couldn't get the main threads straight for a moment." Fei Du paused, then followed his train of thought to a very remote beginning. "I had a maternal grandfather who I never met, the first person to 'go into the sea.' He'd accumulated some family property. At first he was very opposed to my mother marrying Fei Chengyu, but he couldn't dissuade his daughter from her infatuation. After the wedding, he didn't have any contact with them."

Luo Wenzhou didn't know why the main character of the story had changed, a family drama cutting into the plot of a criminal case, but he wasn't in a hurry to ask. He tried to put in a word following his subject. "Because the old man was keen-sighted and saw that there was something wrong with your…with Fei Chengyu?"

"If Fei Chengyu had wanted, he could have disguised himself as any sort of person in the world. It wouldn't have been so easy for him to slip up." Fei Du smiled, but his smile was fleeting. He said, "A sadist first has to use subtle means to break off his target's social connections—for example her parents, relatives, friends…render her alone and unsupported, while at the same time blackening her image to outsiders, so that even if she asked for help, no one would believe her. That's the first step. Only then can you constantly force down her self-respect without scruple, wreck her dignity, firmly control your target."

Luo Wenzhou faintly felt that this was wrong, because he thought that while Fei Du said this, he sounded like a true expert on criminal psychology, academic and impartial—as though what he was saying wasn't the subject of acute pain.

"It's easy to make ordinary friends misunderstand and stop contacting her by sowing discord a few times. The same principle applies to people a little closer; it only takes some more time. My mother's relatives were scattered during the old society's war years. There were few who still stayed in contact. She didn't have a host of distant relatives, so that made things easier—but you know, apart from that, there are some connections that even if you break the bone, there will still be a ligament remaining. My grandfather was widowed young and only had one daughter. Angry as he was, he never changed his heir. I couldn't understand how Fei Chengyu had broken that connection and also obtained my grandfather's family legacy." Fei Du said, "So I asked Fei Chengyu."

Relying on the formidable psychological quality he had used for many years to scam people in the interrogation room, Luo Wenzhou forced himself to maintain his expression. He bit his stiffened tongue, calming his voice with difficulty. "You're saying that you went to question your father, to ask him about the particulars of how he abused and controlled your mom."

This was too…

"Is it very hard to understand? Sadism often comes along with an inexpressible self-satisfaction, and Fei Chengyu was especially narcissistic. He thought that these were all his abilities and works. He was happy to show them off to me, and took it as an opportunity to teach by example," Fei Du said lightly. "If I didn't understand anything, I only had to ask."

If he didn't have any questions when he finished listening, it would be taken to mean that he hadn't thought it over, that his attitude was incorrect. The young Fei Du hadn't especially wanted to know the outcome of an "incorrect attitude."

An indescribable anger leapt up in Luo Wenzhou's heart. He would have loved nothing better than to drag Fei Chengyu out of his cozy vegetative state, kick him into prison, and make him eat lead.

He took a deep breath. A good while later, he pressed down his undulating emotions and asked in a grave voice, "And then what?"

"Fei Chengyu told me that severing that kind of connection was very easy, because a dead person couldn't form a connection with anyone—my grandfather died in a car accident. He'd unexpectedly heard the news that my mother was pregnant and finally couldn't resist going to see her. Before this, my mom had been misled by Fei Chengyu and thought that my grandfather had already broken off relations with her. When she received her father's olive branch, she was wild with joy…but on the day they had arranged to meet, a drunk driver hit my grandfather."

Arranging yourself a tidy assassination and as a matter of course inheriting the victim's property… This story sounded very familiar.

"Isn't it very much like a duplicate of the Zhou Clan's wealthy family drama?" Fei Du displayed a none-too-clear smile. "I asked Fei Chengyu then, what if the traffic police had thought that this car crash had some points that merited consideration? For example, if they'd tracked the driver's whereabouts before his death and found something unusual, or there was some problem with his background. As soon as the police suspected this wasn't an accident but a deliberate murder, then as the beneficiary of his legacy, Fei Chengyu would be extremely suspect."

Luo Wenzhou truly didn't know whether he ought to praise him for being so meticulous about major crimes from such a young age.

"Fei Chengyu casually told me, 'There are professionals to take care of these things. They won't slip up.'" Fei Du said, "That was the first time I heard about their existence from him. Fei Chengyu said to me once that there was a precious sword in his hand, and in the future he could give it to me, provided I could hold it."

Luo Wenzhou's heart stopped, but at this point, Fei Du raised his head and met Luo Wenzhou's suddenly anxious gaze. He smiled at once. "No need to worry. That sword never came to me."

In a somewhat hoarse voice, Luo Wenzhou said, "You've known me and Tao Ran for so many years and never revealed a word of this. Was it that you didn't trust us?"

Fei Du was silent for a while. He didn't answer directly, only said, "You know the old Picture Album Project?"

Luo Wenzhou stared.

"Do you still remember when I told you that I saw a paper written by Fan Siyuan, the head of the Picture Album Project, in his basement? It wasn't only a paper. He had exhaustive materials about the Picture Album Project, including about the people taking part and their relatives—you said your shifu was called Yang Zhengfeng, right? He had a daughter named Yang Xin who was in elementary school then, in the city's Twelfth Elementary School. On Mondays through Thursdays she got taken to school and picked up by a classmate's parents who lived nearby, but on Friday evenings she would wait an extra hour at school for her mother, right?"

Luo Wenzhou's blood ran cold. Even he hadn't known most of these details.

How much power did this invisible net have?

Also, why had the Picture Album Project been established back then? Had it really been merely to compile academic materials? Aside from the experts at Yan Security Uni, wouldn't it have been enough to send a student to make contact and find someone in charge of records to cooperate? Why had so many frontline police officers taken part, and why had the level of confidentiality been so high?

And while the level of confidentiality had been that high, there had still been a leak. That could only mean…could only mean…

"As for what this sword really is, who it is, where it is, how great its power is, I don't know any of that. When Fei Chengyu became incompetent after the car crash, I spent a few years thoroughly taking over his business, digging up some traces. I found that the associated donations and use of social connections had stopped years ago. If I hadn't dug deep into the property management records, I wouldn't have been able to discover that there had ever been such a secret connection between Fei Chengyu and them. Then I started to suspect that his car crash hadn't been so simple."

True—if Fei Chengyu had only gotten into an accident, then these people linked to him by "ties of blood" couldn't have refrained even from showing their faces; moreover, they couldn't have refrained from interfering at all with the company's transfer of rights, disappearing so silently.

Fei Du was evidently Fei Chengyu's only heir. Whether he fit the criteria of an heir or not, these people should have contacted him; they wouldn't have abandoned a former financial backer like this.

Luo Wenzhou said, "They'd broken it off."

Fei Du spat out a breath. "Right, they'd broken it off, and Fei Chengyu suffered from the backlash of the demon sword that he'd kept."

Luo Wenzhou no longer had any attention to spare for his rejected confession, and no time to go into raptures about Fei Du's rare openness.

He pulled over a chair and sat down and, frowning, pondered for a long time, trying to smooth out his thoughts. "Why?"

Fei Du said, "I remember I gave you an analysis of where Xu Wenchao could have disposed of the bodies."

Luo Wenzhou nodded—private property that no one would ever dig up, or a particular region where even if someone did find a body they wouldn't report it to the police.

The Binhai district didn't satisfy either requirement; it was far outside of expectations. But the bodies really had been buried there, and they really hadn't been discovered for many years. It could only be summed up as "a lucky break." After all, China was so large; there were countless wild places no one went to for decades. This kind of luck wasn't all that unusual.

"When Fei Chengyu was in charge, the Guangyao Fund once gave him a plan for a collaborative development of a Binhai project. The board of directors refused on the grounds of an 'unclear profit model'—oh, by the board of directors, I mean Fei Chengyu himself."

Luo Wenzhou: "…"

He was feeling that tonight, his own ears weren't good enough!

"In other words, Xu Wenchao disposed of the bodies there not because he thought the scenery was beautiful," Luo Wenzhou said, "but because he knew that it was a safe 'graveyard'? He was in contact with those people, perhaps even paid rent to use that graveyard!"

Given that Xu Wenchao was the kind of person who would use a box of ashes as a hiding place, he'd be capable of that—if that place had been bought for that purpose, then wasn't it an even bigger "storage locker" for ashes and bodies?

Fei Du said, "It was the Su family case that gave me a guess about what had happened to Fei Chengyu—"

Luo Wenzhou was attempting to look at this thing from the point of view of an ordinary person. "In other words, your dad didn't like this pedophilia business, refused to provide funds to participate, and so parted company with those people?"

Fei Du laughed silently. "How could that be? That would be too honorable."

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