Chapter 311: Chapter 268: I Am a Good Person
Struggling to suppress the taste of blood in his throat, Yang Xiao finally let out a sigh of relief. He leaned against the wall, gasping for breath, feeling pain in every viscera— the middle-aged man’s hand-to-hand combat skills were far superior to his own.
Glancing at the horsetail whisk in his hand, Yang Xiao was filled with emotion. Sects like the Great Black Buddha Mother Sect might be weird and sinister, but their magic artifacts were indeed very useful.
"Ah... Aaahhh!!" The man’s head let out a roar like that of a beast, still struggling nonstop, "Kill me! Kill me now!"
Putting away the horsetail whisk and the Green Lantern, Yang Xiao looked over his trophy with a satisfied smile. He had always wanted to capture an evil cultivator for interrogation, and today his dream had finally come true.
"What’s your name, who sent you here?" Yang Xiao began to ask.
"Kill me!! Ah... Kill me!!"
The middle-aged man kept screaming continuously, exhausting the few remains of Yang Xiao’s patience. He found a glass ashtray in the room, weighed it in his hand—it was just the right heft—then located a finger wrapped in bloody tendons and veins amidst the pile of flesh and struck it hard.
The man opened his mouth wide, unleashing a pitiful scream. Yang Xiao wiped off the blood splashed onto his face with the back of his hand and smiled, "So you do feel pain. That makes things easier."
Yang Xiao squatted down and gently poked at the broken fingernails on the shattered finger, as large patches of flesh spread on the ground twitched in agony. "Let me introduce myself. My name is Yang Xiao, the acting head of the Rongcheng Lin’an District Patrol Office Investigation Team. I am a good person, and I genuinely hope you’d cooperate and answer the questions, otherwise I will do my utmost to torment you."
"Rest assured, I won’t let you die easily. Once I get out, I’ll bring you saline and nutrient solution. Your veins are all exposed, which is very convenient for injection. Thank you for saving me a lot of trouble. I will maintain your life so you can live forever in this state until you talk," Yang Xiao said.
Yang Xiao was not joking. He truly felt this way—a cult member who would always live yet never rebel against him posed no threat. The thought alone was delightful.
"Tell you what you want to know, and you’ll kill me immediately... immediately. Is that true?" Staring at his heart suspended not far away, the man finally broke down.
"Yang Xiao always keeps his word," Yang Xiao said with righteous energy.
Through the man’s confession, Yang Xiao learned his surname was Qi and his name was Qilong. He was one of the Yu Yuan Sect’s leaders in this area. The four young people Yang Xiao had killed were his subordinates, and among the five, only he was a genuine Resentful Eye Cultivator.
"Who leaked my arrival in Qingfeng?"
"It was a woman with the surname Meng who told me. She... she’s a member of the Qingfeng Patrol Bureau. Right after receiving the notification about your arrival, she informed me immediately," said the man, sprawled out and cooperative. His remaining head moved his mouth laboriously to speak.
"Was Secretary Meng killed by you guys?"
"No, it wasn’t us. I only found out about her death recently, and I have no idea who did it," the man’s voice was hoarse, his throat and vocal cords were already ruined.
"Is Secretary Meng the only mole you have inside the Qingfeng Patrol Bureau?"
"Yes, just her. Kill me, please just kill me!!" The man’s head twisted violently on the tabletop, the scene was bloody.
"Bullshit! How could a mere clerk know so much?" Yang Xiao stood up with a scornful laugh, "It seems you won’t cry until you see the coffin."
After some torture, the middle-aged man was at his last gasp, but he finally opened up. He admitted that there was another mole inside the Qingfeng Patrol Bureau. Secretary Meng was also under his command, but the mole’s rank was high, and he did not know the real identity. He had come tonight to launch a surprise attack based on information from this mole, and Meng was also silenced by this person.
"Tell me, who exactly is this mole?"
"I don’t know, I really don’t know!!"
Yang Xiao applied light pressure with two fingers, and the surrounding blood vessels burst open at once, blood gushing out in streams.
"Ahhhh!! I’ll talk, I’ll talk! I don’t know who this person is, but I know how to find them!!"
"Go on," Yang Xiao said, unmoved, and continued applying pressure with his fingers.
"We had agreed that he would set fire to the office building to draw attention, and I would do the killing. If... if he doesn’t get my message after half an hour, he’ll come to check."
"Half an hour..."
Yang Xiao panicked. He’d been delayed too long in the Mirror World with the middle-aged man. By his calculations, the mole should have already arrived while Xi Menxiu and Zhuge Zhijie were completely unguarded.
Yang Xiao immediately went to the mirror in the bathroom, crossing back into reality. As he reached the corridor, the scene in front of him made his eyes turn red with anger. Xi Menxiu lay at the door, covered in blood; her upper body in the corridor, her lower half in the room.
Without hesitation, Yang Xiao drew his gun and charged over. The door was halfway open, and the room was eerily quiet, with no sign of Zhuge Zhijie.
"Thud."
"Thud, thud."
Suddenly, a bizarre knocking sound emanated from inside the room, and Yang Xiao, careful and vigilant, made his way inside. The knocking was coming from a cabinet.
Fearing it might be Zhuge Zhijie, Yang Xiao dared not shoot and instead approached step by step. The moment he pulled open the cabinet door, a bound body toppled out, and at the same time, a hand suddenly reached out from under the bed, grabbing Yang Xiao’s pant leg. Then, a sharp jolt ran up his legs like an electric shock, sending him tumbling to the floor.
In a daze, Yang Xiao saw Xi Menxiu, her face covered in blood, holding him and incessantly slapping his face, with Zhuge Zhijie standing nearby.
"Xiuer..." Yang Xiao said feebly.
"Captain, the captain’s awake!" Xi Menxiu raised her hand and gave Zhuge Zhijie a slap on the back of his head, "Zhijie, are you blind? Couldn’t you see it’s the captain?"
"You were lying at the door playing dead, didn’t you see it was the captain coming in?" Zhuge Zhijie argued back logically, and only then did Yang Xiao realize that in Zhuge’s hand was a stun gun.
After drinking a few sips of water, Yang Xiao finally caught his breath, and the thing that had fallen out of the cabinet turned out not to be a corpse, but a living person bound hand and foot, who had now passed out, still dressed in the uniform of the Patrol Defense Bureau.
"This is..." Yang Xiao, helped to his feet, felt that he recognized the man’s face, but couldn’t recall where he had seen him.
"His name is Cai Dechen, he’s the captain of the Qingfeng Patrol Bureau’s investigation team. This guy looked suspicious, so as soon as he came in, Zhijie and I put him down," Xi Menxiu said as she wiped the blood from her face, which wasn’t hers but borrowed from a corpse in the corridor.
"How did you know something was off about him?" Yang Xiao was somewhat surprised.
"Finding so many dead and not calling for backup immediately, just barging in recklessly, did he think his life was too long?" Xi Menxiu said with a laugh.
Smelling the scent of char on Cai Dechen, Yang Xiao guessed that Xi Menxiu and Zhuge Zhijie had also used a similar surprise attack to take Cai down.
These two weaklings, fighting directly against someone of the investigation captain’s level, would stand no chance at all.
"Send a message to the chief, inform him of what happened here. How much longer until Beibei and the others arrive?" Yang Xiao didn’t feel reassured, so he retied Cai Dechen with a rope.
"I’ve already sent the message. The chief has given orders through the provincial bureau to the Qingfeng Patrol Bureau, commanding all their personnel not to approach this building. Beibei and the others have reached Qingfeng and will soon be here," Zhuge Zhijie said, relieved, "At most half an hour."
"Good, you two stay here. I have other matters to handle. Make sure to watch Cai Dechen closely and bring him back." Cai Dechen had a pistol with a silencer attached to it, which now became Xi Menxiu’s spoils of war.
"Don’t worry, the chief said the same thing. Now they’re going to thoroughly investigate the Qingfeng Patrol Bureau from top to bottom, and none of the responsible parties will escape."
Having confirmed the safety of the two, Yang Xiao once again returned to the Mirror World. The man, seeing Yang Xiao return, became emotional, his flesh trembling violently.
"Kill me! Just kill me!!" His head roared, "You bastard, you promised me, you promised!!"
Yang Xiao didn’t bother with words and turned on the stun gun directly, jabbing it into the man’s exposed entrails. After a series of screams, the man calmed down significantly.
"Do you have people left in Rongcheng? What is their purpose?"
"To catch you, it’s all to catch you..." the man said weakly, never having imagined that he would end up looking like a ghost one day.
"The Soul-Capturing Mirror is a magic artifact highly valued by our sect, requiring the holder to have a supreme spiritual root. We hoped to catch you and use your flesh and blood to nurture it. Of course, if we could... if we could persuade you to join us, that would be... even better."
Yang Xiao sighed and raised the stun gun again, "I tried to ask nicely, but you still won’t tell the truth, huh."
After a burst of sparks and cries, the man was barely hanging on to life, large teardrops of blood falling from his eyes, almost pitiful, "I’m not lying to you, I really am not..."
"If you wanted to catch me, couldn’t you just send more people? Why go through all the trouble of setting up in Rongcheng, where there are seven Patrol Defense Bureaus, far more powerful than the Qingfeng Public Office? Are you guys stupid?" Yang Xiao was unmoved, continuing to press for answers.
But this time the man was almost electrified into incompetence, still insisting he didn’t know. Yang Xiao finally believed that he truly didn’t know, perhaps because he was too low-ranking.
"How many of you are in Rongcheng? Where are you all hiding?" Yang Xiao was determined to eradicate the evil, and he planned to use the power of the Patrol Defense Bureau to capture them all.
"I don’t know, I really don’t know..." The man cried, his sobs pitiful, "I only know the leader of the team is a Venerable One sent from the sect, and people of that level are not going to tell us their location or purpose, please believe me."
Yang Xiao knew there would be no more answers, so he used a sewing kit found in a drawer of the room to stitch up the man’s mouth before leaving.
The man couldn’t die yet, not unless he could catch that Venerable One.
