Chapter 66: Chapter 66; Mo Chen
Eventually, they stopped outside a familiar door. Su Wan’s former bedroom. Mo Chen entered the passcode immediately. The lock disengaged with a soft click. Then the door slowly opened.
And both men froze slightly the moment they stepped inside. The room had already been searched. That realization hit instantly. Several drawers remained slightly misaligned. The wardrobe doors stood partially open. Storage compartments beneath the shelves had clearly been disturbed before being carelessly reorganized again. Even the mattress had been shifted recently. Someone else had already come here looking for something.
The atmosphere inside the room sharpened immediately. Li Chen moved deeper inside carefully while Mo Chen closed the door behind them. The bedroom itself felt strangely empty now. Not abandoned. Stripped, as though pieces of Su Wan’s existence inside the room had gradually been removed over time.
Li Chen checked the bedside drawers first. Nothing. No jewelry. No personal records. No hidden compartments.
Mo Chen moved toward the wardrobe area before crouching beside the lower cabinet structure. Dust patterns had been disturbed recently there too. He opened the compartment. Empty.
The silence inside the room deepened. "They came before us," Li Chen muttered quietly.
Mo Chen’s gaze swept slowly across the room. Not random searching either. Targeted. Careful. Whoever entered earlier knew exactly what they were looking for.
Li Chen checked beneath the desk afterward before straightening again. "Nothing." No watch. No documents. Nothing connected to the attack earlier that day. Only absence. And somehow that felt worse.
Mo Chen’s expression darkened thoughtfully. "If the room was searched this thoroughly, then whatever Madam remembers about that watch..." He glanced slowly around the stripped bedroom again. "Someone else remembers it too."
The atmosphere became colder after that realization. Because now the attack surrounding Su Wan no longer felt isolated. It connected backward. Someone had been searching long before tonight.
Li Chen finally stepped away from the desk. "We move." There was no reason remaining here anymore. Not after realizing they were already late.
The two men left the bedroom quietly afterward before crossing deeper into the estate toward the restricted eastern wing. Chairman Su’s private study. This section of the mansion carried noticeably heavier security than the residential floors below. Hidden surveillance systems lined the corridor corners while biometric access panels guarded several of the private rooms. But Su Wan had remembered the passcode exactly.
Mo Chen entered the sequence calmly. The lock disengaged immediately. Neither man spoke afterward. Because somehow that felt even more unsettling.
The study door opened slowly. Darkness greeted them first. Then faint moonlight filtering through the massive windows behind the desk revealed the room itself. Large. Cold. Immaculately organized. But the moment they stepped inside, both men immediately realized something else felt wrong: the desk.
At the very center of the massive dark wood surface sat a strange, stretched skin map covered in handwritten markings, symbols, territorial circles, and intersecting red lines spreading across multiple cities and regions. The material itself did not look like ordinary paper.
Li Chen’s expression hardened slightly. "What is that?"
Mo Chen stepped closer slowly. The markings across the surface looked less like business planning and more like operational mapping. Routes. Zones. Influence sectors. Several powerful family names appeared written faintly near different sections, including Lu. And beside the map rested stacks of sealed political files. Confidential judicial reports. Corporate surveillance records. Offshore asset structures. Photographs. Media control chains.
The deeper they searched, the colder the atmosphere inside the study became. Because this was no ordinary businessman’s office. This looked like someone quietly studying entire power structures from behind the curtain.
Li Chen lowered another document slowly. "The Su family isn’t just wealthy."
Mo Chen’s eyes remained fixed on the skin map spread across the desk. "No," he said quietly. "They’re preparing for something."
The study remained silent except for the faint rustle of papers moving beneath their hands. Li Chen stood near the side shelves now, flipping carefully through another stack of sealed documents while Mo Chen remained near the massive desk, his attention fixed partly on the strange skin map spread across its surface. The closer they looked, the less ordinary the room became. This was not the office of a businessman. It looked more like the operational center of someone studying families, influence, and power movements systematically over many years.
Several sections of the map carried handwritten annotations beside major cities. Some circles were marked red. Others blacked out entirely. Next to one coastal region sat a familiar symbol connected to the Lu family corporate network.
Li Chen’s expression darkened. "This isn’t financial planning."
"No," Mo Chen replied quietly while tracing one of the marked routes with his eyes. "It’s territorial observation." Influence. Expansion. Pressure points. The entire map resembled the structure of someone quietly tracking how power moved between elite families across the country.
Then suddenly, Li Chen stopped moving. "Chen."
Mo Chen looked up immediately. Li Chen slowly lowered the file in his hands onto the nearby table. Inside rested several photographs. Not surveillance photos this time. Meeting photos. Private gatherings between Chairman Su and various influential figures taken over several years. Judges. Regulators. Media owners. Military-linked businessmen. Even members tied indirectly to the Lu family’s secondary branches.
The atmosphere inside the study sharpened immediately. Mo Chen crossed toward him quickly. The deeper they flipped through the files, the uglier the connections became. Buried political donations. Private settlements. Judicial interference records. Corporate destruction plans targeting rival families. And among the sealed agreements—Lu Conglomerate appeared repeatedly. Not openly. Quietly. Studied. Tracked. Positioned around.
Li Chen’s jaw tightened faintly. "The Su family has been watching the Lu family for years."
Mo Chen lowered another document slowly. "No," he corrected. "They’ve been preparing around them." That difference changed everything.
Then his eyes stopped abruptly on another file partially hidden beneath the others. This one was thinner. Older. Its edges visibly worn from repeated handling. Mo Chen opened it carefully. And both men went silent.
Inside were photographs of Su Wan. Not recent ones. Childhood photographs. School records. Private medical evaluations. Even behavioral observations handwritten along the margins in dark ink.
Li Chen’s face changed immediately. "What the hell..."
Mo Chen turned another page slowly. Most of the notes appeared clinical. Emotionally detached. "Subject displays stronger cognitive adaptability than expected..." "Temperament unsuitable for direct placement..." "Emotional instability affects long-term positioning..."
The atmosphere in the room became suffocating. Because these were not normal family records. This looked like assessment. Evaluation. As though Su Wan herself had been quietly observed for years like part of something larger.
Li Chen lowered his voice instinctively. "Why would her own father keep this?"
Mo Chen didn’t answer immediately. Because near the final pages, another detail had caught his attention. Several coded references appeared repeatedly beside Su Wan’s profile: ALIGNMENT POSSIBILITY. SUCCESSION COMPATIBILITY. PRIMARY ACCESS VECTOR. None of it made complete sense yet. But together with the political files, hidden networks, and territorial mapping spread across the study, one thing became very clear: the Su family was not merely wealthy. They were planning around powerful families like pieces on a board. And somehow Su Wan had always been part of those calculations whether she realized it or not.
Mo Chen slowly closed the file containing Su Wan’s records. The atmosphere inside the study had grown noticeably heavier now, the silence pressing tightly around both men while the strange skin map remained spread across the desk beneath the dim moonlight. Nothing inside this room felt normal anymore. Not the political files. Not the hidden financial structures. And certainly not the clinical way Chairman Su had documented his own daughter over the years.
Li Chen glanced once more toward the coded phrases written beside Su Wan’s profile before quietly returning the file exactly where they found it. "We’ve seen enough."
Mo Chen nodded slightly. No matter how much more remained hidden inside the study, staying longer would only increase the risk of exposure. He reached toward the final drawer compartment—
Then both men froze. Footsteps. This time much closer. Not distant movement elsewhere inside the mansion. Directly outside the study corridor.
Li Chen’s expression sharpened instantly. The footsteps approached slowly across the polished floor outside, calm enough to belong to someone familiar with the estate rather than ordinary patrol security. Then—voices. Low. Muffled. One male. One female.
Mo Chen extinguished the small desk light immediately while both men moved soundlessly deeper into the shadows near the side shelving. The study fell dark again.
