Chapter 12

Ji Yang settled into the passenger seat of the black, modified Hummer parked downstairs.

Nie Xu had lifted him into it.

The vehicle’s broad body and six-hole grille gave its front end an imposing appearance. Its impressive ground clearance also provided an excellent commanding view of the road, much like a Land Cruiser.

The style suited a certain someone perfectly.

Ji Yang felt the vehicle accelerate. He grabbed the seat belt across his chest and counted the cars following them in the rearview mirror. There were three.

The situation seemed more serious than he had anticipated.

Ji Yang hadn’t been to the office lately, and he tended to get up late in the morning, so he hadn’t run into Ji Chengyi. According to Peng Jiaying, although Ji Zhonglin had punished the people responsible for the incident at the entrance last time, he had subsequently provided considerable compensation and support. The Lan Hai Bay project was progressing steadily.

Ji Yang had always felt that, because he had interfered with the plot, Nie Xu had given up on using Ji Chengyi. The next time his dear Third Brother made a splash, it should have been at a turning point in his career, when he advanced another level and shone even brighter.

Who would have thought it would be because of Wei Qiming?

A communication request came through. Ji Yang saw Nie Xu tap his earpiece. After listening to something from the other end, he spoke.

“We can’t rule out the possibility that the other party is armed or intends to carry out a planned kidnapping. Expand the search area, focusing on restrooms, stairwells, and CCTV blind spots. Also, have someone contact property management and obtain the floor plans.”

This was the first time Ji Yang had truly understood what their work entailed.

“Should I call Wei Qiming again?” he asked.

“No need. His phone is off.” Nie Xu kept his eyes on the road. “When there’s a direct threat to someone’s physical safety, we treat it as the highest level of emergency. Continuous location tracking is the most basic procedure.”

Ji Yang responded with an understanding “Oh.”

No wonder everyone seemed so serious.

Ji Yang knew perfectly well that Ji Chengyi was the novel’s main gong. Nothing truly terrible could happen to him.

But Wei Qiming was acting as though he had a screw loose, insisting on dragging Ji Yang, the former villain of the story, into the mess until it looked as though Ji Yang couldn’t escape responsibility.

Ji Yang asked, “There must have been plenty of people at the auction. Didn’t anyone notice anything?”

Nie Xu glanced at his face before looking back at the road.

“You can think about whether you mentioned any other key details when you previously brought up the auction to Wei Qiming.”

Ji Yang: …I’m practically Dou E, the wronged woman from the opera.

“I forgot,” he said.

Nie Xu nodded and repeated, “You forgot.”

Ji Yang knew how ridiculous that sounded, but he couldn’t exactly tell Nie Xu that he had transmigrated into a novel.

“I really did forget,” he emphasized.

Then a thought flashed through his mind, and he immediately added, “It’s because the medication I used to take had a lot of side effects. I switched to a different medicine, and my mood improved a lot afterward. But my memories from before are rather fragmented.”

Since he had brought it up, Nie Xu nodded again.

“So you knew Jiang Lei would get into trouble on the boat, and you knew about Jianyuan, because of the medication too?”

That was clearly his way of saying, Go on. Keep making things up.

Ji Yang knew that the longer he kept this up, the more holes his story would develop.

In the short term, he could still explain things away by claiming he had overheard something accidentally within the Ji family. But what kind of person was Nie Xu? Ji Yang suspected that once the man became suspicious, he wouldn’t easily believe any excuse he offered.

So Ji Yang had no intention of arguing his way out of it.

Instead, he suddenly took a different tack.

“I suspect someone switched my medication.”

Nie Xu turned his head toward him, frowning.

“What?”

“I’ve suspected it for a long time.” Ji Yang leaned back against the seat and stared blankly at the ceiling of the car. His expression was mournful and utterly disillusioned, tinged with self-mockery. “No one in the Ji family genuinely wants me to get better.”

He turned his head.

“Aren’t you only interested in my status as the Ji family’s legitimate heir, too?”

First, he played along with the emotion. Once he had committed to the act, he immediately turned the tables.

Ji Yang tried his best to make his microexpressions convincing. Meanwhile, he thought to himself that he really ought to find time to have the original owner’s medication tested.

According to the book, the original owner had long relied on powerful painkillers, which had made his temper increasingly volatile and his physical condition progressively worse. Ji Yang couldn’t help thinking that it sounded like one of those melodramatic wealthy-family power struggles in novels.

And there were far too many people in the Ji family who might have wanted to harm the original owner: the Second Madam, Ji Chengyi’s mother—the woman who had knowingly become a mistress—the old master who had always exploited him, Zhao Yuan, and even his biological father.

Any of them could have done it.

If the medication really had been tampered with, it would further justify his decision to seek refuge with Nie Xu.

If there was nothing wrong with it, at least the original owner’s reputation could be somewhat rehabilitated.

Either way, it was all because of the medication.

His dramatic change in personality? The medication.

His knowledge of things no one else knew? He had suspected the medicine for a long time.

His cruelty, stupidity, and erratic behavior? They were merely the surface of things.

The more he thought about it, the more reasonable the excuse seemed.

The car ride felt both short and long.

Screeech—

The vehicle stopped outside the largest antique auction house in Fan Prefecture.

Nie Xu rested one hand on the steering wheel and turned to look at the man in the passenger seat.

This young master had recently been putting himself in an extremely vulnerable position, yet every now and then, he would inadvertently show his claws.

There was still a dressing on his elbow.

It was as though the young master had forgotten that no one here had the authority to force him to come along. And yet, he had followed them anyway.

“What’s wrong?” Ji Yang asked in confusion.

Nie Xu tapped the steering wheel with his index finger.

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me.”

Ji Yang smiled and obediently mimed zipping his lips.

Fine. I’ll shut up.

I won’t get in the way of your rescue operation.

Nie Xu pushed open the car door and jumped out. He walked around the front of the vehicle to the passenger side, while the people in the cars behind them quickly gathered together.

Ji Yang was about to open his own door when Nie Xu, as though he had eyes in the back of his head, turned and shot him a look the instant he reached for the handle.

Ji Yang understood perfectly.

Stay seated. Don’t move.

So he sat back down.

While Nie Xu directed the operation, Ji Yang leaned against the open car door and surveyed his surroundings.

It was already mid-afternoon.

Unlike an antique trading market, this auction house was located in the heart of a commercial district, with two large shopping malls nearby. This wasn’t the busiest time of day, but there were still plenty of people around.

Ji Yang could even keenly sense that their group was attracting quite a bit of attention.

He looked at Nie Xu’s people again.

Because the emergency had occurred during their ordinary daily activities, they weren’t dressed uniformly. In fact, out of habit, they instinctively blended into the crowd and tried to make themselves less conspicuous.

Their bearing was simply too different from that of ordinary people.

Standing among the crowds going about their daily lives, they were particularly noticeable.

Fortunately, Nie Xu issued his orders quickly, and the group soon entered the building through different entrances.

To Ji Yang’s surprise, Nie Xu didn’t go inside. Instead, he stood beneath a tree beside a flower bed barely five meters from the car, holding what appeared to be a monitoring tablet. Every now and then, he spoke into his earpiece in a concise, no-nonsense manner.

Those long legs, that narrow waist, the veins running from the backs of his hands toward his forearms, and the straight profile of his nose—

He was pretty much exactly Ji Yang’s type.

Ji Yang was admiring the view when he noticed Nie Xu suddenly look up and walk toward him.

“So sensitive to being watched,” Ji Yang muttered.

He immediately straightened up from the car window.

But Nie Xu stopped beside the passenger door without saying a word. He simply turned around, positioned himself in front of it to block the view, and continued looking down at his tablet.

Ji Yang was baffled.

Then he quickly realized what was happening.

A short distance away, several young women who looked like students were pointing their phones in this direction and taking pictures.

Ji Yang leaned his head out and saw them waving at him.

In his previous life, he had been famous enough that people occasionally recognized him on the street. He was used to it.

Almost instinctively, he raised his hand and waved back, adding a big, cheerful smile.

The man blocking the car door shifted slightly to shield the side where Ji Yang was leaning out.

Ji Yang tugged at him.

“I don’t need that much privacy. Let them take pictures if they want. If people are photographing me, it means I’m good-looking.”

Nie Xu finally turned to look at him.

“The last time you were photographed was only a month ago,” he said, explaining his reasoning. “The scandal about the Fourth Young Master of Haicheng Group humiliating a waiter at a KTV stayed on the headlines for an entire week.”

Ji Yang: “…”

So people weren’t taking pictures because he was good-looking.

It was because he was famous?

The kind of famous where he had so many scandals that someone might beat him up in the street…

Ji Yang looked rather crestfallen.

Nie Xu seemed to have received an update. He lowered his tablet and checked the time on his wristwatch.

“Let’s go.”

“Where?” Ji Yang asked, unable to keep up.

Nie Xu opened the car door.

“We found them. Wei Qiming wants to see you.”

*

The auction had been held in the hall on the sixth floor of the building. But when the bodyguards finally located Wei Qiming and Ji Chengyi, the two were on the twelfth floor.

Inside a small storage room on the twelfth floor.

Ji Yang had initially wanted to ask whether, now that they had found Wei Qiming, the idiot was trying to drag him over to confront Ji Chengyi as a way to escape responsibility.

But when he arrived, he discovered that Wei Qiming was still holding Ji Chengyi hostage.

Wei Qiming had harmed plenty of people in the past, so he was probably rather experienced with this sort of thing.

What he hadn’t expected was for so many people to show up at once. He had panicked, clutching a shard of broken porcelain so tightly that blood was dripping steadily from his hand.

The blood fell onto the light-colored suit of the man he had trapped in front of him.

Ji Chengyi was in a sorry state, too. His carefully styled hair was disheveled, and his clothes were somewhat rumpled. Two buttons had come undone at the collar of his shirt, exposing skin across his chest that had flushed red from his agitation.

The sensual menace Wei Qiming seemed to exude, combined with Ji Chengyi’s disheveled appearance, made him look like a sheet of paper that had been crumpled into a ball.

He really did inspire a desire to protect him.

Unfortunately, Ji Yang was absolutely not going to be the one playing the hero.

There weren’t many people at the doorway. The others were concealed in their respective positions.

Sitting in his wheelchair outside the storage room, Ji Yang tilted his head in confusion.

“Why did you ask for me?”

As he spoke, he caught sight of someone in the corridor making hand signals out of the corner of his eye. They appeared to be coordinating a rescue strategy.

Wei Qiming had clearly been pushed to the brink by the group surrounding him.

He spoke up.

“This was supposed to be a coincidence today.”

He seemed to be savoring Ji Chengyi’s disheveled appearance.

“I never actually intended to do anything to him.”