Just as Yu Can was slowing down to park, Ji Feng reached out and yanked the steering wheel, causing the entire car to veer uncontrollably to the right.
Yu Can had been keeping half an eye on him and reacted quickly, slamming her foot on the accelerator.
The car lurched forward violently.
But Ji Feng refused to let go, even unbuckling his seatbelt to lunge at her arms. Yu Can was equally prepared, immediately grabbing the spray can beside her and shooting it in his face.
The potent pepper spray hit him directly, making his eyes burn red and tears stream uncontrollably.
But in the enclosed space, they both suffered. Yu Can only gained two or three seconds before stumbling out of the car door to escape.
Ji Feng chased after her.
"Don't come any closer," Yu Can unzipped her down jacket, revealing something strapped to her body. "Or we'll all die together."
Ji Feng took a sharp breath, his teeth aching inexplicably.
It was so cold, yet Yu Can hadn't turned on the heat in the car. He had already suspected something was wrong, which is why he tried to subdue her when she wasn't paying attention. He guessed her plan correctly, but underestimated her madness.
The amount of explosives was far too much.
One blast would leave nothing but ashes.
"Are you insane?" Seeing him hesitate, Yu Can secretly breathed a sigh of relief, but demanded harshly, "Aren't you afraid of what I left for your sister?"
Ji Feng tapped his watch. "It's been thirty minutes."
He understood Jian Jing and his colleagues well. Half an hour was enough time for them to move Yunyun to a safe place and evacuate any bystanders.
Two boxes of explosives were manageable, just a bit troublesome to disarm.
Using them as a threat? Tsk, too late now.
Yu Can didn't know what the 30 minutes meant, but realized one of her trump cards was now useless. She said frankly, "You're clever. I'll tell you, what I gave your sister isn't anything bad."
She pointed to the explosives strapped to her body, "It's all here." Then she pointed to the thermal power plant, "And there."
Ji Feng asked, "Is Cai Xin inside?"
"Yes," Yu Can replied. "Will you save her?"
"You're thinking too much," Ji Feng said. "Since my father was involved in the previous cases, this case has nothing to do with me. If you have any demands, I can pass them on to my colleagues."
"Is that so?" Yu Can neither agreed nor disagreed, only saying, "It takes 40 minutes to drive here from downtown, but you only have 20 minutes."
She said, "Let's begin."
She pressed the remote control in her hand.
Boom!
A massive blast of heat and flames erupted from the back seat of the car. Raging fire burned fiercely, shockwaves blasting outward, uprooting surrounding soil and vegetation. The heat spread to their backs, searing hot.
Ji Feng had leapt away the instant she moved, but the force of the explosion still hit him heavily, like a fierce beast pouncing from behind.
His internal organs felt compressed by an invisible force, his ears rang, and his vision blurred.
Fortunately, Ji Feng had protected himself, lying on the ground for a while before slowly getting up.
He understood why Yu Can blew up the car - she wanted to prove to him that she really had explosives and was absolutely willing to detonate them.
At least now, he couldn't just walk away.
Was Cai Xin inside? Definitely.
If Yu Can had brought him here just to kill him, she could have done it earlier.
Ji Feng coughed a couple times, feeling less dizzy as his hearing gradually returned. He ducked into the dense wild grass, contemplating how to find his target in this massive building.
Yu Can had tossed his phone, and his service weapon was kept at the station, only issued for missions and returned after shifts, not allowed to be carried personally.
Regular batons, shields, and handguns were standard equipment, but they were all in the police car. He had nothing on him.
Patting himself down, he found only a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a set of keys.
What a hassle.
*
Ji Feng's phone was turned off.
Jian Jing wanted to know where it had been switched off, which wasn't difficult to check, but required cooperation from the telecom company. However, the police didn't have time to get official approval now, as the company had already closed for the day.
By the time they went through the proper channels and asked them to work overtime to locate the phone, it would be too late.
She had to rely on herself.
Jian Jing bought a map from a roadside newsstand, preparing to use a new technique.
After "The Reasoning King" aired, her fame level had instantly broken through "renowned" to reach just below "world-famous."
The highest level was probably unattainable unless she won a Nobel Prize in Literature. Being renowned was likely the peak an ordinary person could reach.
The newly opened limited card pool gradually shifted towards the supernatural.
[Name: Limited Card - Divination]
[Description: You gain the ability to divine. The more specific the conditions and smaller the scope, the clearer the answer, but with longer cooldown times. Please use with caution.]
[Note: Illegal profits will freeze this card. Not recommended for divining lottery numbers.]
The system imposed many restrictions as usual, but Jian Jing didn't lack money. Saving the divination for a time like this was undoubtedly more appropriate.
She took out the commemorative gold coin the bank had given her years ago.
She used the card.
"I want to know where Ji Feng is," she silently repeated the request three times, then tossed the coin.
It flipped in the air, landing on the spread-out map.
It spun, slid, and stopped.
The gold coin had landed on a spot downstream of the river.
Jian Jing zoomed in on her phone's map, compared and eliminated options, finally locking onto an unnamed building at 25 Fujia Road.
She stepped on the gas and activated voice command: "Open browser, search for 25 Fujia Road, Peace City."
The AI assistant responded: "Search complete. 25 Fujia Road, Peace City, formerly the Peace Thermal Power Plant, established in 1985, officially abandoned in 2014."
Thermal power plant.
Jian Jing pressed her lips together, the ominous feeling in her heart growing stronger.
She gently pressed the accelerator, and the high-performance luxury car left a blur on the highway as it sped towards the remote outskirts.
30 minutes later, Lao Gao called to say they had picked up Ji Yunyun, and the fruit boxes contained no explosives, just firecrackers.
"What does this mean?" Lao Gao was puzzled.
Jian Jing didn't answer, instead shuddering involuntarily as a terrible guess gradually surfaced in her mind.
Lao Gao grew anxious and urged, "Professor Jian?"
She slowly said, "Using firecrackers means she didn't want to leave evidence."
"That doesn't make sense," Lao Gao pondered. "From what you said earlier, she used this to lure Ji Feng away, right? Even if it's not real, we'd definitely investigate her afterward. Could she be under coercion from the real culprit, helping them buy time to escape?"
"No," Jian Jing said with certainty. "Yu Can is the culprit."
Lao Gao said, "Now you've lost me. If Yu Can is the culprit, what's the point of kidnapping Ji Feng? To drag someone down with her before she dies?"
"No," she denied again. "If she wanted to take others down with her, she wouldn't have used firecrackers. Wouldn't more deaths be better? She made a feint, leaving no loose ends. She has only one goal."
Jian Jing stared ahead as the car entered a country road, ghostly shadows flickering all around as if a hundred spirits were watching.
"She wants to escape punishment."
Lao Gao: "Huh?"
"Once a case occurs, there must be a culprit to end it," Jian Jing said. "Last time it was Wu Honglin, this time it's Ji Feng."
It was clear that Yu Can's methods were constantly improving.
Between 2002 and 2003, she murdered four people but feared the police would trace her through their identities. So she tried her best to destroy their identifying information, perfectly concealing herself.
If Wang Zihui hadn't broken a bone before, they might never have discovered her identity back then.
In the 2007 Li Xiaonuan case, she became much bolder, arranging an alibi and providing a scapegoat, pinning all the old cases on Wu Honglin to completely extricate herself.
If Zhang Peiru hadn't killed Ji Liming and instead accepted her fate, who would have sought justice for a dead man?
Everything would have ended.
But Yu Can hadn't anticipated that Zhang Peiru would have unwavering faith in her husband, insisting he wasn't the killer. And Ji Feng, whose family had been destroyed by her, persisted for ten years to resolve his father's case.
When the old case was reopened, Yu Can was found by Jian Jing because she had previously testified.
She had to make other preparations.
"Officer Gao, don't you think Ji Feng is more suitable than the elusive Zhao Bin?" Jian Jing said softly. "Outsiders couldn't imitate the crime, but he's seen all the case files and naturally knows the details of the corpse burning. He also has a motive."
She could easily guess Yu Can's next move: "His biological father died because of this case, so he wants to find the real culprit. But the killer has been hiding for years. To lure him out, the best way is to kill in his name."
On the other end of the phone, Lao Gao lost his ability to speak, his hands and feet turning cold.
Too ruthless.
He thought, this is just too ruthless.
"The living can defend themselves, the dead cannot," she said. In the distance, under the night sky, the abandoned thermal power plant loomed like a giant beast lurking in the abyss, ready to devour any unwelcome guests. "If it were me, I would die there, beating the killer to death."
Jian Jing stepped on the brake and got out of the car.
"I've arrived at the location, the old thermal power plant in Peace City. You guys can come now," she said, pausing slightly. "Officer Gao."
Lao Gao swallowed hard, suddenly nervous: "What?"
"Don't be late." She smiled and added, "But don't come too early either."
Silence.
"That's it, I'm hanging up." Jian Jing ended the call and gazed at the explosion marks not far away. She could still smell the acrid scent of gunpowder particles suspended in the air, making her want to sneeze.
She turned on the night vision function of her glasses, thinking, Yu Can, you'd better have been caught already.
*
12 minutes ago, Ji Feng had found Cai Xin.
Yu Can thought that the thermal power plant was big, with many rooms, making it difficult to find someone. He was terribly wrong. Bringing someone in from outside, it was impossible not to leave any traces.
Abandoned places have the most dust, which also means the most obvious clues.
Ji Feng used the small flashlight on his keychain, shining it on the dusty floor, and quickly found the remaining footprints.
There was only one pair, size over 40.
This made Ji Feng feel something was off. He sped up, following the trail of clues deeper into the plant, finally stopping at the boiler room.
Cai Xin was on the floor.
She was unconscious, with a bomb strapped to her body as well.
Ji Feng observed from the shadows for a moment, not seeing any trace of Yu Can, while the timer on the bomb showed only 8 minutes left.
He had no other choice.
Bomb disposal was a required course for counter-terrorism specialists, but not for criminal investigation majors. Fortunately, when Ji Feng was in school, he wasn't yet a corporate slave like now, had plenty of time, and took quite a few electives, including this one.
His grades were good, well, to brag a little, they were excellent.
It's just that in all the years since graduation, he never had a chance to put it into practice, so he wasn't sure if he was rusty.
Let's hope our luck holds out, he thought.
Ji Feng used his key to unscrew the cover, exposing the internal structure.
It was homemade, not too complex in structure, still within the realm of solvable problems.
He let out a genuine sigh of relief, dividing his attention between monitoring the environment and focusing on dismantling the circuitry.
For the first five minutes, he worked very slowly, triple-checking every step, afraid that he had forgotten everything he had learned. But as he progressed, muscle memory kicked in.
One by one, components were removed and carefully set aside. The core wasn't the explosive, but the timing chip. He had to be extremely careful in cutting the circuits to ensure it wouldn't detonate.
Beep, beep, beep.
The countdown timer kept beeping incessantly, inexplicably irritating.
But Ji Feng didn't make a single mistake. He displayed rare patience and meticulousness, his hands not shaking at all.
"Click."
The thin wire was cut, and the countdown suddenly stopped.
Ji Feng quickly removed the dangerous explosive material, hoisted the unconscious Cai Xin onto his back, and prepared to evacuate immediately.
At that moment, he noticed blood on the ground.
Cai Xin had a wound on her forehead, not deep, with a scab formed, as if she had accidentally hit something.
But don't forget, there was only one set of footprints on the way in, proving that she wasn't tricked here by Yu Can, but was carried in while unconscious.
She couldn't have been awake.
Where did the blood come from?
In a flash, Ji Feng understood everything.
