(For Chapter 1-163, go to (https://chrysanthemumgarden.com/novel-tl/awbtv/))
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"Meng Wangda?"
Yu Jingzhi quietly repeated Sheng €€'s words, his face showing no obvious reaction.
"It is indeed a very valuable piece of information—but how do you prove it's true?" he asked.
Sheng €€ kept a careful eye on Yu Jingzhi's expression, as well as Chu Yunsheng's movements beside him. After a brief silence, she said: "Meng Wangda secretly visited Mr. Adams at the end of last year. But it seems he asked for too high a price, so Mr. Adams didn't agree. It wasn't until this April that he began contacting Mr. Adams frequently."
"He runs a shop called White Dove Watch House under his third son's name. On the fifteenth of every month, Mr. Adams' people meet with his men there. This, Mr. Yu, you can investigate yourself—there is absolutely no mistake."
Hearing this, Yu Jingzhi's expression remained unchanged, but a faint flicker of doubt and contemplation crossed his eyes.
That hint disappeared almost instantly, buried so quickly it was nearly imperceptible.
However, Sheng €€ —seemingly tense and distracted, but in truth watching him like a hawk— still caught that tiny shift.
She swallowed slowly, gathered her courage, and said: "Mr. Yu… can this information buy my life?"
Yu Jingzhi smiled. "Of course it can. But if it turns out later that what you said was false, then that will be another matter entirely."
Sheng €€ very visibly let out a breath of relief. A small, relaxed smile emerged on her face. "I have no reason to deceive you, because I want to live. In those classes about how to handle being captured, I never once received a perfect score."
"People who do score perfectly don't tend to live very long with me," Yu Jingzhi said. "I prefer someone like Miss Sheng—flexible, perceptive, knowing how to read the situation. If there's a chance, you might take a look at Lu Yun's Jianmen. It was established much later than Green Eagle and lacks a great deal of experience."
Faced with what sounded suspiciously like an invitation, Sheng €€'s eyes flickered slightly. She smiled and said: "I am interested in Jianmen… but I think Mr. Yu probably wouldn't feel at ease letting someone from Green Eagle walk through Jianmen's doors."
"Nothing is absolute."
Yu Jingzhi smiled faintly and waved his hand. "Send Miss Sheng to Pudong Road."
"Yes."
The female soldier behind him responded crisply, then stepped over to Sheng €€ and pulled out an old-style hoof-shaped handcuff, snapping Sheng €€'s arms back behind her.
Sheng €€ sagged her shoulders in resignation, offering no resistance as the female soldier pressed her forward and escorted her out of the private room.
A few minutes after the two left, the door was knocked on again. Now that the matter here was settled, the dishes Chu Yunsheng had ordered earlier finally arrived, slowly and belatedly.
While adjusting his napkin, Yu Jingzhi smiled and asked Chu Yunsheng, "How much of what Sheng €€ said do you think is true, and how much is false?"
"Thirty percent true, seventy percent false."
Chu Yunsheng held his knife and neatly sliced open the medium-rare steak. "Boss Meng should be fine. The patent-medicine business is in his hands; with the back-and-forth dealings, it wouldn't be hard for him to guess that it's connected to me. But Sheng €€ not knowing this isn't an act."
"However, that White Dove Watch House definitely has a problem."
Yu Jingzhi understood the implication in Chu Yunsheng's words. He smiled, let out a small sigh, and said: "Old Meng's third son was born to a concubine he doesn't favor."
"He thinks the boy's talent is average, and he's far too withdrawn and self-centered, without any real ability. So he gave him some of the less desirable businesses in the Meng family to manage. That watch shop is one of them."
"During the Dragon Boat Festival, he even told me: children have to be sent out to temper themselves—only after they build something of their own can they grow up. His third son has been getting close to him lately, behaving more filial."
Chu Yunsheng slid the pieces of steak he had cut over to Yu Jingzhi, offering no comment on this bit of family drama.
If nothing unexpected happened, Meng Wangda's third son was very likely the one secretly establishing contact with Adams.
Meng Wangda himself might be innocent—but he was on the brink of facing a painful choice between loyalty to his country and loyalty to his family.
Yu Jingzhi didn't need Chu Yunsheng to respond to everything he said. He wasn't a man of few words, but in many situations and occasions, there were things that simply could not be spoken aloud. Only when he was with Chu Yunsheng could he say whatever he wished to say, without worrying whether it mattered or not.
As dinner was drawing to an end, Yu Jingzhi called Lu Yun inside and instructed: "Go to the Meng family's foreign firm and send Meng Wangda a message. Tell him, when he has the time, to visit Meng Yun's White Dove Watch House. It is, after all, a Meng family property."
Lu Yun bowed his head in acknowledgment. He showed no excess emotion or doubt toward this perplexing order.
By Yu Jingzhi's side, such sudden and inexplicable instructions were nothing unusual. And behind these strange arrangements, there was often a deeper meaning that couldn't be discerned right away—no need to ask further.
After the meal, Yu Jingzhi seemed to have nothing else to deal with, so he and Chu Yunsheng took the car back to the residence near Renhe Hospital.
Later, the two sat in the flower hall of the Western-style house—one reading, one writing—enjoying a rare moment of calm and quiet, accompanied only by the chirping of insects and birds at night.
But with more flowers and plants came more mosquitoes. Chu Yunsheng wasn't very bothered, but Yu Jingzhi suffered for it. Despite having three or four mosquito-repellent sachets hanging at his waist, he still had to get up every few minutes to slap away the mosquitoes. Half the night passed, and he hadn't even read a few pages of his book.
Fortunately, his training in cultivating qi was exceptional; otherwise, he would have thrown the book aside and cursed long ago under this kind of torment.
Before bed, while Yu Jingzhi was bathing, Chu Yunsheng ground some herbs and pressed them into small medicinal pastes to apply onto the red bumps on Yu Jingzhi's skin.
"I thought that since autumn was coming, I wouldn't need your medicine anymore," Yu Jingzhi said softly, fanning himself as he looked at Chu Yunsheng's faint silhouette in the darkened room. "Who could have guessed that autumn mosquitoes would be even sharper and greedier?"
Chu Yunsheng took the fan from him and slowly waved it. "Sleep."
"It's not hot anymore. No need to fan."
He raised a hand and pressed down the fan, then turned over and shifted closer, resting his head in Chu Yunsheng's direction.
The two said nothing more. In the hazy late-summer night, only their soft, steady breaths remained, gently lulling them toward sleep.
Just before slipping into deep slumber, Yu Jingzhi felt the presence of the person beside him. In his half-conscious haze, he thought that the two of them really did resemble a couple in their seventies—old, familiar, inseparable… He wondered, once Chu Yunsheng's hair turned white, whether he would still be willing, just like tonight, to grind herbs for him and fan him to sleep.
With that thought, the corners of his lips curved upward, and he drifted into dreams.
Later that night—
Near a secluded residence on Pudong Road.
A man with a grave expression stood by the third-floor window of a rented apartment, peering through the gap in the curtains. Through a military-grade binoculars, he observed the residence not far across the street.
On the sofa behind him sat a short, stocky man, quietly cleaning his gun in the darkness.
The two exchanged no words. The silence was unsettling.
Time ticked by. The hands of the clock in the room slowly pointed toward two in the morning. Suddenly, the man at the window lowered the binoculars, closed the curtain gap, and turned to give the small man a slight nod.
Seeing this, the short man grinned, tucked his gun into his coat, stood up, and walked out.
At this hour, Pudong Road no longer had any pedestrians. Most of the streetlamps were dead; every so often an entire section would be dark, leaving the street helplessly swallowed by patches of shadow.
The short, wiry figure moved through the darkness and soon reached the outer wall at the back of the residence.
Most of the lights in the compound had already been extinguished, leaving only a few lanterns hanging under the eaves, casting dim light across the courtyard. The small man climbed the wall in a few swift moves. Using the neighboring roof as cover, he observed the figures patrolling back and forth inside.
He lay flat against the top of the wall, and it didn't take long before he saw the guards switching shifts.
He and his partner had spent hours watching to learn this pattern. This was precisely the moment he had been waiting for.
Taking advantage of the brief gap as the guards crossed paths, the small man vaulted over the wall and slipped inside. Like an agile monkey, he landed in a shadowy patch of the courtyard without making a sound.
Carefully avoiding the light, he moved quickly toward a side-room.
According to Green Eagle's intelligence, although the holding site Yu Jingzhi maintained on Pudong Road was heavily guarded, it wasn't a true prison. The detainees here were usually minor figures, not high-priority targets.
The small man hadn't expected Yu Jingzhi to keep Sheng €€ here, but perhaps that was proof that she hadn't been fully exposed yet—and thus hadn't drawn serious attention.
Of course, there was also a chance this was a trap Yu Jingzhi had set, and Sheng €€ was merely the bait. But regardless of which it was, he had to come.
Compared to the rest of the courtyard, there were clearly many more guards stationed around the side-room.
The small man hid along the wall, patiently waiting for an opportunity.
After ten minutes or so, one of the guards near the window yawned, visibly growing drowsy. He discreetly glanced left and right, and seeing no one paying attention, let his eyes droop shut as he began to nod off.
Suddenly, he felt a faint breeze sweep past his face.
He snapped his eyes open in alarm—but everything around him remained silent. The entire courtyard was soaked in dim, murky darkness, unchanged.
At that very moment, on the roof of the side-room—where he could not see—a thin figure lay flat, swiftly and silently prying away the roof tiles one by one. Only when he had created a wide enough opening did the small man stop. He shifted his body, contorting himself into an odd shape, and slipped through the gap.
The side-room was pitch dark. The small man dropped down from a roof beam and scanned the room. He was just about to move toward the bed to locate Sheng €€ when a very soft voice sounded behind him.
"Bone-shrinking technique to get in… You must be one of Master Zhao's people?"
Startled, the small man spun around with his gun drawn—only to see Sheng €€ sitting awake in a corner behind the screen, where she should have long been asleep. Her eyes shone in the darkness as she scrutinized him.
"Sheng €€?"
The small man stepped closer and lowered his voice.
"If it's not me, who else would it be?" Sheng €€ gave a faint smile. "Did Green Eagle send you to rescue me… or kill me?"
"Green Eagle doesn't abandon any of its intelligence operatives lightly," the man said.
"Naturally, I'm here to get you out."
Before Sheng €€ could react to that statement, he pressed on: "Your mission was to get close to Chu Yunsheng. How were you exposed? Yu Jingzhi didn't kill you on the spot but locked you up here instead—what did you tell him?"
Hearing this, Sheng €€'s expression twisted with frustration. She gritted her teeth.
"We were all tricked by Yu Jingzhi and Chu Yunsheng!"
The small man froze. "What do you mean?"
Sheng €€ lifted a hand, as if to grab the nearby teacup and take a sip to cool her anger.
"What else could it be? Chu Yunsheng is definitely not just Yu Jingzhi's close friend. The forces Yu Jingzhi has placed around him are far more than what we've seen. They didn't treat those women who approached Chu Yunsheng these past weeks lightly, nor merely investigate them casually—they were prepared from the start."
"We thought laying false trails and using those women as cover would allow deeper infiltration. Who could've guessed Yu Jingzhi had the same idea? And that Chu Yunsheng is no ordinary man either—there's something about him—"
When she reached the crucial part, Sheng €€ lowered her voice even further, as though afraid the guards outside might hear.
The small man, listening intently, instinctively leaned in closer, tilting his ear toward her.
But just as he took those last two steps—
Sheng €€ suddenly hurled the teacup in her hand.
Crash!
A sharp shattering sound exploded abruptly, piercing through the silence of the compound.
"What was that sound?"
"Someone's there!"
Noise rose instantly from outside.
The small man had never expected Sheng €€ to suddenly act like this. Shocked beyond belief, he still reacted quickly—he raised his gun and pulled the trigger.
But almost at the same moment, Sheng €€, who had smashed the teacup, grabbed a jagged shard of porcelain. She lunged forward in a single step and drove it straight into the man's throat.
"You—!" The small man stared in disbelief.
Sheng €€'s gaze remained cold and steady.
Expressionless, she watched him, then murmured a short sentence in Eastern-language. The small man froze, confusion and bewilderment clouding his eyes.
Bang! Bang! Bang—!
A series of rapid gunshots burst inside the side-room, then gradually weakened… and faded away.
Everything happened within just a few seconds.
In the next moment, the guards around the side room kicked the door open, only to see Sheng €€ and a thin, small man collapsed together on the floor.
One had been shot several times, blood pooling beneath her, already breathless; the other had his throat cut open and died with eyes wide, gasping painfully in his final moments.
The commotion in the courtyard caught the attention of a man on the third floor of the apartment building across the street.
Realizing something had gone wrong—that the operation had failed—the man didn't hesitate. He put down his binoculars, quickly put on his long jacket and hat, and left the room.
He left in such a hurry that he didn't notice this: as he quietly descended the apartment staircase, the door of the room next to the one he had been using opened soundlessly by a narrow crack. A pair of eyes silently watched his retreating back and murmured a sentence in Eastern language.
Nobody noticed that, for the past few hours, those same eyes had also been observing the side room of the mansion through a pair of binoculars—just like the man.
The incident on Pudong Road quickly reached the Western-style house near Renhe Hospital.
Lu Yun knocked on the bedroom door and reported the situation to Yu Jingzhi, who was sitting up with a coat draped around his shoulders. But he found that neither Yu Jingzhi nor Chu Yunsheng—also awake and quietly listening—showed any sign of surprise upon hearing the news.
Yu Jingzhi said, "Check every place Sheng €€ passed through from Nanjing Road to Pudong Road, and every building within 500 meters of that mansion that is more than two stories high. Also, go find Yu Bing and bring me the abnormal behavior summary and psychological analysis she wrote for Sheng €€."
Yu Bing was the female soldier from the Western restaurant earlier that day.
Lu Yun acknowledged the order and turned to leave. As he closed the bedroom door behind him, he heard two sentences spoken from inside through the narrowing gap.
Chu Yunsheng asked, "Is there any problem with the guard deployment you arranged on Pudong Road?"
Yu Jingzhi said, "No. From the outside, that mansion does look heavily guarded, but no one would realize that in reality… it's tight on the outside and loose on the inside."
…
When dawn began to break, the rooms on the third floor of an apartment building on Pudong Road were forced open one by one.
As Lu Yun went through them room by room, he faintly smelled a very light scent of ink near the window of one particular room.