Chapter 33 — Kidnapped (2)

The drive to the location provided by Elder Mao was spent mostly in silence. Hu Baolin suggested turning on the radio for a singalong to lighten the mood, but Shen Yue just stared him down in response.

Once parked within a reasonably undetectable distance away from the warehouse, Shen Yue opened the glove box to grab a ski mask for herself and two talismans. She held one talisman out to Hu Baolin, who immediately whispered something under his breath and tucked it in his pocket without instruction, and she did the same.

She pulled the ski mask down and Hu Baolin set the wooden fox mask against his face.

They moved towards the warehouse.

***

The side door was unlatched, as the mechanism itself had mostly rusted over, and, thankfully, the crates of storage did not block entry. Before opening the door, Shen Yue placed a hand on it, irradiating short bursts of Qi to detect any potential traps blocking entry.

There were none, which suggested either carelessness or confidence.

She went through first and Hu Baolin followed.

The four kidnappers were arranged around Lin Che with their backs towards the door, which felt like a gift given by the universe helping them enter undetected. Jiang Pei was speaking about compounds and Lin Che was staring at the vials on the table with his mind elsewhere.

Through the glass, his eyes found them — two masked figures of unknown origin, but he showed no signs of noticing them.

Shen Yue and Hu Baolin nodded.

Hu Baolin reached into his bag, retrieving a black and narrow incense stick wrapped in oilskin. He clicked his fingers, producing a slight spark, and a noise which, thanks to the effects of the talisman, did not escape and echo throughout the warehouse.

He had already placed a pill on his tongue before they’d come through the door, and now he produced a second one, which he held out to Shen Yue.

She took it and swallowed, face grimacing only slightly at the taste of the compound.

The smoke from the incense dispersed almost immediately in the warehouse air, but the smell itself was absent. It was a faint, grey wisp that made its way through the atmosphere, but the darkness and translucency of the smoke itself helped it remain undetected.

All they needed was thirty seconds.

The driver’s posture changed first, with his spine incrementally moving from an upright position to something more angular, before his knees gave way and his brain went offline. He went down without drama, catching himself and folding in sideways against the wall.

Chen Wei followed, but was midway through a sentence as the effects kicked in. His speech slurred and the last thing he said remained incomplete as he too ended up on the floor.

Jiang Pei turned.

The elder woman had already moved.

But, by then, the two figures had already separated and hidden themselves behind storage crates and in shadows.

***

The woman’s name was Liang Su, and she was in her late fifties, having reached a cultivation stage that most people do not reach by the time she hit 35. Since then, her progress had plateaued and remained stagnant, and she had consequently gone from being a bigshot at the Shen Clan to becoming an agent in charge of information affairs, having previously been privy to information at the sect elder level in the previous decades.

That is to say, she was once strong enough to be considered a sect elder.

She felt the incense the moment it began to disperse, but held off on acting hastily. After all, if she started moving, so would her opponents, thus ridding her of her element of surprise. By the time the first man hit the floor, she had already traced the location of one of the intruders in the building, and was fairly confident that there were at most two people involved.

She jumped on top of a crate and peered over the edge, and caught a glimpse of a fox-masked individual leaning against the crate and fumbling through a bag. She leaned in closer, hoping to get a better glimpse of the mask, when suddenly—

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She deflected a needle using the fan she kept in her grasp.

The man threw three more in the deflection’s wake, reading where the deflection would take her hand.

The third needle found the inside of her forearm.

She looked at it, and then she looked back at the fox mask.

The man had moved positions, and the faint light reflected off the lacquered wood of the mask.