Chapter 266: WHAT APPROACH WOULD HE TAKE
He turned slowly, his chest heaving, his eyes wild and unfocused.
Luo Cheng stepped forward from the cluster of officers, his hands in his pockets, his face expressionless.
The fluorescent lights cast hard shadows across his features, and for a moment Shen Zihao saw Liuxian’s face superimposed over the stranger’s.
"No," he breathed, taking a stumbling step backward. "No, you’re not real. You’re not real. Get out of my head. GET OUT OF MY HEAD."
Luo Cheng didn’t flinch. "You’re coming with us. Put your hands behind your back."
"Do you think this changes anything?" Shen Zihao’s voice cracked with desperate, manic energy, spittle flying from his lips as he lurched forward a step.
Two officers grabbed his arms before he could go any further and pinned him in place against the wall. "You think you’ve won? You think this little game is over? I BUILT THIS CITY! I OWN THIS CITY! EVERYONE BOWS TO ME! EVERYONE!"
"Your parents are already in custody," Luo Cheng said, his expression unchanged, his tone flat and unyielding. "The psychiatric hospital director is in custody. The doctor who fled the country was extradited and arrested three days ago. Every officer on your payroll is sitting in an interrogation room as we speak, giving up whatever information they have to save themselves. Your company is hemorrhaging value so fast that by the time the markets open tomorrow morning, Ruijie won’t even be a shadow of what it was when you walked in here today."
Shen Zihao’s face drained of every last drop of color, leaving him pale and sickly under the harsh lights. He started laughing then, a high, fractured sound that bounced off the corridor walls. "You’re lying," he said between gasping breaths. "You’re all lying. This is a test. This is a test to see if I’m worthy. My father set this up. My father is testing me. He always tests me. I passed. I always pass. I’M THE GOLDEN CHILD!"
"You won’t get away with your crimes. Ren Hao is alive and will speak against you in court." Luo Cheng said, and he let the name hang in the air between them.
Something in Shen Zihao’s face shifted. The manic laughter died in his throat, replaced by something darker, something colder. His eyes narrowed, focusing for the first time with real clarity.
"Ren Hao," he repeated, the name dripping from his lips like poison. "That stupid little whore. I should have killed him when I had the chance. I should have ripped his throat out with my bare hands. But I wanted to savor it. I wanted to hear him beg. I wanted to break him piece by piece until there was nothing left but a hollow shell—"
"Shut it, you bastard! He’s in surgery right now, fighting for his life because of what you did to him," Luo Cheng cut in, his voice hardening for the first time. "And when he wakes up, he’s going to testify against you. Kong Siying is going to testify against you. And every single victim you buried in that hospital is going to have their day in court. You get to live with that knowledge. You get to rot in a cell for the rest of your life and think about every person you destroyed. That’s worse than death, isn’t it?"
Shen Zihao thrashed against the officers holding him, a guttural, animal sound tearing from his throat as he fought against their grip with renewed, manic strength. "YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! I’M SHEN ZIHAO! I’M INVINCIBLE! I’M GOD! I’M—"
The cuffs clicked shut around his wrists, the metal biting into his skin with a cold finality.
Shen Zihao’s body went slack, all the fight draining out of him at once. His head dropped forward until his chin touched his chest, his shoulders trembling with silent, broken spasms.
A wet, fractured sound escaped his lips that might have been a laugh or a sob, or perhaps something in between.
"It’s not fair," he whispered, his voice small and childlike, the manic energy gone as quickly as it had come. "It’s not fair. I only wanted to be loved. Why doesn’t anyone love me? I’m a good son. I’m a good person. They don’t understand. None of them understood me. You don’t understand. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING!"
His voice rose to a shriek on the last words, and then it broke entirely, dissolving into incoherent sobbing as the officers began to lead him away.
Luo Cheng watched him for a long moment, then turned to his second-in-command. "Take him to the holding facility," he ordered, his voice low and precise. "The one the boss prepared. No police station for now. He doesn’t get processed until we’re ready to hand him over. Understood?"
The man nodded and gestured for the officers to move Shen Zihao toward the service exit, where a black van with tinted windows waited in the loading bay. Shen Zihao stumbled between his captors, his sobs fading into a hollow, exhausted silence as they guided him into the vehicle and secured the doors behind him.
Luo Cheng pulled out his phone and dialed Liuxian as he walked toward the exit.
"He’s contained," he reported. "We’re transporting him to the holding facility now. He’ll stay there until you give the order to transfer him to official custody."
"Good," Liuxian replied, his voice carrying a note of cold satisfaction. "Keep him there. I want him to sit with what’s happened to him for a while before he sees the inside of a courtroom. Let him think about every choice he made that led him here."
"Yes, sir."
The line went dead. Liuxian set his phone down and stared out at the skyline, the afternoon sun casting long shadows across the city below.
His phone remained silent in his hand.
No calls from the hospital yet.
No updates from Yanchen.
No word on whether Ren Hao was still fighting or whether he had already slipped away on the operating table.
The seconds stretched into minutes, each one heavier than the last. He thought about calling Yanchen back, about demanding answers, about driving to the hospital himself and sitting in the waiting room until someone told him something, anything, about Ren Hao’s condition.
But he forced himself to stay still, to wait, to trust that Yanchen would call the moment there was news to share.
The silence in his office was absolute, broken only by the distant hum of traffic from the street below and the steady, rhythmic ticking of the clock on his wall.
Each tick felt like a hammer blow against his skull, a reminder that with every passing second, Ren Hao’s chances grew slimmer.
Now that Shen Zihao was finally in his custody, it was time to let Guiying decide what to do with him.
The man who had hurt him and several others, he wondered what approach he would take.