Chapter 170: Split Up?
"He has a point!" He Yi said softly, watching Zhou Fan's retreating figure. "Go find your Senior Uncle!"
Fan was stunned for a moment, then nodded. Pushing down their grief, they left the complex, each carrying a body on their back.
But what neither Zhou Fan nor He Yi and Fan knew was that just after they left, a figure reappeared on the rooftop. Or, to be more precise, two figures. A petite one was riding on the shoulders of a tall one.
"Hee hee hee, Big Brother's gotten stronger again. But that annoying old man was here, too. I really don't like this aura!" Wan'Er giggled, her voice carrying far into the distance.
Zhou Fan, now several hundred meters away, suddenly stopped in his tracks. His expression flickered as he whipped his head around to look back the way they'd come. He scanned the area for a moment but saw nothing suspicious. The sky above the wide street was still dark. Besides his group of three, the only others in sight were Fan and He Yi, far in the distance and heading in a different direction.
Shaking his head, Zhou Fan thought with a sigh, 'Damn it, am I hearing things?'
'How could I have suddenly heard that girl Wan'Er's laugh?'
The thought of Wan'Er's monstrous power vexed him.
"Boss, where are we going now?" The two women had been trailing behind Zhou Fan. After exchanging several glances, Li Xing reluctantly asked in a low voice.
"To Jiang Province, then back to Nanjiang City," Zhou Fan said softly.
"Are we driving or taking the high-speed train?" Li Xing asked.
"The high-speed train." Zhou Fan turned back, looking at Li Xing in confusion. 'She's unusually talkative today.'
"The high-speed train station is ten kilometers from here." Li Xing took out her phone to show Zhou Fan the map.
"There aren't any taxis, are there? A little walk won't hurt us." Zhou Fan shot them a look. 'He'd never admit he had been so lost in thought that he'd completely overlooked the problem.'
He was still thinking about what Elder Witch had said. Even his eyes, which could typically see through anything, couldn't get a clear read on the mysterious man. There was only one thing Zhou Fan knew for certain: Elder Witch was absolutely not his friend.
He didn't know how long they had been walking when the sky finally began to lighten and pedestrians started appearing on the street. Zhou Fan suddenly turned around to find Li Xing and Li Yue standing still, frowning, their eyes glued to a breakfast shop by the side of the road.
"Order whatever you want. It's on me!" Zhou Fan declared with a magnanimous wave. But when it was time to pay, he nearly choked. 'These two look so small and thin, how could they possibly eat nearly two hundred worth of breakfast? Are they insane?'
"Did you hear? A car just crashed into a stone bollard on the side of the road!"
"No, what happened? Probably a drunk driver. It's not like that's uncommon these days."
"Not a drunk driver. I heard from a friend that of the people in the car, one was conscious, another was in a coma, and two more were dead. And get this—they're saying the comatose one was driving!"
"And I heard—this is just a rumor, mind you—but when people got to the scene, the comatose person's face... it was like tree roots were growing out of it. All these thick, dense lines, like he'd been poisoned or something!"
"Jesus, stop talking! I'm trying to eat here, you're killing my appetite!"
Just as Zhou Fan paid the bill and was about to take the two women to the station, he overheard the conversation from a few middle-aged men eating breakfast at a nearby table. He froze for a second, then glanced back at them.
Sensing Zhou Fan's interest, Li Xing asked sweetly, "Sirs, where did this thing you were talking about happen?"
"Out in West City, almost at the edge of town!" Seeing a young woman asking, one of the men replied enthusiastically. If he hadn't been in the middle of eating a steamed bun, he looked ready to take them there himself.
After leaving the breakfast shop, Zhou Fan took out his phone and dialed Fan's number. It rang for a while with no answer, so he tried He Yi.
Still no answer.
A bad feeling growing in his gut, Zhou Fan spotted a taxi and hailed it. "West City," he said, getting in.
A crowd had already gathered at the accident scene in West City. Zhou Fan and the others got out of the taxi. He saw the car, which now contained only the bodies of Lingling Daoist and Elder White Tiger. After a quick scan of the area, he took the two sisters and broke into a run toward the West Suburb.
If his guess was right, Fan and He Yi were in trouble.
They reached a fork in the road, with rugged mountain paths branching off in two directions. Zhou Fan crouched down to examine the ground and found footprints leading down both.
"Boss, how about we split up? The two of us can take one path," Li Xing suggested with a frown.
"No. We're taking this one." Zhou Fan shook his head, pointed to the path on the right, and took off running.
Li Xing and Li Yue were baffled. The path to the right had significantly fewer footprints than the one on the left. If someone was chasing He Yi and Fan, shouldn't they be on the path with more tracks?
Seeming to guess their confusion, Zhou Fan explained, "Those tracks were faked to mislead anyone following them. But this path on the right... it has something more important. It leads toward Jiang Province. He Yi might be old-fashioned, but he's a calm man. He'd know he was no match for his pursuers, so he'd run in the direction where he might find reinforcements. It's a long shot, but it's their best bet right now."