SES Chapter 122 Part 1

Chapter 122

After Wu Yuping left, Luo Ren sat stunned for a long time.

He finally typed in the group chat: Has anyone tested Wu Yuping with blood?

Replies trickled back: No. Not me. I haven’t either.

That didn’t make sense. Luo Ren frowned hard, deep lines twisting his brow.

Mu Dai tugged at his sleeve. “Come on. The sun’s already down—we still have to find Ding Guohua.”

He had to set his doubts aside for now. Pulling up an e-map, he checked the shortest walking route.

On the way, Mu Dai said, “So strange. I lived here for four years, but nothing feels familiar.”

She tilted her head toward him. “It’s like being a radish yanked up and shoved into a cabbage patch. No matter how you look, it just doesn’t feel like home.”

Luo Ren shot her a look. “Make whatever metaphor you want, but why a radish?”

Her big eyes rolled playfully above the mask. She hooked his arm and said, “Maybe because I’ve spent too much time with a certain radish.”

He chuckled, slipped his arm around her shoulders, the picture of any couple in love.

Still, Mu Dai felt uneasy showing themselves so openly on the street.

“Will the police be watching me more closely?” she asked.

“They’ll assume you ran off, found a place to hide,” Luo Ren explained. “Even if you did show your face, they’d expect you to skulk around, nervous and suspicious. Very few fugitives stroll down the street holding their boyfriend’s hand like they’ve got nothing to hide.”

Mu Dai murmured, “I never used to think about it, but now I envy the people who can walk in the sun with their heads held high.”

She wasn’t a criminal, but her heart had been trained into hypervigilance: hat, mask, eyes down around strangers, a tremor running through her arm whenever a police car drove past. Instinctively, she was always scanning for escape routes.

Through his mask, Luo Ren pinched her cheek. “This will pass soon.”

“And if it doesn’t? If everything falls apart?”

The noise of the street seemed to dim with her question. Life was a fickle whore—talking about justice on one side, while carelessly sending the innocent to bleed out on the other.

Don’t count on the heavens to clear your name. The troposphere sits ten to twenty kilometers above the ground—how could the sky possibly hear your small cry of injustice in all this noise?

“Then I’ll take you away,” Luo Ren said. “We’ll never pay the price for something we didn’t do.”

“And where would we go?”

Wanted. Hunted. They wouldn’t even get past the border.

“Have you ever flown on a plane?” he asked.

“I have.”

“From up high, you can’t see borders, governments, institutions, or rules. You see land, rivers, hills, and plains. We can go wherever we want. The whole world could be ours.”

As he spoke, sunlight slanted across his face. He raised his hand instinctively, light filtering through his fingers and casting shifting shadows on his skin.

Mu Dai suddenly laughed, stepped forward, and wrapped her arms around his waist, trying to bury her face against his chest. Her cap brim got in the way, so she turned her head sideways.

A good lover is like a pair of eyes—showing you bluer skies, longer rivers, a wider world, until all the walls around your soul vanish.

A bad lover only narrows your gaze, filling it with cramped rooms, hopeless futures, and the suffocating mess of a failing relationship.

An old man passed with a vegetable basket, grinning at them.

Mu Dai grinned back, even winked.

So what if it’s a setup? she thought. Just a basin of dirty water dumped on me. Wipe it off with a towel, take a shower if needed. No way it’ll drown me.

Ding Guohua’s home was on the sixth floor of an old apartment block.

For someone who had already been a chief physician twenty years ago, the living conditions seemed shabby.

The sky wasn’t fully dark yet, but the stairwell was so dim it was hard to see.

Luo Ren knocked—three times. Thump, thump, thump. Then leaned in. Someone was moving inside.

Maybe he should’ve asked Ma Tuwen for a deeper background check… but forget it. Just a few questions.

A chair scraped, slow shuffling footsteps, then a metallic clink. The door cracked open only a palm’s width, held shut by a security chain.

Behind it was a gaunt, wary old man’s face.

His tone was curt. “Who are you looking for?”

“Ding Guohua… doctor?” Luo Ren asked.

At the word doctor, something flickered. Luo Ren noticed his pupils shrink.

“What do you want?”

Luo Ren doubted this door would open any further tonight. He cut to the point: “I just want to ask about something. Twenty years ago, you were chief physician at the county hospital. Back then—”

“I don’t know,” Ding Guohua cut him off.

Luo Ren chuckled. “I haven’t even said what it was yet—”

Bang. The door slammed. Rust rained from the frame, brushing his cheek.

A slammed door, plain and simple.

He turned to Mu Dai. “Besides his name and address, you don’t have any other info on him?”

Calling Ma Tuwen, Luo Ren got only irritation: “You know Wan Fenghuo. Information trickles in. That’s just how it works.”

True enough. Wan Fenghuo always insisted that information’s only value was in timing. Like news headlines—today’s scoop was tomorrow’s stale cabbage. He never sat on intel, always passed it along immediately.

“Any updates coming?” Luo Ren asked.

“Relax,” Ma Tuwen drawled. “I’m expecting another delivery today.”

In the background, a woman’s voice scolded, “I told you we’re out of body wash! What, did a dog eat your brain?”