Shi Yin stared at the contents of the report over and over again, as if he wanted to memorize it word for word.
He didn’t know how much time had passed before he finally calmed his racing heart, though the smile on his face only grew wider.
"Brother, can I share this with Xu Fan and the others?" He was practically itching to show off to them immediately.
"Hmm, up to you." Shi Wei didn’t mind in the slightest.
After all, it would be known sooner or later—by everyone, including... that one person.
Just the thought of that person sent an icy chill coursing through Shi Wei’s entire body. His dark, almond-shaped eyes grew so shadowed they seemed to lack any trace of light.
He buried his face into the girl’s neck, concealing his expression. His voice was utterly devoid of emotion: "Zhizhi, what else did you find out?"
Yu Zhi pressed her lips together, her demeanor hesitating as if she wanted to speak but held back. Her behavior caught the attention of Shi Yin, who had just been about to send a WeChat message.
Shi Yin’s smile faded. "It’s fine, go ahead and say it."
After everything he’d been through, Shi Yin’s capacity to endure had grown exponentially. When it came to Shi Beiming, for whom he felt no attachment, he was utterly indifferent.
Yu Zhi exchanged a glance with Ruan Yuan before she spoke slowly: "The kidnapping of Shi Wei back then—it was orchestrated by him too."
Silence blanketed the air. ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ꜰʀᴏᴍ novel fire.net
Then, a derisive chuckle echoed inside the room.
Shi Wei lifted his gaze steadily. His deep, dark eyes were like a bottomless abyss, drenched in thick, viscous ink.
He laughed lowly. "How amusing."
The memory was still vivid—on the day before his sixteenth birthday.
An adolescent Shi Wei, after overhearing part of a conversation outside the study, dropped his basketball and stormed out of the Shi Family mansion.
He wandered aimlessly through the streets.
When he passed an old basketball court near an ancestral property, he was ambushed by several men driving a van. They knocked him unconscious and took him away.
When Shi Wei regained consciousness, his hands and feet were bound tightly with thick ropes, and he was confined in a damp, dimly lit room.
Panic-stricken, he shifted his body, attempting to make a sound to call for help, only to find his mouth stuffed with a filthy rag he couldn’t dislodge no matter how hard he tried.
Shi Wei scanned the room’s sparse furnishings. Apart from some abandoned televisions and couches, there wasn’t a single sharp or useful object around.
He forced himself to calm down swiftly. With his hands tied behind his back, he began rubbing the ropes together furiously, trying to wear them down and free himself.
Even though his wrists were soon raw and bloody, filling the air with a pungent scent of iron, his deep eyes were still filled with unyielding determination.
"Creak—"
The rickety wooden door was pushed open.
Two men wearing skull masks entered, gripping long sticks they dragged across the floor, creating a grating, piercing noise.
They stomped over to Shi Wei and roughly yanked the filthy, stinking rag out of his mouth.
"What do you want?" Shi Wei tilted his head back, meeting their eyes courageously without the slightest hint of fear.
Children born into prominent families were exposed to far more than ordinary people from a young age. Kidnappings and extortion had become par for the course, usually driven by greed.
Shi Wei assumed these men were no different.
He believed they wouldn’t harm him without securing a profit first, so the initial terror he’d felt had mostly subsided by this point.
The two masked men sneered derisively. "What we want—you can’t afford to give."
Before Shi Wei could press for more answers, they raised the sticks in their hands and began striking him.
Over and over.
The force behind each blow was immense.
Each strike felt like a form of torturous execution.
The metallic scent of blood grew thicker in the air. Dressed in nothing but a thin shirt, Shi Wei’s back was soon stripped of its skin, left raw and bloody.
His thin lips pressed tightly together as muffled groans escaped him.
Even as beads of sweat dripped relentlessly from his forehead, even as his vision blurred, he refused to utter a single plea for mercy.
"This kid’s tough to break." One of the masked men swung until his arms were sore, clearly losing patience.
Their goal had been to beat him severely before moving on to other methods of torture, but dragging it out like this was nothing but a waste of time.
The man spat disdainfully. He rubbed his palms together, then struck the back of Shi Wei’s neck with precision.
In just one blow, Shi Wei fell unconscious.
"Alright, let’s grab some food first. We’ll wake him up with water later," the other masked man said, jabbing his companion’s arm with his elbow.
Without sparing another glance at Shi Wei, who lay battered and bruised on the ground, they strolled off leisurely.
The foul-smelling room returned to an eerie stillness.
When Shi Wei was roughly woken again, it was deep into the night. The faint sound of crickets could be heard chirping faintly outside the window.
This time, the masked men reeked of alcohol. They had discarded their sticks in favor of thick, coiled whips.
Slumped against a corner of the wall, Shi Wei looked as though his bones had been shattered. His eyes had turned hollow, devoid of any spark of life. He understood fully that escape was impossible and stopped resisting.
When the next round of beatings finally ended—
Aside from his face, not a single part of Shi Wei’s body was unscathed. It was as though the searing pain had dulled to nothingness through overwhelming repetition.
The cold, pale moonlight filtered through the window.
It streaked across the two men fast asleep on the couch, their skull masks casting an even more terrifying shadow on their faces.
Shi Wei saw the skulls laughing at him, and the hatred in his heart surged, magnified tenfold. The despair within him was consumed by the angry fire erupting in his eyes.
His gaze shifted to the splinters of a broken beer bottle beneath the wooden table. In mere moments, he made a daring decision.
With his broken, battered body, Shi Wei forced himself upright and endured the excruciating pain as he crawled, inch by inch, toward the wooden table.
His eyes fixated on the glass shards, treating them as his only lifeline—as a hope he refused to relinquish.
The distance between the corner of the wall and the table wasn’t far.
But by the time Shi Wei reached it, nearly ten minutes had passed, leaving a trail of crimson blood in his wake.
A faint ’snap.’
Shi Wei cut through the rope binding his wrists.
He glanced cautiously at the two men mere feet away, holding his breath as he moved his blood-soaked hands down to the bindings around his ankles.
When the remaining ropes fell quietly to the floor, he exhaled in relief and pushed himself up using the table for support.
A sudden gust of wind blew through, nudging the door open and shut.
Perhaps, in their arrogance, the kidnappers had unintentionally given Shi Wei an easy opportunity to escape, even saving him the trouble of searching for keys.
The corridor was pitch black, devoid of light.
The semi-circular, tubular-shaped building was entirely abandoned, reeking strongly of rust. The stench served as a constant reminder to Shi Wei that this place had long been left derelict.
Dragging his heavy steps, he braced himself against the walls and moved laboriously toward the stairs.
Survival was his only thought.
Shi Wei gasped for air, his body pushed past its limits, yet he dared not stop even for a moment.
He feared that if he paused—
What awaited him would be eternal damnation.
When Shi Wei reached the third door in the hallway, his steps froze suddenly upon spotting an oil drum someone had left behind.