WMSR — QT Chapter 80

Chapter 80

After handling these matters, Fang Ruoming completely ignored Qiao Qianqian, instead grabbing a thin blanket to drape over Bai Yichen. Bending down, he scooped him up into his arms, his voice softening instantly as he murmured: "Let's go."

Thus, the silent assembly of operatives who had arrived without a whisper withdrew swiftly mere minutes later. Although the rescue operation suffered minor disruptions due to Qiao Qianqian's sudden intervention, overall it proceeded smoothly. While Qiao Qianqian's unexpected arrival allowed Xu Jiangzhe to receive an alert a few minutes early, her bodyguards had simultaneously neutralized the villa's exterior guards, effectively saving the extraction team an equivalent block of time—meaning the net impact was virtually negligible.

Half an hour later, Xu Jiangzhe, having rushed back at breakneck speed, burst straight through the front doors, roaring in a voice choked with furious anxiety: "Qiao Qianqian, exactly what do you think you're playing at?"

Yet the instant he stormed into the bedroom, he froze dead in his tracks, staring dumbfounded at a floor littered with bound captives. More critically, Ziqian—the person he cared for above all else in the world—had completely vanished without a trace.

Author's Note: My face hurts so much, wuwuwu o(╥﹏╥)o

And thank you to the little angel delldeyn for the lurking hand grenade, I am deeply flattered.

Chapter 40: The Caged White Moonlight (17)

"Wuwu..." Catching sight of Xu Jiangzhe's arrival, Qiao Qianqian—whose makeup had long since been ruined by a torrent of tears—frantically made muffled noises to signal him.

Yet Xu Jiangzhe possessed zero chivalrous or tender sentiments at that moment. Yanking the fabric gag straight out of Qiao Qianqian's mouth, he didn't even bother untying the ropes binding her limbs, instead grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and shaking her violently, his expression warped into a terrifying, ghastly mask: "Where is Ziqian? Where did my Ziqian go?"

Qiao Qianqian had never witnessed Xu Jiangzhe in such a feral, unhinged state. Paralyzed by shock, she froze completely, momentarily terrified out of her wits and forgetting how to respond. In her memory, Xu Jiangzhe had always been the epitome of refined, scholarly elegance; the man standing before her now felt utterly alien compared to the persona she thought she knew.

Receiving zero answers from Qiao Qianqian, Xu Jiangzhe pulled out his mobile phone to access the surveillance feed. Having sped all the way back with blind urgency, he hadn't spared a single second to check the logs during his commute. Pulling up the playback now, he rapidly pieced together every single event that had transpired inside the room.

Finishing the footage, his expression twisted into a volatile storm of shifting shadows: "Wang Dazhi!"

No matter how slow-witted or sluggish his realization had been initially, he now fully comprehended the truth: that Wang Dazhi was fundamentally compromised—and harbored a catastrophic problem. Judging by the security footage, the orchestration behind kidnapping Ziqian was almost certainly headed by him.(Read this novel on https://donttelmewhattodo.blogspot.com/ for free.)

Yet he couldn't fathom where on earth this Wang Dazhi crawled out from, nor why he would abduct Ziqian. After all these years of absolute isolation, shouldn't Ziqian have been completely cut off from any lingering ties to the outside world?

A sudden flash of insight struck Xu Jiangzhe. Fumbling with his phone, he urgently dialed an outside line, receiving confirmation almost instantly: Wang Dazhi's "nominal elderly father," who was supposed to be undergoing continuous medical treatment at the hospital, had vanished without a trace.

Learning that critical piece of intelligence felt like having every ounce of strength instantly drained from Xu Jiangzhe's physical frame, leaving him utterly incapable of self-deception. When painstakingly vetting candidates to secure a reliable caregiver, after exhaustive screening, he had managed to pick the single operative hiding the most malicious, treacherous agenda.

So right now... where on earth was he supposed to search for his Ziqian?

Acting like a hollow, drifting phantom stripped of his soul, Xu Jiangzhe pivoted and mechanically staggered toward the exit. Spotting him preparing to walk away while she remained firmly trussed up in ropes, Qiao Qianqian hurriedly whimpered to signal him—she hadn't been untied yet!

Yet upon hearing her desperate cries, Xu Jiangzhe merely turned his head to cast a single, glacial glance her way—a gaze saturated with an unarticulated, chilling abhorrence—before resuming his march toward the door. Having reviewed the surveillance playback, he was fully privy to every single outrage committed inside the room, including Qiao Qianqian's venomous verbal abuse hurled at Bai Yichen, and even her vicious attempt to kick Bai Yichen's paralyzed, motionless legs.

Seeing the person he cherished as the absolute apple of his eye subjected to such vile degradation had already ripped open his heart with unbearable agony and ignited a furnace of apocalyptic rage. How could he possibly stoop to untying Qiao Qianqian? Restraining himself from planting a brutal, bone-crushing kick squarely into her ribs required the absolute limit of his self-control.

Thus, in absolute disbelief, Qiao Qianqian could only watch with wide, horrified eyes as Xu Jiangzhe vanished completely from her field of vision.

The moment Xu Jiangzhe evacuated the villa, he mobilized every single ounce of resources and personnel at his disposal to hunt down Bai Yichen. That massive commotion kicked up by Xu Jiangzhe was swiftly intercepted by Xu Weihai and Liu Ling. Upon digesting the grim details, no vocabulary could adequately capture the vertigo-inducing horror crashing over them; without a moment of hesitation, they immediately joined the search party, decisively deploying the full, unreserved weight of the Xu family's institutional apparatus.

Driven into a frantic frenzy to recover the missing target, the Xu couple didn't even spare a fraction of a calorie to handle the Qiao family coming knocking to demand an explanation. Furthermore, upon learning that the prelude triggering Bai Ziqian's abduction stemmed entirely from Qiao Qianqian's reckless, ignorant decision to storm the safehouse with a squad of goons, they extended their raging animosity straight toward Qiao Qianqian herself. Liu Ling cursed under her breath in bitter remorse, repeatedly questioning what kind of blind, defective vision she possessed to have ever targeted such a catastrophic domestic menace for her son.

Yet regardless of how frantically or desperately the Xu couple and Xu Jiangzhe scoured the terrain, days bled into the calendar with precisely zero breakthroughs. That Wang Dazhi—alongside his nominal "elderly father"—seemed to have evaporated into thin air. Even when they managed to requisition transit surveillance footage along the highway routes, the vehicle carrying Bai Yichen vanished midway through its transit corridor. The statistically highest probability pointed to a mid-route vehicular transfer, effectively obliterating their final fragile thread of tangible leads.

Among all those agonizing days of futile searching, the individual suffering the most catastrophic emotional and mental collapse was undoubtedly Xu Jiangzhe. While the Xu couple worked themselves into a blistered frenzy driven purely by the fear of losing operational control over Bai Yichen and forfeiting the massive fortune sitting under his name, Xu Jiangzhe's torment stemmed from an entirely different dimension: he was fundamentally incapable of accepting the absolute finality of losing Ziqian.

His Ziqian had remained tethered to his side across all these long years—they shared their meals, they slept in the same bed, and they had never once been torn apart. Back when he possessed Ziqian, his heart felt perpetually anchored and brimming with completeness; yet now, following Ziqian's abrupt, violent erasure, his entire chest felt hollowed out into a vast, echoing void.

Every second of every minute, his mind tormented him with identical loops: Where is my Ziqian right now? What is Ziqian doing? Is Ziqian being properly cared for? He found himself paralyzed by suffocating dread over Ziqian's safety: What if—what if that Wang Dazhi who abducted Ziqian isn't a good person at all?

Whenever those agonizing thoughts crested, acute panic drove Xu Jiangzhe to the brink of madness, desperate to establish immediate contact with Ziqian. In this modern era, bridging the distance to reach someone should have been effortless—requiring nothing more than a single phone call or a digital message across a social media account.