Including the time he spent in the previous quest, Zhang Heng realized that he had been away from home for a long time.
It had been so long that he had forgotten the finer details of the old man when he used to live with him. His grandfather at that time undoubtedly looked younger—the world had developed rapidly over the years, and science and technology had advanced at a pace faster than anyone could imagine. None of those factors affected grandpa, though. In defiance to the test of time, he still kept many of his old habits.
Grandpa had always been a relatively old-school man. Time had not changed him one bit.
When the elderly man heard the door opening, he called out without looking up. “You’re home earlier than usual.”
“The rice is in the pot,” he continued. “We’ll be having curry chicken tonight; scoop as much as you can eat.”
“Okay,” Zhang Heng responded. He then changed his shoes without putting down his schoolbag and went straight into the kitchen to get himself a bowl of rice with curry gravy on top of it. After that, he went to his room with his food.
Grandpa did not say much about when he saw Zhang Heng bringing his food back to his room. However, he reminded, “Make sure a single grain of rice doesn’t fall to the ground.”
After Zhang Heng closed his room door, the first thing he did was disassemble the Lego Gundam that he acquired recently. Once it was done, he reassembled them into a brick kitten. And when he inserted the Infinite Building Block, the Lego kitten instantly bounced to life. It started licking its paw after it was put on the ground, and it wanted to squeeze itself into the box used to store Zhang Heng’s test papers.
Zhang Heng ignored the feline. He placed a paper towel on the floor, then put a potato and some rice on it. The kitten didn’t seem too very interested in curry, sneezing after it gave the gravy a sniff. In the end, it did finish eating the small spoonful of potatoes and rice. Zhang Heng then released it and watched it scurry around the house. After waiting for a while, he saw that the cat had no adverse reactions to the food.
Zhang Heng felt that he had become overly sensitive.
If his grandpa in this quest had been replaced by something else, Zhang Heng figured that it would barge into his room while he was sleeping-just like what they did to the college student. Going through all that trouble to poison his food didn’t seem necessary.
After eating up the remaining curry chicken rice, he took the plate to the kitchen and washed it clean.
“Qin Zhen wants to meet me. I’ll be going out for a bit later,” he told grandpa. “Don’t come back too late.”
“Okay. Don’t wait up for me. Just sleep at your usual time. I have the key.”
After that, he returned to his bedroom, waiting a while before turning back the kitten into a pile of Lego building blocks and stuffing them into his schoolbag. This time, Zhang Heng had swiftly prepared the things he needed to bring with him. Other than the usual game items, he brought a USB flash drive as well.
For the next part of his investigation, Zhang Heng started by checking the CCTV footage. Last night, the college student’s entire family disappeared into thin air. It was impossible to leave the residence without leaving any traces when dozens of security cameras had been installed in the corridors. Judging from how badly the student had been struggling at that time, it was clear that he did not want to be taken away. Bringing a person out of the neighborhood against his will without being seen or heard would be almost impossible.
The most likely scenario was that the college student had been stuffed into the car’s trunk. After that, his fake parents left the neighborhood with the car. There were also CCTV cameras installed at the neighborhood’s entrance and exit, and if that were the case, their movements should have been captured.
To investigate the footage, Zhang Heng knocked on the door of the monitoring room.
“Coming!” a voice responded. The person inside put down his bowl, slipped on his flops, and walked over. After a while, the person opened the door and poked his head out. “What’s the matter?”
“I lost my phone, and I want to check the CCTV footage.”
A young man, the control room guard, was not much older than Zhang Heng and had just started working here less than half a year ago when he heard Zhang Heng’s request, a deep frown formed across his brow. “I can’t allow you to do that. You’ll have to come with a police officer if you want to check the CCTV footage. It’s a rule that the residents of our neighborhood are not allowed to watch the security recordings.”
“The police won’t care that I’ve lose my mobile phone. At most, I can only file a report. You show me the footage. If I don’t see it, I won’t bother to make a report, eh?” replied Zhang Heng
The zealous young man in charge of the control room shook his head. “No, no, rules are rules. If I let you in, I will be fired tomorrow.” The guard then closed the door.
But the next moment, a hand blocked the door that was about to close.
“I will make you a deal,” Zhang Heng went on.
“It’s not about money,” the young man harrumphed confidently with an awe-inspiring sense of justice. “The leader has asked me to supervise this area because I am a man of principle.” “I’m not planning to bribe you either. The deal is—you let me check the CCTV footage, and I won’t expose your dirty little secret.” The incident in question would happen two months later. The young guard had secretly recorded a couple of surveillance clips when he was on duty in the control room. Instead of copying them into his flash drive, he decided to record the footage with his mobile phonemainly surveillance clips of attractive female residents living in the neighborhood. Since it was now summer, many women wore loose-fitting clothes. And the angle the CCTV cameras pointed at endeared him with the best view of them.
It was not until later that he got drunk and showed-off the recorded videos to others. Once the matter got exposed, the property agency fired him immediately. The incident had created an uproar in the community at that time, and Zhang Heng still vaguely remembered bits and pieces of it.
In fact, the real estate agency also shared part of the responsibility. They did, in fact, hire two people to work in the control room, but the other person happened to be a relative of the agency’s higher-ups. The latter was paid every month, but he would never show up at work. This had opened up opportunities for the young man to make those mistakes.
Before he got fired, he recorded those surveillance clips for his personal pleasure, not expecting anybody to find out about his dirty little secret. The young guard’s expression had changed drastically. “You, what did you just say?”.
“You really think no one will know about the horrible things you’ve done?” Zhang Heng saw the young man put his hand into his pocket, attempting to destroy the evidence, and instantly grabbed his arm. “What are you trying to do?! I warn you, don’t use violence on me,” the young guard warned sternly. Seeing that Zhang Heng was all but a student, he tried to break free, but little did he expect his opponent had such great strength. He simply couldn’t break free no matter how hard he tried.
“You can continue to shout… shout louder. I want to see which one of us would end up worse in the end,” Zhang Heng replied in a calm tone.
The young man was in a dilemma. Not too long after that, he gave up resisting, nervously looking around his surroundings instead. When he saw that nobody had been paying attention to them, he said, “Come in first.”
Zhang Heng knew that he had gotten the deal. He then followed the young man into the control room.
“Let me lay some ground rules. You can only have 20… no, 15 minutes top to look at the CCTV footage. And you can’t make a copy.”
Although the young guard had succumbed to Zhang Heng, he insisted on mounting a little resistance, all in the name of stroking his ego.
“Let me take a look at the CCTV footage first.” Zhang Heng was not bothered by the young man. He was threatening the young man with his dirty little secret. In other words, he could just ignore the rules that were set by him.
