Chapter 7: The Raven (3)
At intervals, after she crumbled — whether from fainting or passing out — Li Yufu would come.
At first, Elyse would beg piteously.
Then she'd curse him viciously.
Pleading didn't work. Cursing didn't work.
She tried resistance through silence.
But he remained unmoved — every time, he would only stroke her hair with that gentle, merciless tenderness, creating the illusion of cherishing. He held her, stayed with her, comforted her.
After a while, he would render her unconscious and have a doctor come in to administer IV nutrition, clean her, keep her alive.
If there were such a thing as the most torturous psychological punishment on earth, this was it. Elyse didn't even know why Li Yufu was doing this. Sometimes she'd despair and think that maybe this was how it would be forever.
She would gradually devolve into a blind snake coiled in the dark.
A loathsome, ugly scavenger.
She'd be sickened by what she'd become.
One day, two days, three days…
In truth, Elyse had no idea how much time had passed. Li Yufu's visits were irregular, impossible to use as a clock. She was sealed in oblivion, without end.
Her shell slowly eroded away.
Sustained only by nutrient drips for so long, her body grew feeble, muscles atrophying until lifting a hand to slap Li Yufu was a struggle.
The experiment took effect by degrees, with irresistible force, carving her — stroke by stroke — into the shape the creator desired.
Except for Li Yufu himself, she lost all sensation for everything else. Gouged away, stripped down to the bone.
How to describe that feeling.
It was like being thrown onto an oil-slicked precipice — the slightest shift and she'd slide off, living every moment in the terror of a foothold collapsing. And then he gave her a rope.
A rope named Li Yufu.
The warmth of her first twenty years, the few precious memories, the swollen and humiliating pain, the delusive dreams, the desperate will to survive — all of it went dark like stars before a storm, dying in the chaos of dust.
She had been nearly healed.
And in this great terror of darkness, she shattered all over again.
Elyse didn't cry anymore. She let her sickness swallow her whole. She wanted to see how far she'd fall — she chewed over and over the dead things crusted inside her, which was self-harm.
And a mute, violent self-mutilation.
It was rupture, it was withering, it was a grotesque resurrection — crawling back up like a demon, feeling something like pleasure from destruction.
What did it matter.
She'd die in the end anyway — die? Just… die, like that?
Someone didn't want her to die.
And she… didn't want to, either.
She didn't know when, but gradually she began to wait — wait for Li Yufu to come, wait for him to hold her, comfort her, gently stroke her hair.
This was the only stimulus in endless darkness, in eternal silence. The only proof she was still alive.
Murderer, tyrant, lover, destroyer, creator — he ground her to dust yet tethered her, keeping her alive.
Li Yufu wanted to be her god.
Slowly she stopped struggling.
She nestled passively in his arms.
She reached out and quietly gripped the hem of his shirt.
Finally, this time.
As he was about to leave, she lifted her terribly wasted arm and grabbed his hand, holding on with everything she had.
"Little Elyse," Li Yufu's gaze gleamed behind his night-vision goggles. He suppressed the excitement flooding his blood and asked softly, "Why won't you let me go?"
Coaxing, guiding — wanting her to say the answer herself.
She kept her eyes open in the darkness, turning her gaze toward him, as though looking into his eyes.
She'd been tormented into something like a skeleton. In the pale night-vision feed, her enormous black pupils stared out, terrifying.
But she was also like a person scoured of all attachments by immense force — pure, single-minded, with only one abiding devotion left.
"I love you."
She said.
"I want you."
The man exhaled in satisfaction, bent down, and pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead. It had been four months — exactly four months — since the day she'd first been locked in the Black Room.
He'd poured his heart and blood, baptized her in darkness and imprisonment, and he thought: at last, he'd obtained a believer who would never betray him.
5.
Cang City, Criminal Investigation and Narcotics Division office, 6:30 A.M.
Having pulled several all-nighters, flipped through entire cabinets of case files, all for a thread on a recent drug-related murder — Chen Shen felt his skull about to split. Most of his colleagues were already down for the count, passed out every which way, a chorus of snoring rising and falling.
Chen Shen yawned enormously, threw on his police jacket, rubbed his hair — not noticing it was sticking up like a rooster's nest — and shuffled in his slippers toward the break room to make tea.
In the stairwell came the rapid footsteps of a young man in a hurry — practically taking the steps two at a time.
Chen Shen looked up. It was Wei Shu, a pork bun clamped between his teeth. He'd been up all night too, but youth had its advantages — he could still run, still function. He'd just come back from a stakeout.
Wei Shu's dark circles were so deep he looked like he'd been punched. He bit off a chunk of his bun and mumbled a greeting at Chen Shen.
"Old Chen — where's Captain Zhou?"
Not actually waiting for an answer, Wei Shu was already barreling toward the captain's office.
"Hey, Little Wei — buns! Toss me one!"
A bag of cold steamed buns sailed through the air. Chen Shen caught it, but the young man's back had already disappeared around the corridor corner.
Standing there a moment, he closed the lid of his thermos.
In the end, he didn't pour a single drop of water.
The office door was shut, lit from within. Case materials covered the desk.
Wei Shu rubbed his face to wake himself up, then dropped onto the visitor sofa next to the captain, reporting in a low voice:
"Here's the situation, Captain. Yang and I followed the suspect — the car couldn't get past Xiaomo Village, so we went on foot. Xiaomo Village has forty-seven households, lots of empty-nest elders and left-behind kids, barely any women. The target went into a feed-processing plant, but —"
He was puzzled: "Xiaomo Village doesn't seem like it could produce feed at any scale. It's not exactly a grain-growing region."
Captain Zhou kept rubbing his chin. Two days without shaving, he looked prickly all over. He asked: "Did you check their production equipment?"
Wei Shu knew what he meant — whether someone was using a feed-processing cover to hide drug manufacturing.
"Couldn't get a chance to look. I think they made us, so we had to pull back."
Wei Shu said gravely: "We couldn't get into the plant, but Yang propped me up against the back wall, and I listened through a window. I heard some weird things."
He tried to recall and express it clearly:
"There were three men inside, playing cards and making phone calls. One of them said something about 'the raven' — something like, the raven left the nest, so sooner or later it's going to get caught. Ravens are stupid, no matter how much they flap around, that's all they'll ever amount to."
Wei Shu's face was clouded with thought. He felt there was something lurking in the fog he hadn't quite grasped: "I think they were talking about —"
Then he looked up and saw his captain's face had entirely transformed.
A phone call went out immediately.
"Director Lin! Listen — our person may have been compromised. Yes, the Raven is in danger. We need to request immediate mission termination and pull them out."
Exhaling heavily, Zhou Mi tossed his phone into a drawer and massaged his temples, exhausted.
"Captain, the Raven is one of ours?"
His captain looked like he might keel over in his chair, voice waterlogged and flat: "After Case 127, a lot of our assets in Myanmar got pulled. You know that."
Wei Shu felt that soggy heaviness settle on his own chest. He nodded silently.
Zhou Mi lowered his voice: "So the top brass urgently approved the Raven Plan."
He stared blankly at nothing — whether he was seeing someone or something, his voice dropped further: "Nearly half a year. Our old assets have been nearly paralyzed — this is an unprecedented exposure event. The impact's been devastating. The Raven Plan used all fresh faces."
He sighed heavily:
"After months of deep cover — still failed."
He slammed the table, snapping to attention: "Xiaomo Village is definitely dirty. Little Wei — round everyone up, we're moving!"
Outside the door, someone slid away like a shadow.
6.
Deep in northern Myanmar.
It had been several days since Elyse was released from the Black Room, and she gradually learned that Li Yufu had brought her to Charlie Group headquarters — the vortex where arms, drug lords, and underground trade all swirled.
A place unlabeled on any map — Tikka.
Li Yufu had operated in northern Myanmar for over a decade like a local emperor. His white compound on the hillside was colloquially called the White Tower of Tika — the legendary lair of Kunjiao.
Elyse had been imprisoned in the Black Room beneath the White Tower for four months.