After The Honest Person Was Discovered For Simultaneously Pursuing Three People - Chapter 94

Chapter 94: The Sober Madman

The road back to the apartment was in front of the van, but Tao Ning could only run in the opposite direction. To make matters worse, there were not many shops nearby, and because it was getting late, there were no pedestrians on the street.

The footsteps relentlessly chasing him from behind felt like death itself. His frantic heartbeat grew more rapid in the darkness. Tao Ning panted heavily, not daring to stop for a second. But because of his frail body, he didn’t even have the strength to shout for help while running.

Run… run fast… I can’t be caught…

A narrow alley suddenly appeared on the side of the road. Tao Ning seized the opportunity and darted into it, then quickly tipped over the trash can at the alley’s entrance. The people chasing him were suddenly blocked. A man with a scarred face tripped and fell to the ground, his expression twisted in pain. He cursed angrily, “Quick, call Wang Xiong and the others! This kid is too hard to catch! When I catch him, I’m going to kill him…”

The furious voices gradually faded. The alley’s paths were intricate, and Tao Ning had successfully shaken off the people behind him. But after the adrenaline rush came an intense dizziness and nausea. His vision began to blur into blackness.

Tao Ning didn’t see the rock on the ground. He lost his balance and fell to the ground. “Ah!” The pain from his elbow made him cry out. It hurt so much that he couldn’t stand up for a moment.

Frowning, Tao Ning slowly rolled up his sleeve, revealing the scrape on his arm. The bruised wound was actually small, just a small patch of scraped skin. However, what was terrifying was that within just a few seconds, blood began to gush out of the small wound like beads from a broken string.

The blood accumulated more and more. In about a minute, Tao Ning’s elbow was soaked in blood. It was a bloody and frightening sight.

Sighing through the pain, Tao Ning’s head was spinning. The desperate run just now had exhausted all his strength. No… I must go to the hospital.

His trembling hand opened the phone. The screen was already shattered. Tao Ning’s vision was still blurring. A message in the chat box was “Happy New Year” from an unknown number. He had just typed one character but hadn’t sent it yet.

With a crash, his phone was heavily slapped to the ground. A menacing laugh came from above. “Kid, you dare to mess with us, huh? Go on and run! Let’s see where you can run to now?”

Tao Ning wanted to run, but it was already too late. Because the alley was too dark to see clearly, and he was disoriented from excessive blood loss, he had been surrounded both in front and behind without realizing it. “What do you want to do?… I can give you all my valuables.”

The man with a face full of fat had originally intended to kick Tao Ning to the ground, but when Tao Ning looked up, he saw his face, which was too beautiful to be real. He instantly changed his mind, a look of greed on his face. The muddy lust in his eyes was about to burst out. He laughed wickedly, “Little beauty, we don’t want your money. How about this, you let me have a piece of you, and I’ll be merciful and let you go…”

As he was about to reach out and touch him, a jab to his side came from the man with the scarred face, who had just been tripped by the garbage. He said impatiently, “You horny moron, he’s the one Zhao Yi wants. We were told to get him here in one piece. You dare to touch him now? Hurry up and tie him up and take him. After the job is done, you can do whatever you want with him.”

Zhao Yi?

Tao Ning caught those two words. Who was he? Why did he want to capture him? The surname was Zhao. Could it be related to Zhao Jingqun? Knowing that he couldn’t escape with his own strength, he simply stopped resisting, letting the men tie his hands with rough ropes. But in his mind, he preserved his strength to think of a way to escape.

“Damn it, look at his hand. It’s full of blood. Is this kid okay…”

“He won’t die. Let’s go.”

Tao Ning walked with his head down behind them. Just as the group was about to exit the alley, a crack echoed. The sound of a bone breaking was followed by the fat man’s heart-wrenching scream. “Ahhhh!!”

“Tao Ning!” In the darkness, amidst the chaos, a crisp scent of faint disinfectant rushed towards him. The next moment, Tao Ning was held in someone’s arms.

The person’s embrace was warm and full of a sense of security. But the hand behind his waist used immense force, as if he was holding a long-lost treasure.

It was Xu Jun.

This embrace was very brief, lasting only a few seconds. But Xu Jun had already taken the opportunity to quickly untie the ropes on Tao Ning’s body.

Shielding Tao Ning behind him, Xu Jun turned with a steel pipe in hand, his gaze coldly fixed on the people surrounding them. There were thirteen of them in total, and two or three of them were nearly two meters tall, even taller than he was.

But even so, Xu Jun’s expression didn’t change at all. The gaze behind his lenses was vigilant and cold. He remained a protector, firmly blocking Tao Ning behind him, and even distracted himself to whisper in a low voice, “Don’t be afraid.”

His voice was like a frozen spring falling from a snow mountain, with little fluctuation, yet it easily soothed the fear in Tao Ning’s heart, giving him the strength to calm down.

There was no extra time to ask why Xu Jun had suddenly appeared. Tao Ning could only try not to be a burden. He said with a trembling voice, “Okay, I’m not afraid.”

“Where did this stinking kid come from?!” The scarred-face man helped the fat man up. The latter’s entire arm bone was broken, which showed how swift and ruthless the attacker was. But this was followed by a raging fury ignited by the provocation.

The scarred-face man waved his hand, and someone directly pulled out a knife. “Grab him! I’m going to skin him alive!!”

Over a dozen people charged. There were people in front, behind, and to the sides. Xu Jun shouted, “Stick close to me.” With that, the cold steel pipe was swung at the charging men. One after another, painful cries cut through the deadly silence of the night. Tao Ning used his backpack to defend against the people trying to ambush Xu Jun.

Rip! The knife slashed through the white shirt, and skin and flesh parted. Blood instantly gushed from his abdomen. Xu Jun let out a muffled groan, cold sweat beading on his forehead, but he gritted his teeth and endured.

The opponents seized the opportunity of Xu Jun’s moment of distraction. A punch landed, and a person next to him delivered a kick. In an instant, countless fists smashed into his body, and several flashes of sinister, silvery knives appeared.

“No!” Tao Ning wanted to rush over to help Xu Jun, but someone intercepted him halfway. The scarred-face man directly kicked him in the knee. The bone-chilling pain instantly shot through his limbs.

Tao Ning fell heavily to the ground, and bright red blood flowed from the wound on his elbow again.

The strength of one person could not withstand over a dozen people. Xu Jun spat out a mouthful of blood, his movements starting to become sluggish. Another punch came at him, and finally, overwhelmed, Xu Jun fell. His shattered glasses were covered in blood.

However, the people who surrounded him didn’t get off easy either. Because Xu Jun had been calm and rational the entire time, with an extremely fast reaction speed, the steel pipe he swung had broken the bones of many people.

It took over a dozen people half an hour to subdue Xu Jun on the ground. Of course, they settled all old and new grudges together, and the punches that landed were heavy and vicious.

“No… no… please, no…”

The pain from the wound and the knee had already become numb. Tears and snot streamed down his pale face. Tao Ning stared desperately at the surrounded Xu Jun. The continuous sound of fists hitting flesh from within the crowd was like a knife, slowly torturing his heart.

Despair enveloped Tao Ning. His voice was hoarse from crying, and the sounds he could make became weaker and weaker. “I’ll go with you, please… I’ll go with you, just let him go. He was just passing by… please…”

Just as these people were about to stab Xu Jun’s abdomen, a piercing police siren suddenly sounded from outside the alley. Someone rushed over. When they saw the horrific scene inside the alley by the moonlight, their face turned pale, but they still forced themselves to suppress their fear and said with a trembling voice, “Hurry… let’s go… the police are coming. They’re coming to catch us.”

The scarred-face man lifted Tao Ning, who had passed out from exhaustion, with one arm and snorted coldly. “Stop! Don’t hit him anymore. That kid got lucky. Let’s go!” As he passed the person at the alley’s entrance, he showed a playful smile. “You should be thanked, good student. If Tao Ning didn’t have a classmate like you, how could we have lured away the people around him and captured him so easily… ha ha ha ha.”

The police siren got closer and closer. A car passed through the dark area, and in a momentary flash of its headlights, Liu Yuliang’s pale face was revealed.

“Mr. Zhao, how are you feeling today? Have you been able to control your self-harming behavior?”

The psychologist took out his notebook, ready to record the patient’s daily words and actions as usual. After he said his greetings, there was a long silence with no response. The psychologist looked up and met a pair of empty, black eyes.

Even though he had been seeing these eyes every day for over three months, each time, the psychologist felt a chill down his spine. At the same time, he felt a hint of pity for this patient named Zhao Jingqun sitting at his desk.

Zhao Jingqun had come to him for psychological therapy three months ago. It was the first time the psychologist had met this man. Their first meeting, he was startled by the gloom and numbness the man exuded. Not only that, but the man’s gaunt face was also enveloped in a thick layer of a deathly pallor.

The psychologist had only seen that kind of deathly pallor on patients who had been rescued after a suicide attempt. Without exception, these people had a very low will to live.

As expected, after the man completed a series of psychological assessments and Q&A sessions, the evaluation report showed that the patient had a high probability of being a potential sociopath. Logically speaking, this was a very dangerous person, as such people have an extremely high crime rate and are often heinous serial murderers.

Such people usually lack basic empathy, have a low sense of morality, and their actions are often cold and cruel, not resting until they have driven a person to despair.

However, a contradiction arose. Zhao Jingqun also showed signs of severe depression and a tendency for self-harm. Such a person, on the other hand, had a melancholic and highly compassionate nature. These two completely contradictory traits combined to create a strange sense of conflict, but it could also explain his extremely low will to live and his numb indifference.

What surprised the psychologist even more was that all of this was caused by just one person. Zhao Jingqun never said who that person was, only referring to him as “he.”

At the very beginning, the first sentence Zhao Jingqun spoke was:

“I want to kill him.”

When he said this, Zhao Jingqun’s eyes were empty and unfocused. But the psychologist felt that behind those pitch-black pupils was an inhumane beast, honestly and frankly narrating a repressed secret.

Pausing, Zhao Jingqun showed a very faint and chilling smile. “Because he doesn’t love me.”

“During the days I had him locked up, I was very, very content, but I still couldn’t get rid of the idea of killing him, because how wonderful would it be to die with him.”

“But every night, when I reached out my hand to his neck, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Later, whenever I had that thought, I would use a knife to cut my own arm.”

Zhao Jingqun spoke to himself, “I have no choice. As soon as I see him, I can’t control my thoughts. I want to kill him and be buried with me, but I also want to lock him up forever and be the only one he sees… But why can’t he just love me alone?”

The chilling words were spoken in a calm tone by the man in front of him. Even the well-experienced psychologist was a bit overwhelmed. He swallowed and hesitantly asked, “Then do you… know that your thoughts are not normal?”

Unexpectedly, the man in front of the desk smiled slightly. “I know.”

He slowly rolled up his sleeve, revealing a multitude of fresh and old knife scars on his arm. It was impossible to count how many there were. His entire arm was densely covered in scars.

“You see, I know I’m not normal, so I’m controlling myself.”

“I haven’t seen him for two weeks. I miss him so much, but I’m afraid I’ll hurt him if I see him.”

“Now… I feel like I’m losing control, so I came to seek help through medicine.”

So, he was a sober madman.

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