Silence for Good

Tu Ran's heart skipped a beat, and her gaze toward Ding Naiqing turned cold. "Did you know me before?"

"Yeah." Ding Naiqing grinned, showing two small fangs, clearly unaware of the gravity of the situation.

Tu Ran instinctively pressed her tongue against her teeth.

Ding Naiqing had known her before.

Ding Naiqing had known her before!

Those two sentences were all that filled her mind right now.

When she'd faced Ding Naiqing earlier, she'd acted like a complete stranger to him.

Had he already noticed something was off?

In that moment, Tu Ran ran through countless solutions. She even glanced at the guards who were dispersing the crowd—if she took this chance to silence him for good and pin his death on the aberrant...

"But Ran Jie, you probably don't know me, since I never even said hi to you," Ding Naiqing said.

Tu Ran felt the taut string in her heart slacken.

"Why didn't you say hi to me?" Tu Ran probed.

"Back then, you were really cold, Ran Jie. I didn't dare get close to you," Ding Naiqing's brow, which had been furrowed, smoothed out as he spoke, and he said cheerfully, "But now you're much more approachable, and you're even willing to be on my team."

Tu Ran rolled her eyes internally. She'd rather not team up with him, but he'd ruined her chance—the big shot had been taken by someone else, leaving only him. She'd had no choice.

Still, from what Ding Naiqing said, she'd taken first place in many areas during training back then. That made her something like a top student, didn't it? Then why had Xi Chunzhi said, "Whoever dares mock you, I'll beat them up for you," when she'd given Tu Ran her bracelet?

Tu Ran had originally assumed the original body had been a bottom-rung member of the Pioneer Team, someone who couldn't bring anything valuable out of the Threshold, which was why she'd been mocked.

Now, it seemed that wasn't the case.

So what was the real story?

Tu Ran desperately wanted to know everything about the original body, but she couldn't ask.

Xi Chunzhi wasn't by her side, and she couldn't just ask over the communicator. The last time they were in the elevator, the AI had immediately detected Xi Chunzhi's accelerated heartbeat. If she said anything sensitive over the communicator, it would definitely draw attention.

With a sigh, Tu Ran had no choice but to shelve the thought for now. Once this mission was over and she got back, she'd definitely have Xi Chunzhi tell her everything about the original body.

When Li Wu and Liang Feng came back, Tubin was following behind them.

"We couldn't find her. The person who was questioning Naya Rivera has disappeared," Li Wu said, his face clouded with worry.

"How could she disappear?" Ding Naiqing was shocked. "Weren't all one hundred and twenty-one people accounted for just now?"

"It was chaos. We didn't notice when she left," Li Wu said.

They'd had to deal with the aberrant and evacuate the crowd at the same time—keeping track of a single person's movements would have been nearly impossible.

"It's fine if we can't find her. Her disappearance basically confirms there's more than one aberrant on the farm," Tu Ran said calmly.

Suddenly, she fixed her gaze on Tubin's face. Staring at the tall, burly Black man before her, she said without any change in expression, "Where did Mr. Tubin go just now?"

"It was terrifying, so I ran straight home. I didn't know if it was safe outside, so I stayed in and didn't come out until I saw you two officers here. Only then did I dare follow them over," Tubin said with an honest, simple air.

When danger strikes, everyone's first instinct is to flee. Tubin's reaction was perfectly normal. If not for her position, Tu Ran would have run even farther than he had.