Rinna lifted her head from Hisaki’s embrace and opened her eyes. The light in this corner was very dim.
The noon sun outside was baking the asphalt road white, heating car hoods to the point of frying eggs. But here—in the northeast corner of the second floor of Yangjian Town Central Commercial District, right next to the emergency exit—it was a dead angle.
The sunlight was completely blocked by the exterior wall of the neighboring 24-story office building. Only a small area about seven or eight meters above their heads remained.
A patch of grayish-white diffused light leaked down from the reflection of the glass curtain wall, falling on the dark gray rolling shutter door. It illuminated a thin layer of dust on it.
Rinna blinked several times, letting her pupils adjust to the dimness.
The smell in the air made her feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t the usual stuffy odor of an enclosed space, but a rougher, drier scent.
The astringent taste of cement dust, the alkaline residue left by lime after meeting water, the musty smell of wood that had been sun-dried and then dampened again, and the rusty tang of iron. These smells mixed together, like an invisible layer of ash settling on her tongue and throat.
In the corner, equipment left by the construction team was scattered haphazardly. Several sandwich panels leaned against the wall, their edges unpolished, the raised wood splinters glowing with the faintest pale yellow in the darkness.
Next to the panels was a bundle of steel pipes tied with wire—about a dozen, varying in length. The longest was taller than Hisaki by a head; the shortest was still an arm’s length long. A thin layer of rust covered the pipes, reflecting a dull metallic luster where the diffused light hit.
Further in, there was a half-open bucket of white latex paint, with dried paint skin hanging on the rim, curling into irregular white fragments.
The floor was bare cement mortar base, no tiles laid. The exposed concrete surface was scratched with marks of varying depths from work boots. In the corner, a small pile of cement dust had been swept together but forgotten, still sitting there.
This place was clearly a project that had been paused midway.
The construction team had probably suspended work for some reason, dumping equipment and materials here without even bothering to clean up, leaving only this corner full of dust and discarded steel.
Rinna pulled her gaze away from those steel pipes and looked back at the human wall in front of her.
The man with elegant posture, a lean and muscular build, still stood at the front of the crowd.
The crease on his casual trousers was razor-sharp, and his light summer shirt jacket fluttered slightly in the last of the air conditioning. Behind him, over a hundred people blocked the corridor completely.
From the edge of the hallway to the wall, there were about ten rows of irregular but tight formations. Each person wore a uniform sun hat and maintained uniform silence.
The faces beneath the hats looked no different from ordinary people. Some were young, some middle-aged, and one face even looked like a college student still in school. But their silence itself was the most abnormal sound.
Rinna’s mind was racing. How had she and Xiao Xiao attracted these people? They had only gone out this afternoon, eaten lunch, drunk a cup of hot cocoa, and hugged in the second-floor corridor. Those actions were, at most, “excessive intimacy in public.”
There was absolutely no way they would provoke over a hundred people to chase them around a shopping mall. So the reason must lie elsewhere.
Her gaze paused on that man’s face—that calm smile, those eyes that seemed to have everything under control, that aura that could make him the center of attention without raising his voice.
Her first thought was the enemies of the Kurose Clan. After all, Hisaki was the Young Lady of the Kurose Clan, a major yakuza family with many political adversaries. These hundred-plus people had probably been tracking Hisaki’s movements for a long time.
But then another possibility crossed her mind. She stared at the number on the system panel. After exchanging the Vitality Pill, [Malice Points: 47]. Where had that sudden surge of 107 malice points come from?
They had been squeezed out of that middle-aged man—whose every weakness she had poked, who had hit his knee on the table leg, and who had stood up and walked away—and the other customers who had watched and snickered but felt disgust toward her.
If these people, these hundred-plus men in hats, were here to retaliate for that man she had scolded, then what was the relationship between them? That man was just an ordinary office worker.
After being yelled at, he had waited outside in the sun for who knows how long, even the condensation on his Coke cup had dried. How could he have gathered so many people? How could a bunch of creeps organize so meticulously? Absolutely impossible.
At that moment, Hisaki’s thoughts were mostly the same as Rinna’s. She lowered her head, her black hair sliding down from both shoulders to cover her profile, the ends indistinguishable in the dim light.
A thought kept stabbing her like a needle: ‘I’m dragging Rinna down.’ She knew how many enemies the Kurose Clan had. That wasn’t just rhetoric—there really was an enemy list, densely written with names and spheres of influence.
From her father’s generation to hers, kidnapping and threats were never hypotheticals. They were emergency plans she had to run through in her mind before every outing.
She wasn’t afraid of being in danger herself. Having lived in the Kurose Clan for sixteen years, she had seen more dangerous scenes and knew what to do.
But she was afraid of dragging Rinna into this. Rinna was already frail. She couldn’t handle any trouble. If even a single scratch came to Rinna because of the Kurose Clan’s grudges, she would never forgive herself.
Seeing that neither Rinna nor Hisaki spoke, the man didn’t rush to make a move.
He raised one hand, making a “wait” gesture in the air—an action that exuded a slow, deliberate grace from the inside out. Then he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a phone.
It wasn’t a flip-style privacy phone, just a very ordinary full-screen phone with a privacy screen protector. He swiped his thumb across the screen a few times, then turned the screen toward Rinna.
The image showed a train car. The evening rush hour crowd, the overhead handrails, the lights flickering past outside the window, and in the center, a girl with white hair and a red ribbon leaning into a black-haired girl’s arms.
Her chin slightly raised, with a remarkably sharp expression, she directed at a middle-aged man outside the frame the line that had become her trademark: “No sense of boundaries, no manners, and you still get angry when called out. It figures that trash like you would be stuck in a cheap train your whole life.”
Rinna watched the video of herself. The upward curl of her lips in the footage looked even more punchable than she remembered.
Oh no. They really had come to get revenge on her.
Hisaki’s pupils contracted sharply at the sight of the video. Her fingers tightened slightly on Rinna’s shoulder. Then Rinna felt it—a trembling.
Hisaki’s hands, those reliable hands that could steadily carry a tray across a hundred-meter corridor and through a crowded train, were trembling faintly at that moment.
Rinna turned her head slightly and could see Hisaki’s jawline tightly clenched, her lips pressed into a bloodless line, the crease between her brows deeper than ever.
The man put the phone back into his pocket and spoke to Rinna.
“Shirase Rinna, 16 years old, first-year high school student.”