514: Chapter 514 Tsinghua and Peking University Admissionees

The town street fell completely silent.

Even the old men who had been cursing fell silent, looking at Lin Que with an unfamiliar expression.

The man in black pulled his hand out of his pocket.

His fingers were trembling slightly.

"How do you know all this?"

He blurted out.

As soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted it.

This was tantamount to indirectly admitting that everything Lin Que said was true.

The man in black tugged at the sleeve of the man in orange and gave him a look.

The two exchanged a glance.

"Let's go."

The man in black whispered.

"Why waste time arguing with him? We've got the footage; we'll deal with it when we get back."

The two turned and walked toward the off-road vehicle.

Lin Que stepped forward half a pace, stopping outside the driver's side door.

His toes avoided the tire tracks, but his shoulder line perfectly blocked the man in black's hand from reaching the door handle.

"Move."

The man in black said, his face darkening.

Lin Que didn't budge.

He pulled out his spare phone, which only kept emergency contacts and text messaging functions.

The screen lit up.

He scrolled to the number for Officer Li from the town government and dialed immediately.

The call was answered instantly, and Lin Que's tone was steady:

"Officer Li, this is Lin Que, a student from the Qingbei School of Literature here for a field study."

His tone remained steady.

"There are two outsiders on the main street of Muchuan Town, driving a dark gray off-road vehicle."

"They have been filming extensively in the area surrounding the classified site and have had a physical altercation with the townspeople."

"I am reporting their license plate number to you now; please contact the town police station and the relevant authorities to arrive as soon as possible."

When the words "classified site" left Lin Que's mouth, the expressions of the two influencers changed simultaneously.

The man in black almost dropped his selfie stick.

He lowered his voice sharply and leaned toward the man in orange.

"Didn't you say this was just an ordinary abandoned factory? What 'classified site'?"

The man in orange's face had turned pale.

He turned his head to look in the direction of the high wall.

Barbed wire, warning posts, and yellow "No Filming" signs.

He had seen them when they first came in.

But at the time, he just thought they were normal factory security signs and didn't think anything of it.

"Brother Liang, I don't know either."

He replied in a hushed voice.

"The internet just said it was an 'abandoned factory site, great for taking photos,' nobody said it was a classified facility!"

"Then was he... bluffing us just now?"

The man in orange was anxious and was about to step forward to argue.

The man in black looked back.

He saw the high wall in the distance.

The barbed wire on top of the wall glimmered coldly in the mist.

On the rope stretched between the red and white warning posts, signs hung and swayed slightly in the wind:

"No Approaching," "No Filming," "No Trespassing."

He also saw a person standing by the factory's iron gate, looking toward them.

Old Zhao was wearing a faded, dark blue old-style uniform cotton jacket, with a faded "Security" armband pinned to his chest.

His cap brim was pulled low, and his steps were as steady as if they were nailed into the mud, swaying slightly in the mist.

That old cotton jacket might not look like a uniform, but the faded "Security" characters on his chest, combined with the high wall, the warning signs, and the phone call Lin Que had just made, were enough to make the man in black afraid to take the risk.

"Something's wrong."

His voice went hoarse.

"That place might actually be a classified area."

Both of their faces turned white.

In this country, any unauthorized filming in a place associated with "classified" status was no longer a matter of simple administrative punishment.

If they were deemed to have intentionally collected classified information, they would genuinely face jail time.

The man in black paused for a moment and signaled to the man in orange.

"Fine, fine, fine! There wasn't any good footage anyway, just delete it!"

He clicked straight to format.

From the panoramic view of the town street to the close-up of Old Zhou, from the windows of the residential building to the silhouette of the high wall in the distance—everything was wiped clean.

The man in orange gritted his teeth and yanked his phone off the selfie stick.

He glared at Lin Que, his eyes full of resentment, but when his peripheral vision swept over the distant "Security" armband, his fingers stiffly opened the album, selected all the videos and photos taken today, and deleted them.

"Look, the trash bin is cleared too."

He said, his voice stifled as he tried to maintain his last shred of dignity.

The two frantically went through the operations.

In less than half a minute, the man in black turned the camera screen around to show Lin Que.

The screen showed only blank thumbnails, and the memory card capacity bar had turned back into a solid gray block.

"Satisfied now?"

Lin Que glanced at the screen.

"There's still the action camera."

The man in black looked down at the action camera on his chest.

Gritting his teeth, he pulled out the memory card and formatted it right in front of Lin Que.

"Done."

Lin Que nodded and stepped aside.

He had no law enforcement authority; achieving this much was already his limit.

The license plate had already been reported.

The only old surveillance camera at the town entrance, although dated, was more than capable of capturing clear images of entering and exiting vehicles.

The two men, with dark expressions, pulled open the car doors and climbed in.

The man in orange slammed the door shut, shooting a sinister glare at Lin Que through the window.

The off-road vehicle's engine roared to life, its tires slipping on the wet ground and spraying a patch of mud.

The car lurched as it made a U-turn and sped off along the narrow road they had come from.

The taillights flashed twice in the mist before being quickly swallowed by the mountain bend.

The people on the town street watched the car disappear, silent for several seconds.

Then, as if a floodgate had been opened, voices suddenly poured out.

"Little Lin, well done!"

"This kid's got guts!"

"Students from the city are this impressive?"

The owner of the grocery store put down the bamboo ruler in her hand and patted the dust off her apron.

"No wonder Old Zhao's attitude toward him has been different these past few days."

Someone nearby chimed in:

"Exactly, I even saw him serve tea to this kid a couple of days ago. Old Zhao, that man hasn't poured water for an outsider in ten years."

Old Zhou stood in place.

His cane poked at the ground, and his left hand was still trembling slightly.

His gaze landed on Lin Que's back.

The teenager had already turned around, his jacket splattered with a few drops of mud, leaving dark spots on the gray fabric.

"Kid."

Lin Que turned back.

Old Zhou opened his mouth, his cane scraping irritably against the ground, his stiff face turning bright red:

"About what happened today..."

Lin Que chuckled, interrupting him:

"Uncle Zhou, if you don't get the chili noodles back, Auntie will be waiting anxiously."

Old Zhou grunted heavily in response.

The awkwardness hadn't left his face, but his tense mouth corners visibly relaxed.

He looked down at the plastic bag in his hand; the chili noodles were still resting safely inside.

"Got it."

He leaned on his cane and walked toward the residential building.

He walked three steps, then paused.

He didn't look back.

"Come to my place for noodles tomorrow."

The voice wasn't loud and was half-scattered by the wind.

But Lin Que heard it, and he nodded.

The crowd slowly dispersed.

The morning town street returned to its usual quiet.

The smell of coal ash, rust, and the musty, sour scent of old wood spread once again.

Lin Que stood by the roadside for a while.

Old Zhao walked over from the distance.

"Those two just now?"

"They're gone."

Old Zhao sniffed, his gaze looking out along the narrow road.

"People like that have come before, but back then they usually just filmed the outside and left."

"I thought they were here to cause trouble; I was even ready to go grab my gear."

Lin Que smiled and shook his head, putting his spare phone back into his pocket.

"I called Officer Li; he said he'd be here in ten minutes. Just let him register the license plate when he arrives."

Old Zhao nodded.

He looked at Lin Que.

There was something indescribable in his gaze.

"You kid..."

He hesitated, leaving the sentence unfinished.

The two walked one after the other toward the factory area.

Their footsteps crunched on the wet mud, deep and shallow.

From the second-floor window of Unit 3 in the distance, the sound of opera singing drifted out again.

Yi... ya...

The trailing note today was dragged out longer than yesterday, like a breath that this town street had held for a long time, finally releasing just a little.

...

The off-road vehicle bumped along the mountain road for nearly twenty minutes before finally emerging from the Qinling Tunnel entrance.

The heater in the car was turned to the maximum setting, and the man in black slapped his thigh.

He reclined his seat, lay on his back, and stared at the gray fabric of the car ceiling.

"Sigh, what bad luck."

He cursed.

The man in orange gripped the steering wheel, his face pale.

The car was much slower than when they had arrived, hitting the brakes at every turn.

"Brother Liang, what do you think that kid's background is?"

He asked, gritting his back teeth.

"Our account strategies, editing techniques, and even those old thumbnails—how did he see through them with just one glance?"

"Who cares what his background is."

The man in black said, turning over irritably.

"Either way, this trip was a waste. All the footage is deleted, we didn't earn a single cent, and we ended up spending eight or nine hundred on gas."

There was silence in the car for half a minute.

The man in orange suddenly remembered something.

A flash of something crossed his eyes.

"Brother Liang, this trip might not have been a waste."

He pulled his phone from his pocket, and the screen lit up.

The man in black looked over.

"What are you doing? Didn't we delete everything?"

The man in orange didn't speak.

His fingers swiped across the screen, tapping into an app.

Cloud Gallery.

The automatic backup feature was enabled by default.

Local deletion did not affect files that had already finished syncing to the cloud.

A video thumbnail lay quietly in the list.

The duration was eighteen seconds.

The content showed a teenager in a gray jacket standing sideways, blocking the lens, his lips moving as he said something.

Because it was the first few seconds of the automatic backup, the video was very short and incomplete.

But that face was captured very clearly.

The man in orange watched the road ahead while scanning the thumbnail.

The words the kid had said on the phone earlier flashed through his mind.

"Brother Liang, do you remember what he said his name was when he made that call?"

The man in black frowned:

"Qingbei School of Literature... Lin something, right? Lin Que?"

"Hmm? Why does that name sound so familiar?"

The man in orange immediately opened a search engine and typed "Tsinghua-Peking University Lin Que."

The moment he pressed the search button, dense entries flooded the screen!

[National Composition Champion]

[Tsinghua-Peking University School of Liberal Arts Recommended Student]

[Beihai Park Poetry Battle Crushing the Field]

...

The man in orange's breathing became heavy instantly, his eyes turning red.

"Brother Liang! Look!"

The man in black snatched the phone.

He scanned the titles on the screen, his pupils constricting violently.

His originally pale face slowly twisted, and the corners of his mouth slowly spread into a grin.

"It wasn't a waste, this time it really wasn't a waste."

The man in black gripped the phone tightly, his voice trembling with excitement.

He looked at the blurred Muchuan Town in the mist through the rearview mirror.

"Compared to a crappy town..."

"The downfall of a Tsinghua-Peking University genius—wouldn't that have so much more traffic!"