9: Chapter 9 The Knocking of an Old Friend

Before trouble could find Chen Feng, it knocked on Old Tom's door first.

At 10:11 AM on Tuesday, three black-and-white patrol cars pulled up in front of Old Tom's clinic.

Sarah Mitchell stepped out of the first car, her blonde ponytail tied tight. A gun was holstered at her waist, and she held a thrice-folded paper. Two uniformed officers followed her—one carrying an empty evidence box, the other with a hand on the radio at his waist.

There were five patients in the waiting area; when they saw the police enter, they all stood up in unison. A woman holding a child slipped out the back door immediately.

Sarah ignored them and walked straight to the inner room, pushing open the door to the consultation room.

Old Tom was sitting at his desk writing a prescription. When he looked up and saw her, the tip of his pen paused on the paper.

"Uncle Tom." Sarah unfolded the paper and placed it on the desk. "A search warrant, signed by the Chief of the South District Precinct. Suspected storage and distribution of drug products not approved by the FDA."

Old Tom glanced down at the official seal on the warrant and capped his pen.

"Couldn't you have called before coming?"

"It wouldn't be a surprise inspection if we called." Sarah tilted her head toward the medicine cabinet. "Cooperate, Uncle Tom. The faster, the better."

Old Tom didn't move.

Sarah nodded to the officers behind her. They opened the medicine cabinet and searched through it layer by layer. Painkillers, betadine, sterile cotton—all normal. When they reached the third shelf, one officer pulled out a small foam-padded box and opened it to reveal fourteen test tubes neatly lined up inside.

A pale green liquid. No labels, no batch numbers, no ingredient descriptions.

Not even a sticker on the bottles.

Sarah picked one up and rotated it in the light coming through the window. The liquid sloshed slightly in the tube, its color somewhere between emerald and mint, incredibly transparent.

"Uncle Tom." She put the tube back in the box. "What is this?"

"A secret herbal remedy. I formulated it myself."

Sarah didn't smile, but the corner of her mouth twitched.

"You've practiced medicine for thirty-two years. Tell me, what kind of herbal remedy comes in sterile test tubes?"

Old Tom fell silent.

Sarah sat down across from him, her hands clasped on the desk.

"Let me make the situation clear to you. These fourteen items have no FDA registration number, no GMP production certification, and no legal documentation whatsoever. Using them to treat patients—regardless of whether they work—constitutes 'use of unapproved drugs in illegal medical practice' under the U Federation legal framework."

Old Tom leaned back in his chair, staring at the desk.

"If even one patient has an adverse reaction, or if their family comes back to sue you, this charge starts at a minimum of five years." Sarah paused for two seconds. "If manufacturing and sales are involved, it's ten years or more."

Outside the consultation room, the last two patients in the waiting area also left. The radio in the patrol car at the door crackled.

Old Tom took off his reading glasses and wiped the lenses with the sleeve of his white coat.

"Sarah."

"Yes."

"You're a good kid. Your father always said when he was alive that you'd end up in law enforcement."

"Uncle Tom, don't change the subject."

"I'm not." Old Tom put his glasses back on. "You're asking where this medicine came from. I'll tell you—I don't know. Someone sold it to me, I thought it worked well, so I bought it."

"Who sold it to you?"

"I don't remember."

Sarah looked at him.

Old Tom looked back at her.

The two were silent for about eight seconds. Outside, the officer had sealed the evidence box and was applying the tamper-evident tape.

"Uncle Tom," Sarah said, her tone shifting away from that of a police officer, "have you been in touch with Chen Feng?"

Old Tom's eyelid flickered.

Just once.

"Which Chen Feng?"

"You know exactly which one."

Old Tom looked down at his hands; age spots mottled the skin, and veins protruded.

"Sarah, go ask him yourself."

Sarah stood up and pushed the chair back to its original position.

"Uncle Tom, if you speak now, it's cooperating with the investigation. By the time I come back with the lab report, the nature of this will be different."

—

On the way back to the precinct, Sarah drove while an officer sat in the passenger seat, the evidence box in the back.

The officer flipped through his notebook. "Boss, the tip came from United Shield Health Insurance. They said emergency room visits at community hospitals in the South District dropped by twenty-three percent over the last two weeks, and they suspect someone is distributing illegal drugs through underground channels. They provided three clinic names; White Clinic was first on the list."

Sarah stared at the red light ahead.

"Have the other two been checked?"

"Ruan Wenhui's Vietnamese Clinic and Okafor's Community Medical Center. They're scheduled for tomorrow."

"Don't move on those two yet."

"Why?"

"Wait for the lab results. Without hard evidence, it'll be hard to get a second warrant approved. The Chief only signed the first one as a favor to United Shield."

The light turned green. The car started and drove toward the South District Precinct.

The officer didn't say anything else.

Sarah's mind was on something else.

Chen Feng.

She first met Chen Feng five years ago. At that time, she had just graduated from the police academy and was a patrol officer at the South District Precinct. Her sister, Amy Mitchell, was still in high school, and her math was a complete disaster—not just bad, but the kind of bad where she got a D for three consecutive semesters. Her mother was desperate and looked everywhere for a tutor, eventually finding a small ad posted by a Chinese college student on the community bulletin board: twenty dollars an hour for home tutoring.

That college student was Chen Feng.

Back then, Chen Feng didn't talk much. He carried a backpack and arrived at her house promptly every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon to teach Amy math for two hours. His way of explaining problems was completely different from the school teachers—he didn't memorize formulas or drill through endless problems; he used analogies from everyday life, like "Imagine an equation as a scale" or "Probability is the chance of you picking up expired milk at the supermarket."

Amy was a restless girl, but Chen Feng had a knack for making her sit quietly and listen for forty minutes without touching her phone.

Over the course of a semester, Amy's math grade went from a D to an A.

An A.

Her mother nearly adopted Chen Feng as a son back then. Every time he came for a lesson, there were always freshly baked cookies and a cup of hot chocolate on the table. When he left, she would insist on stuffing a box of fruit into his hands to take back.

During that time, Sarah often ran into Chen Feng at home. Sometimes when she returned from an early shift, Chen Feng would be sitting on the living room sofa teaching Amy functions. Sunlight would stream in through the gaps in the curtains, and his profile looked so peaceful.

She remembered one time she came home after work covered in sweat, and a button on her uniform collar had fallen off. Chen Feng glanced at her, pulled a sewing kit out of his backpack—he actually had a sewing kit in there—and sewed the button back on for her.

The stitching was a bit crooked, but it was certainly secure.

Later, something happened to Chen Feng's parents. She didn't look into the details, only knowing their family company was failing. Chen Feng stopped tutoring, and they gradually lost contact. She was later promoted to Sergeant and became incredibly busy; with South District cases piling up—gangs, drugs, shootings—she had no time to keep track of a former tutor's whereabouts.

Then came the recent incident with the Iron Fist Gang causing trouble at Tom's clinic. When she arrived with her team, Chen Feng was standing in the middle of the room, with six members of the Iron Fist Gang collapsed on the floor around him. Standing beside him was a massive man nearly two meters tall.

Her first thought wasn't "What happened?" but rather—this person is different from five years ago.

The Chen Feng of five years ago would sew a button for her.

The current Chen Feng had six gang thugs down in front of him, and he didn't have a single drop of sweat on his face.

Sarah parked the car in the precinct parking lot and turned off the engine.

She grabbed the evidence box from the back seat, walked into the building, and went to the Forensic Identification Laboratory.

"Full component analysis." She placed the evidence box on the intake counter. "As soon as possible."

The technician on duty flipped open the seal and took a look. "Liquid samples? What level of detail do you need?"

"As detailed as you can get. Molecular structure, active ingredients, toxicological screening—the works."

"Forty-eight hours at the earliest."

"Fine. Send the results directly to my email, but don't put them through the internal system."

The technician gave her a look and nodded.

After signing the intake form, Sarah returned to her office and closed the door.

Forty-eight hours.

She didn't know where this case would lead after those forty-eight hours.

But one thing she was certain of—if those fourteen tubes of green liquid were truly as miraculous as the rumors suggested, there was no way they were cooked up by a small company on the brink of bankruptcy in a dilapidated three-story building.

Unless the owner of that company was far more complex than she had imagined.

—

When the news reached Chen Feng's ears, it was 1:40 PM that afternoon.

The source wasn't Old Tom—his phone wasn't going through, meaning it had either been confiscated or he was cooperating with a statement.

It was Ricardo's people.

The Iron Fist Gang's information network in the South District was faster than the police. The news of Old Tom's clinic being searched spread through the underground circles within an hour. A lackey from the Iron Fist Gang came to the door and shoved the news through the gap in the door of Maple Leaf Bio's first floor—a cigarette box paper with a line scribbled in pencil: "Clinic busted, green medicine seized, cops took over a dozen tubes."

When Chen Feng saw the note, he was holding a tube of sample he had just taken out of the centrifuge.

He placed the note on the table and was silent for ten seconds.

Tony was standing nearby and had already seen the content of the note; his face was as white as the laboratory walls.

"Boss—"

"Move all finished ruisu products that haven't been shipped to the basement."

Chen Feng's tone was flat, as if he were reading a grocery list.

"Encrypt all experimental records and save them to my personal offline hard drive. Leave only routine R&D materials on the desks—strain culture records, equipment maintenance logs, and the like. Not a single piece of paper involving the ruisu formula, extraction process, pricing, or shipping can be left out in the open."

"Boss, are the police coming?" Tony's voice was trembling.

"It's not that they might come; they definitely will."

Tony swallowed hard.

"But not today." Chen Feng placed the test tube in his hand into a rack. "Sarah does things by the book. She got samples from Old Tom, so the next step will definitely be sending them for testing. Without a component analysis report, she has no grounds to apply for a search warrant for Maple Leaf Bio—Uncle Tom won't give me up, so all she has now is suspicion, not hard evidence."

"Then... how long will the testing take?"

"With the equipment at the Los Angeles Forensic Identification Laboratory, using LC-MS for a routine component analysis: forty-eight hours."

Chen Feng counted the time on his fingers.

"It's Tuesday afternoon. The results will be out Thursday at the earliest. She gets the report Thursday, applies for a warrant Friday, and will be at our door by Friday afternoon or next Monday at the latest. We have a window of about two to three days."

Tony stood frozen, his mouth hanging open.

"What are you standing there for? Move."

"Oh—oh!" Tony snapped out of it and turned to move the ruisu from the refrigerated cabinet.

Chen Feng walked to the window and looked down. Big Black was lying on the steps below, ears pricked, sniffing the air toward the street.

Marcus walked up from the stairs, clearly having received the news as well. He didn't ask Chen Feng if anything needed to be done; he just stood at the door, waiting for orders.

"Marcus."

"Boss."

"There's a hidden compartment under the floor on the second level of the lab. It was left by the previous owner—my father. Help Tony hide the items in there. If the refrigerator is too heavy to move, pack the finished products in ice packs and stack them inside."

Marcus nodded without a word and walked over, lifting the refrigerator liner that Tony couldn't budge with one hand.

Chen Feng leaned against the window frame, his fingers tapping twice on his knee.

Forty-eight hours.

What would Sarah see once the lab results came out?

The active ingredient of ruisu was an alkaloid derivative of Streptomyces Obscura, processed through a unique three-step extraction and low-temperature pre-activation from the system blueprint. There was no record of such a component in any of the Blue Star's existing drug databases.

In other words, the lab report would show that this was a new type of bioactive substance that had never been documented.

It wasn't a fake drug.

It wasn't an imitation of a known drug.

It was something entirely new, something that had never appeared before.

Once that conclusion was on the report, the matter would be beyond what the South District Precinct could handle.

The FDA would intervene.

Perhaps even those higher up would catch the scent.

Chen Feng closed his eyes for a moment.

Things were getting dangerous.