224: Chapter 224 This is a city

Jiang Wanting was intercepted on the periphery of the seventh sensory defense line.

Viewed from the outside, that area was simply a piece of wasteland, with waist-high weeds, uneven ground, and gravel mixed with floating soil.

She was wearing a pair of slender-heeled sandals, her trouser legs were splattered with mud, her left forearm had several cuts from bushes, and the oozing blood droplets mixed with sweat, smudging into strips of dark red marks.

Most of her hair was loose, the ponytail she had originally tied up only had a single hair tie hanging loosely at the end, and the stray hairs in front of her forehead were stuck to her face by sweat.

Jiang Wanting had no idea where she was, nor did she even know how long she had been walking.

The man in the jacket had given her a rough direction and a hand-drawn sketch with crude markings; following the route on the map, she got off at the nearest highway and walked on the dirt road for nearly ten hours.

The soles of her shoes had long since worn through, the blisters on her heels burst over and over again, and every step felt like stepping on broken glass.

But every time she was on the verge of collapsing, Su Mingyuan's face would pop into her mind.

She hated Su Mingyuan for disappearing so completely.

His phone was disconnected, his account deregistered, and the house in his hometown was empty and abandoned.

"Fine, you hid yourself well enough. Did you know long ago that I'd come looking for you and run off ahead of time?"

"Su Mingyuan, what right do you have to just leave like that!"

"How could you do this to me!"

The more she thought about it, the more strength she had in her legs.

Back then, looking for Zhou Kaiwen was because Su Mingyuan couldn't make money; owing those debts was because he couldn't give her the life she wanted; going to the KTV to accompany drinks and getting poured to the point of losing consciousness, tracing it back to the root, was still because of him.

She had calculated this ledger countless times, and every time she calculated it, her hatred for Su Mingyuan drove an inch deeper into her heart.

The pain from the soles of her feet surged upward in waves, and she clenched her back teeth and stood up again.

If not for this hatred supporting her, she would never have been able to walk here.

Finally, in an empty lot that showed no signs of abnormality, ten armed soldiers emerged from a direction she couldn't see, their muzzle points uniformly aimed at her, shouting a few words in terminology she couldn't understand.

She stood in place and didn't dare move.

Her legs were shaking, but not entirely because of fear—having walked for too long, her knees had long since begun to go soft.

After being brought into the nearest sentry post, a young security officer sat down opposite her, with a form placed on the table.

"Name."

"Jiang Wanting."

"What are you here for."

"Looking for Su Mingyuan."

The security officer's pen paused for a moment.

"I am his girlfriend," Jiang Wanting added.

The moment the three words "girlfriend" were spoken, something in the air changed.

The security officer was stunned at first, and then, as if reacting to something, straightened his back abruptly.

The sloppy, nonchalant air of leaning back in the chair vanished completely, and even the way he looked at her was different—turning from sizing up into scrutiny, and from scrutiny into a certain cautiousness.

"This lady, please wait a moment."

The word "you" was articulated very clearly; previously when asking her name and purpose, he had still used "you".

The security officer got up and went out, gently closing the door behind him.

Jiang Wanting sat alone in that very small interrogation room.

An iron table, a hard wooden bench, and an incandescent lamp overhead.

The walls were gray cement surfaces, and in a few places, you could still see the mold marks left from pouring.

The air conditioner wasn't turned on, but the room was much cooler than outside; the scratches on her arms suddenly cooled down from their hot state, and instead hurt even more, burning and stinging as if throbbing outward in lines.

She looked down at her sole-worn-through sandals, her toes still stained with dried mud.

I walked ten hours just to reach this place—Su Mingyuan, you'd better be right here!

About ten minutes later, a different batch of people came in.

A man in his thirties had a different identification number on his uniform than the previous one, and his shoulder insignia was also different.

He came in and first glanced at Jiang Wanting without speaking, flipped through the form on the table, and then picked up the phone at the corner of the table and dialed out.

She couldn't hear clearly what was said on the phone, only faintly catching the last sentence: "...Yes, she claims to be Group Leader Su's... girlfriend... Right, I'm not sure either, let's report it."

Hanging up the phone, the man looked at her, his tone much more polite than the previous young man: "Sorry, we need to temporarily hold onto your cell phone."

Jiang Wanting hesitated for a moment, took her phone out of her pants pocket, and placed it on the table.

"Do you have any other personal belongings on you?"

Jiang Wanting shook her head.

The cell phone was put into a transparent plastic bag and labeled. Before taking it away, the man nodded at her: "It will be registered properly, and it won't be lost."

Then came a full-body security check.

It wasn't the kind of airport security check where they wave a scanner around a couple of times, but the process was obviously accommodating her.

Two female security officers brought her into a separate room, handing her a cup of water before entering the door.

One of the slightly older ones spoke: "Routine check, we apologize for any grievance, please cooperate." After speaking, she took out a folded set of gray clothes and trousers, "Please change into these; your clothes will be returned to you after the inspection."

Every piece of clothing she took off was turned inside out and checked, the soles of her shoes were pried open, the inner layers of her bag were cut open, and even the underwires in her bra were taken out and scanned with an instrument.

The technique was very professional, and the speed was also very fast.

Then she was brought to a piece of equipment she had never seen before.

The slightly older security officer said to her in advance: "Just stand on it, it doesn't hurt, it's a matter of a few seconds."

That thing emitted a low hum, and a green light band swept from the top of her head to the soles of her feet, back and forth twice.

After all the checks were done, there was nothing on her body.

Spotless.

The whole process took nearly forty minutes.

Afterward, someone brought her a clean jacket to drape over her shoulders and poured another cup of hot water, placing it at the corner of the table.

No one explained where she was going next, but at least no one was pointing a gun at her anymore.

After coming out, she was led onto a dark green vehicle.

The car door was much heavier than she expected; when the security officer pulled it open with one hand, the muscles on his arm visibly tightened.

The car body was very thick, and the window glass had a dark tint; you could see outside from the inside, but the outside couldn't see inside.

The seats were hard, not the soft leather sofas of business vans, but the car drove extremely smoothly. The terrible roads outside reduced to only a slight vibration inside the car, as if there was none at all.

After the car drove out of the security sentry post's range, Jiang Wanting glanced out the car window.

Her first reaction was that she had gotten the place wrong.

This wasn't the "base" she had imagined.

The base in her mind was probably just an open space fenced in by walls, a few buildings, a group of people in camouflage uniforms, at most plus a gate and a national flag. That's how it was always portrayed in television dramas.

But what was outside the car window had nothing to do with those at all.

Complexes of buildings spread out as far as the eye could see, with no end in sight.

The distance between the buildings was very wide, the main thoroughfare was visually estimated to have eight lanes, and the road surface was as smooth as newly laid.

There were street lamps on both sides, green belts, and signposts. She didn't have time to see the words on the signposts clearly, but the zone numbers changed all the way from "D-7" to "D-12", and then to "E-1".

This was a city.

It was no exaggeration; this truly was a city.