179: Chapter 179 We've been kidnapped by pirates!

Lin Fan gripped his crossbow and took two steps in that direction.

The first thing the man moved was his legs.

His knees bent slightly, and upon finding his ankles bound, he kicked hard a couple of times, but failed to break free.

Then he raised his head, meeting Lin Fan's gaze.

And then meeting the tip of the crossbow bolt.

The man's expression shifted rapidly.

Confusion, fear, and then the calmness stamped down by some form of training.

His lips moved twice, and the first sentence he spat out was:

"Young Master Yang!"

Then he turned his head, desperately looking in another direction.

"Young Master Yang! There are pirates! We've been hijacked by pirates!"

The man had a loud voice, and this shout felt particularly abrupt on the devastated beach.

Lin Fan didn't move. His finger rested beside the crossbow's trigger, the metal bolt steadily pointing right between the man's eyebrows.

"Shut up."

Pointed at by the arrow tip, the man swallowed hard.

By this time, he could clearly see Lin Fan's attire; he was nothing like the Somali pirates wearing thick gold chains and brandishing AK-47s firing wildly in his imagination.

Lin Fan was wearing a semi-new jacket, his trouser legs were covered in thick mud, and his boots were so dirty their original color was unrecognizable.

But the cold gleam emanating from the crossbow in Lin Fan's hand, along with those eyes that looked at him as if he were already a dead man, forced him to swallow the rest of his words back down.

This roar failed to wake the Young Master Yang he kept shouting for, but it instead startled awake several bound people nearby.

Two meters away, a muscular Short-haired Bodyguard abruptly opened his eyes, professional instinct making him want to flip over and leap up.

The sharp pain from his wrists and the tug of the dead knot caused him to directly lose his balance, heavily crashing down into the mud.

He let out a muffled grunt and turned his head to look at his hands.

The tightly bound knot behind his back was tied extremely professionally; the more he struggled, the tighter it got, leaving zero leeway.

Then came the third, and the fourth.

A total of four bodyguard-looking individuals successively regained consciousness from their fainting spells.

Their reactions were strikingly identical: first struggling with all their might, then quickly observing their surroundings after finding it futile, and finally, their gazes all landing on Lin Fan.

Behind a sand dune not far away, the slightly younger male corpse still had his eyes tightly closed.

This man wore a meticulously tailored waterproof mountaineering jacket made of high-end fabric, obviously belonging to a completely different social class from these uniformed bodyguards.

The four bodyguards exchanged glances, their long-standing tacit understanding allowing them to quickly assess their situation.

The man who woke up first took a deep breath, forcefully suppressing his panic as he stared at Lin Fan.

"Brother, are you after money?" He tentatively spoke up, lowering his posture significantly. "We are people from the Yang Group. Whatever you want, we can negotiate. Just don't harm Young Master Yang."

Lin Fan didn't reply, prompting the man to immediately change his tune, "B-Big Brother... Name your price, whatever you want is negotiable."

Lin Fan's gaze swept over the muscle lines of these few men and the calluses on the web of their thumbs.

These people had decent physical fitness; being able to survive the apocalyptic tsunami earlier relied on more than just luck.

If he hadn't tied them up tightly earlier, he would most likely have suffered a huge loss right now.

At this moment, movement came from the broken cabin gap.

Liu Feifei dragged a military-green waterproof box out from the wreckage, muttering curses under her breath.

"Is this box filled with lead or something, why is it so heavy! Song Ya, put some effort into it, my fingernails are splitting!"

Liu Feifei wiped the muddy water from her face, her hair plastered limply against her temples.

She trudged unsteadily through the sand, climbing up the slope looking utterly disheveled.

Hearing the sound, the four bodyguards turned their heads in unison.

The distance wasn't far, and although Liu Feifei's face was half-smudged with muddy water, her bone structure and contours were still visible.

As a top-tier young actress watched by audiences nationwide for years, the recognition of this face was simply too high to hide.

The man who spoke first froze, staring straight at Liu Feifei.

"Wait..." he muttered under his breath, even suspecting that his brain had flooded and hallucinated just now, "That woman..."

The Short-haired Bodyguard squinted over, unable to stop himself from drawing a sharp breath.

"Isn't this fucking Liu Feifei?"

"Which Liu Feifei?"

"Who else could it be! The big star Liu Feifei from that Shengtang Group cruise ship that met with an accident on the high seas two months ago!"

The Short-haired Bodyguard lowered his voice, his tone filled with shock, "No wonder not even a bone was fished up after two months. Turns out the cruise ship was hijacked by pirates!"

The way these people looked at Lin Fan changed.

Previously they thought it was ordinary extortion for money, but now the nature of the situation was completely different.

That Shengtang ship was full of dignitaries; even a top-tier female celebrity had been captured by this gang of pirates to do hard labor and act as a wife.

They had fallen straight into the den of an international criminal organization.

Watching Liu Feifei panting heavily from dragging the box, the man imagined an extremely tragic drama.

The once high-and-mighty top-tier female star had now fallen to doing hard labor for the pirates by day and warming their beds by night.

"Liu Feifei is here..." The Short-haired Bodyguard swallowed a mouthful of saliva, "Then what about the one from the Su Family?"

"Su Qingxue?"

"Yeah, wasn't Su Qingxue, the female CEO of Shengtang Group, also on this ship?"

Several people began whispering among themselves.

With their hands and feet bound and their lives gripped in someone else's hands, it instead stirred up their desire to probe into this heaven-shaking piece of gossip.

"Su Qingxue is probably done for," the man with the scratch on his face shook his head. "You guys know how arrogant that woman's temper is. In a pirate den like this, women with stubborn tempers die the fastest. Look at how Liu Feifei has been tortured."

"True. With Su Qingxue's looks, what good outcome could she have falling into this gang's hands? Chances are she refused to submit, got played to death, and was thrown into the sea to feed the fish."

"How tragic. Tens of billions in net worth, just gone like that. Falling into their hands today, our odds are grim too."

Standing nearby, Lin Fan listened to these bodyguards fabricating a plot all on their own.

He lowered the crossbow slightly.

These people had quite active brains, and they provided a very crucial piece of information: the Yang Group.

Lin Fan didn't know how many Yang Groups there were domestically, but anyone who could afford this level of bodyguards and head out to sea with professional military supplies was definitely from a wealthy and powerful family. That Young Master Yang's identity was no small matter.

Lin Fan glanced toward Young Master Yang, who had been lying motionless beside them all along.

With these bodyguards shouting loudly just now, a normal person, even if unconscious, should have reacted to such a commotion right beside their ears.

Yet this person's breathing rhythm was shockingly steady.

Moreover, right when the Short-haired Bodyguard mentioned that "Su Qingxue was probably played to death," Young Master Yang's finger resting in the muddy water twitched slightly.

His eyelids didn't lift, but his eyeballs rolled beneath his eyelids.

This bastard had been awake for a while.

Lin Fan didn't expose him; he wanted to see just how long this Young Master Yang could keep up the act.