Chapter Eighty-Six: The Purge Operation

At midnight, Ning Zhiheng, dressed in dark plain clothes, appeared near the apartment. He made a careful circuit of the area and, seeing neither Chen Yanqing nor Hou Cheng, knew they had left as instructed.

In truth, Ning Zhiheng had never trusted these peripheral men very deeply. Bringing them into this anti-traitor operation had been a matter of necessity.

His own manpower was indeed limited. The operational personnel of the Military Intelligence and Investigation Bureau could not be used; if he did so, the risks afterward would be immense. Should anyone betray him, he would have no way to explain his actions.

Thus, the only people he could call upon were these fringe associates. Compared with others, they were easier to control, because Ning Zhiheng was their greatest pillar of support.

He believed that even if Chen Yanqing and Hou Cheng had doubts about what he was doing, they would assume it was an operation by Military Intelligence and would never dare question it.

Besides, both men were shrewd. Even if they had the slightest suspicion of Ning Zhiheng, they had no reason to betray him, and to a certain degree, they were still reliable.

Ning Zhiheng glanced at his watch. It was now twelve-thirty. In this era, people had little in the way of night entertainment and usually went to bed before nine. By that reckoning, it should now be the deepest part of the night, when everyone slept most soundly.

Darkness blanketed everything, and silence held the surroundings in its grasp. Ning Zhiheng’s vision was extraordinary; he could see in the dark, and since he had already surveyed the place once during the day, he had a rough grasp of the terrain.

He crept silently to the back wall of the apartment, drew a pair of black gloves from his pocket, and put them on. Caution came first in all things.

The back wall was not high and was ideal for climbing. He approached the base of the wall with light steps, then sprang upward with force. His fingers caught the edge lightly, and with a single hand for leverage, his body light as a monkey’s, he vaulted over the wall and landed without a sound.

Inside the courtyard, all was quiet. The entire apartment was swallowed in darkness, with only the light in the first-floor living room still burning.

Ning Zhiheng moved softly to the window and peered inside. He saw a young man reclining diagonally on the living room sofa, eyes hazy, hovering between sleep and wakefulness.

This was one of the guards on duty. According to the report from Chen Yanqing and the others, there was another guard and Zhang Pei inside. They must have already fallen asleep.

Ning Zhiheng turned and circled the living room, coming beneath a window on the left side. He tried pushing it and found it locked tight.

These two guards were cautious indeed; before sleeping, they had locked all the windows in their rooms. Ning Zhiheng used the same trick again, drawing a dagger and slipping it into the window crack. His movements were minute, his probing meticulous. After quite a while, he finally lifted the latch and flipped himself inside.

Once within the apartment, he looked toward the living room and hesitated briefly. In the end, he decided to eliminate the guard there first.

After all, the man had not fully fallen asleep and still retained some alertness. If Ning Zhiheng made the slightest sound while dealing with Zhang Pei, he would surely wake and alarm the others.

He had to remove him first. The remaining two were already asleep, with almost no vigilance left, and would be much easier to handle.

Ning Zhiheng made his way into the living room step by step. He had deliberately changed into soft-soled cloth shoes, which made no sound at all, and he further restrained his own movement. Step by step he advanced, exceedingly careful, holding his breath so that not the slightest noise escaped.

As he closed in behind the guard, who was already half asleep, the man remained utterly unaware.

Ning Zhiheng did not hesitate. With one hand he suddenly exerted force, cinching the guard’s neck from behind, while the other supported the guard’s chin and jerked upward with strength. A dull crack came from the cervical vertebrae. The guard’s head snapped back, and with his neck broken, his body went limp.

Ning Zhiheng’s arm strength was immense. With both hands applying force, he could bend an iron pipe, let alone a human neck.

This was Ning Zhiheng’s first solitary operation tonight, and it was especially dangerous. He needed to finish his opponents as quickly as possible and eliminate any chance of an accident. To prevent complications, he had to strike with lightning speed.

So he had no intention of spending any energy on reading the guard’s memories.

After all, a guard of this rank would not know much, nor would he hold any great secrets. As for the details of the man’s life, Ning Zhiheng had no interest in them.

Before acting, he deliberately calmed his mind and controlled his consciousness so it would not enter the spiritual platform. As expected, with the growing strength of his mental power, his ability to control thought and awareness had become increasingly formidable. As long as his consciousness did not enter the spiritual platform before the guard died, and without the Bodhi tree’s aid, he would not be able to read the dead man’s memories.

He could now independently control and choose whether or not to read a corpse’s memories.

Ning Zhiheng kept one hand tightly around the guard’s throat and watched for a moment longer. Once he was certain the man had no breath left, he slowly released his grip.

He carefully studied the layout of the apartment, then began searching the first floor. There were four rooms downstairs, and he examined them one by one, listening intently.

Ever since his physique had been enhanced by the green leaves of the Bodhi tree, his senses had improved greatly, and his hearing had become extremely acute.

He searched every room. At each doorway, he listened closely, but heard no sound of breathing from anyone sleeping inside.

It seemed the first floor was empty. He then began searching upstairs. At a room directly across from the stair landing, he stopped and listened carefully for quite a while. Sure enough, he heard the faint sound of snoring within.

He slowly pushed the door open and saw, in the darkness, a person lying asleep in bed. He stepped forward softly and took a careful look. It was not Zhang Pei, but the other guard. In truth, it no longer mattered whether it was or not; no one in this apartment would be left alive tonight.

He moved closer, then struck suddenly, wrapping both hands around the man’s throat and twisting hard. There was another crisp snap of bone. The man gave no sound, and his breathing ceased.

Ning Zhiheng withdrew from the room with equal caution and searched the adjacent room. He quickly found his target in the second room beside it.

He approached carefully, came to the bedside, and looked at the sleeping man on the bed. There was no mistake. This was Zhang Pei.

Having confirmed the target, he did not hesitate in the slightest. With both hands, he quickly strangled Zhang Pei’s neck. Zhang Pei woke in shock, but before he could react, Ning Zhiheng had already crushed his cervical vertebrae in the killing grip. His breathing weakened at an alarming rate, his pupils slowly dilated, and his consciousness drifted away.

In an instant, Ning Zhiheng sent his own consciousness into the spiritual platform, where he appeared beneath the Bodhi tree and reached out to touch the cluster of memory light before him.

Once again, scenes of memory unfolded.

In the first, the young Zhang Pei wore a laborer’s clothes and stood in a spacious factory hall, giving a passionate, ringing speech to a crowd of workers.

In the second, a much more haggard middle-aged Zhang Pei had just finished a lesson for children in a rural classroom. The moment he stepped outside, several agents swarmed him and slammed him to the ground.

In the third, within a dim prison cell, Zhang Pei was bound to a wooden frame, covered in wounds, suffering brutal torture. Agony that seemed to tear the soul apart filled every inch of his body. Ma Hong’s ferocious face appeared before him as he roared threats.

In the fourth, a door was gently opened. A man wearing a thick scarf entered, then turned and removed the scarf from his face. He looked quietly at Zhang Pei, and it was unmistakably Lu Ming.

“Old Lu! It’s really you! It really is you?” Zhang Pei cried with excitement, rushing forward to seize Lu Ming’s hands tightly.

“Old Zhang, so many years apart! You’ve been well, I hope.” Lu Ming also extended both hands and gripped Zhang Pei’s in return.

In the fifth, inside a bright office, a middle-aged man with a long face slapped a document bag down in front of Zhang Pei and said sternly, “This is your last chance. Starting tomorrow, you will not appear at any unit of the Party Affairs Investigation Bureau. I’ll arrange a safe house for you outside. In three days, memorize this man’s dossier, then get close to him, win his trust, and infiltrate the underground party again. I’m waiting for your good news!”

The images quickly flickered away and turned into specks of starlight that merged into the Bodhi tree. Ning Zhiheng did not delay; his consciousness swiftly withdrew from the spiritual platform.

He slowly loosened his hands, and Zhang Pei’s head drooped lifelessly as his body collapsed onto the bed.

The operation to eliminate the traitor had been completed smoothly. He had infiltrated in the dead of night, caught them off guard, used neither guns nor tools, and with bare hands silently killed Zhang Pei and the two guards. The entire process had gone even more smoothly than Ning Zhiheng had expected.

Still, he did not relax. He searched the remaining rooms on the second floor once more. Finding no one else, he finally confirmed that the whole apartment had been cleared.

Only then did Ning Zhiheng allow himself to relax, and he took the time to review the memory scenes from Zhang Pei once more.