Chapter 212 — Ghosts Knocking at the Window at Midnight

"Wha—?!" Gu Mengyao was stunned. She had never imagined that in the few seconds it took her to answer the phone and speak, Shen Yushu could have tipped off Wei Zhao first... That little sneak! So the whole scene from before had been a performance the two of them put on together? At the thought, Gu Mengyao glared furiously at Shen Yushu. "Xiaoshu!"

"Oh... I've already confessed my mistake, so don't be angry, Yaoyao!" Startled, Shen Yushu bolted into her room.

Gu Mengyao was caught between laughter and tears, but she said nothing more. In truth, this outcome was already quite perfect, wasn't it? They really had gone a bit too far with today's games...

……………………

That night, Zhong Yongliang sat upstairs in the second-floor room of his own villa, staring intently at a horror film playing on his computer. As it happened, Zhong Yongliang was actually a very timid person. He had still wet the bed at eight, still been too scared to sleep alone at ten, and at twelve still dared not go out by himself after dark...

That hardly fit the domineering image he had always cultivated at school, so Zhong Yongliang had hit upon a brilliant trick: whenever the night grew still and silent, he would shut himself alone in his room and watch horror films...

At first he had been scared witless, but by now he had slowly trained up a bit of courage—at the very least, he dared sleep on his own and walk outside at night.

Even so, when watching horror films Zhong Yongliang was still somewhat afraid, and dared not turn off the lights. He had to have the room blazing bright before he could manage... Tonight's film was about a child living alone in a villa who, every midnight, heard knocking at the window.

Why did it have to be so scary? Zhong Yongliang shivered... His parents were both away tonight. Surely nothing would knock on his own window, would it?

Just as Zhong Yongliang was watching the film with total concentration, a dark figure suddenly leapt up onto the ledge outside his window...

"Knock, knock, knock... knock, knock, knock..." Several taps against the glass...

"Aah—" Zhong Yongliang let out a miserable shriek and promptly wet himself... collapsing onto the floor on his backside. "Who is it? Who? Who's there?"

"Knock, knock, knock... knock, knock, knock..." More taps against the glass...

Zhong Yongliang was frightened, but he forced himself to look toward the window... Surely he couldn't be that unlucky? He watched one movie, and it summoned something that shouldn't be summoned?

"Huh?" When Zhong Yongliang made out the face outside the window, he breathed a sigh of relief—and then felt a little puzzled. What was *he* doing here? Forgetting the foul stench of his trousers, Zhong Yongliang hurried to the windowsill and pulled the window open. "Brother Black Panther, what are you doing here?"

The visitor was none other than Brother Black Panther, who had escaped from the police car that very day. Under cover of darkness, he had crept to Zhong Yongliang's room to get himself a little getaway money and to discuss plans for revenge.

"Young Master Zhong, on the way to the detention center today, I put a few of them down and broke out of the police car!" Black Panther vaulted into the room, his agility so startling that Zhong Yongliang clicked his tongue in amazement.

"Brother Black Panther... how did you get up here?" Zhong Yongliang knew the structure of his own villa well enough. The outside was covered in smooth mosaic tile, without a single crack to set foot on—climbing up was absolutely impossible, and leaping up even more so! It was nearly ten meters high. That was no joke.

"I jumped up," Black Panther said flatly. "Young Master Zhong, I am no longer the Black Panther I once was. I now possess the strength of the peak of the late Yellow Rank!"

"Peak of the late Yellow Rank? What kind of strength is that?" Zhong Yongliang was not very clear on the martial world's ranking of strength.

"It means I'm a bit stronger than your average special forces soldier!" Black Panther said. "That little Miss Song on the team is only at the middle Yellow Rank!"

"Oh, oh..." Zhong Yongliang was utterly lost in the fog. "Brother Black Panther, how did you suddenly become so strong?"

Before, when Brother Black Panther had been beaten black and blue by Wei Zhao, he had seemed rather weak. But now, by his own account, even Qiu Lingshan of the team was no match for him—and judging by the agility he had just displayed, he did not seem to be lying.

His strength must have suddenly shot up, then. If only he had been this formidable back when he fought Wei Zhao, Zhong Yongliang thought with some regret.

"Hmph. In my younger days, I was once taken into a mysterious martial sect. The sect possessed a most formidable martial arts manual, one chapter of which involved burning away one's own lifespan to elevate one's strength to its utmost limit!" Black Panther made no attempt to hide it. "But because I broke the sect's rules, I was expelled. When I left, I copied out that chapter on rapidly boosting one's own strength..."

Zhong Yongliang heard this and could make neither head nor tail of it, but he nodded all the same. He was no fool: "Then this so-called method of rapidly boosting one's strength—it has its flaws, doesn't it?"

"It does. Not just flaws—enormous ones. First, it costs you five years of your lifespan! Second, the strength you gain this way lasts only about a month; after that you become an ordinary person again, and your principal meridians are damaged besides—you can never practice martial arts again for the rest of your life!" Panther said. "But weighed against the punishment I'm facing, that sacrifice is worth it!"

The reason Panther had to flee was that he knew full well the trouble he had landed himself in this time was no small matter! Illegal possession of firearms, picking quarrels and provoking trouble, intentional injury—and on top of that, there were prior offenses on file at the police station from before all this, dragged out into the light along with the rest. He reckoned that with the combined punishment for his several crimes, he faced at least ten years or more behind bars. Panther simply could not afford to wait, and so he had resorted to desperate measures!

Ten years in prison—for a man as addicted to comfort and pleasure as Panther, he would sooner be dead! There were two things he meant to do after escaping. One was to find Wei Zhao and settle the score! That bastard had not only landed him in the lockup, but half his face still had not healed, and the wound where the gun had blown his hand open still throbbed with pain—this was nothing short of the greatest humiliation Panther had suffered since he first came up in the world!

"Oh... Brother Panther, so you came here to..." Zhong Yongliang asked cautiously. After all, Brother Panther's going to prison had everything to do with him; if he had not summoned him, he would never have come to this. So Zhong Yongliang was very careful, afraid that Brother Panther might vent his anger on him.