Chapter 617 — Qiu Lingshan's Suitors
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
And it was not that Qiu Lingshan lacked backbone — it was simply that her timing was rotten. She had barely taken up her post when one major case after another came crashing down around her. Back when Yang Huaijun had held the post of Criminal Investigation Unit chief, there had been criminal gangs too, but they were the usual sort: muscle for the underworld, bag-snatching crews, pickpocket rings. Those cases had been sizable enough, but the difficulty of cracking them was nothing compared to the tangled mess she faced now.
It just had to be Qiu Lingshan, a special forces veteran with a full arsenal of skills and nowhere to deploy them — how could she not be frustrated? When she had mustered out and come home, she had been brimming with ambition, dying to show what she could do!
That fantasy of hers — grappling with thugs, taking them down in a single clean move — had never materialized. In truth, such chances did exist; there were plenty of thugs, and no shortage of opportunities. But how many could one woman run into on her own? And even among thugs, how many were actually formidable?
How many thugs could possibly possess Yellow-rank strength? Qiu Lingshan was a mid-Yellow-rank fighter — even within the Song family, one of the four great houses, she ranked among the finest of the younger generation. For a thug to have Yellow-rank strength, he would have no need to be a thug at all; bodyguard work for some wealthy man would pay handsomely enough. Why risk robbery?
What a headache — why did these criminals keep rising up wave after wave? And why here, in Songshan City? Before the kidney-harvesting ring appeared, an underground organ market had indeed existed in Songshan, but since it was underground trade, a matter of negotiated prices between consenting parties, no one had reported it afterward. So long as these people did not go too far, Qiu Lingshan would not interfere — she couldn't have kept it in hand anyway.
But the current business of snatching people and cutting out their kidneys — that she could not ignore! Yet these people seemed to operate within a tightly knit organizational system, and uprooting them entirely would not be easy. Destroying even a single nest had already proven grueling work.
The crux of the problem was that these people had doctors and operating tables ready at hand; they did not need the formal medical system or clinics to perform surgery. Nor was the kidney sales operation local — at least, from what Qiu Lingshan had gathered, she had not found a single transplant patient who had bought a kidney from this gang.
Of course, kidneys bought on the black market did exist — but those went through shady brokers, with prices privately agreed upon with the sellers, and the transplant performed in a proper hospital. The brokers themselves took only a commission of ten or twenty thousand.
Several of those black brokers had been taken down, but they were all small fry, and did nothing to advance the case as a whole.
"Ring—" Qiu Lingshan's phone chose that moment to sound. Her ringtone was not one of those fancy melodies young men and women liked to set, but the plainest default tone — in keeping with her profession and her character: steady, unassuming.
"Hello, Qiu Lingshan of the Criminal Investigation Unit," she answered by habit, since the caller display showed an unfamiliar number and she had no directory on her phone.
"Lingshan?" A somewhat gruff male voice came over the line. "This is Chen Yuxuan!"
"Oh? Chen Yuxuan?" Qiu Lingshan paused a beat, and a frown flickered almost imperceptibly across her brow. "What is it?"
Hearing the coolness in her tone, Chen Yuxuan could only smile wryly. "Lingshan, I'm coming back to Songshan City tomorrow — I've got a assignment. Would you do me the honor of dinner together?"
"I'm busy with a case. I shouldn't have the time." Qiu Lingshan turned him down flat.
"Is that so..." Chen Yuxuan sighed. "Surely we could at least meet?"