“What do you mean, something odd?” asked Mu Yu anxiously.

“Ru Bing is—”

Rong Jian was interrupted when the door was pushed open as Rong Ying walked in. Mu Yu knew she came to look for Feng Qiqi as she explained hurriedly, “Ying, Qiqi had gone back already.”

Earlier, Qin Jinhuan had sent Cheng Xiang to follow Feng Qiqi back, so Mu Yu wasn’t worried about her safety.

“Yu, I know that, but I’m not here to look for Qiqi,” said Rong Ying faintly while she handed a bag to Rong Jian. “The canteen is already closed, so I’ve ordered some noodles for you. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Chief Rong, you haven’t eaten!?” Mu Yu was surprised because it was almost 11.00PM.

“I didn’t have time to eat because I was rushing back. But I did eat some biscuits on the way, so I’m not that hungry.”

Rong Ying looked irritated when she saw Rong Jian refusing to accept the bag, saying that he was not hungry. She slammed the bag heavily on the table and glared coldly at Rong Jian. “I don’t care if you eat, since skipping a few meals isn’t going to starve you to death. But I warn you—don’t you dare call me if you have gastric problems in the middle of the night!”

Rong Jian sighed guiltily. “Ying, I’m sorry, but I really don’t have the appetite nor the desire to eat anything.”

Mu Yu chimed in, “Chief Rong, you should eat a little for the sake of Ying’s kindness! Besides, you still have many things waiting for you to do—how would you be able to do anything if you really get gastric problems from this?”

Rong Ying, however, did not have Mu Yu’s patience. When she realized Rong Jian didn’t intend to move, she pretended to take the bag away. “Are you going to eat it or not? If you’re not going to, then I might as well feed it to the dogs!”

“I’ll eat it,” Rong Jian said as he walked to the table. He untied the bag and picked up the chopsticks before eating the noodles out of the thermos.

“Just put the thermos at the nurse’s station once you’re done, and also take a good rest after you eat. Don’t forget you’re only human, not Superman!” Rong Ying stated indifferently, and she smiled faintly at Mu Yu before she left the ward.

Mu Yu noticed how concerned Rong Ying was over her brother as she sighed. “Chief Rong, Ying really cares for you.”

Rong Jian, who was eating noodles, paused abruptly as his gaze was fixed at the closed ward door. After a while, he sighed and mumbled, “I know.” He then continued to eat the noodles.

“They were actually quite close before their family forced Ying to study medicine and take over Fraternity Hospital,” Qin Jinhuan, who hadn’t spoken out, interjected suddenly.

Rong Jian, who had a mouth full of noodles, immediately corrected him, “Our sibling relationship is great now! It’s always been great!”

Qin Jinhuan rolled his eyes but kept silent, because Mu Yu was quietly kicking him.

“There’re only you two siblings in the family; how bad can your relationship be?” Mu Yu chimed in with a smile.

“How did you get back?” asked Qin Jinhuan when he remembered Rong Ying’s reminder for Rong Jian to rest more.

An City and Feng Rubing’s hometown were miles apart. Her home, Guangyang Province, was a small capital city that didn’t even have an airport nor a train station; Rong Jian had to take a plane from An City to the provincial capital of A City and then a 3-hour cab ride to reach Guangyang Province. Rong Jian only found out about the news of Feng Rubing at 4.00PM, and it was now 11.00PM, and according to his knowledge, there were only two flights a day from A City Province to An City at daytime, so Rong Jian could not have managed to catch any of these two flights.

“I bought a car.”

“You drove back!?” Qin Jinhuan exclaimed.

“Bought a car?!” Mu Yu questioned. “You got the car immediately?!”

“Even if you could get the car immediately, it’s a thousand miles from here to Guangyang Province. Besides, you can’t arrive here in just 5 or 6 hours even if you speed.” Qin Jinhuan was suspicious.

“It was a pretty decent car.” Rong Jian chuckled dryly. “Well, the car was not bought from a car dealership; it was actually a Ferrari car that I stopped by the road. I wrote down my ID, work ID, and my bank card with the password for the owner; I even left him my cell phone number. Then I forcefully drove the car back here.”

Mu Yu covered her mouth and cried out, “Chief Rong, you hijacked a car?!”

“You drove here all alone by going over the speed limit?” Qin Jinhuan and Mu Yu focused on different parts of the story.

“Yu, I didn’t hijack it. I told the guy I’d pay for it’s worth plus an extra 20% of the market price and asked him to transfer the money himself,” Rong Jian answered Mu Yu and turned to nod at Qin Jinhuan. “Yes, I drove it back all by myself.”

Mu Yu was completely dumbfounded.

She had no idea that such impulsiveness came with being rich.

When she heard that he had driven back alone, she grew more worried for him. “Chief Rong, that was too dangerous!”

“Yu, I know that, but I willingly broke the law because I was just too worried about Rubing. I’ll take the responsibility and report myself to the boss tomorrow.”

Qin Jinhuan seemed unfazed about what Rong Jian did as he asked casually, “So you were not stopped by any traffic police while you were speeding?”

“I was, but they couldn’t catch up with me, and I couldn’t let them catch me because I didn’t have my personal and work ID with me.” Rong Jian sighed heavily. “When I heard that Rubing was in the emergency room, I was completely stunned, so I didn’t think much about it and just wanted to get to her side as soon as possible.”

“Didn’t I say she was alright?”

“I was worried that you lied to me because you didn’t want me to panic.”

Qin Jinhuan glanced at him in defiance. “I’m not that nice.”

Rong Jian smiled awkwardly and then replied in a serious tone, “But I know that you care about me.”

“Now that you’ve rushed back to her to see her lying safe and sound on bed, not only did you not find any conclusive evidence to exonerate her, you’ve also gotten yourself into trouble by violating traffic laws. Are you happy with how things are now?”

“Huan, don’t say it like that. I’m sure Chief Rong did it because he was too worried about Madam Feng.” Even though she knew Qin Jinhuan was just worried about Rong Jian, she still couldn’t stand his overbearing tone toward the latter. “If it was me that was sent to the emergency room—”

Qin Jinhuan furrowed his eyebrows and scolded, “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“I’m not being ridiculous; I’m just metaphorically speaking. What if—”

“You’re not allowed to use yourself as an example!”

She hadn’t expected him to take it so seriously, so she snarled back, “Are you afraid that it would come true?”

“Do you still want to go to work?”

“Fine. I’ll stop saying it, then. Happy?” Mu Yu decided to back down as she was afraid that he would mean it and stop her from solving cases with Rong Jian. She couldn’t help but mutter in a low voice, “I’m not a magical fairy, so my words are probably not even going to come true.”

Seeing that she was still defiant, Qin Jinhuan reached out and poked at her head as a sign of punishment. Mu Yu held her head as she turned around and glared at him.

Rong Jian was worried that they might get into an argument over his affairs, so he quickly put down the chopsticks and tried to divert their attention. “Let me tell you about the results of my investigation in Guangyang Province in the past two days.”

“Finish your noodles first!”

Rong Jian froze as the two of them yelled out in unison. He quickly finished the noodles and wiped his mouth as he turned toward Qin Jinhuan and Mu Yu and began to describe the details of his investigation.

It turned out that the night before when he was rushing over to Guangyang Province, through the limited information he had about Feng Rubing, he had managed to gain information about her high school class teacher, Zhong Guoliang, who said that he had quite an impression of her, and not only because she was the only transfer student of the senior year.

“She said that she had a medical condition that prevented her from coming to school and that she would study from home, so I should just inform her when she needed to register for college entrance exams and fill in application forms,” said Mr. Zhong.

“What kind of medical condition?” surprised, Rong Jian asked.

Mr. Zhong shook his head. “She didn’t say. At that time, I noticed that she was quite pale and skinny, but she seemed to be in good spirits, so I assumed that it was not a very serious medical condition. Since the school agreed to let her participate in the college entrance examination and assured me that her poor results would not be counted as my class results, I was quite content with the arrangement. But I didn’t expect her to do so well in the exams. All the teachers were shocked when the results came out, because she never came to class, and even the students didn’t know that she existed. That year, our school’s rate of students passing the college entrance exams were unsatisfactory; only a total of 5 students passed with straight As, and she was one of them. According to the school’s tradition, students who scored well in the exam had to go back to the school to attend a special ceremony, but she didn’t attend it. So I went over to her grandmother’s house to look for her, and her grandmother told me that Rubing was working 3 different jobs to earn school tuition fees and had no time to attend school activities. When I realized that her family was so poor, I offered to help Rubing apply for a scholarship that helped poor students, but her grandmother refused, saying that they weren’t that poor, and asked me to give the scholarship to other students who needed help. I really admired that old woman’s character. Well, you probably don’t have an idea how they were living, but that place they were staying in was a small room of less than 30 square meters in the suburbs, and the family of three ate and slept in it! By the end of August, the school had arranged a send-off for the soon-to-be college students, so I had to contact Rubing, but by the time I arrived at their house, her family had already moved out. Even the landlord had no idea where they moved to, and I haven’t heard from her since.”

After relaying the words of Mr. Zhong, Rong Jian continued, “With the help of Mr. Zhong, I finally managed to track down the landlord who rented the house to Rubing’s family. The landlord told me that Rubing’s family rented his place for 6 months, and he only knew that there were 3 of them; he didn’t know where they moved from or where they moved to. He also mentioned that Rubing and her grandmother never communicate with their neighbors, and that they hardly went out of the house, except to buy household groceries and to regularly pick up work from the nearby factories to do at home. The family was very frugal. Aside from Rubing’s sister crying sometimes, her home was always very quiet.”

At this point, Rong Jian paused for a while. “Through the school’s transfer records, I managed to track down the other teacher, Gu Lihao, from Linhe First Middle School, which Rubing once studied in. Mr. Gu also had a deep impression of Rubing, saying that even though her family’s financial situation was not good, she excelled in both her studies and character—she was helpful, well behaved, and liked by most of her classmates and teachers. She even skipped two grades because she had excellent results and was the school’s top student. Mr. Gu felt quite regrettable when Rubing dropped out of school abruptly during her senior year due to an emergency medical condition. He said that Rubing’s grandmother had taken her out of town for treatment around March that year, and that was the last they saw and heard of any news of her. A year later, Rubing’s grandmother came back to process her transfer procedures, and then there was no more news of the family.”

“No more news?” Mu Yu was suspicious. “Weren’t they just trying to get her treatment? Why did Rubing’s grandmother have to be so mysterious about it?”

“Could it be a disease that cannot be known to people?” asked Qin Jinhuan. “Have you sought out the old neighbors or relatives of the Feng Family to ask about their current situation?”

“The old household registration information was not very clear, so I couldn’t find any of her family relatives, and the place that her family used to live in was demolished years ago. After much hard work, I managed to tracked down the contact of an old neighbor and had planned to pay him a visit this afternoon; maybe I can find out more information from that old neighbor—”

“Stay where you are!”

“What do you want?”

Suddenly, loud shouts of Bian Zijun and Huang Bo were heard from outside the door.