Chapter 40: Since I Created This Persona, I Have to Play It Through to the End!

It was the first time he realized that his cheat could be used in this way.

Based on his understanding of where the text boxes appeared, they generally hovered directly above a person's head. In other words, as long as he aimed his gun directly below the text boxes belonging to these criminals...

Without a second thought, he raised his gun, acting before Tang Hua and the other police officers behind them could even react.

"Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang."

Five consecutive shots rang out, exceptionally crisp and clear in the dead of night.

Cen Lian watched as four of the text boxes collapsed completely, while a fifth text box struggled and tried to run into the woods.

He fired one more shot.

The man whose text box identified him as a core member of the gang quickly parted ways with his right hand that was holding a gun.

By this time, Tang Hua and the other police officers finally realized what was happening and rushed forward in a swarm.

Some kicked the gun far away, others piled on top of the drug dealer like arhats and slammed him heavily to the ground, and Tang Hua whipped out his handcuffs, looking somewhat at a loss.

"Brother Cen, these cuffs probably won't fit anymore, right?" He looked at the man's bloody wrist.

"Stop the bleeding first," Cen Lian hurriedly urged the others to get up. "Judging by his age and build, this guy looks like a core member of the gang. Don't let him die."

The police officers dazed-ly acknowledged the order, dazed-ly applied first aid to stop the bleeding as Cen Lian instructed, and then dazed-ly carried the man out.

Cen Lian and the remaining police officers continued walking forward.

Tang Hua couldn't help asking, "I say, Brother Cen, did you install eagle eyes in those sockets? You just wiped out all four of them straight away?"

"I judged their positions based on how their movement affected the leaves," Cen Lian began to spout nonsense. "Though mostly it just comes down to muscle memory."

Tang Hua never expected he could learn such a skill anyway.

"So you were really good at marksmanship back when you were in school?" he asked.

Cen Lian flashed a very modest smile.

"Not bad, only won first place a few times."

Tang Hua fell silent.

It turned out that he was the only one who truly sucked so badly that he could only slack off at a grassroots police station, while everyone else was a genuine master.

Tang Hua, whose self-awareness was becoming increasingly clear, stood on a high vantage point and looked out into the distance.

"There were intense gunshots in that direction just now. It looks like the area they were guarding ran into the main force of the drug dealers." Tang Hua quickly climbed down from the rock, terrified that standing too high would make him a live target for any wandering drug dealers.

"It's still quite far from us; it shouldn't reach our sector." After Tang Hua climbed down, Cen Lian stepped onto the rock, which could truly be called a commanding height. Within a radius of several hundred meters, not a single text box appeared anywhere in his field of vision.

He suddenly felt that the specific uses of his cheat still needed further development.

At this moment, the admiration the other police officers held for Cen Lian was like a rolling, endless river; they followed right behind him without a single distracting thought, doing whatever Cen Lian said.

The mountain-sealing cleanup lasted from the first half of the night until the afternoon of the following day, spanning almost a full twenty-four hours. Cen Lian and Tang Hua took turns sleeping for a bit, but remained awake for the majority of the time.

Near nightfall the next day, Wu Qiushan suddenly called out to Cen Lian.

"What's the situation?" Cen Lian asked, fighting to stay awake.

"We found their lair. There seems to be something like a secret passage here; come over and help look for it." Wu Qiushan's tone was also laced with extreme fatigue, and one could tell he was likewise forcing himself to stay alert.

Neither of them had slept for almost an entire day and night.

Yet the mountain had been completely surrounded; if the drug dealers still managed to escape under these conditions, it would be utterly disgraceful to speak of.

Cen Lian forced himself to snap out of it, hiked out of the mountain along the trail, and took a vehicle to the captured stronghold.

Judging from the scattered bullet casings and the smell of gunpowder, a rather fierce firefight had taken place here earlier.

"You move pretty fast." Wu Qiushan was holding two cans of coffee, one opened and the other unopened.

Cen Lian very consciously took the unopened can. This was like feeding forage to a draft animal; otherwise, he might just stand there in the drug traffickers' manufacturing den and fall asleep on his feet.

Wu Qiushan watched Cen Lian gulp down the entire can of coffee in one breath, and only then pulled him down to the first basement level of the heavily concealed building.

"These drug dealers practically turned this place into a bunker." Cen Lian widened his eyes, which had barely opened a fraction wider thanks to the coffee, and reached out to touch the wall. "Looking at these bullet craters, they even had Type 95 semi-automatic rifles?"

"Yeah, still investigating where they got them," Wu Qiushan knew this matter was of great importance and simply gave a brief explanation. "It has nothing to do with us anymore."

Cen Lian understood instantly.

He stopped looking at the bullet craters and instead carefully inspected the basement level, which stored numerous semi-finished raw materials.

A large quantity of raw materials and sundries was piled up here. If, as Wu Qiushan claimed, there was a secret passage or secret room here, these items were likely meant to create distractions and obscure vision.

As for how Wu Qiushan had found this place, Cen Lian had his own judgment: he had most likely followed some specific traces all the way, only to discover that the traces vanished entirely right here.

Clearly, this guy was now trying to use his "intuition" to find a solution, but this empty space didn't even have a shadow of a person around, let alone any traces—his "intuition" cheat had no way of functioning here!

Cen Lian hesitated for a mere 0.1 seconds before speaking up. "The place is a bit big. Let me walk around and take a look first; you keep searching for any traces as well."

While Wu Qiushan began searching everywhere for traces, Cen Lian walked away looking troubled.

Since he had built this persona for himself, he had to bite the bullet and carry it through.

First, he ruled out the possibility of any large-scale mechanical devices that needed to be moved. Such things would have left behind numerous traces, and since Wu Qiushan had already spent some time here without any success, it meant that the most likely reason for the drug dealers' escape route was that it had been concealed by something that did not require large-scale movement.

The purpose of creating the cover was clearly to buy time, so the most common item in this warehouse might well be that disguise.

Cen Lian looked around and found that the items piled up in the greatest quantities here were bags upon bags of semi-finished products.

The semi-finished products were stacked in a chaotic and disorderly manner, but some were lumped together with messy sundries and obsolete machinery.

According to a normal person's train of thought, the more chaotic a place was, the easier it was to hide things. Therefore, this chaos should just be a distraction, and the real pathway should be located within the parts that were stacked more orderly.

He walked straight toward that direction.

The raw materials piled up in this area were relatively more orderly. Although they were not completely aligned, one could see they were stacked in many rows, and some police officers had already started preparing to clean up the area.

Cen Lian observed for a moment and confirmed that according to normal cleanup procedures, the innermost section against the wall would be the last to be removed, which should buy them the maximum amount of time.

Without hesitation, wearing shoe covers, he climbed right up and began moving dozens of bags of semi-finished raw materials stacked in the middle.

"Brother Yue, stop looking. It's right here." Cen Lian glanced at the surrounding bags. "Come straight over and check for fingerprints; I moved these while wearing gloves."

Wu Qiushan dashed over at lightning speed and gave him a thumbs-up.

"As expected of someone who relies on intuition. I was just watching you; you didn't go anywhere else and walked right over here." Wu Qiushan was never stingy with his praise.

An aggrieved erhu melody began to play in Cen Lian's heart.

Fine, even though his actual method was ignored, his persona had only been reinforced!

He consoled himself with a sorrowful sigh.