Chapter 46: Mai Minghe – Riding a Tiger and Finding It Hard to Get Off

They've already figured out where she is?

Are caller IDs really this advanced nowadays that they can even pinpoint addresses?

Mai Minghe's heart hammered against her ribs like a drum, and for a moment, panic seized her entirely: what if the Morgans managed to track her down? At that point, the only thing separating the "Snake-Belt" artifact from the Morgan family's hunters would be the thin layer of clothing she wore.

Once they realized she was the last person to have had dealings with Jonah...

No, she had to run.

Unless her luck was so abysmal that the Morgans happened to live directly above this Chinese restaurant, it would take them some time to get here. Yes, she needed to make her escape before they arrived.

Mai Minghe hastily hung up the receiver, slapped down some loose change, and lifted her foot to bolt outside—but unexpectedly, that step went nowhere.

Because the back of her collar had been grabbed by someone.

"Where do you think you're going?"

Before she could even react, she heard the restaurant owner shouting behind her: "The fried noodles you ordered are already in the pan, you haven't paid, and now you want to walk out on me? I've had my eye on you for a while—good thing I kept my wits about me!"

She had completely forgotten about that detail. Her mind had been so consumed by thoughts of artifacts and hunters that she had momentarily pushed the fried noodles out of her head.

Mai Minghe was swept by a wave of annoyance, anxiety, and a touch of helpless amusement. Choked slightly by her own collar, she coughed twice and quickly said, "Let go of me! I'll pay you, alright?"

The owner leaned half his body out of the cashier's counter like a bald, watchful owl, still not entirely trusting her.

"Sixteen-fifty," he said flatly. "Card or cash?"

"So expensive? Isn't it just fried noodles?" She was startled, glanced briefly at the menu, and felt a wave of intense regret. "Prices are this high now?"

"Do you actually have money or not?"

Mai Minghe felt her scalp tingling: in the precious moments of escape before the Morgans arrived, she was haggling over dollars and change for a plate of fried noodles.

When she finally managed to scrape the money together, the owner took it and still muttered complaints: "Took you this long just to scrape together sixteen-fifty? Oh, whatever. Are you taking it to go, or eating here?"

He had already said it—they knew her address and might arrive at any second. Why would she stay to eat—

Mai Minghe opened her mouth, then paused.

She looked at the owner's bald pate, thought for a moment, and changed her tune: "...I'll take it to go."

The owner had no desire to have someone who looked like a homeless vagrant dining inside his establishment anyway. This answer evidently suited him, and he turned and headed back to the kitchen.

Mai Minghe stood by the cash register, sinking into a daze of contemplation. The empty, struggling little restaurant held only her, the murmur of the television news in the corner, and the dim, greasy scent of stale cooking.

...Why on earth would the person from the Morgan family, right before hanging up, deliberately say, "I know your address now"?

Thinking about it now, human lives were at stake; the Morgans wouldn't just take the word of an anonymous caller and hang up to launch a rescue in the nest without verifying the source of the information first...

If they suspected her of being involved in Jonah's peril and intended to capture her, they certainly wouldn't have tipped her off in advance—that would be equivalent to telling her to run.

Had she been in the Morgans' shoes, would she have immediately suspected the person on the other end of the line of being connected to Jonah's disappearance?

Maybe connected, maybe not.

"I know your address now" was, in itself, a fairly neutral statement.

The other party hadn't specified what they intended to do to her; they had merely hinted at an intention to come find her.

If Mai Minghe had a guilty conscience and fled the moment she heard those words, it would undoubtedly send a clear signal to the Morgans: *I have something to hide, come catch me.*

Given her current state, she certainly couldn't outrun the search party of well-equipped family hunters.

Yet, what if she truly were just a vagrant who took money to pass along a message? Would she take those words to heart after hearing them?

The other party was testing the waters, but Mai Minghe had no choice except to play along—even if it meant showing herself to the Morgans.

She had learned only in her old age that life is strange: things obtained without a shred of risk are rarely worth having. Now it seemed that holding onto the "Snake-Belt" artifact would require taking risks as well.

Thanks to the restaurant owner; if he hadn't delayed her, she might never have had the chance to think this through, and she would have fled long ago.

Besides, if he hadn't stopped her, who knew how much longer she would have gone hungry, right?

Mai Minghe thought this with a sense of near-satisfaction as she sat on the pavement against the outer wall of the Chinese restaurant, shoving mouthfuls of fried noodles into her mouth.

Her appetite had been ruined for years—she couldn't chew properly, couldn't swallow easily, and eating had long been devoid of any pleasure. Yet at this moment, on the precipice of an approaching storm, the piping-hot, richly fragrant fried noodles in her hands finally seemed to anchor her firmly into this second youth.

No matter what happened next, she was eating a proper meal right now, and that was more blissful than anything else.

That was simply the kind of person she was; no matter what she encountered, she could always find a silver lining.

When a sleek, handsome gray car pulled up in front of the Chinese restaurant, Mai Minghe was busy picking the bean sprouts out of her noodles.

She hated bean sprouts the most. Earlier, driven by ravenous hunger, she had shoveled them down indiscriminately; but now that her stomach had some food in it, the bean sprouts looked particularly hateful, as if they had taken advantage of her starvation.

Mai Minghe lifted her eyes to look at the vehicle, steadied her heartbeat, kept her expression as neutral as possible, and lowered her head to continue picking.

A man and a woman stepped out of the car. As they approached the entrance, the restaurant owner poked his head out first. Pointing at Mai Minghe by the wall, he muttered, "That's her," and then quickly retreated back inside.

Mai Minghe wasn't surprised in the least.

Just as she had been wolfing down her noodles a moment ago, she had heard the phone ringing inside the restaurant.

"Is that your call?" asked the man, his gaze predictably dropping to her intentionally exposed, dirt-stained feet, his eyebrows twitching.

"Yeah," Mai Minghe wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, making it look even less clean than before. "Which one of you is a Morgan?"

Nobody answered her question—instead, the woman pulled out her phone, made a call to someone, and instructed, "We've found her. Stay where you are for now."

The moment she spoke, Mai Minghe recognized her voice: this was the person who had answered the phone earlier.

In other words... there were others around besides these two? The surrounding streets were probably crawling with the Morgans' eyes and ears. Had she tried to run earlier, she certainly wouldn't have gotten far.

The woman hung up the phone and turned back to Mai Minghe. "What kind of person was it that had you pass along the message?"

Her guess had been right; it seemed they harbored no suspicions.

"Oh,"

Mai Minghe lowered her head and vigorously scratched at her scalp, as if plagued by fleas—causing the man to take half a step back. "The way they spoke, all over the place, real eccentric... Hard to say how old. Twenty or thirty, maybe thirty or forty, definitely under fifty. Wore a hat and glasses, and a scarf wrapped tight around the lower half of their face so you couldn't tell what they looked like."

The two exchanged glances.

"How tall?"

"I was sitting on the ground, couldn't tell."

"...What race?"

"Either a fair-skinned minority, or a tanned white person."

"And the accent?"

"Oh, spotless," Mai Minghe praised, "good enough for the radio."

The woman's jaw tightened.

"What else did they say?"

"Real strange stuff, see if you can make sense of it." Mai Minghe cleared her throat, set her takeout box down on the pavement tiles, and recited: "'Jonah looks like a normal person on the outside, but residents have already gotten inside his body.'"

The expressions of the two shifted slightly.

Good, it seemed they understood... That way, when they entered the nest to effect a rescue, they would at least know what precautions to take.

Mai Minghe felt a slight weight lift from her chest.

Judging by this posture, the Morgan family appeared to be quite a formidable faction.

Although she didn't yet know the precise definition of a "faction," she had heard plenty of unfamiliar new terms by now, so one more didn't hurt—and since they were so formidable, they ought to be able to rescue the person, right?

"What are you smiling at?" the man asked abruptly.

Mai Minghe started, realizing she must have let slip a small smile.

Helping others felt wonderful; how could she not smile?

Come to think of it, people usually assumed the recipient of help was the happy one, but in truth, the act of giving help also brought a swelling, tingling sense of joy—someone had once explained that it was related to human evolution or something—unfortunately, she couldn't tell the truth.

"They gave me money, so I finally got to eat," Mai Minghe held up her box of noodles and replied, "Good things like that don't happen every day."

"Keep an eye on her," the woman told her companion. "I'm going to call Fu Tailan."

She walked aside and waited for the person on the other end to pick up. After a few seconds, she said in a low voice, "Tailan? We found the caller. It's just a vagrant who took money to run an errand."

Mai Minghe listened as her own fabricated nonsense was repeated back to her with deadly solemnity through the woman's lips.

Yet regarding Jonah's condition, every single word had been the absolute truth; as the woman's expression grew increasingly grim, the stone in Mai Minghe's chest hung higher and higher.

When the woman finished the call and returned, even her companion looked somewhat tense, gazing at her in silence.

"This is serious. He might go into the nest himself," the woman said to her companion, jerking her chin toward Mai Minghe. "Before we go, Fu Tailan wants to see her first."

She then squatted down, speaking in the gentle, coaxing tone one might use with a small child, and smiled pleasantly at Mai Minghe: "Our supervisor has a few questions for you. Come with us for a bit, you won't be treated unfairly. Whatever you want, just name it."

At that, it was Mai Minghe's turn to be dumbfounded.

As a homeless vagrant, this was a rare stroke of good fortune with no reason to refuse; but how could she possibly dare to follow these two back to the Morgan household?

"Um—I—" Unable to come up with a plausible excuse, she ended up blurgering out: "It's not that I don't want to, but I've got fleas on me—"

"No worries," the woman said, her expression darkening slightly but remaining resolute. "When we get to our place—our company—you can take a bath."

The man took a step forward, looking thoroughly unwilling, yet stationing himself tightly right beside Mai Minghe.

He bent down and said, "Are you getting in the car on your own, or do you need me to help you?"