Reborn Cat Sheriff

Chapter 643 That Damn Beast

Slowly waking up, Chen Dongzhi found herself lying flat on the bed. Reaching out to touch the blankets beside her, she found they were still warm.

It's like... just woken up.

But the scene in the dream was so vivid; the image of her daughter as an adult appeared before her eyes, yet she still retained the same youthful and innocent charm as when she was a child, making Chen Dongzhi feel as if her daughter had truly returned.

"Am I really just daydreaming about my daughter?"

Chen Dongzhi turned to look at the bright sunlight outside, but for a moment she couldn't remember when she fell asleep or how long she had slept.

The book I started reading this morning, Žižek's *The Most Sublime Hysteric*, was still on my bedside table. Perhaps it was because reading such a complex philosophical work at my age was too mentally taxing that I unconsciously fell asleep?

But Chen Dongzhi was puzzled as to why he would think of his daughter, and what she would look like when she grew up.

He even felt a sense of disgust towards the book in front of him. He didn't know why these foreign classics, which he had once admired so highly, now made him feel nauseous and even angry. He didn't know why he was suddenly so angry, but everything in front of him just seemed extremely displeasing; it was as if some completely different thought and regret were surging in his heart, urging him to completely change and destroy everything he used to love.

"Woooooo~"

Suddenly, the sound of an old woman's mournful cries came from outside.

I don't know what she's crying about, and what good does crying do? Hegel once said, "What is real is rational, and what is rational is real." So don't panic when faced with anything. Since it exists, face it calmly, understand it, and ultimately accept it! Therefore, crying and regret are the most meaningless things! Even if there are problems that can't be solved, then don't try to solve them; face them calmly…

"I'll fuck your mother's spinning top!"

Before the words of self-persuasion could even fully process in his mind, Chen Dongzhi reflexively cursed aloud. He didn't even know why he suddenly started swearing, or why he felt such contempt and anger towards the very arguments he had previously championed.

Even this insult...

Chen Dongzhi wasn't sure if this counted as an insult, nor could he remember where he had heard it from. He vaguely recalled a time when he was still teaching, when he confiscated a student's toys and that rude kid cursed him behind his back.

But at this moment, Chen Dongzhi not only did not feel that the child's words were excessive, but even regretted that he did not know enough swear words to express his current anger.

I remembered!

I remember everything now!

My daughter is indeed back!
She didn't go abroad, nor was she treated well by that beast. Her own carelessness and stupidity caused her to suffer the worst and most painful things in the world at such a young age. It was all her fault for being so senile!
Chen Dongzhi shakily sat up in bed, grabbed his shoes, and tried to go out. But he had no strength at all, so he could only try his best to stand up and then slowly walk towards the living room step by step.

"Waaaaah... My daughter~ My poor daughter! It's all my fault~ Waaaaah~"

Fan Weiping cried loudly, clinging tightly to Ai Yun and refusing to let go.

She cried and pounded on Ai Yun's back, causing the woman to groan softly, but she stubbornly endured it and did not break free from the strange old woman.

Ai Yun wasn't stupid; she had already guessed the identity of the old man whose voice had become hoarse from crying.

According to Sun Chang and Li Siyu, they had come all this way to help her find her relatives. The old woman cried so much after seeing them; she was probably their mother.

But... how did the mother feel?
Ai Yun didn't know, nor did she understand, what emotion she should express. She only knew that her back hurt terribly, and she knew she couldn't rudely push her away. Her son had said that one should be polite, so she would just have to endure it a little longer.

Across from the sofa, Zhang Yong, along with Zhang Ke, Sun Chang, Li Yiduo, and Li Siyu's teams, plus several police officers from the Zhuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau, had already gathered.

Now that Ai Yun's mother had been found, there was no point in further investigation. Especially after learning from Fan Weiping the absurd reason why Ai Yun had been taken away from her parents, Zhang Yong was speechless.

After briefly telling the old woman about Ai Yun and the events of the past years, she just held Ai Yun and cried, without doing anything else.

Zhang Yong and the Zhuzhou police were waiting for her to calm down, and they were also waiting for the name and identity of that so-called sworn brother so that they could quickly arrest this bastard who had betrayed his brother's trust and harmed Ai Yun.

However, the old woman was in a state of grief, and who knew how long it would take for her to calm down?
Lin Ge's ears twitched, and he turned to look in the direction of the room.

The door creaked slightly, and Lin Ge quickly turned around to see Chen Dongzhi walking out slowly with a limp, his face expressionless but his lips trembling.

Seeing that there were many more people in the house, he didn't care at all. He just dragged his unsteady legs slowly to Ai Yun and quietly looked at his poor daughter, who looked bewildered and kept groaning as her old woman patted her.

She was exactly the same as before, never crying or making a fuss when her mother scolded her, but silently bearing the grievances herself.

But my silly daughter, not every grievance should be silently endured! I shouldn't have taught you those things about self-respect, self-reliance, emotional intelligence, rationality, and relying on yourself! When you realized something was wrong, you should have called the police for help, my silly daughter!
Chen Dongzhi felt both heartache and regret. Even though Zhang Yong spoke lightly, he could still imagine what kind of life his daughter had lived over the years and what terrible nightmares she had suffered.

"Where is that bastard?"

Fan Weiping suddenly raised her head, glared at Ai Yun, and said, "Why are you still keeping such a bastard? Get rid of him immediately! Our family doesn't want the offspring of such a wicked devil!"

Lin Ge's ears twitched, and he raised an eyelid to look at Fan Weiping.

"Bastard? No!"

Ai Yun tilted her head, finally realizing what was happening. She forcefully broke free from Fan Weiping's embrace, stood up, and glared at her, saying, "Luo Jue is my son! He's my precious child! He's not some bastard, he's my life!"

"Life……"

Chen Dongzhi, who was about to greet her daughter, paused for a moment.

Suddenly, he felt immense shame, wishing he could bury himself in a brick. His daughter cared deeply for an illegitimate child, yet he had handed his beloved daughter over to a beast whose face he knew but whose heart he couldn't fathom!
"Chen Dongzhi!"

Fan Weiping only realized the old man had woken up when she heard her husband's voice. She immediately forgot about her daughter and turned to glare at Chen Dongzhi, saying, "Look what you've done! Look at what you've done to our daughter, you blind old man!"

"..."

Chen Dongzhi remained silent, consumed by shame, leaving him speechless.

Facing the gazes of his wife and a group of police officers, and seeing his daughter's still innocent and bewildered eyes, Chen Dongzhi smiled bitterly and suddenly slapped himself.

'Snapped! '

A crisp sound startled everyone in the room.

Fan Weiping's anger and accusations vanished instantly. She stared at her husband in astonishment, seeing for the first time this man, who had been refined and scholarly since his youth, exuding an aura of frustration, dejection, and despair.

"Alright! Alright! You and your daughter are reunited, that's a happy thing, why torture yourself anymore!"

Seeing that Chen Dongzhi was about to slap him again, Zhang Yong quickly stepped forward to stop him.

"It's all my fault!" Chen Dongzhi gave a bitter smile.

Zhang Yong let out a long breath and looked at Chen Dongzhi seriously, saying, "You and your daughter have already met and reunited, so there's no need for further words now. The most important thing now is to tell us immediately who your so-called sworn brother is. What's his name, and what does he do? You mentioned that he's been in contact with you recently, so please give us his phone number as well. We must arrest him immediately; we absolutely cannot allow this criminal who committed human trafficking to escape punishment and go unpunished."

"Yes Yes!"

Chen Dongzhi suddenly realized and nodded repeatedly, then quickly turned around and went back to his room to get his phone.

He was in poor health and walked very slowly, so Zhang Yong quickly went to help him. However, Fan Weiping was much faster. She got up and stormed into the room, even shoving Chen Dongzhi as she passed him, nearly knocking the old man to the ground.

Soon Fan Weiping rushed out again, carrying an old-fashioned mobile phone, and slammed it onto the coffee table with a 'bang'.

Several police officers raised their eyebrows as they watched. If it were broken and the image lost, data recovery would be a real problem.

Fortunately, the old-fashioned phone was still durable. Li Yiduo took it, unlocked it, and then asked Chen Dongzhi to help him find the contact name Shen Bo in the phone's address book. Inside was a long list of call records, some lasting only a few tens of seconds, others lasting an hour or two. The recent call records on the phone also showed that Chen Dongzhi didn't have many contacts; in fact, it could be said that Shen Bo was the only person he communicated with frequently.

No wonder Chen Dongzhi trusted Shen Bo so much. Even though this guy betrayed Chen Dongzhi's trust by kidnapping and selling his good friend's daughter, he still never broke off contact with Chen Dongzhi. He was utterly shameless and audacious.

“I haven’t spoken to my daughter on the phone even once in all these years, let alone met her in person. Now that things have come to this, don’t you have any doubts? This is the internet age; it’s not difficult to make a video call or something.”

Li Yiduo found it difficult to understand the couple's thinking.

“I had considered it before, but Shen Bo said there was a Great Firewall in China that prevented me from connecting to foreign countries. I had vaguely heard that this was true, so I gave up on the idea.”

Chen Dongzhi lowered his head in shame.

After realizing that Shen Bo was a fraud, all his previous reasons and excuses now seemed to be flawed.

But why did I trust him so much back then, without having any doubts about him at all?

Perhaps his daughter was entrusted to his care, and her well-being meant he was trustworthy; also, he often discussed philosophy and European literature with her, and her extensive knowledge made her feel inferior, leading her to believe that a cultured person couldn't be a bad person.

"I thought...we were making friends through literature!"

Chen Dongzhi gave a wry smile.

"But in that old swindler's eyes, you're just a complete idiot! Utterly stupid, you'd be sold out by him and still be counting the money for him! You old good-for-nothing! You've gone stupid from all your studying!"

Fan Weiping interrupted Chen Dongzhi, pointing her finger at his nose and launching into another tirade of abuse. Annoyed by his tirade, she simply ignored the old bastard and instead took Ai Yun's hand, leading her into the room and carefully questioning her about her life over the years.

Although both Zhang Yong and Ai Yun said they had forgotten the past, Fan Weiping still felt sorry for her and wished she could throw all her longing and care from the past years into Ai Yun's arms right now.

In the living room, the police officers from Zhuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau transmitted Shen Bo's phone number, name, and a brief description back to the bureau's big data database.

The recent activity locations of this phone number were quickly and easily discovered.

Shen Bo, the overseas Chinese citizen Chen Dongzhi claimed frequently traveled abroad and between China and the United States, was actually just a local resident of Zhuzhou! No one knew how he had fooled Chen Dongzhi, but the police investigation based on Chen Dongzhi's information proved that Shen Bo was merely a sock vendor at the Zhuzhou small commodities market. This guy had never even left the province, let alone traveled abroad.

Heaven knows where he got all those philosophical sparks from, which made Chen Dongzhi, a schoolteacher, so confident that he was a philosophy expert that he even entrusted his daughter to him.

"Hehe... Shen Bo's sock stall is only a little over four kilometers away from Chen Dongzhi's home. In other words, the two of them might bump into each other on the road! But Chen Dongzhi has difficulty walking and rarely goes out, which is why she believed Shen Bo's lie."

The Zhuzhou police arrested Shen Bo with surprising ease; the process was so simple and smooth it was unbelievable. This beast who sold someone's daughter had never considered fleeing all these years, and he even managed to completely manipulate the Chen family with simple words.

He even borrowed more than 200,000 yuan from Chen Dongzhi over the years, always using the excuse of going to Europe or other places to hold seminars.

Chen Dongzhi's trust, respect, and admiration for experts and scholars led him to hand over his retirement savings to Shen Bo without hesitation, only to receive a series of foreign postcards that he could clearly see were fake.

After being arrested by the police, Shen Bo confessed to his crime of deceiving the victim Ai Yun (original name Chen Aijun) and finding a middleman to resell her.

"Now there's one more problem!"

In the special investigation office, Zhang Yong raised another point of doubt that would seriously change the severity of Shen Bo's crime.

Seeing the police officers from the Zhuzhou City Criminal Investigation Brigade looking over, Zhang Yong raised a finger and said, "Ai Yun doesn't remember anything from the past, so only Shen Bo knows what really happened back then. So... there's a very real question: did he assault Ai Yun? It's not impossible, is it? He's capable of luring people away and selling them, so who dares say he wouldn't suddenly have lustful thoughts? Given the circumstances at the time, Ai Yun had no chance to resist. You can tell from the severe abuse she suffered afterward. The middleman who took Ai Yun from Shen Bo didn't treat her well."

"How do you investigate something like this?"

A criminal investigation police officer in Zhuzhou gave a wry smile and spread his hands to Zhang Yong, saying, "There are no witnesses, no physical evidence, and even the victims themselves won't report it. How can we determine whether this kind of thing happened?"

"But if it really happened, we can't just turn a blind eye because we don't have any evidence, can we?"

Zhang Yong also sighed.

"Let's put those aside for now and focus on another issue! Ai Yun was sold to Luo Jianlin in Yongshi by Sister Mei, but the buyer Shen Bo mentioned wasn't Sister Mei! In other words, there's at least one middleman involved, and we have to find that person!"

The criminal investigation police officer stood up and drew a relationship diagram on the whiteboard, then tapped a question mark in the middle with a whiteboard marker and said, "To be honest, these middlemen who connect buyers and sellers are actually more hateful than human traffickers! To put it bluntly, these bastards set up the criminal market for human trafficking; without these bastards, those who buy trafficked women and children wouldn't be able to find a place to buy them! So, to completely cut off this human trafficking network, we must find this middleman! But more than ten years have passed, and Shen Bo has no recollection of that middleman! His descriptions are inconsistent, and it's obvious that he has a high probability of being a fraud."

"How could Shen Bo forget something so serious?"

Zhang Ke looked up and questioned, "If Shen Bo can even forget about selling people like this, just how big is his heart?"

Thinking of this, Zhang Ke suddenly paused, because this bastard had been pretending everything was normal for almost more than ten years, and even dared to continue to swindle money from Chen Dongzhi... This guy really has an extraordinary amount of audacity.

According to Shen Bo's confession, it was his first time doing something wrong, and he was so scared that he didn't dare to look at what the person looked like, for fear of being silenced. He only took 30,000 yuan and ran away. He had no idea how Ai Yun was treated afterward.

The criminal investigation police officer looked at the case file and explained.

None of the police officers questioned the price of 30,000 yuan.

At the Zhanghe Police Station in Zhangzhou City, Zhang Yong and Sun Chang frowned, while Lin Ge widened his eyes and quickly noticed something was wrong.

If the middleman's "buying" cost exceeds 30,000, how much would he ask for when he sells Ai Yun to Huang Guimei?
How much money will Huang Guimei make by reselling Ai Yun to Luo Jianlin?
Luo Jianlin is an unemployed man from the countryside. Where would he get so much money to buy people? Unless Ai Yun had some problems when she came into Luo Jianlin's hands, such as illness, or she had already been abused; or perhaps... she was pregnant.

If she had truly been assaulted or even become pregnant, then the child must have been aborted; but in doing so, her value would be depreciated, making it understandable that she would be 'cheaply' sold to Luo Jianlin.

To be honest, this deduction is not surprising at all!

How could a vicious human trafficker let go of a delicious treat that he had already obtained? Ai Yun had already admitted that she had been severely abused by Huang Guimei. So why would the human trafficker who took her away from Shen Bo treat her so well?
To some extent, Huang Guimei's abuse of Ai Yun was likely an act of revenge after Ai Yun had been assaulted by this person and Huang Guimei discovered she had been deceived.

(End of this chapter)