A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

Brother Wang's smile froze at the corner of his mouth.

The cigarette ash fell on the table, but he didn't flick it off.

"Brother Yuan, think about it again."

"I've made up my mind."

The office was silent for a few seconds. Brother Wang stubbed out his cigarette in the half-empty bottle of beer with a sizzle.

"Lu Yuan, let me tell you the truth." Brother Wang leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the table. "You know where the extras in the north gate area of ​​Hengdian come from. If you don't sign this contract, starting tomorrow, you won't even get a single shot of a corpse, let alone a corpse."

"Issuing you is just a matter of me giving a heads-up."

Lu Yuan held his thermos cup, his expression remaining unchanged.

"Okay." He nodded. "Then I won't work for you anymore. According to the group rules, refund my 500 yuan deposit."

Brother Wang paused for a moment, then laughed.

He gestured with his chin toward the doorway.

Three people walked in.

The one in the lead had a neck thicker than his thigh, was bald, and had a blue dragon tattoo on both arms that ran from his sleeves to the back of his hands. The two behind him were thinner, but their eyes were hostile, and they blocked the doorway, cutting off any escape route.

"Deposit?" Brother Wang picked at his ear. "What deposit? That's called training fee, it's written in black and white, non-refundable."

He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed: "Yuanzi, don't be ungrateful. If the contract is signed, everyone makes money. If you don't sign? You won't get your deposit, and you won't be walking out of here unscathed."

The sixth child in her arms cried out again.

Lu Yuan lowered his head.

The little orange cat looked up at him, its eyes round and bright. A little yellow liquid had seeped through the gauze on its hind leg; it was time to change the dressing.

Five hundred yuan. It costs one hundred and twenty yuan to change the splint for Lao Liu, eighty yuan for cat food, and the rest is all the money he has for the next two weeks.

He tightened the lid of the thermos and placed it on the table.

"Brother Wang." He looked up.

"Um?"

"I'll ask one last time, are you going to refund or not?"

"You fucking bastard—"

When Brother Wang spoke again, the young man sitting opposite him had changed.

The hand holding the thermos rested on the edge of the table, fingers spread wide. The nonchalant, "I'm just waiting to die" look on his face vanished in an instant.

The man with the buzz cut at the door was the first to give in, stepping forward to grab Lu Yuan's collar.

He didn't see what happened next.

Lu Yuan raised his right hand, put his index and middle fingers together, and placed them on the inside of the bald man's wrist.

Two fingers, fingertips precisely inserted into the gap between the radial styloid process and the palmaris longus tendon, while the thumb hooks onto the ulnar head from the outside, making a very short, sharp rotational cut.

With a "click," the joint was instantly locked, and the tendon was forcibly stretched to its limit.

The bald man's knees slammed directly onto the concrete. A hundred kilograms in weight, he was kneeling. His mouth was wide open, the veins on his neck bulged like earthworms, but not a sound came out.

It hurts. It hurts so much that the pain signal doesn't even have time to reach the vocal cords.

The two thugs at the door took a half step back at the same time.

Lu Yuan calmly pulled over Brother Wang's boss chair, sat down, interlaced his fingers, and fixed his gaze on Brother Wang's face.

Brother Wang's Adam's apple bobbed.

Lu Yuan looked at him.

"Brother Wang," Lu Yuan said slowly.

"You have a blister on the second joint of your right index finger. It's yellowish in color and located on the inside. This is from playing mahjong for a long time. The fact that you got a blister from playing mahjong means that the game lasted a long time lasting at least eight hours."

Brother Wang's face froze.

"The perfume on your left sleeve isn't the same brand as the one you're wearing. Your own bottle is a two-hundred-yuan counterfeit, and this one on your sleeve is even worse—a ten-yuan street vendor's strong-scented perfume. It's standard at the Chengnan Bath Center."

Brother Wang's lips began to twitch.

Lu Yuan's gaze shifted from Brother Wang's face to the table. He scanned the pile of messy documents, pausing for two seconds on a few partially exposed forms.

"Those reports on the table show two different figures for the same project. You've kept two sets of accounts. I roughly estimate that the difference between the extras management funds allocated to you by the guild headquarters and your actual expenditures is at least 200,000 yuan."

He paused for a moment.

"They couldn't make up for it, could they? So when they saw my name trending on social media, they felt like they'd found a lifeline. They signed me, quickly monetized my wealth, and plugged the hole."

Brother Wang's back was completely soaked.

Lu Yuan glanced down at the paper shredder under the table. The indicator light was still on, and the wastebasket hadn't been emptied.

"The shredder is processing this morning's material; the edges of the paper scraps are still warm from the ink. Is it a dual contract? Or some kind of receipt that they don't want anyone to see?"

He looked up.

"Brother Wang, guess how many minutes it will take for the Economic Crime Investigation Team to arrive if I report this now?"

Brother Wang's lips trembled slightly.

He found himself gripping the homemade stun gun on his desk, his knuckles clenched so tightly they turned blue.

He rushed up.

The blue arc of electricity crackled at the tip of the stun gun as it pierced straight at Lu Yuan's face.

Lu Yuan grabbed an empty beer bottle from the table with his right hand, flipped his wrist so the bottom of the bottle faced forward, and swiftly slashed it horizontally.

The mouth of the glass bottle stopped, one millimeter away from Brother Wang's right eyeball.

The airflow from the bottle opening ruffled Wang Ge's eyelashes.

The entire office froze solid.

Lu Yuan sat in the chair, his posture unchanged. One hand held the cat, the other held a wine bottle. His expression was blank.

"Refund."

Two words.

Wang Ge's stun gun fell to the ground. His legs were trembling, and a small dark stain had seeped through the seam of his trousers.

With trembling hands, he fumbled for his phone, opened the transfer interface, and entered the wrong password three times. On the fourth try, he finally got it right and pressed confirm like a pestle striking a ball.

Five thousand yuan.

Lu Yuan's old phone vibrated. He took it out, glanced at it, put the bottle back on the table, opened the refund page, and got 4,500 yuan back.

"My deposit is five hundred." He stood up, patted Lao Liu on the head, "No more."

Lu Yuan unscrewed his thermos, took a sip of goji berry water, and walked out of the office.

Jiang Yan stood outside the door, her face pale.

She stood outside for at least five minutes. Fine beads of sweat appeared on her forehead.

The two people made eye contact.

"Officer Jiang," Lu Yuan greeted her.

Jiang Yan didn't speak. Her gaze shifted from Lu Yuan's face to the cat in his arms, then back.

"What did you do?"

Lu Yuan took out his phone and lit up the screen. Transfer record: Received 500 yuan.

"I asked for my deposit back. Brother Wang was moved by my sincerity."

Jiang Yan stared at the transfer record for three seconds.

Lu Yuan put his phone back in his pocket, tilted his head and thought for a moment, then added a sentence.

"By the way, Officer Jiang, when you're tracking and scouting, don't step on the fallen leaves in the puddles. Your footsteps are thirty decibels louder than on normal roads; you can hear them even two alleys away."

He finished speaking and, without waiting for a reply, picked up his thermos and walked towards the stairwell.

The sixth brother stuck his claw out from the zipper and waved it at Jiang Yan.

Jiang Yan stood in the corridor, motionless for a long time.