I Start with a Mysterious Island

Chapter 349 - 268: The Still of the Night Is the Perfect Time for Trouble

’What do you mean, "how"?’ Lin Li grumbled to himself. He chuckled and said to Su Yue, "It’s just like you saw! I swung my arm, tossed the ring forward, and... it landed."

"Oh, come on, don’t make it sound so easy! I just threw more than ten rings and only managed to get a single bottle of water.

But you just threw ten rings and won ten prizes! And every single one was the kind that’s super hard to get. That’s not something you can just do by chance," Su Yue said.

"Is that so! Well, maybe I’m just talented at this ring toss game!" Lin Li said with a laugh.

"Talented? Uh... alright, I guess!" Su Yue nodded, then looked at the prizes Lin Li had won. "You won so many prizes. Are you really planning to haul them all the way home from Qiong City?"

When the sour-faced middle-aged man heard Su Yue’s words, an idea sparked, and he quickly spoke to Lin Li.

"Hey, buddy, if you take all those prizes, I won’t be able to keep my stall open tonight. Besides, it’ll be a pain for you to carry all that stuff home. How about this? I’ll buy the prizes back from you for cash. I can transfer the money right to you."

"Buy them back for cash?" Lin Li thought for a moment. "Alright. How much are they worth in total?"

"Five hundred... uh, seven hundred. I’ll give you seven hundred for all of it. How’s that?"

The middle-aged man had wanted to say five hundred, but when he saw the "are you kidding me" look on Lin Li’s face, he quickly added another two hundred.

"Seven hundred is too low." Lin Li was still not happy with the offered price. It wasn’t that he needed a few hundred extra yuan; he was just genuinely unhappy with how the middle-aged man had conducted business from the start.

"One thousand, cash. If you agree, transfer it to me now. If not, I’m taking the prizes."

As Lin Li spoke, he moved to grab the prizes he’d won. Seeing this, the middle-aged man hastily agreed, "One thousand it is! I’ll transfer it from my phone."

The middle-aged man had already calculated it in his head. Excluding the small stuffed bear, the total value of the prizes he’d lost was at least thirteen hundred yuan.

Paying Lin Li a thousand yuan in cash now, while painful, would still save him a loss of several hundred yuan.

Seeing the man agree, Lin Li pulled his phone from his pocket and opened his payment QR code.

"Alright, the money’s been sent. Take a look..." the middle-aged man said with a gloomy expression after paying the thousand yuan.

"Received." Lin Li confirmed the thousand-yuan deposit, then turned to the ever-smiling Su Yue beside him. "Let’s go."

Su Yue hummed in agreement and followed Lin Li away from the ring toss stall.

"Damn my luck, running into a customer like that. I lost big tonight," the middle-aged man muttered to himself as he watched Lin Li and Su Yue leave. Then, he called out to the onlookers who had gathered around.

"Did you see that? That customer just won a whole bunch of prizes in one go and made a thousand yuan! Anyone who wants to play can give it a try."

"You might not have perfect accuracy like him and win that many prizes, but even with the worst luck, it’s easy to win two or three."

Hearing this, the onlookers’ faces showed a flicker of interest. After a bit more coaxing from the cunning middle-aged man, quite a few of them took the bait.

Of course, even with all these new customers, the money the middle-aged man had lost to Lin Li tonight couldn’t be recouped. It would take him several days of hard work to earn it back.

「Inside the park, on a small stone path paved with cobblestones.」

Lin Li and Su Yue were each holding a cotton candy, eating as they strolled leisurely.

Just then, Su Yue took a bite of her cotton candy and asked, "Lin Li, back at the ring toss game, why didn’t you let me buy more rings?"

Lin Li bit off a large piece of cotton candy, mulled it over for a few seconds, and said, "Because that stall owner was dishonest..."

After Lin Li finished explaining his reasoning to Su Yue, a look of sudden understanding dawned on her face. Then, she said with a touch of annoyance,

"That guy is so dishonest! He saw we were tourists from out of town and tried to rip us off like we were a couple of suckers."

Lin Li looked at the indignant Su Yue and chuckled. "Don’t worry too much about it now. Didn’t I make him pay the price in the end?"

Su Yue glanced down at the small stuffed bear cradled in her arms. The annoyance on her face instantly vanished, replaced by a beaming smile as she said,

"Losing that much money all at once... that’s going to sting him for a while."

"Mhm." Lin Li nodded. He continued to stroll leisurely through the park with Su Yue. After about half an hour, they returned to their car and drove back to the hotel.

「Rongcheng.」

The prison for the city’s South District was built on a desolate, small plain, far from any inhabited areas.

Ever since someone had infiltrated the South District Prison and broken out an inmate, security had been tightened.

After nightfall, the prisoners watched the news together for a while after dinner before all returning to their cells to rest.

As the night deepened, the entire prison fell silent. The only sound was the occasional footfalls of patrolling prison staff.

The bright moon in the sky cast a hazy glow over the land.

Inside the prison, under the shade of a large, leafy tree near the high wall, the shadows began to ripple like the surface of calm water, sending out concentric circles.

Then, a human figure slowly emerged from the rippling shadows, like a person swimming up and breaking the surface of the water.

The figure that appeared from the shadows was a man, around thirty-four or thirty-five years old. He had average looks, a well-proportioned build, and a flattop haircut—the kind of face you’d forget the moment you looked away.

’The security here is really tight,’ the flat-headed man muttered to himself, hiding behind the leafy tree as he watched the distant patrolling prison staff.

This flat-headed man was a member of the Canglan Society’s intelligence department. His superiors had ordered him to investigate the reason for the failure of the recent plan to rescue Tie Qiu Heng.

Upon receiving the order, the man immediately took action. He first went to investigate the remote riverbank where the rendezvous for the rescue plan was supposed to have taken place.

Based on the clues he found at the scene, he knew that a completely one-sided battle had occurred there.

From this, he deduced that the Investigator who had taken down Tie Qiu Heng’s group of four must have been at least a Tier Two High Rank.

As an elite of the Canglan Society’s intelligence department, this single piece of information was far from enough for him.

He needed a deeper understanding of why the rescue plan had failed. Only then could he properly report back to his superiors.

So, he began looking for a way to find Tie Qiu Heng’s group, who had been captured by the Investigator, hoping to learn the real reason for their failure through a face-to-face conversation.

The flat-headed man then learned through various channels that the three members who had carried out the rescue plan were still being held and interrogated by Investigators at the Superpower Administration Bureau. Only Tie Qiu Heng had been sent back to the South District Prison to continue serving his sentence.

It didn’t take much thought to know what to do. Going to the Superpower Administration Bureau, which was crawling with Investigators, to find the three captured members would be like walking into a tiger’s den—a suicide mission.

Going to the South District Prison to find Tie Qiu Heng, on the other hand... although security had been tightened after the prison break, infiltrating the prison was still leagues easier than infiltrating the Superpower Administration Bureau.

Thus, the flat-headed man chose the dead of night to use his Superpower and infiltrate the South District Prison.