Chapter 100: I Won’t Be Able to Take It

Inside the secluded café, Cheng Xiuyan opened his laptop and brought up the data he had recently gathered and organized.

“According to our investigation, in the month before your mother disappeared...”

“Cheng Xiuyan, if you think you’ve got too much life left in you, just say so. I’ll send you to your grave myself.” Ruan Cha clenched her tiny fist; her expression was fierce and ruthless, a stark contrast to her soft, sweet voice.

Seeing that, Cheng Xiuyan’s gaze softened almost to the point of overflowing. “Little Cha-cha, don’t look at me like that. I won’t be able to resist you~”

Ruan Cha took a deep breath, raised her hand, and slowly blew on her fist.

The next second, Cheng Xiuyan yelped, “Ow—!”

“I was only joking. Why hit me so fast? And so brutally, too!” He pouted in grievance, one hand pressed to the corner of his mouth, looking aggrieved.

Under the threat of Ruan Cha’s fist, he hurriedly got serious. “Within the month before Aunt Feng Rong disappeared, several groups of strangers came and went through the village where you lived. They all wore matching clothes. According to one rumor, someone saw an ink-blue tattoo on the left side of their backs. It seemed to belong to some very mysterious organization.”

“An ink-blue tattoo?”

Ruan Cha frowned and searched her memory. Then suddenly—

She remembered that one time, when her mother had gone to bathe and forgotten to lock the door, she seemed to have seen an ink-blue pattern on her mother’s left shoulder.

Feng Rong was an extremely secretive person. Even now, when Ruan Cha thought back, the things she knew about her were few and far between.

Especially when it came to bathing. When Ruan Cha was little, Feng Rong had never once bathed with her. She would always help her wash up, coax her to sleep, and only then go into the bathroom to bathe herself.

Those strange habits had seemed unremarkable when she was a child, but now that she was older, thinking about them made them seem especially baffling.

“As for that ink-blue tattoo, the investigation results have all been vague. No one can clearly remember what shape it actually was...”

Cheng Xiuyan was still speaking when Ruan Cha’s eyes suddenly lit up. “It was a datura blossom.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it on my mother’s body.”

“If it was a datura flower, then we should already have narrowed it down to a few powerful, mysterious organizations.” Cheng Xiuyan filtered out the other patterns and pulled up the ones related to datura.

“In our line of work, every organization has its own rules. Tattoos like that are normal, and datura carries the dark meaning of vengeance, so quite a few groups use it. Based on what we’ve found so far, there are four in total. Three of them are small operations, just hired muscle. The other one is the Black Dawn Society.”

“The Black Dawn Society?”

The moment Ruan Cha heard those three words, her eyes turned noticeably colder.

The Black Dawn Society had a formidable reputation, and yet it was also extraordinarily secretive.

“According to the rumors, the Black Dawn Society was founded more than a hundred years ago. It grew powerful enough to have long since controlled the economic lifelines of several Northern European countries. In recent years, though, they’ve kept deliberately low profiles, so there’s been less and less talk about them. The last time news of them surfaced was on the wanted list.”

Ruan Cha nodded. After he finished, she tapped her fingertips lightly against the tabletop.

If her mother had a tattoo too, then she must have been a member of some organization. But why, after giving birth, had she never returned to that organization and instead lived in that village?

If she really was a member of an organization, how could Ruan Yingzhe have drugged her and forcibly...