Chapter 140: The Successor

A white Fukang car was parked by the roadside. Among several other vehicles, it did not look particularly conspicuous, but Xiao Cheng spotted it at a glance. Unlike the other cars, the exhaust pipe of that Fukang was still faintly emitting hot steam, clearly having been switched off only a moment ago.

Realizing there was no time to leave, Yun Shisan simply reclined his car seat, pulled his jacket over his face, and pretended to be a driver taking a nap. Beneath his clothes, his eyes remained fixed on the monitoring map as the red dot drew closer and closer—ten meters, eight meters, five meters...

"Damn it! Are we really going to capsize in a drainage ditch?"

Xiao Cheng and the Foreign Thief walked one after the other, getting closer and closer to the Fukang. They could even see the person inside through the car window. Xiao Cheng calculated and weighed his options in his mind; now was not the time to alert the enemy.

He had only gone to the hospital's archives room to look up records concerning his own birth, but the other party did not yet know that his memories had fully awakened. It was better not to startle the snake in the grass just yet, and furthermore, if a direct conflict were to break out now, he stood no chance of winning.

Wen Xiaodao was right: a single gun was enough to put you down, no matter how high your IQ was. Stephen Hawking's intelligence was enough to eclipse the vast majority of people in this world, yet any random junior high school student with a brick could make that world's cleverest brain stop thinking.

"Let's go home. My mother's files aren't here."

This sentence was ostensibly spoken for Wang Yang's benefit, but its real purpose was to throw Yun Shisan off. Whether it worked or not, it at least carried no risk and cost nothing.

Climbing into the Foreign Thief's Santana, Xiao Cheng could still see that white Fukang far away in the rearview mirror. The person inside remained completely motionless, as if truly fast asleep.

"Who was that guy?" Wang Yang possessed the observant eye of a thief and suspected that man was likely the very person who had been peeping at them from atop the wall earlier. However, since Xiao Cheng hadn't reacted in any way, he had kept his mouth shut until asking now.

"I don't know. But I think I'll be dealing with him again in the future."

............

Watching the Santana gradually drive away, and seeing the red dot on the monitoring map move further and further from him, Yun Shisan finally let out a long breath of relief. The call had not been disconnected, and Seventh Master on the other end had also been sweating bullets for him.

"Damn it, I never expected that none of the people around this kid are pushovers! An auto mechanic, yet his footwork is almost on par with our reconnaissance platoon's! I was almost spotted by him!"

"Chances are, he's already noticed something." Seventh Master was also watching the monitoring map on the other end of the line; Xiao Cheng's departure route had clearly taken a wide detour.

"Hell, I don't even know what I was nervous about. Even if I was discovered, what could this kid possibly do to me?"

On the phone, Seventh Master chuckled: "You'd better not cross this fellow. Have you forgotten how miserably that guy covered in candy fared in the night market the other night?"

............

Sneaking back into his own bed and seeing that Grandma in the other room hadn't noticed a thing, Xiao Cheng finally relaxed.

Lying in bed, sleep eluded him. The swapped archives—he wondered whether only his own file had been switched, or if the babies in the nursery back then had all been swapped. Of course, verifying this would be easy; he only needed to casually ask Yang Liushan if she had been born in the town's maternity and infant hospital.

Several possibilities now existed, and only one thing was certain: his file had been tampered with. Three doses of serum—one for himself, one for the deceased female infant, and a third for another girl.

First, did that mysterious organization know about the file-swapping? Second, had only one file been swapped, or all of them? Tonight's undercover probe into the maternity hospital had flushed out a mysterious figure, showing that the experimenters had not abandoned their surveillance of him, though it remained unclear how much information they had actually grasped.

Another crucial question was whether the other party was monitoring the hospital archives room or him directly.

Xiao Cheng pushed his photographic memory to its absolute limit. If he were under surveillance, he surely would not have been completely oblivious to it. He froze every change in his home and even the surrounding environment from day to day within his memory, then compared them day by day to search for discrepancies, eliminating those predictable, natural changes—such as the Boston ivy on the courtyard wall growing taller and sprouting new buds each day, or Carpenter Yuan building a house next door and the minor alterations that brought. The remaining changes, though easily overlooked, could reveal extremely vital clues if hunted down.

A brain with total recall functioned like the hard disk of a security camera, storing all seen and heard information. Now, he needed to find out-of-the-ordinary details within that data. What might seem unbelievable to an ordinary person was not overly difficult for Xiao Cheng.

On the low wall beside the utility pole at the entrance, there was less dirt on Friday than there had been on Thursday; someone seemed to have stepped on it while scaling the wall. Between Thursday and Friday, the differences seemed the most numerous—even the position of the door lock had changed.

The iron padlock on the courtyard gate: if nobody had touched it, it would undoubtedly look exactly the same when he returned as it did when he left!

Xiao Cheng rose quietly. Suspecting he might even be bugged, he didn't even put on shoes, getting up clad only in a pair of boxer briefs. If his guesswork was correct, someone had come to his house on Thursday night, and that low wall had been stepped on—most likely someone installing a surveillance camera there!

All these suspicions were verified one by one. On the utility pole by the entrance, under the cover of the old elm tree next to it, a new camera had indeed been installed. Moreover, the lens was adjustable, pointing directly at the small alley right outside his front door!

A wave of frustration washed over Xiao Cheng. It looked like he had been targeted long ago! His actions during the Math Olympiad competition must have been entirely too reckless, alerting the experimenters!

Still, it was just as well. Once discovered, instead of immediately being hauled off to be dissected, the experimenters had chosen to observe his behavior from the shadows. Perhaps their experiments were still ongoing, or perhaps the information they possessed was still insufficient. Regardless, since he had already been exposed, there was no longer any point in worrying about startling the snake.

The tracker in the sole of his shoe, the camera at the entrance, and his cell phone were likely compromised as well. Xiao Cheng mentally filtered through the other party's possible oversights one by one. That fleeting brush past each other outside the hospital today had probably already aroused their suspicion, but he wasn't entirely without a trump card: the other party presumably still did not know that he vividly remembered the moments immediately following his birth. Therefore, he ought to continue playing the role of the oblivious party.

How would a high-IQ monster react upon discovering that someone was monitoring him?

............

"I think you should pull back," Young Master Tang Seven said to Yun Shisan over the video feed.

"Our goal is to recruit high-IQ talent. Observation and surveillance are not the ends in themselves; they are merely meant to enhance our understanding. Now that he should already be aware of our existence—though he doesn't yet know who we are—rather than needlessly courting resentment, it would be better to withdraw and seek opportunities for cooperation later."

Yun Shisan shook his head with a bitter smile, "Seventh Master, to be honest, I really hate to let this go. This kid is quite interesting! It would be great if he could truly join us; this guy and the Boss would definitely hit it off!"

Young Master Tang Seven also felt a twinge of regret, shaking his head as he sighed: "Don't I feel the same way? Actually, we aren't short on talent, and geniuses are a dime a dozen. But a freakish level monster like Wen Xiaodao is truly a rare find. To be frank, none of us—whether it's me, Han Peng, or Shen Yi—can keep pace with the Boss's stride. We need talent like this—talent capable of leading an era!"

Yun Shisan was startled, "Seventh Master, you hold this kid in such high regard? Could it be that you want to... make him the Boss's successor?"

——————

Liu Mang was here again.