I asked Xiaotao if Yuanchao had found anything suspicious in Professor Li’s background. She replied that Professor Li had a clean record. She grew up with her parents in Inner Mongolia until they died in an accident. She was then left with her elder brother Li Wenhai, who was ten years older than her and had looked after her ever since. He worked hard to support her. In fact, Professor Li’s college tuition was paid for by Li Wenhai’s hard-earned money. Unsurprisingly, the siblings seemed to have a very close bond with each other.

Li Wenhai made great achievements in psychology, especially in the field of hypnosis. In addition to his post as a university professor, he was also a renowned clinical psychologist. In the eyes of the public, he was a modest but successful scholar; but in truth, he would use hypnosis to trick many beautiful female patients to go to bed with him.

One day, one of his colleagues found out his dark secrets and threatened to report him to the authorities. He quickly grabbed the colleague’s throat and ordered him to jump off the building using hypnosis.

Because the colleague’s death was ruled as a suicide, Li Wenhai managed to escape punishments for his first murder. Unfortunately, this incident only proved to awaken his evil nature and was the start of his murderous rampage!

After that, he was no longer content to just deceive people or trick women to have sex with him. He began to use his skills to murder people. Anyone who dared to annoy him would end up dead. Once, when a take-out delivery man gave him a different soup from what he ordered, Li Wenhai hypnotized that man and caused him to walk straight into busy traffic and he died after he was hit by a car.

As time passed on, he began to kill just for the sake of it. In one case, he bumped into a beautiful woman on the street, so he hypnotized her into following him to an isolated place and had his way with her. After that, he made her commit suicide by hypnosis.

Within half a year, Li Wenhai killed close to a dozen people, all of whom died of accidents or suicide. The only thing that these victims had in common was that they were in contact with Li Wenhai in one way or another before their deaths, and that was why the police started to suspect him.

Perhaps the power he had over other people’s actions corrupted Li Wenhai’s heart over time, and gradually turned him into a monster. When Xiaotao first met him, she shuddered in terror even though he was only smiling at her. The police task force spent a whole month gathering enough evidence and finally arrested him.

“How did you manage to acquire convincing evidence to incriminate him?” I asked.

“Through a video recording!” she answered. “I personally acted as a bait for him to hypnotize and recorded the whole process.” The unpleasant memories connected to the incident made Xiaotao shiver involuntarily.

“That case caused me a lot of psychological trauma,” she continued. “I had to see a psychiatrist, and even then, it took me a long time to recover fully.”

The next few days were uneventful, and there were no breakthroughs in the case. Shiwen was transferred to the prison to await trial. I felt guilty for not being able to help him, so I paid him a visit together with Dali.

He cried as he was taken out of the police station. Xiaotao patted his shoulder and comforted him, “Don’t worry, I’ve asked someone to protect you in prison. You’ll be fine.”

The van that was to transport Shiwen drove up to the entrance. Apart from him, there were other prisoners to be transported to prison too. Before he got into the van, Shiwen suddenly knelt down on the ground. We were all taken by surprise. It turned out that he was kneeling in the direction of the college.

“Yanyan!” he shouted. “Wait for me! I’ll be accompanying you to the afterlife soon!”

Dali and I were shocked to hear that. The officers began to urge him to get up, but Xiaotao stopped them.

Shiwen knocked his head on the ground three times, then slowly stood up. All of a sudden, I heard the crisp sound of fingers snapping. Instantly after that, I saw the look in Shiwen’s eyes change and he started to charge towards Xiaotao. Then he grabbed her neck with both hands and choked her. Xiaotao tried to fight him off and they ended up falling to the ground.

“What are you doing, Shiwen?!” I shouted, frightened.

Xiaotao’s eyes had started to roll backward. She would soon lose consciousness. The police officers and I rushed up towards them and tried to pry Shiwen’s hands off of Xiaotao’s neck. Shiwen had never been a physically fit person, but strangely enough, even the six of us couldn’t move his arms at all.

Xiaotao desperately fought Shiwen off by scratching his arms. They were now bloody and full of scratches, yet Shiwen remained unfazed. I noticed that his eyes looked glazed over. At that moment, I could hear the bones in Xiaotao’s neck crack.

“Stop it right now!” I shouted, while kicking at Shiwen’s ribs as hard as I could. I was sure that I’d broken one of his ribs, but he just wouldn’t let go.

Finally, an officer tased Shiwen with a high-voltage stun gun. He trembled like a leaf in the wind before letting go of Xiaotao’s neck, then collapsed to the ground with his mouth foaming.

Xiaotao gulped the air and coughed violently. She vomited out a pool of gastric juice. There were two red palm prints on her neck. Everyone was still confused about what had just happened. I asked, “Did anyone hear the sound of fingers snapping earlier?”

“I heard it!” a few people answered.

“I think Shiwen implanted a command signal in his brain,” I explained. “That snapping sound brought him back under the hypnosis state and he lost control of his body.”

The target of this attack was Xiaotao, of course. I now understood Professor Li’s intentions. She framed Shiwen for murder, which forced the police to capture him. That way, she could send him, her ‘time bomb,’ straight to Xiaotao, and she would ‘activate’ the bomb anytime she saw fit! The hypnotized person could become as strong as a handful of men even if he was physically weak in normal circumstances. Had Shiwen not been tased just now, Xiaotao would’ve been killed.

Xiaotao continued to cough for a few minutes after that. Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. I asked her if she was alright, but she waved her hands and replied, “Don’t worry about me. Find Professor Li! She must be nearby!”

She struggled onto her feet and was about to pull out her gun, only to find that the holster on her waist was empty. She frantically asked if anyone had seen her gun. Police officers were usually punished if they somehow lost their guns.

Everyone looked around and tried to find the gun, but I suddenly noticed that Dali stood there silently. Just as I realized that something was wrong, Dali raised a black pistol, aimed it at Xiaotao and was about to pull the trigger!

I pushed Xiaotao out of the way. A police officer behind her was shot and collapsed to the ground. Dali didn’t give us any chance to respond; he re-aimed it at Xiaotao and continued firing.

I gritted my teeth and blocked a bullet with my own body. It felt as if I was punched really hard. I rushed up to Dali and shoved him down to the ground. I pinned his arms down with all my might. He opened fire towards the sky several more times.

Thankfully, the officers rushed up and subdued Dali. But as he was pinned to the ground, he suddenly shouted, “Your time has come, Huang Xiaotao!”

Although his voice was loud and clear, it was completely devoid of any emotions. In fact, it sounded robotic. This must’ve been implanted into his brain by Professor Li too.

Xiaotao came over to check my injuries. I was only shot in the shoulder, but the officer who was shot earlier was dead. One of the officer’s colleagues was so angry that we wanted to beat Dali up, but he was stopped by the others.

After this turn of events, Shiwen was no longer to be transferred to prison.

“Bring them back into the police station,” Xiaotao ordered. “Detain them separately and make sure to keep an eye on them at all times!”

She then drove me to the hospital. The doctor injected anesthesia into my body and removed a bullet from my shoulder. The image of a bloody bullet on an iron plate was seared into my mind. I’d only seen such a thing in films and television dramas—I never thought that I would one day experience it firsthand. The wound was then bandaged and my arm was then supported by an arm sling.

Once my injuries had been dealt with, I walked out of the ward and found Xiaotao sitting on a bench in the hallway. Her face was pale and she looked extremely worried.

“I just called Yuanchao,” she told me. “No one answered…”

I was speechless. Wang Yuanchao had been monitoring Professor Li for the past two days. If Dali and Shiwen could have such terrifying strength under hypnosis, I shuddered to think how terrifying Wang Yuanchao would be under the same circumstances!

“Don’t worry too much,” I comforted Xiaotao. “He’s incredibly strong-willed. He won’t be easily hypnotized. By the way, did anyone figure out where that finger-snapping sound came from?”

“It was Dali’s ringtone,” Xiaotao replied. “Professor Li must’ve set that up herself. I’ve sent some officers to her apartment to watch her movements and detain her in her house.”

Xiaotao paused for a moment, then looked up at me.

“Song Yang, can you stay with me tonight?” she asked.

“Of course,” I nodded. “I’ll always protect you!”

She smiled, but the smile was full of pain and sorrow instead of happiness.

“Thank you!”