Just as Ye Huan was about to deliver the fatal blow and Jin Jiu was quite literally scared out of his wits, an urgent voice rang out from outside.
The next moment, Hongluan rushed inside in a panic:
"Spare his life! Do not kill him!"
Jin Jiu and Jin Peng stared in utter disbelief at the person who had just burst in.
Hongluan!
How had Hongluan, one of the eight Guardian Gods of War, ended up here?
"Why? Doesn't he deserve to die?" Ye Huan asked coldly.
"He deserves to die, but he must die at the hands of the law!"
Hongluan said quickly:
"Although Jin Jiu has committed countless crimes and deserves no pity, he is a prominent business figure and the founder and chairman of Lin Group. His influence is far too great. If he dies an obscure and unexplained death, it will trigger a whole chain reaction."
"What kind of chain reaction?" Ye Huan asked.
Hongluan caught her breath before answering:
"First, if Jin Jiu dies mysteriously, it will cause many people in the Pengcheng business community to lose faith in the city's law enforcement system. Particularly those with dark secrets—they will likely withdraw their capital and flee Pengcheng, which in turn will plunge the city's economy into crisis.
"Second, if Jin Jiu dies, Lin Group will be left without a leader. Banks and numerous business partners will sever ties with the company, causing Lin Group to collapse and leaving a massive workforce unemployed.
"Third, if Jin Jiu dies, Lin Group will descend into a vicious internal power struggle, leading to the indefinite suspension of many ongoing projects, which will trigger even greater repercussions..."
Ye Huan listened quietly to Hongluan's explanation, feeling somewhat enlightened. He had no idea that killing a single person could pull at so many threads.
"Do me a favor and spare Jin Jiu. I will investigate all of his illegal activities and gather the evidence, bringing him to justice through proper legal channels. That way, we can minimize the fallout from this chain reaction."
Hongluan looked at Ye Huan with a pleading expression.
Jin Jiu and Jin Peng felt a violent jolt in their chests. They looked at Ye Huan in sheer disbelief, wondering what on earth his background could possibly be. He had just killed the Butler, yet Hongluan—a Guardian God of War—didn't bat an eye. And now, to save Jin Jiu's life, she was actually begging Ye Huan and asking him to grant her a favor.
"Since Jin and his son are so curious about my identity, why don't you tell them?"
Ye Huan said, which served as an indirect agreement to spare Jin Jiu's life!
"He is the King of Hell."
Hongluan breathed a sigh of relief and said.
"What?"
Jin Jiu and Jin Peng were so terrified they fainted on the spot!
"Wake them up," Ye Huan said.
"Right away!"
Hongluan hurried over to the washroom, filled a basin with cold water, and splashed it straight onto the faces of Jin Jiu and Jin Peng.
"Spare us! King of Hell, spare our lives! Please..."
As soon as they regained consciousness, Jin Jiu and Jin Peng dropped to their knees and began kowtowing frantically to Ye Huan, begging for mercy.
Jin Peng had completely forgotten the excruciating pain of his severed arm; the terror gripping his heart had utterly overwhelmed any physical agony.
They had heard far too many legends about the King of Hell!
To offend the King of Hell didn't simply mean being killed—it meant having your entire clan wiped out!
"How about working for me from now on?"
Ye Huan nudged Jin Jiu's chin up with the tip of his shoe and asked.
"Huh?"
Every single cell in Jin Jiu's body had been trembling with terror, but upon hearing those words, he suddenly felt as though a sweet, life-giving rain had fallen from the heavens, drenching every fiber of his being.
He had offended the King of Hell, yet not only was he not going to be killed, but the King of Hell was actually taking him in as a subordinate?
Damn it, the dramatic roller coaster of life was just too damn thrilling!
"You're not willing?" Ye Huan asked.
"Willing!"
Jin Jiu let out a roar, practically bursting with excitement:
"Willing! Yes, I'm willing! From this moment on, I, Jin Jiu, am willing to be a loyal dog under your command, unwavering until death!"
"Get up."
Ye Huan was quite satisfied with Jin Jiu's attitude. He nodded and said:
"From now on, you are not allowed to give Lin Xi a hard time ever again!"
Jin Jiu scrambled to his feet, standing rigidly at attention: "Understood!"
Chapter 26: A Temper Bigger Than Her Chest
At that moment, Hongluan furrowed her brow: "What do you mean by taking in Jin Jiu?"
Her subtext was clear: the King of Hell had always operated alone, yet today, within the span of a single day, he had first taken control of Hell Sect and now subdued Jin Jiu. This completely contradicted his past behavior.
"I need a foundation in Pengcheng," Ye Huan replied.
Hearing this, Hongluan felt deeply depressed. Damn it, the King of Hell was already starting to plant his roots in Pengcheng—which meant he intended to stay here for the long haul!
She asked, "Then should the police still investigate Jin Jiu's criminal evidence?"
Ye Huan thought for a moment before saying, "No need to investigate. Just make him confess everything himself. But don't arrest him for now. If he steps out of line in the future or commits any more illegal acts, we can always lock him up then."
In his mind, Jin Jiu rapidly analyzed the information contained in Ye Huan's words:
First, he needed to honestly and thoroughly confess every single crime he had ever committed to Hongluan;
Second, he had to obey—to follow the King of Hell's commands without question;
Third, he must never engage in any illegal activities again unless ordered by the King of Hell.
"Fine," Hongluan nodded. She had caught the underlying meaning in Ye Huan's words: right now, he needed Jin Jiu to help build his foundation. Once that foundation was secure, Jin Jiu would lose his usefulness, and at that point, the police could arrest him whenever they pleased.
"Speaking of which, the Global Official God of War Summit is about to start. Why aren't you going to the meeting instead of constantly trailing behind me?"
With the issue resolved, Ye Huan changed the subject and chuckled.
*I was worried you'd go around slaughtering innocent people...* Hongluan thought to herself, but aloud she said:
"I was ordered to protect you."
"Do I look like I need your protection?" Ye Huan asked.
Hongluan: "..."
"Don't worry, Pengcheng is my hometown. I won't cause trouble here."
Ye Huan patted Hongluan on the shoulder and turned to leave.
Hongluan watched as he walked out of the villa, then pulled a few tissues from the coffee table to wipe the sweat from her brow. Earlier, she had genuinely been afraid that Ye Huan wouldn't give her any face and would slice Jin Jiu apart with a single knife!
...
When Ye Huan returned to the bar, the birthday party had reached its climax. The thumping music and swaying bodies were thoroughly infectious.
Lin Xi had transformed into a DJ queen, mixing tracks, swaying to the rhythm, belting out songs at the top of her lungs, and occasionally taking a sip of alcohol.
As for the fifty hoodlums Jin Peng had brought along, along with the smashed tables and chairs, they had long since been cleared away by the bar staff. Even Su Lei's bodyguards had been packed off to the hospital.
"This girl has some spirit."
Ye Huan found a corner seat and sat down, quietly enjoying Lin Xi's performance from afar.
At that moment, a young woman walked over holding two glasses of drink. She sat down right next to Ye Huan, pressing tightly against him, and cast a flirtatious, melting glance his way:
"Want to go up to a second-floor private booth and have some fun?"
Because the music in the bar was deafeningly loud, the girl had to shout to make herself heard.
"What kind of fun?" Ye Huan asked loudly.
Without a shred of shyness, the girl replied:
"I want to experience Xiang Yingxin's pain for myself!"
Ye Huan: "..."
"Let's go!" the girl shouted.
The corner of Ye Huan's twitched: "My prostate is acting up, let's make it another time."
"Fine."
The girl didn't look disappointed; instead, she asked for Ye Huan's contact information before heading back to the dance floor.
No sooner had she left than another girl approached him, expressing the exact same desire to experience Xiang Yingxin's pain, only to be politely rejected by Ye Huan as well.
And then—
Girl after girl came looking for Ye Huan, all with the exact same objective!
Ye Huan was simply at a loss for words. What was wrong with the affluent heiresses of Pengcheng? Were there no men left in the city? Or were the local men just completely useless?
Right then, Shen Huamei walked over carrying a bottle of liquor.
"Do you want to experience Xiang Yingxin's pain too?" Ye Huan asked loudly in genuine astonishment.
Shen Huamei glared at him with fury and barked, "Who let you in here? Get the hell out!"
Ye Huan breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, a normal person had shown up. He yelled back:
"What did you say? I can't hear you!"
"I said get out!" Shen Huamei roared.
"Go to the bathroom together? No thanks, you go ahead!" Ye Huan shouted back.
Furious, Shen Huamei took a deep breath, leaned right up to Ye Huan's ear, and screamed at the top of her lungs:
"Get out!"
Ye Huan continued to play dumb: "Dance with me? I don't know how. I'm a butcher—I can geld pigs just fine, but I can't dance!"
Seeing Ye Huan feign ignorance, Shen Huamei was completely out of options. She huffed in frustration and stomped back to the dance floor.
"That girl's temper is even bigger than her chest," Ye Huan chuckled to himself.
Just then, DJ Queen Lin Xi received a text message. The moment she read it, her pretty face altered dramatically. She hurried over to exchange a few words with Shen Huamei, then dashed out of the bar, typing away on her phone as she ran.
A second later, Ye Huan's phone buzzed with a text from Lin Xi:
"Come with me to the company!"
Ye Huan quickly chased after her out of the bar. Once inside the car, he asked:
"What happened?"
"Every single computer at Lin Group is under a simultaneous hacker attack!"
Sitting in the passenger seat, Lin Xi wore a dark, grim expression as she urged him:
"Step on it! Never mind the red lights or anything else—just get to the office as fast as you possibly can!"
"Got it!"
Ye Huan immediately started the engine and slammed his foot down on the accelerator.
The sudden, violent surge of G-force made Lin Xi feel as though her back was about to smash right through the seat cushion. And that wasn't even the half of it—what Ye Huan did next nearly scared her soul right out of her body.
He floored the gas pedal all the way, executing heart-stopping drifts and overtake maneuvers as if he were a professional race car driver.
"Slow down! If you drive like this, we'll die in a car crash before we even reach the office!"
Pale-faced and terrified, Lin Xi screamed at the top of her lungs.
"Relax. Even Lewis, the God of Racing, would bow to my driving skills," Ye Huan said casually, showing no intention of slowing down.
Lin Xi rolled her eyes: "I swear, you really do know how to brag."
Ye Huan: "..."
Why was it that whenever he told the absolute truth, nobody ever believed him?
Choosing not to dwell on it, Lin Xi said in a grave voice:
"There's a rumor that Jin Group has a top-tier hacker. I bet it was you who crippled Jin Jiu, and out of fury, he's ordered his hacker to retaliate against Lin Group."
"I can guarantee you this has nothing to do with Jin Jiu," Ye Huan stated with absolute certainty.
"On what grounds can you make that claim?" Lin Xi asked.
"Jin Jiu begged and pleaded to be my subordinate, so I didn't have the heart to cripple him. Therefore, the hackers attacking Lin Group were definitely not sent by him!" Ye Huan replied.
"You're bragging again!"
Lin Xi was utterly defeated by Ye Huan's chronic habit of talking big.
Too lazy to argue, Ye Huan steered with one hand while pulling out his phone with the other. He called Jin Jiu and put the call on speaker as it connected.
"Who is this?"
Jin Jiu's deep, authoritative voice came through the receiver.
"It's me," Ye Huan said.
"Ah, Master! Please give me your orders, whatever they are—I'll leap into a sea of fire without a second thought!"
In a split second, Jin Jiu's booming, domineering tone morphed into the obsequious, ingratiating whine of a groveling subordinate.
Hearing this, Lin Xi's jaw dropped in sheer astonishment. She knew Jin Jiu's voice far too well; this simply couldn't be faked.
"Little Jiu, sing a nursery rhyme for me," Ye Huan commanded.
Jin Jiu: "Two little honeybees, flying through the flowers, flying, flying..."
Chapter 27: Flashy, Mind-Bending Operations
That finally convinced Lin Xi that Ye Huan hadn't been boasting!
She stared in shock at the side profile of Ye Huan's face as he drove, finding it hard to wrap her head around reality. Just who was Jin Jiu?
He was the founder and chairman of the Jin Group, a corporate titan valued in the hundreds of billions;
He was an underworld overlord whom the police desperately wanted to arrest and the courts wanted to sentence, yet for over twenty years, law enforcement hadn't been able to unearth a single shred of criminal evidence against him.
And yet, a supreme overlord like that had actually been subdued by a mere butcher!
"Do you believe now that the hacker attack on Lin Group has nothing to do with Jin Jiu?"
Ye Huan hung up the phone and asked.
Lin Xi didn't answer, but she believed him. However, a troubling thought immediately surfaced: if it wasn't Jin Jiu, then who on earth had hired hackers to target Lin Group?
Seeing the deep concentration on Lin Xi's face, Ye Huan didn't disturb her. He drove at maximum speed all the way until they pulled up at Lin Group's headquarters.
Before the car had even come to a complete stop, Lin Xi flung the door open and bolted out, with Ye Huan close behind her.
The two of them rushed into the Lin Group tower and headed straight for the elevators.
It was already past ten o'clock at night, but plenty of employees were still working overtime, along with the on-duty security guards.
They arrived directly at Lin Group's cybersecurity department.
"Ms. Lin!"
Seeing Lin Xi arrive, Wang Bin, the head of the cybersecurity department, hurried over to meet them.
"What's going on?" Lin Xi demanded.
"The company's network has been infiltrated by a completely unprecedented type of novel malware. I'm currently leading the on-duty team members trying to crack it, and the rest of the team is on their way here," Wang Bin reported rapidly.
"Are you confident we can win this cybersecurity defense battle?" Lin Xi asked.
"Yes!" Wang Bin answered with absolute confidence.
"Good!"
That gave Lin Xi some peace of mind. She said, "Get back to work, don't mind me."
"Understood!"
Wang Bin immediately returned to his workstation, his fingers hammering away at the keyboard as if he were suffering from severe muscle spasms.
The other on-duty members of the cybersecurity team were doing the exact same thing.
"Need any help?"
Ye Huan asked, looking at Lin Xi, who was trying hard to maintain a facade of calm despite her obvious tension.
"What can a butcher possibly help with? Smash the computers?"
Lin Xi shot Ye Huan a sidelong glance and retorted sharply.
"Actually, I happen to be a very professional hacker," Ye Huan said.
Lin Xi flared up, hissing in a low voice, "Would it kill you not to brag? If you were a professional hacker, you'd be pulling down a massive annual salary at any tech firm. Why would you be butchering pigs?"
In Lin Xi's eyes, hackers were elite technical talents proficient in advanced programming who could command high salaries anywhere.
If Ye Huan were a professional hacker, there was no way he'd be doing grueling physical labor like butchering pigs.
Besides, Ye Huan was someone who had been abandoned by his biological parents, trafficked by kidnappers, and deprived of any higher education—how on earth could he possibly be a professional hacker?
"Oh no, they're copying company data right now!" someone suddenly cried out in alarm.
Lin Xi whipped her head around to look. Every single monitor in the cybersecurity department had gone pitch black, and a line of text had just appeared across the screens: *Data copying in progress... 1.5%*
"Block them immediately! We cannot let them steal the company's data!"
In that instant, panic seized Lin Xi!
Once company data was leaked to hostile parties, it would be a fatal blow to the firm.
Especially since the company housed an R&D department; if their research results and proprietary data were stolen, the consequences were simply unthinkable.
She didn't need to remind them—Wang Bin and his team were already frantically trying to intercept the transfer, but it was completely useless.
*Data copying in progress... 2.1%*
*Data copying in progress... 3.5%*
*Data copying in progress... 5.4%...*
Watching the numbers climb relentlessly, Lin Xi felt sweat bead on the palms of her hands.
"This guy's a pro,"
Ye Huan muttered in surprise after walking up behind Wang Bin to watch for a moment.
Wang Bin, whose fingers were flying across the keyboard in a blur, furrowed his brow and snapped:
"Please don't disturb my work!"
At that moment, Lin Xi ran over, pulled Ye Huan back toward the doorway, and scolded in a low whisper:
"Whether the company survives this crisis depends entirely on Wang Bin and his team. Why are you over there causing distractions?"
Watching the screen where the text now read *Data copying in progress... 8.2%*, Ye Huan said with a grave expression:
"I'm not trying to look down on Wang Bin and these guys, but I'm afraid they've got zero chance of stopping whoever is stealing Lin Group's data."
"What the hell do you know?"
Lin Xi fired back without a trace of politeness:
"Ever since Lin Group was founded, it has weathered countless hacker attacks. Every single time, Wang Bin has led his team to beat back the enemy. I believe he and his team can work a miracle this time, too."
Before her voice had even faded, Wang Bin and everyone else in the cybersecurity department stood up one after another.
Wang Bin rose to his feet, his face pale with shame and despair:
"Ms. Lin, all company computers have been remotely hijacked by the intruder. We can no longer stop them from stealing the company's data."
Color drained entirely from Lin Xi's face. Her legs buckled, and she staggered backward, nearly collapsing to the floor. Wang Bin's words were, without a doubt, a death sentence for Lin Group.
Once all the data was stolen and fell into the hands of competitors, it would only be a matter of time before Lin Group went under!
"Let me try,"
Ye Huan caught Lin Xi just as she was about to crumple.
Those words felt like a drowning person clutching at a final straw. Lin Xi grasped at it desperately:
"Jin Group has a top-tier hacker! Call Jin Jiu right now and tell him to send that hacker over!"
"There's no time,"
Ye Huan shook his head.
"I'm the only one who can try!"
Despair gripped Lin Xi once more.
Meanwhile, Wang Bin and his subordinates looked over at Ye Huan. None of them recognized him.
Wang Bin spoke up: "Ms. Lin, while I don't know who this gentleman is, we're currently just sitting here waiting to die anyway. We might as well let him take a shot—treat it like treating a dead horse as a live one. Even if he fails, he can't possibly make the crisis any worse."
Lin Xi took a deep breath and said to Ye Huan in a voice devoid of strength:
"If you want to try, go ahead."
Her tone carried the resignation of *do whatever you want, Lin Group is finished anyway.*
Without wasting a second, Ye Huan strode over to Wang Bin's workstation and sat down. He pulled out his phone, opened an app that neither Wang Bin nor Lin Xi had ever seen before, and tapped a few buttons. In a flash, his phone established a direct connection with Wang Bin's computer.
The next moment, countless black terminal windows filled with streams of code exploded across the screen.
Ye Huan's index fingers began hammering the keyboard with the speed of a man having a seizure.
"What kind of operation is that?"
Wang Bin and his team members crowded around, staring like a bunch of idiots at Ye Huan's flashy, mind-bending inputs, completely unable to make sense of what they were seeing.
Lin Xi edged closer as well. She couldn't understand a single line of it either, but Ye Huan's actions looked remarkably professional. For a fleeting moment, he became the sole beacon of hope to save Lin Group.
Right now, she had no choice but to trust him!
"Lin Xi, what the hell do you think you're doing?"
At that exact moment, several senior company executives burst into the cybersecurity department, headed by a middle-aged man who bellowed in fury.
It was Lin Xi's eldest uncle, Lin Group's Vice President, Lin Qingyun.
The moment she laid eyes on Lin Qingyun, unmistakable disgust flashed in Lin Xi's lovely eyes. She said in a cold voice:
"Uncle, I'll explain the situation outside."
She had no intention of letting Lin Qingyun start shouting and disrupting Ye Huan's work.