Villain? No, I'll catch up with the protagonist after passing the civil service exam.

"Clang!"

The heavy security door slammed shut behind them, completely silencing Qiu Kun's hysterical screams within the interrogation room.

The incandescent light bulb on the corridor ceiling is quite old. The current is unstable, and it flickered twice with a crackling sound.

Lu Jingyan was carrying a stack of half-meter-high kraft paper files.

The red streaks of blood seeping from the gauze on the back of my left hand have dried. It feels a little tight against my skin, pulling at the wound and causing a slight itch.

He strode forward. His leather shoes clicked on the terrazzo floor, his pace neither fast nor slow.

At the corner of the corridor.

Su Xiaoxiao leaned against the wall, which was half-painted green, her head bowed.

He clutched a black military tactical tablet tightly in his hands. His fingernails unconsciously scratched the edge of the casing, leaving a few small, whitish marks.

Hearing footsteps, she suddenly looked up.

That round face, usually adorned with a sly smile, was now as white as a blank sheet of paper. Even her lips were bloodless and dry.

Zhao Tiezhu followed behind Lu Jingyan, carrying a teacup with peeling paint.

He strode over and nudged Su Xiaoxiao's shoulder with his thick elbow.

"What are you doing, girl? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Zhao Tiezhu grinned, his bald head gleaming under the light. "Even that purple sweet potato devil inside has admitted defeat, so why is your face so long?"

Su Xiaoxiao ignored him.

She held up the tablet and handed it directly to Lu Jingyan. The screen lit up, its pale blue light illuminating her bloodless face.

"Boss. The data processing is complete."

Her throat was dry. She swallowed, her voice sounding weak and trembling.

"Just now I did a low-level cross-comparison of the transaction records of Qiu Kun's overseas accounts with the intranet access logs of our municipal bureau headquarters over the past half month."

Lu Jingyan stopped in his tracks.

His gaze fell on the row of rapidly scrolling green code on the screen. His dark eyes were as still as water.

"That old fox is cunning. He knows there's counter-tracking."

Su Xiaoxiao swiped her finger across the screen, bringing up a complex network topology diagram.

"Every time he checked the highest password of the database, he used the public computer in the bureau's lobby as a botnet. He also used three foreign encryption proxies."

She took a deep breath. Her chest heaved.

"But he overlooked one crucial detail. He didn't know that I had added a disguised backdoor Trojan to the core crystal of that alien invisibility cloak."

"Yesterday afternoon at 3:40."

Su Xiaoxiao pointed to a red data cable on the screen.

"Someone used advanced intranet privileges within the bureau to access the physical encapsulation parameters of that invisibility cloak without authorization."

"Following this point, I forcibly breached the firewall and reverse-checked the biometric records in the attendance machine during that period."

Zhao Tiezhu leaned closer, his bald head sticking out.

"Hey, stop beating around the bush! Who's the traitor?" He wrung his hands anxiously. "I'll skin him alive and hang him on the city wall!"

Su Xiaoxiao remained silent.

She bit her pale lower lip hard, pressing her thumb firmly on the Enter key in the center of the screen.

"Smack."

The code stops scrolling.

A police ID photo of someone wearing a light blue short-sleeved police uniform popped up on the black screen.

This man is over fifty years old.

He wore old-fashioned gold-rimmed glasses. His hair was thinning, and he had a classic receding hairline on his forehead. When he smiled, his eyes were covered with layers of wrinkles.

He looked like an honest, unassuming man who had spent his whole life working at the grassroots level.

The air in the corridor suddenly froze.

The whirring sound of the exhaust fan is particularly annoying right now.

Zhao Tiezhu stared wide-eyed.

His jaw felt like it was dislocated. He rubbed his eyes hard with the back of his hand, then leaned forward half an inch, almost pressing the tip of his nose against the glass screen of the tablet.

"This...this is fucking..."

Zhao Tiezhu's tongue was tied. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down several times, but he couldn't utter a complete sentence for a long time.

Everyone knows the person on the screen.

Just a few days ago.

He was still in Conference Room One, trembling as he handed Lu Jingyan the backlog of case files. After being scolded, he was so frightened that he kept wiping cold sweat with a handkerchief.

Old Chen, the head of the archives section of the general headquarters.

He's known throughout the bureau as a nice guy. He usually carries a glass covered in tea stains and greets everyone with a smile, nodding and bowing.

I've worked in office administration for almost thirty years. I've never even caught a thief, let alone fired a gun.

"That can't be..."

Zhao Tiezhu stumbled back a step. His back hit the wall with a dull thud.

He scratched his head, his face full of disbelief.

"Old Chen? That old codger who can't even bear to watch a chicken being killed?"

"He dares to collude with black market thugs? He dares to sell the top-secret password to our police station's vault?"

Su Xiaoxiao's eyes reddened.

She hugged the tablet back to her arms. The light on the screen dimmed, turning into a deathly black.

"Gait analysis based on IP address, palm print records, and blind spots in surveillance."

Her voice was clearly choked with sobs, and her knuckles were bluish-white from the exertion.

"It all matches up. One-third of Qiu Kun's 80 million yuan in overseas embezzled funds was laundered into anonymous cryptocurrency and flowed into his wife's medical account abroad."

The corridor fell silent once again.

The feeling of being stabbed in the back by your own people is even more frustrating and disgusting than being inside a vault in a heavy alien mech.

The air felt like a sponge soaked with water, heavy and clogging everyone's lungs.

Lu Jingyan remained silent.

He turned to the side. The parchment file tucked under his arm was crumpled in his hand, the edge of the paper digging into his palm, leaving a deep white mark.

He stared at the faint light filtering through the blinds at the end of the corridor.

In the darkness beneath his eyes, the once calm and still lake surface slowly began to frost over.

"Oh."

A soft, cold laugh escaped his throat. It carried a hint of mockery, but more so, an unspeakable disappointment.

He remembered that conference room.

Old Chen pushed up his glasses and said tremblingly, "Those are just trivial matters like stolen bicycles."

Beneath that timid exterior lies a greedy and rotten face, utterly corrupted by money and fear.

"You can guard against thieves and robbers, but if you can't guard against thieves within your own household, you'll find it even harder to guard against them."

Lu Jingyan released his grip and placed the stack of files on top of a rusty water dispenser next to him.

He pulled out the thermos with its peeling paint. With a flick of his fingers, he unscrewed the metal lid.

I didn't drink it. I just stared blankly at the steam rising from the water.

"Boss, what do we do now?"

Su Xiaoxiao wiped her eyes and sniffled, her nose stinging.

"Should we arrest him now? The attendance system shows that he started work at 8 a.m. this morning, and he's in the archives room on the third floor right now."

Zhao Tiezhu's eyes instantly turned red.

Bloodshot veins filled the whites of his eyes. His fleshy face had turned a deep liver color.

The veins on his forehead bulged out, writhing under his skin like green worms.

"Fuck your mother!"

Zhao Tiezhu suddenly turned around.

He raised his right leg high and kicked the green wall hard with his heavy military boot.

"Bang!"

That was extremely powerful.

The plaster fell off the wall in a rustling sound, landing on the ground. A large, grayish-white shoe print was left on the wall.

"He acts like a pushover all the time, but behind our backs, he's risking his brothers' lives for money!"

His chest heaved violently, like a panting bull, hot air billowing from his nostrils.

He ripped open the Velcro straps on his tactical vest.

His rough, large hands reached directly for the quick-draw holster on his waist.

"Click".

He pulled out the large-caliber pistol he was issued with a swift motion. The metal barrel struck the belt buckle with a crisp, piercing sound.

"I'm going to kill this traitorous old bastard right now!"

Zhao Tiezhu gritted his teeth and strode towards the stairwell.

Just took a step.

A hand with distinct knuckles suddenly thrust in from the side.

There were no unnecessary movements. There was no overwhelming supernatural power.

The hand landed firmly on Zhao Tiezhu's dark gun barrel and pressed down hard.

The metal barrel felt a little cold.

Lu Jingyan placed his fingers on it, forcefully stopping the enraged black bear.

Zhao Tiezhu was stunned.

He turned around, panting heavily, and met Lu Jingyan's unfathomable black eyes.

A cold wind blew through the corridor.

Lu Jingyan raised his eyelids.

He didn't get angry or yell at them.

He simply tightened the thermos in his other hand.

Enraged, Zhao Tiezhu kicked the wall and drew his gun to grab the man. Lu Jingyan reached out and pressed down on the barrel of his gun, his voice low and menacing: "Put the gun away. I'll go myself."