With Gu Heping's support, Gu Qiang was seamlessly integrated into the top levels of Gu Corp. By the end of the month Gu Cheng stepped aside 'temporarily' and Gu Qiang became acting CEO of Gu Corp. Mo Ye agreed to his promotion of Director at Shooting Star Entertainment, and with hardly a ripple, Gu Cheng officially stepped to the side to pursue 'new ventures'. To most in the business world, this meant that he would be starting up a new company that would cover one of the areas that Gu Corp had not yet branched out into. For a while, people would speculate on what that would be, but with no official information forthcoming, they soon grew tired, and it sank to idle gossip.
Unofficially, Gu Cheng immersed himself in preparing for a trip that he knew he could not really prepare for. His current thoughts were that Joseph Zaria must work for some up-till-now unknown and secretive agency that had developed technology that the world could not even imagine. Even though he did not get the tiniest whiff of "nothing going on here, move it along" that he would normally expect when questions were asked about things that others wished to remain secret, he had no other ideas that would explain what happened in the apartment bathroom that day that she disappeared.
Remembering how she spent a month gathering things to take with her on her trip, Gu Cheng began to call in favors and gather his own supplies. On the day that he planned on setting out, he stood in a small office in an outwardly abandoned factory, facing a cabinet with its doors standing open.
He wore black, from his military style lace-up boots, up to his black turtleneck top. He wrapped a belt covered in pouches around his waist, tightening it before beginning to add items to each compartment. In a strapped holster that went from the belt down and around his thigh, he slipped a 9mm gun, and extra clips went into several of the pouches around the belt.
Blades slid into sheaths in several spots around his body, and all other compartments were filled with anything else that he thought he might need in a hostile situation. He considered a larger weapon than his pistol, but he was not sure if something larger and fully automatic would be more likely to help an unknown situation or make it worse. In the end, the weight was not worth the risk if he needed to travel with speed, and he closed the armaments cabinet. A black cap was pulled down on his head, newly shorn back into his preferred length from his days as a colonel in the army. His lips quirked up for just a moment as he wondered if Zaria would like his shorter hair.
Not for one second did the thought occur to him that she might not want to come back to him or that he would never be able to find her. In the core of his being, he knew that she was alive, and the expressions she tried not to show as she left told him that she wanted to be with him as well. She belonged to him, as he did to her, and nothing would stop him from finding her. It was that conviction that kept him moving when his fear for her safety wormed its way into his thoughts each day.
For the last week, that fear had grown, and he sped up his preparations. It was as though something was telling him that she was in danger. He took one more look over the different items carried on his body, taking out his weapons to check that they were ready to be used and then carefully securing them once more. He slid his phone from the pouch at the small of his back and looked at the picture of a small woman sleeping peacefully on her side in a delicate blush colored gown. Then he took a deep breath, put the phone back away, and opened the door to the office.
Instead of the large storage area filled with security teams preparing for missions as he expected he found himself suddenly in a downpour, rain beating on his head and shoulders, running off the brim of his hat in sheets. His head whipped around, but the door he just walked through was gone, as though it never existed. Years of experience in the field kept him from panicking, but his heart rate picked up, and his muscles tensed.
Ahead of him, between two of the trees that surrounded him, he could see a grey dome that looked a lot like a tent. He walked cautiously toward it, his hand hovering over the holster at his side, stopping when he got to the entrance. He looked around slowly, freezing when he saw a tall shape twelve to thirteen meters away, barely distinguishable in the onslaught of rain. The shape shifted and seemed to get wider for a moment, but it was much too tall to be the person he was looking for so he waited to make sure it was moving farther away, not moving until it was nothing more than a dark shape in the distance.
He looked around again to verify that nothing else was around him and then concentrated his attention on the tent. There was nobody inside, the door hanging open and water beginning to pool at the entrance. Whomever was staying there had left recently, within minutes, if the amount of rain inside was any indication.
He ducked through the door and lowered himself to one knee, looking without touching at the things that were strewn about. An uneasy feeling grew as he took in the scene, and he shifted the clothing on the ground out of the way, freezing when he uncovered the bags under the mess. The clothes that looked familiar could just be chance, but the bags were distinctive enough that individually he could argue it was coincidence but together he was certain that the tent belonged to the woman he was looking for.
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He knew that something out of the ordinary had happened to her, but finding himself in the middle of the woods after walking through a door that he had been through a dozen times before and ending up in front of the tent of the person he was looking for raised the hairs on his neck.
He shoved the items in the bags quickly, not sure what all she had when she left to know what was missing. As he reached the back of the tent, he froze, his eyes glued to what looked like drops of blood on the damp floor. Several drops, and a long smear, but definitely blood. A balled up shirt lay nearby, and without touching it, he could see dark stains on the wet fabric. He recognized the material and the color. He had looked at her wearing it so many times while she made dinner after work. Working quickly, he packed everything up, leaving only the things that could not be used again. Then he broke down the tent and attached it to the pack before sliding his arms through the straps.
From the time he looked inside the tent to the time he settled the bags across his back it had been no more than five minutes, but he had to force himself to stop and take a breath before running wildly through the woods looking for her. There was not enough blood to be a serious wound, he repeated to himself. He thought back to the tall shape he saw moving away and as he concentrated on the memory he became certain that the odd way it seemed to grow to the side was because it was not one person but two, the other quite a bit shorter than the first.
Without thinking about it first, he took off through the woods in the direction he saw the figure or figures. When he reached the area he last saw them he slowed down and looked carefully at the ground. There, he could see footprints, one set walking toward the tent, and two walking away. The smaller tracks were close together, their tips dragging forward slightly. The person was tired or ill. Maybe injured.
Moving as quickly as he could, glancing down occasionally to make sure he was still following the trail, he burst out of the trees and onto a dirt road. Far in the distance to the right, he could see large shapes, but they were getting smaller quickly, and in the downpour, he could not make out what they were. He looked to the ground, the footprints indistinct where they entered the road. Fighting the urge to go to the right, he stepped back and walked along the side of the road, trying to make sense of the tracks he was seeing. There were no tire tracks, motorcycles, or cars. The road was covered in horseshoe shaped impressions, and the small footprints ended in the middle.
Although he had to admit to himself that the situation was abnormal, he somehow knew that he needed to follow the horses if he wanted to find the person he was looking for. As he ran, he tried to concentrate only on steadying his breathing and keeping a steady pace. His eyes worked from side to side as he ran, checking for danger as he went.
Hours passed, but he did not stop except to take a moment to drink some water from a canteen hanging from his belt. His eyes moved from the tracks on the road to the treeline to up ahead in the distance. Several times, the tracks moved off the road he was on and onto another, never any other tracks except horses. This unsettled him, but he could not put his finger on why. The rain never let up, but when the sky grew even darker, he knew that night was falling, and he ducked under the trees to try and get a bit of cover before checking his phone. It was well past midnight, but the sky was just beginning to darken? It made no sense, but he put his phone away and continued on.
Gu Cheng pushed his exhaustion aside and kept going. Several more hours went by before he saw anything besides tree and road. Ahead to the left, the trees gave way to a long dark line that ran along the road for as far as he could see. He slowed and stepped off the road, ducking into the trees for some way before starting back in that direction again.
Through the trees, he could see a wall rising up from the ground, three, three and a half meters high. He stopped a short distance away, crouching low and listening for the sound of guards or a patrol unit. No lights lit up the sky from within, and no voices carried in the dark, so he carefully moved forward, setting the bags on his back onto the ground. Gu Cheng slowly scaled a tree near the wall, sticking to the side that kept the trunk between him and anyone who might see him when he got near the top of the wall.
When he peered from around the trunk, he could see a building, massive even by City C standards. He looked at it at an angle from the front and side, and both sides stretched out for quite a distance. It was easily five times as large around as the sprawling villa that was the Gu Family home, and four stories high. Light flickered in some of the windows, and it took him a moment to figure out that it was fire light, candles, or perhaps oil lamps by the brightness.
Voices pulled his attention toward the road, and he noticed a closed gate leading outside with two cloaked figures standing in the rain at its sides talking . Lowering himself down again, he gathered the packs and retreated to a safe distance, farther away from both the wall and the road. The bags were tucked inside of a hollow tree to keep them safe, and Gu Cheng climbed another tree with broad branches growing in tight clusters, settling on a branch some four meters off the ground where he could see anyone coming and they would be unlikely to see him. He folded his arms and leaned his head back against the bark.
If it was Zaria he was following, even if she was injured, whomever she went with did not want her dead or they would have killed her out in the middle of the woods where nobody would find her for a long time. He needed information, and for that, her would have to be patient. Which meant he needed rest. He closed his eyes and called on years of training to slow his mind and heart and dropped off to sleep.