Jian Yuche, the Dragon Head of the Crimson Veil Society, arrived at the warehouse at 7:43 a.m., earlier than usual but not early enough to matter.
The guards were standing outside the loading dock, talking in low voices. One of them was on his phone while the other kept looking at the door like it had personally offended him.
Jian Yuche stepped out of his car and walked toward them, already knowing something was wrong. He'd been doing this long enough to recognize the body language—confusion mixed with the kind of nervousness that came from not knowing how to explain a problem.
"Sir," the first guard said, straightening up as Yuche approached. "We have a situation."
Jian Yuche stopped in front of them and waited for them to explain more.
The guard hesitated, glancing at his partner before continuing. "The door is locked. Everything looks normal. The alarms never triggered. But—" He paused, like he wasn't sure how to finish the sentence. "Something feels off. We don't have the clearance to go inside, so we don't know what is going on for sure..."
Jian Yuche looked at the door. It was closed, the bolt in place, exactly the way it should be. No scratches on the lock, no damage to the frame. The security cameras were still mounted at each corner, their red lights blinking steadily. Everything looked exactly the way it was supposed to look.
"Open it," Jian Yuche said, handing over the one and only key to the warehouse.
The guard nodded, reaching out with both hands for the key, lowering himself slightly in a bow. The lock clicked open, and he slid the bolt free, letting the door swung inward with a low creak.
Jian Yuche stepped inside and looked around.
The warehouse was empty.
Not partially empty.
Not missing a few crates.
Completely empty.
Jian Yuche stopped just inside the doorway and stared.
The metal shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, exactly where they'd always been, but every single one of them was bare. No crates. No weapons. No ammunition. The racks that had held tactical vests and helmets were empty. The pallets that had been stacked with explosives were gone. Even the smaller items—the knives, the flashlights, the spare magazines—had vanished.
He walked down the first aisle slowly, his footsteps echoing in the hollow space. The concrete floor was clean. No drag marks. No footprints. No oil stains from equipment being moved. It looked like the warehouse had been swept, scrubbed, and left to sit empty for years.
When he reached the end of the aisle, he turned back around, scanning the rest of the building.
Every shelf. Every rack. Every corner. All of it was gone.
He pulled out his phone and dialed Wei Lingyun.
"I need you at the warehouse," he announced without any greeting when Lingyun picked up. "Now."
Wei Lingyun arrived twenty minutes later, stepping out of his bright red sportscar with the same calm, unhurried expression he always wore. He walked into the warehouse, stopped beside Yuche, and looked around without saying anything for a long moment.
"Well," Wei Lingyun said finally. "That's impressive."
Jian Yuche didn't respond. He was still trying to process the scale of it.
This wasn't a smash-and-grab. This wasn't a crew breaking in, loading up a truck, and driving off.
This was systematic. Methodical. Whoever had done this had taken everything—down to the last bullet—and left no trace.
Honestly, it should have taken days for it to be emptied to this extent...days and a shit ton of vehicles.
Wei Lingyun walked down one of the aisles, his hands in his pockets, studying the empty shelves. "No signs of forced entry," he murmured under his breath. "The door was locked from the outside. The alarms didn't trigger. The guards didn't see anything."
"No trucks," Jian Yuche added with a long sigh. "No tire marks outside. No footprints inside."
Wei Lingyun stopped and turned to look at him. "So how did they move it?"
The other man shook his head. He didn't have an answer.
Wei Lingyun walked back toward the loading dock, his eyes scanning the floor, the walls, the ceiling. He stopped near the door and crouched down, studying something on the ground. After a moment, he stood up and pulled out his phone.
"There's a security camera across the street," Wei Lingyun pointed out. "It's not ours, but it might have caught something."
The two men went outside and looked up at the camera. It was mounted on the corner of a building across from the warehouse, angled toward the street. Wei Lingyun made a call, spoke quietly for a few minutes, and then hung up.
"They're sending the footage," he informed his boss.
As they waited, Jian Yuche leaned against the side of the building, staring at the warehouse.
In all the years he'd been running the Crimson Veil's operations, he'd never seen anything like this. Thefts happened. Equipment went missing.
But this?
This was something else entirely.
Finally, after what felt like forever, Wei Lingyun's phone buzzed. He opened the file, scrolled through the footage, and stopped on a frame. He studied it for a moment, then handed the phone to Yuche.
The image was blurry, taken in low light, but it showed a figure near the loading dock. A woman, her face partially obscured by a hood, walking toward the door. The timestamp read 2:47 a.m.
"That's it?" Jian Yuche asked.
"That's all they have," Wei Lingyun replied. "But it's enough to go on. Not to mention it is more than what we had before."
He took the phone back and started pulling up more footage—street cameras, traffic cameras, anything within a three-block radius.
Jian Yuche watched as Wei Lingyun pieced together a path, frame by frame, tracing the woman's movements backward through the district.
A taxi. Then another taxi. Then a third one, farther out, near the edge of the city.
It wasn't until the third taxi that Wei Lingyun stopped on a final frame—a clear shot of the woman stepping out of a car in front of a large, gated property.
The mansion was unmistakable and Jian Yuche recognized it immediately.
"That's Xu Zhenlan's place," he announced, his voice going hard.
Wei Lingyun nodded in agreement. "Only one person left that property last night." He pulled up another image—a clearer shot of the woman walking toward the taxi. Her face was visible this time, sharp and focused. "Facial recognition says that her name is Shen Rouxi."
Jian Yuche stared at the image. The woman looked young, maybe late teens, early twenties, with an expression that was calm and unbothered. She didn't look like someone who had just robbed a military warehouse. She looked like someone going out for groceries.
Or someone going out clubbing at that time of night.
He looked back at the empty warehouse, then at the image on the tablet.
Whoever Shen Rouxi was, she had just done the impossible.
And Jian Yuche was determined to find out how.