180 Degrees

Instinct

"Stay hidden until we get there" — The instruction was very clear and easy to understand. However, to actually follow it was much more complicated than one could imagine.

Being able to escape from the place where he got locked up was a good first step. Successfully reaching out to Zhang Zhehan's right-hand man and asking him for help was a great follow-up. Up until this point, Gong Jun thought he had done pretty well but he knew it would all mean nothing if he got caught again here. That said, for a grown man to keep himself hidden in a den of vicious hoodlums was not an easy task to do, especially not for an ordinary student who never once had any training or experience dealing with such a dangerous situation.

The storage room he was being kept in earlier was apparently a part of a large mansion, located in the back of the building's ground floor. After leaving the dusty chamber, the young Alpha had been sneaking here and there to avoid the guards patrolling the vicinity, but it was gradually becoming harder and harder for him to steer clear of their notice. Perhaps the people he tied up in the storage room were able to free themselves, perhaps news of his escape had spread among these thugs. He could never stay in one spot for too long, yet at the same time, the number of places he could use to hide was becoming scarce. It didn't help at all that he wasn't familiar with the mansion's interior; every time he needed to flee from a group of pursuers, he couldn't stop worrying if he would end up rushing straight into another group.

At the moment, the young Alpha had found shelter in a study, curling under a large desk in the corner. He'd been staying here for about half an hour. In total, it had been more than one and a half hours since his call with Xiao Yu ended. The other man hadn't contacted him again at all since then, while there were more and more noises of people running around in the corridor just beyond the door of the study. They might discover this place soon, Gong Jun thought, so before that happened, he decided to slip out and search for a new hiding place.

Maybe it was due to his restlessness, or maybe he simply never knew how it felt to live in a house as big as this, the mansion seemed like a huge, confusing maze with dozens of rooms and corridors spanning from the first to the third floor. There seemed to be a basement, as well, yet when he first made his escape, Gong Jun had taken the stairs to the second floor and he hadn't been able to get down again since then. Right now, he was already on the third floor of the building. If the help he'd been waiting for didn't show up anytime soon, he didn't know where else he could run off to, considering that the lower floors were already swarming with enemies.

Just then, he heard footsteps approaching from the end of the corridor in front of him.

"Oh, no, they're coming this way!"

At once, Gong Jun turned on his heels and ran in the other direction.

While his brain was spinning as he ran, however, his nose suddenly caught whiff of a peculiar scent. It wasn't particularly foreign; he felt like he had smelled this scent before — a bizarre circumstance since he'd been taken away by an unknown group of people to an unknown place. The reason why it was peculiar was that while the scent was sweet at first, the more he inhaled it, the stronger it became, and it wasn't only because he was getting closer to the source. There was something unnatural about how this scent was made to spread like this. It was neither perfume nor something like the fragrance of an air freshener; it tickled not only his nose but also his mind, seeping into his body and dulling his senses from noticing everything else around him but that scent alone. For some reason, Gong Jun had an unpleasant premonition growing in his heart.

Yet he wasn't allowed the chance to ponder about it any longer. From the other end of the corridor, the shadows of several people were reflected in the wall by the sunlight pouring through the window. There was no other way to run; front and back, his escape route was blocked by his pursuers. He had no time to think. Immediately, he grabbed the handle of a door closest to him, turned the knob, and threw himself inside.