To say «Pang Bo» was a name would be a misnomer; it was more akin to a callsign. As far as Pang Bo himself knew, he was already the third person to bear it. Without real prowess, inheriting such a title was impossible. A Caucasian male standing six-foot-three, Pang Bo was not merely built like a brick wall-he was a seasoned veteran who had served in the military and undergone rigorous formal training. Agile and impeccably coordinated, he had once taken on two armed thugs bare-handed and sent them both to meet God in under a minute. Safe to say, he possessed absolute confidence in his skills and reflexes.
Yet that was precisely the problem. Pang Bo could not, for the life of him, fathom how Li Yunlong had managed to drag him inside with a single hand. He had been fully prepared, his nerves stretched taut in a state of high alert. Forget hooking a arm around his neck and hauling him in-the moment Li Yunlong's hand so much as twitched, Pang Bo should have launched a swift counterattack. How could he have stood there like a brainless wooden post, letting himself be manipulated without a fight?
Before he could make sense of it, the door slammed shut behind him. Driven by raw instinct, Pang Bo spun around, just in time to see Li Yunlong pulling his hands back. Li Yunlong hadn't done much-merely brought the edges of his palms down in sharp chops against the necks of Pang Bo's two lackeys. Neither of them had offered the slightest resistance; their eyes rolled back, and they crumpled limply to the floor.
Forged through life-and-death struggle, Pang Bo's reflexes responded before his mind could process the threat. His hand darted down, reaching for the pistol holstered at his waist. But the distance between them was far too short. Li Yunlong gave him no time to draw. Gathering his strength, Li Yunlong struck both of Pang Bo's shoulders with a pair of heavy, muffled thuds, dislocating both joints instantly. In the face of agony, Pang Bo grit his teeth, steeling himself to throw a desperate upward kick to turn the tables. Li Yunlong answered with a brutal punch straight to his groin. A wave of numbness hit first, followed by a searing chill, and then total loss of sensation. Forget kicking-Pang Bo couldn't even control his lower body. He collapsed onto the floor in a twisted, helpless heap.
At a moment like this, Pang Bo deserved credit for one good habit: whenever he wasn't planning to shoot, he kept his safety on. Otherwise, in his current position, he would have accidentally put a bullet through his own lower half. As a veteran who had navigated the underworld for years, his psychological fortitude was exceptional. Trapped and ambushed though he was, he neither panicked nor broke into hysterical curses. Instead, he forced his head up and glared directly at Li Yunlong. «You planning to put me down?» he growled. «Won't do you any good. Nobody skips out on Mr. Goldfinger's money and lives!»
Li Yunlong dragged Pang Bo over to the wall, propping him up against it before pulling a chair over to sit opposite him. «In a situation like this, you're still worried about money?» Li Yunlong toyed with the captured handgun. «A loan shark enforcer falling into my hands ought to be a little more concerned with his own life, don't you think?» The weapon wasn't the famous Desert Eagle, but a Beretta 92-the kind ubiquitous among American law enforcement. Mass-produced, relatively cheap, and unhindered by strict legal barriers, firearms were so common in this country that they had evolved beyond weapons into a cultural staple. Even so, one class of people never possessed them: paupers like Tom Riddle. In the underworld, a gun was not just firepower; it was a status symbol. Sitting at the very bottom of the gang hierarchy, Tom Riddle had rarely enjoyed the chance to touch one. Having lived his whole life in a law-abiding country where guns were strictly controlled, Li Yunlong had never possessed the chance to handle one either. Now, holding a real pistol and twirling it freely in his palm, he found himself in quite a good mood.
Pang Bo's face remained impassive. «For a guy like me, getting gunned down in the street any day of the week is par for the course. But you… I sure as hell misjudged you! Still, even if you're a better fighter than I thought, it doesn't change a thing. The power Mr. Goldfinger commands is beyond your wildest imagination!»
«Beyond my wildest imagination, is it?» Li Yunlong curled his lip in a sneer, raising the gun to gesture at him. «Even if that's true, so what? I don't care about any of that right now. What I want to know is why you loaned me the money in the first place. You're a loan shark-you know better than anyone that a bottom-feeder like me stands a high chance of defaulting. Sure, ten thousand dollars isn't a fortune, but on someone like me, even in the best-case scenario, it would take months to pay back. There are too many variables. If a slight bump in the road happens-like right now, when I don't have a single cent-how did you plan to recover the debt?»
Pang Bo offered a cold, matter-of-fact look, as if he saw no reason to keep the truth secret. «There are plenty of ways. Just because you don't have cash doesn't mean you lack value. We could ship you off to smuggle high-value hazardous goods, or drop you into some boss's crew to act as a stooge while working for us. And if you turn out to be completely useless, we can always harvest your organs for cash.»
… Li Yunlong was momentarily rendered speechless. As expected of the mob-utterly ruthless. «You're certainly honest,» he said dryly. «Aren't you afraid saying all that will piss me off enough to blow your brains out?»
«And if I didn't say it, you wouldn't get mad? You wouldn't kill me?!» Pang Bo wore the expression of a man who had seen through everything.
Tom Riddle's memories told Li Yunlong that killing Pang Bo and his two lackeys was the only logical choice. Li Yunlong accepted those memories, but he didn't agree with the conclusion. As a proletarian worker who had grown up under the red flag in a peaceful era, Li Yunlong had no desire to walk a path of ruthless slaughter if he could avoid it, transmigrated or not. He decided to give Pang Bo a chance. «I don't enjoy killing,» Li Yunlong said. «So I'm going to give you an out. Tell me everything you know, and I'll let you walk away alive.»
Pang Bo snorted in total disdain. «Your struggling is useless! You have no idea what kind of power Mr. Goldfinger holds. You want me to spill everything I know? Keep dreaming! Even if you let me go, what good does it do? Mr. Goldfinger won't let me live.» With that, he turned his head away and closed his eyes, waiting for the end.
Ha! Trying to play the unyielding hardass with me, are you? Had it been Tom Riddle, he would have slaughtered all three of them without a second thought. Had it been the peaceful, law-abiding Li Yunlong of his past life, he would have had no choice but to call the police. But now, possessing the supernatural power of sensory control, Li Yunlong had the leverage to choose a third path.
Li Yunlong grabbed Pang Bo's head with both hands, forcing him to face forward, and snarled directly into his face, «You chose this path yourself-don't blame me for being brutal!» Through ysical contact, his sensory control forcefully seized command of every one of Pang Bo's senses. Highly corrosive, heavily contaminated junk data-carefully selected by Li Yunlong-surged into Pang Bo's open sensory pathways like a violent mudslide, flooding his brain!
Pang Bo's expression shifted from indifference to agony, from agony to contortion, from contortion to despair, and finally from despair to total emptiness. Perhaps he had wanted to struggle, but his body had already suffered severe trauma during their brief scuffle, stripping him of any capacity to resist. Coupled with Li Yunlong's sensory control taking absolute dominion over his perception, any chance of struggle was severed at the root. In those final moments, perhaps Pang Bo wanted to cry for help, or beg Li Yunlong for mercy, but Li Yunlong gave him no opportunity to speak. Stripped of all agency, Pang Bo could not even squeeze out a scream, left only to swallow the bitter ruin in absolute silence. Li Yunlong didn't kill him, but to Pang Bo, the alternative was far worse than death.
Choosing not to kill meant choosing to forcibly erase Pang Bo's memories. The ability of sensory control worked by mastering a target's physical senses through direct bodily contact. However, Li Yunlong's power was not memory manipulation; he could not neatly edit or rewrite someone's mind at will. Instead, he employed a method akin to a hacker's brute-force attack. Treating the brain like a hard drive and the senses under his control as the data pipeline, he channeled highly destructive junk information to act as a virus, mercilessly wiping every byte of data stored within the target's mind. Using such a method on a human was immensely dangerous, but Pang Bo made for a convenient test subject. The trial was an unqualified success, proving Li Yunlong's theory: a normal human brain possessed finite processing capability. Forcefully flooding it with excessive information would severely corrupt it, inflicting irreversible damage even at the level of the soul. The subject's psyche, willpower, and memories would suffer catastrophic, unrecoverable collapse.
For Pang Bo, surviving Li Yunlong's hands was hardly a stroke of luck. After being subjected to such reckless experimentation, waking up as a vegetative lump would be bad luck; a ninety percent probability dictated he would wake up a mindless idiot stripped of all memory. How many enemies did a mob enforcer and loan shark accumulate over a lifetime? Even he couldn't keep count. Once reduced to an imbecile, he would lose all value to Mr. Goldfinger, along with any ability to protect himself. Factoring all three together, Li Yunlong could already foresee his miserable end.
Having finished his experiment on Pang Bo, Li Yunlong didn't bother wasting energy on the two lackeys. He fetched a roll of duct tape from the room, lined the three men up in a row, bound their hands tightly behind their backs, taped their ankles together, and finally slapped a thick strip across each of their mouths. Job done, perfectly neat.