Chapter 28

After a moment, a voice came from the other side, "Hello, may I ask what you need?"

Su Yang didn't beat around the bush and said straightforwardly, "I need to investigate a girl's activities and the people she has interacted with in Shanghai over the past five years. Is there a way to do this?"

The person on the other end immediately replied, "As long as she's not the child of a vice-ministerial level official or above, there's no problem."

Then, Su Yang told the person the name and school of Zhao Yar.

"The latest response will be given within an hour." The person on the other end spoke sincerely, and Su Yang hung up the phone right away.

That night, Zhao Yar waited at home with a complex mood. After returning from the taekwondo studio, she had thought a lot but still couldn't come to a conclusion she wanted.

"Perhaps I was too eager to pursue great power. Should I really trust him so easily?"

"Just a few words of conversation, why does this Su Yang make me feel a strange sense of familiarity?"

Reflecting on it, if it were anyone else with Su Yang's strength, Zhao Yar believed she would never have told them so much so easily. After all, the car accident that led to her parents' deaths involved a force that was too powerful.

"Ding dong"

The doorbell suddenly rang, pulling Zhao Yar out of her thoughts. She took a deep breath and opened the door.

"You're here..."

Seeing the person at the door, Zhao Yar was at a loss for words.

Su Yang pushed the door open, closed it behind him, and sat down on the sofa. His mind was filled with the investigation results from the 73 department about Zhao Yar's experiences over the past five years.

The eleven-year-old girl had come to the unfamiliar city of Shanghai alone. Over the five years, she had encountered three assassination attempts and five so-called "accidents." At her worst, her left arm was broken, her right leg was severely cut, and she had over ten stitches on her back.

By now, the girl had grown into a graceful young woman, but the heavy burdens and pains buried in her heart far exceeded those of any adult.

The key was that this girl was his relative, his granddaughter from a previous life.

Such a thing was absolutely unacceptable to Su Yang. Those who dared to do these things, whether they were individuals or forces, would pay a price they could never imagine, no matter where they were on Earth.

Because Su Yang was thoroughly enraged.

Su Yang's deep, starry eyes looked at Zhao Yar with a tender expression and said in as calm a voice as possible, "Your grandmother's name is Ye Xiaoman, right?"

"Ah, how do you know my grandmother's name?"

In Zhao Yar's memory, after leaving the United States, she had never mentioned her family affairs to anyone, let alone the name of her beloved grandmother.

The corners of Su Yang's mouth twitched, and he smiled with a deep sense of nostalgia, "Xiaoman was a talented woman. Her favorite thing to do was to find a quiet place with a beautiful view, write some poetry, and savor some tea. Her favorite tea was West Lake Longjing, and she always said that it was the perfect match for southern women."

At this moment, Zhao Yar was entranced. The Su Yang in front of her seemed to have completely transformed into someone else, someone who had seen the world and experienced the vicissitudes of life, someone who had a deep connection with her grandmother.

Especially when Su Yang recited, "The lotus outside the courtyard smiles like Xi Zi, and the pre-rain Longjing tea is as red as a daughter's blush."

These two lines of poetry were what Ye Xiaoman would always recite when she brewed tea. This memory was deeply etched in Zhao Yar's mind from a young age.

"These are the two lines of poetry my grandmother loved to recite..."

Zhao Yar's bright eyes, which seemed to speak, were full of doubt as she stared at Su Yang and asked, "Who are you? How do you know these things?"

Meeting Zhao Yar's gaze, Su Yang seemed to return to his previous life. Ye Xiaoman's eyes, just like Zhao Yar's, were lively and bright. Su Yang always liked to gently embrace her and praise her for having eyes that could see through the world.

"Has your grandmother ever mentioned your grandfather to you?" After a long silence, Su Yang extended a finger, dipped it in some tea, and wrote a line of words on the glass coffee table in front of him.

Instantly, Zhao Yar seemed to freeze, staring blankly at the words on the coffee table and softly repeating them, "A leaf knows the autumn, tranquil and elegant, coming and going lightly, graceful and silent."

These were the four lines of poetry that Su Yang had written for Ye Xiaoman, and they were also the proof of recognition he had agreed to use if he ever met her descendants.

When she was young, Zhao Yar had sat in her grandmother's lap countless times, listening to stories about her grandfather, although she had no specific image of him in her mind.

"Yar, there are great people in the world, and your grandfather is one of them, an unparalleled genius. It was the greatest fortune of my life to meet him. Perhaps one day, you will meet him. When that day comes, tell him on my behalf that if there is another life, Ye Xiaoman would also wish to meet and stay with him."

The words her grandmother had whispered to her with a contented smile echoed in her ears, and Zhao Yar's body trembled uncontrollably. Although it was just a premonition, it was enough to make her excited and uneasy.

"It's impossible. If it were my grandfather, he should be over a hundred years old now, but the person in front of me is just a young man around my age?!"

Su Yang seemed to hear Zhao Yar's thoughts and suddenly said, "There are always things in this world that people cannot explain, isn't that right?"

As he spoke, Su Yang summoned a thread of true qi from the sky, lifted it, and guided it. A goldfish in the fish tank, three meters away, seemed to be pulled by an invisible thread, slowly rising to the surface and hovering above the tank.

Witnessing this, Zhao Yar's already wavering thoughts became even more uncertain. She looked at Su Yang with a mix of joy and fear.

The joy was that the person in front of her might be her only relative in the world, the grandfather she had only heard about from her grandmother, the one who had made a great woman like her grandmother fall in love with him.

The fear was the fear of the unknown and the uncertainty of the outcome. Over the past few years, her burden had been too heavy. For a sixteen-year-old girl, she had faced too much.

In Zhao Yar's memory, five years ago, she was a lively and cheerful girl. But over the years, every time she looked in the mirror, she found that she had changed, becoming silent and distant, using a cold exterior to reject everything and never allowing anyone to enter her world.

"Yar, look at me."

Su Yang looked at Zhao Yar with tenderness and said softly, "You must have many questions in your head. It's okay. Sit down and listen to the story of how I met your grandmother."

At that moment, even though she was mentally prepared, Zhao Yar still couldn't help but exclaim, "Ah." She never expected that when Su Yang revealed himself as her grandfather, whom she had never met, she would feel such a sense of relief, as if a heavy burden had been lifted from her shoulders.

"You... you really are my... grandfather..."

Su Yang nodded gently and said, "Don't doubt anything. Listen to me, and you will understand."

It was a cold midnight, but Zhao Yar, sitting quietly beside Su Yang, felt as warm as spring.

Her beautiful eyes fixed on Su Yang, after listening to his heartfelt recollections of the past, Zhao Yar had completely let down her guard. Over the past five years, she had never felt as relaxed and peaceful as she did at that moment.

The feeling of having someone to rely on was truly wonderful.

"Yar, tell me about the accident five years ago," Su Yang said lovingly, draping a coat over his granddaughter's shoulders, a fierce glint in his eyes, trying to remain as calm as possible.

Zhao Yar's heart was touched by this simple inquiry. She frowned, closed her eyes, and slowly began, "That year..."

In the Chinese-American business circle, the Zhao family was a prominent wealthy family. Zhao Yar's father, Zhao Xin, was the next generation successor, running businesses worth several hundred million.

In the Zhao family, Zhao Xin had an older brother, Zhao Nuo, and a younger sister, Zhao Lan.

The car accident that led to the deaths of Zhao Yar's parents happened on a street in New York. According to the police report, it was caused by a tanker truck with brake failure, and the driver fled the scene, never to be caught.

But this was just the official explanation. After the accident, Zhao Lan, Zhao Yar's aunt, refused to let it go. She spent a large sum of money to hire professionals to conduct a thorough investigation, uncovering many suspicious points.

Following this lead, Zhao Lan continued to investigate. On a rainy night five years ago, she suddenly called Zhao Yar to the airport and sent her on a flight to Shanghai.

Before parting, Zhao Lan put a letter in Zhao Yar's luggage, instructing her never to return to the United States and not to open the letter until she received a message from her.

Zhao Yar had absolute trust in her aunt, who had treated her like a treasure after her parents' death.

In Shanghai, Zhao Yar settled down as her aunt had instructed and did not contact anyone else in the Zhao family.

Two years later, her uncle, Zhao Nuo, sent someone to Shanghai with an unfortunate message: Zhao Lan, her greatest support after losing her parents, had died of a sudden heart attack.

The person conveyed her uncle's sincere wish for Zhao Yar to return to the United States and, after graduating from university, help him manage the Zhao family's business.

But at that moment, Zhao Yar immediately thought of her aunt's instructions before she left the United States and went home to open the yellowed letter.

The content of the letter was shocking. From it, Zhao Yar learned that her parents' deaths were not an accident, and her aunt could not have died of a sudden heart attack as the person had said. Everything was orchestrated by a powerful force, and the person who had brought this force into play was likely her uncle, Zhao Nuo.

Therefore, the next day, Zhao Yar moved out of her original residence and completely severed all ties with the Zhao family.

Over the next few years, she conducted investigations, both openly and secretly, and anonymously hired six private detectives through the internet to uncover the truth.

However, even now, the clues Zhao Yar had found were only slightly more than what her aunt had left behind. Her biggest discovery was a mysterious organization called "DR," but that was all.