Chapter 387 - 206: Quick! To the Train Station!!

Chapter 387: Chapter 206: Quick! To the Train Station!!

Cardboard boxes of mineral water were stacked everywhere, along with undistributed conference manuals. A few staff members were on the phone, confirming the schedule for tomorrow’s closing ceremony.

With a grim expression, Li Jianming pushed open the half-closed back door and walked in.

His eyes swept the room and locked onto a young man sitting at a corner table, clutching his hair with a look of utter exhaustion.

Li Jianming recognized him.

It was the male conference staffer who had stopped him at the lobby entrance yesterday, the dedicated liaison assigned by the organizing committee to the foreign guests.

Li Jianming strode over.

SMACK.

Li Jianming slammed his work ID down on the document-strewn table.

The young liaison jumped, his head snapping up.

"You... Professor Li?"

He glanced at the ID on the table.

"How did you get backstage? This area is off-lim—"

"Shut up."

Li Jianming’s voice wasn’t loud, but it was incredibly intimidating.

He pulled over a chair, sat down directly across from the liaison, leaned forward, and stared intently into the other man’s eyes.

"Young man, let me ask you, who is in charge of foreign affairs security for your organizing committee?"

The liaison was bewildered by his accusatory posture and stammered.

"It’s... it’s headed by the leadership from the Municipal Foreign Affairs Office and the organizing committee... What’s wrong, Professor Li? Was there a security incident?"

"There was a massive incident!"

Li Jianming slapped his palm on the table.

"A sixty-five-year-old foreign guest, a Fields Medal winner, suffers a severe heart condition right under your noses, and you don’t take him to the hospital, don’t keep any medical records, and just listen to some foreign assistant, leaving him completely unattended in his hotel suite?!"

Li Jianming summoned the absolute authority he had cultivated over thirty years as a full professor lecturing students from a podium.

"If he had died in that hotel tonight, do you have any idea what a huge international incident that would be? Can a junior liaison like you possibly take the blame for that?!"

The liaison’s face instantly turned pale.

"Professor Li, please don’t scare me... That Mr. Arthur was very forceful yesterday. He absolutely refused to let us see him and even signed a liability waiver..."

"A liability waiver is bullshit!"

Li Jianming cut him off, his gaze turning razor-sharp.

"He dared to sign it, and you dared to believe it? I just checked with the municipal emergency center. There are no dispatch records whatsoever. What does that tell you? It means the man isn’t in the hotel at all!"

"N-Not in the hotel? Then where could he have gone?"

The liaison panicked, standing up as if to leave.

"No, I have to report this to my superiors. We need to force the door open and confirm..."

"Stay put."

Li Jianming grabbed his arm.

’I absolutely cannot let him go to the leadership right now. Once the organizing committee gets involved, this whole thing will spiral completely out of control.’

Staring into the liaison’s panicked eyes, Li Jianming employed his most cunning bluff.

"Where did he go? You know damn well, don’t you?"

Li Jianming’s voice was low and icy, carrying a tone that suggested he already had all the evidence.

"In the last couple of days, did that assistant, Arthur, ask you for help?"

The liaison froze.

"Well... he did come to me..."

Li Jianming’s heart leaped, but his expression remained impassive.

"What did he want? Did he ask you to use the organizing committee’s connections to buy a train ticket for him?!"

Li Jianming pressed his advantage.

"Let me tell you, the ticket records at the foreign-traveler train station are a breeze to check. If you were the one who bought the ticket and secretly sent a foreign guest away from his designated residence, that’s a serious dereliction of duty and a breach of security! I can call the Municipal Public Security Bureau’s Exit and Entry Administration right now!"

Those words struck like sledgehammers, completely shattering the young liaison’s psychological defenses.

He was just an ordinary university administrator on loan to help out. He had never been in a situation like this. The moment he heard the Municipal Bureau mentioned, his legs went weak.

"Professor Li! Please don’t! I’ll talk! I’ll tell you everything!"

The liaison’s voice was on the verge of tears.

"It really has nothing to do with me! The day before yesterday, right after the session ended, that Arthur guy ran backstage, found me, and shoved five hundred US Dollars into my hand."

The liaison took an envelope from a drawer and pushed it toward Li Jianming with a trembling hand.

"He forced me to use the Chinese organizing team’s priority ticket-purchasing rights to buy a ticket for him at the train station..."

Li Jianming felt his breath catch in his throat.

"A ticket to where?"

His throat was dry.

"He said Mr. Pierre was very interested in Hua Country’s traditional culture and wanted to use the excuse of resting from his illness to go out and look around... He had me buy a soft-sleeper ticket for yesterday, to... to Huizhou..."

The liaison was still explaining something, but Li Jianming couldn’t hear a word.

"Huizhou."

That one word detonated like a bombshell in Li Jianming’s mind.

There was no illness.

There was no medical quarantine.

The day before yesterday, the very day the conference opened, Pierre had already slipped away from everyone and boarded a train to Huizhou.

’What traditional culture is he going to see in Huizhou? What the hell kind of traditional culture in Huizhou could possibly attract a Fields Medal winner!’

The pieces instantly clicked together in Li Jianming’s mind.

The *Mathematical Annals*.

The submission that was one-third engineering derivations, with the rest being nothing but rogue mathematical truncations.

Corresponding Author: Jianming Li, Hua Country Science and Technology University.

Address: Huizhou.

Pierre hadn’t just read the manuscript; he couldn’t wait.

He didn’t even want to bother with the conference in Shanghai. He followed the submission address and went straight to raid Keda’s nest himself!

Li Jianming sat in his chair, a cold dread washing over him.

He had come all the way to Shanghai and spent two sleepless nights in the hotel lobby.

He had been drinking tea that tasted like bitter water and chewing on dry crackers, all for the chance to slip two crumpled pages under the man’s door, hoping to get a few words of guidance for free.

And what was the result?

The man didn’t give a damn about his crumpled pages.

He had completely bypassed this old fox to raid his home base, to poach the peerless genius who could write those rogue truncations!

He calculated the time.

If Pierre had gotten on the train the day before yesterday, he would have arrived in Huizhou yesterday morning.

Knowing that old madman’s temperament, he would have gone straight to the Keda School of Mathematics.

And Chen Zhuo—that unsuspecting, thirteen-year-old, third-year university student who spent his days wandering over to the School of Physics and his afternoons doing problems on the blackboards at the School of Mathematics—was now like a piece of fresh, bleeding meat, laid out completely exposed before a top-tier foreign shark!

"Professor Li... what should we do about this..." the liaison asked cautiously.

Li Jianming shot to his feet.

The movement was so abrupt that it knocked his chair over, which hit the floor with a loud CRASH.

He said nothing. He didn’t even grab his work ID from the table. He just threw open the door to the staff room and charged out like a crazed old lion.

He bolted down the hallway and burst through the glass doors of the international conference center.

The cold November wind cut through his old trench coat, but he didn’t feel it. There was only one frantic thought throbbing in his mind.

’Get back there! Get back there and stop that old madman! I absolutely cannot let him take Chen Zhuo away!’

Li Jianming sprinted to the side of the road, ran straight to a taxi that had just stopped, and yanked the door open, throwing himself inside.

The driver jumped in surprise.

"Hey, mister, where to?"

Li Jianming’s eyes were bloodshot red. He gripped the back of the front seat with both hands.

He was panting, his voice so hoarse it was almost a roar:

"To the train station!"

"Hurry! To the train station!!!"