Chapter 163: He Who Stands at the Center of the Storm

"All unrelated personnel! Retreat immediately!" An enforcer stared at Chen Ling with extreme vigilance and turned to warn the crowd, "This person is a heinous criminal! A heretic who infiltrated the enforcer system! Be careful, he might lash out and hurt people!"

Hearing this, the faces of the Aurora City residents changed instantly. They retreated rapidly, their eyes filled with fear and terror as they looked at Chen Ling.

Watching the retreating crowd in front, Chen Ling's expression remained as calm as water. He swept his gaze across everyone, his mouth curling up slightly,

"Thousands of people... what a pleasant surprise."

Before entering the city, Chen Ling had been worried that relying only on enforcers and Enforcers behind the city wall might not be enough to gather an "audience" of a hundred people. Now it seemed that worry was completely unnecessary; the citizens and enforcers surrounding him added up to at least a thousand people.

Seeing that Chen Ling not only didn't refute but instead showed a smile, an indescribable sense of eeriness suddenly arose in everyone's hearts... It was like the feeling of a serial killer being exposed in public and then smiling at the crowd, which was hair-raising.

"Sir, is, is there some kind of misunderstanding?" Beside the train, those Third District residents brought into Aurora City by Chen Ling looked at each other with confusion in their eyes.

"How could Chief Chen be a criminal? He saved our lives!"

"That's right... without Chief Chen, we would have frozen to death on the ice plains long ago..."

"Chief Chen is the best enforcer I've ever seen, and the only enforcer who didn't abandon us... How could he possibly be a heretic?!"

"Impossible! Chief Chen couldn't be a bad person! You must have made a mistake!!"

"That's right, Brother Chen Ling isn't a bad person!!"

“……”

The voices of the Third District crowd grew louder and louder. They frowned as they looked at the enforcers in front of them and began to refute one after another, their tone filled with unprecedented firmness!

"Stupid!" The enforcer saw this and shouted angrily again,

"You've all been deceived by him, and you're still helping him cover it up?! He saved you just to use you to blackmail Aurora City into opening the gates! From beginning to end, you were just his hostages!! Do you understand?!

This person killed all his companions in the Military Path Ancient Treasury and stole the Dao Foundation fragments. He is a heretic disguised as an enforcer! And you still believe him?!"

The people from the Third District were stunned.

But the next moment, Xu Chongguo spoke angrily:

"I don't care about any heretic or not! Even if he used us, he really sent us into Aurora City! We are alive because of him! He is more like an enforcer than you enforcers who abandoned the Seven Districts!!"

"That's right!! When the disaster came, those enforcers all ran away and even killed my father!! Now Chief Chen saved me! And sent us into Aurora City alive! How could he be a heretic?!"

"When Chief Chen was fighting Calamities for us, where were the real enforcers?! You hypocrites hiding behind the wall, what right do you have to talk about him!"

"Chief Chen is not a heretic!!"

"Chief Chen is not a heretic!!!"

“……”

Xu Chongguo's words woke everyone up. They were the group abandoned by Aurora City, and now their anger was completely ignited by this inexplicable framing. The anger and hatred suppressed in their hearts were all vented with Chen Ling as the catalyst!

At this moment, the onlookers from Aurora City were all a bit dazed. They looked blankly at the blood-clad figure standing calmly on the locomotive, not knowing for a moment whose words were correct...

They had no way to define Chen Ling, nor could they label him as good or bad in their hearts. The figure was like an unknown mystery.

In the crowd, Wen Shilin also looked at Chen Ling thoughtfully,

The fountain pen in his hand wrote rapidly, clearly recording every word spoken by both sides... Sparks from the flashbulb flew, and his assistant had already permanently engraved Chen Ling's image onto the film.

"This is impossible," Han Meng, locked in shackles, shook his head immediately. "Chen Ling cannot be a heretic."

"Han Meng, you are the Enforcer Chief of the Third District. A heretic lived right under your nose, and you really didn't notice anything at all?" A Five-Strip Enforcer sneered. "The culprit who caused the total annihilation in the Military Path Ancient Treasury is him. If we hadn't caught a survivor from the treasury to perform soul-shattering evidence gathering, we almost would have let him get away with it..."

Hearing this, Han Meng's body trembled slightly.

"Also, we found evidence from Xi Renjie's soul. This Chen Ling has strange abilities; not only can he change his face, but he can also use illusions to perform tricks and feed on Calamities... With all this, is he still not a heretic?"

"What did you say??"

Han Meng jerked his head up. In his mind, the mysterious red-clad figure that appeared when he was seriously injured in the Gray Realm flashed by... Before this, Chen Ling had also mentioned the Twilight Society in front of him... Clue after clue connected in Han Meng's mind, all seemingly corroborating his identity.

Han Meng stared blankly at the familiar figure on the locomotive, which gradually overlapped with the big red opera robe in his memory.

The dispute between the Third District and the enforcers continued, while Chen Ling, the subject of it all, listened quietly, as if everything others were arguing about had nothing to do with him.

As the other two Five-Strip Enforcers approached, the enforcers surrounding the train cleared a path. The two of them stood in front of the train, looking at Chen Ling with cold eyes, and spoke slowly:

"Heretic Chen Ling, we were originally thinking about how to catch you back from outside the city, but we didn't expect you to deliver yourself to our doorstep... Since that's the case, come with us."

"Go?" Chen Ling said slowly. "Where?"

The Five-Strip Enforcer looked at him and replied, word for word, "Soul-shattering evidence gathering!"

"Chen Ling, we know you have many tricks, but since you've entered Aurora City, don't think about escaping even if you have heaven-defying abilities... No matter what your purpose is for infiltrating the enforcer system, as long as we perform soul-shattering evidence gathering, everything about you and everything about the forces behind you will be completely exposed!"

"Chen Ling, we can understand that you were desperate to escape into Aurora City to save your life during the Gray Realm convergence. As long as you finish the soul-shattering evidence gathering, you might still have a chance to live."

"Surrender. You were able to enter the Military Path Ancient Treasury, which means you are at most Third-Order... No matter how much you struggle, it's useless."

The two Enforcers spoke one after another, their Fifth-Order pressure sweeping out directly. In just a few sentences, they had sealed off all of Chen Ling's escape routes.

In their eyes, Chen Ling had already become a turtle in a jar!