CHAPTER 92 — A Mother Made of Fire
Sirens still screamed outside the Mu estate. Red and blue lights painted the walls like frantic brushstrokes, illuminating the panic that had swallowed everyone whole.
Inside the command room hastily set up in the living hall, chaos churned — officers giving reports, Mu security units rushing in and out, screens flickering with CCTV footage, maps, and tracker data.
But in the middle of it all…
Shi Yunxi stood utterly still.
Like the eye of a hurricane.
Her face was calm. Too calm.
A terrifying, icy calm that came only after a mother's heart had shattered into something sharper than steel.
Mu Lingchen stood beside her, breathing hard, his fists clenched so tightly the veins bulged in his wrists. He hadn't sat. He hadn't blinked. He hadn't stopped shaking since the moment Qing'er's sob-filled voice told them Rui was gone.
But Yunxi…
Yunxi hadn't shed a single tear.
Not yet.
Not when she carried Qing'er and Yichen inside.
Not when she listened to the guards report the moment of abduction.
Not when she replayed the grainy CCTV footage of Rui being dragged into a black van.
She just stared at the screen with the cold, deadly focus of a sniper preparing to fire.
Xiolan.
She had spent years burying that identity.
Years hiding from the digital world, from the past, from the terrifying things she was capable of.
But now?
Now someone had taken her child.
And the woman she used to be — the shadow hacker feared in the underworld, the ghost nobody could catch — began to awaken inside her bones.
Mu Lingchen finally turned to her, voice breaking.
"Yunxi… say something. Please."
Her eyes flickered to him.
Sharp. Controlled.
Burning with a fury that could level empires.
"Find Roulan," she said flatly. "She has Rui."
The silence in the room trembled.
Everyone already suspected it.
But hearing Yunxi say it — with certainty, with absolute conviction — turned suspicion into truth.
Mu Lingchen's jaw tightened. "I'll kill her."
"No," Yunxi said coldly. "I will."
His breath caught.
She walked to the table, picked up the laptop someone had brought in, and opened it with the ease of muscle memory. The officers paused, confused.
"Madam, we have a cyber team coming—"
"They're too slow," she cut in.
The officer blinked. "Ma'am, it's highly secured equipment, you can't just—"
Click.
The screen lit up — instantly bypassing system authentication.
Files opened.
Hidden feeds unlocked.
Encrypted channels decrypted like peeling back soft paper.
The officer's jaw dropped. "What… how did you—"
Mu Lingchen's eyes widened as the realization sank in.
All this time…
This quiet woman who hid herself, who protected the triplets alone, who had once escaped the Shi family's digital surveillance…
She wasn't just clever.
She wasn't just resourceful.
She was a ghost-level hacker.
A phantom.
Xiolan.
He had heard the name whispered before in the darker corners of business intelligence — a hacker capable of wiping companies off maps, erasing identities, overturning scandals, creating ones out of thin air.
He never imagined she was standing beside him all this time.
"Yunxi…" he whispered.
She didn't look up.
Her fingers danced across the keyboard, movements smooth, precise, merciless.
Lines of code flowed like lightning.
Cameras across the city unlocked.
Traffic networks hijacked.
Restricted GPS servers overridden.
"Xiolan," one senior officer breathed. "You're Xiolan."
A cold wind swept through the room.
Yunxi finally spoke — voice low, dangerous.
"That name no longer matters. Only one thing does now."
She hit Enter.
A digital map exploded across the screen — every camera, every moving car, every hidden feed in the city.
"I'm getting my son back."
Mu Lingchen stepped closer. "Tell me what to do. Anything."
Yunxi didn't look away from the screen. "Stay with the children."
Lingchen froze. "Yunxi, no. I'm coming with you."
"You can't," she said, tone chillingly firm. "Rui needs me thinking clearly. And I can't do that if I'm worried about Qing'er and Yichen."
Lingchen's breath trembled. "You want me to stay behind? When someone took our son?"
Her voice softened for the first time.
"I trust you," she whispered. "They need someone who won't break."
He closed his eyes.
The words struck deeper than any knife.
And she… she had already broken.
But she refused to let anyone see the pieces.
Her hands flew across the keys again, switching feeds. "Roulan wouldn't take Rui on foot. She's not stupid." Her voice laced with venom. "She's desperate, but not reckless."
"Roulan's phone is off," an officer reported.
Yunxi scoffed. "She doesn't know who she's dealing with."
Another flurry of typing.
Seconds later —
A ping.
Yunxi leaned closer.
Her pulse hammered — once — before returning to cold precision.
"Found her."
Everyone crowded around the screen as it zoomed into a district on the outskirts of the city — the industrial zone.
An abandoned warehouse.
Mu Lingchen swore under his breath. "Of course she'd go there."
"It's isolated," Yunxi murmured. "No civilian traffic. No CCTV except for citywide feeds… and she cut most of them."
The screen refreshed — grainy footage flickering.
And then—
Mu Rui.
Tied to a chair, crying silently, his small chest rising and falling in terrified bursts.
Yunxi's breath shattered.
Just one crack.
One fragile, trembling sound.
Mu Lingchen reached for her — instinct, pure instinct — but she stepped away before he touched her.
She couldn't afford to fall apart.
She wouldn't.
Not until Rui was in her arms again.
Her voice turned to ice.
"Roulan wants war," she whispered. "So I'll give her hell."
She shut the laptop and stood.
A different aura surrounded her now — lethal, unstoppable, a storm wearing a woman's form.
Lingchen swallowed hard. "Yunxi… Xiolan… what are you going to do?"
She met his eyes.
Something ancient, something frightening, something burning lived in her gaze now.
"Whatever it takes," she said.
Then she walked out of the room.
And every officer, every guard, every human in that hallway instinctively stepped aside —
Because they felt it.
A force of nature had just awakened.
A mother made of fire was going to war.