Transmigration; Married to My Ex-Fiancé's Uncle-Chapter 355; Guardian 4

The lead detective arrived twenty minutes after the arrests, a grizzled veteran with thirty years on the force and eyes that had seen everything humanity had to offer. He reviewed the surveillance footage one more time, standing in the security office, watching the monitors with growing disbelief. Watching that infant dissolve into jade radiance. Watching the stone appear and then vanish. Watching reality itself seem to bend and break.

"What the hell am I looking at?" he muttered, rubbing his eyes as if that might change what the footage showed.

No one had an answer. The security chief shook his head mutely. The technician could only shrug helplessly. Because the truth, that the baby had been an ancient guardian spirit who’d transformed and traveled across the city to find her queen, was too impossible to believe. Too far outside the boundaries of what reality was supposed to allow.

So the hospital filed reports. The police opened an investigation. The families sat in holding cells, still demanding justice for a kidnapping that had never happened. And somewhere across the city, the guardian in question sat in the back of a sedan, jade eyes reflecting streetlights, returning to a mansion full of enemies beside the queen she’d been reborn to serve.

The cosmic and the mundane are colliding in ways no one could predict. And the war for the Tidal Throne continued, whether the mortal world was ready for it or not.

The police station’s holding cells echoed with the sound of metal striking metal, a rhythmic clanging that had been going on for the past twenty minutes without pause. Lin Feng’s hands gripped the iron bars with white-knuckled desperation, slamming them repeatedly against the frame, each impact sending reverberations through the concrete walls.

"LET ME OUT!" he roared, his voice hoarse and breaking. "I NEED TO FIND MY GRANDSON! YOU CAN’T KEEP ME HERE!"

In the adjacent cell, Madam Chen was doing the same, her palms already bruised and bleeding from the repeated impacts. Her carefully manicured nails were broken, several torn down to the quick, leaving smears of blood on the cold steel bars. "MY DAUGHTER IS DYING!" she shrieked, her voice cracking into something that barely sounded human anymore. "And her baby is MISSING! How can you just lock us up like criminals?!"

A tired officer approached, clipboard in hand, his expression carefully neutral despite the hours of dealing with their hysteria. "Sir, ma’am, you need to calm down. You were arrested for assault and battery. Multiple witnesses, including hospital security footage. You attacked medical staff....."

"I DON’T CARE!" Lin Feng slammed the bars again, harder this time, the sound like a gunshot in the confined space. "My grandson is OUT THERE somewhere! Someone took him! Someone..." His voice broke completely, dissolving into something between a sob and a roar. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

"Sir, the missing infant is being investigated separately. But right now, you’re being charged with..."

"INVESTIGATED?!" Madam Chen lunged at the bars, her fingers wrapping around them with desperate strength. "My grandson VANISHED from a sealed hospital room! Into thin air! And you’re treating it like some routine investigation?!"

The officer’s expression tightened. He’d seen the footage. All the officers had seen it. The impossible transformation, the light, the empty incubator. But admitting that would mean admitting that reality had broken, and that wasn’t something anyone was prepared to do. "Ma’am, I understand you’re upset, but assaulting our officers and continuing to disturb the peace isn’t helping your grandson....."

Lin Feng slammed the bars again. And again. And again. Each impact was punctuated by wordless sounds of rage and grief and helplessness. The other detainees in surrounding cells had gone quiet, watching this display with a mixture of fear and pity.

"That’s enough," the officer said, his patience finally wearing thin. He gestured to two colleagues standing by. "Get the restraints. They’re not calming down."

"NO!" Madam Chen’s scream rose to a pitch that made several people flinch. "You can’t! You have to let us OUT! We have to find him! We have to....."

The cell door opened with a metallic clank. Two large officers entered, moving with the practiced efficiency of people who’d done this before. Lin Feng tried to fight, his fists swinging wildly, but he was exhausted, emotionally and physically drained from hours of violence and stress. It took only moments to force him face-down on the narrow cot, securing his wrists behind his back with plastic zip-tie restraints.

"This is ILLEGAL!" he shouted into the thin mattress. "I’ll have all your badges! I’ll....."

"Sir, you’re being restrained for your own safety and the safety of others," the officer said calmly, professionally. "You’ll be released when you’ve calmed down and processed. Not before."

In the next cell, Madam Chen’s restraint was less smooth. She fought like someone who’d completely lost touch with reality, nails raking at faces, teeth trying to bite, legs kicking out at anything within range. It took three officers to finally secure her, and even then she continued to scream, the sound echoing through the holding area like the wail of something wounded and dying.

"Someone sedate her," one officer muttered, backing away with fresh scratches on his arm. "She’s going to hurt herself."

A nurse was called. A sedative was administered despite Madam Chen’s thrashing protests. Within minutes, her screams faded to whimpers, then to nothing at all as the medication pulled her under.

Lin Feng, still conscious but restrained, lay on his cot with tears streaming silently down his face. His grandson. Gone. His daughter was in critical condition. And him locked in a cell, powerless to do anything about either.

Across the city, in the other holding facility, Lu Cheng and Mrs. Lu sat in separate cells with cold, controlled silence. No screaming. No banging on bars. Just quiet, calculating rage that promised retribution far more dangerous than any amount of hysterics.

Lu Cheng sat on his cot with perfect posture, hands folded calmly in his lap despite the handcuffs, eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Already his mind was working through the legal angles, the connections he could leverage, the pressure he could bring to bear. This was a temporary inconvenience. Nothing more. And when he got out, and he would get out, there would be a reckoning.