Chapter 2539

Raven walked down the stairs cautiously.

"Is he dead?" Raven tried her best to squeeze herself into the gap between the stair railing and the wall, slowly accepting the fact that she had just witnessed a murder.

The Azeroth where Raven lived was an orderly society, so she understood the importance of rules even better than those mages who had been exposed to the magical world since childhood. Murder was also a serious crime there, requiring extremely harsh punishment, and because the social customs there were more primitive, many times murder required paying with one's life.

Schiller looked at her while holding the statue.

Raven shuddered. She bit her lip, but in the end, she couldn't bring herself to say something like "I didn't see anything."

"Why did you kill him?"

Schiller sighed softly, looked down at the statue in his hand, and cast his gaze onto the mailbag placed on the sofa.

Raven carefully tiptoed around the back of the corpse, walked to the back of the sofa, and reached out to grab the mailbag.

She didn't pull the strap of the mailbag, but rather the bottom of it, and as she pulled it backward, something fell out.

A huge meat cleaver.

"Hiss..."

Raven immediately looked up at Schiller. Schiller's eyes confirmed her guess. Raven looked back at the mailman lying on the ground and said, "Even if he wanted to kill you, he didn't actually do it, did he? He might have just been worried about losing his job."

Raven heard Schiller sigh again, so she looked at him with some confusion, wanting to know what she had said wrong.

"If he were worried about losing his job and wanted to kill to silence me, he should have brought a loaded handgun."

Raven was speechless. Even though she hadn't lived in this society, she knew that the most efficient weapon for killing here was a gun. Sometimes, the efficiency of a gun was even higher than magic, because you only needed to pull the trigger, and almost no one could predict the trajectory of the bullet. Whoever fired first won.

A gun was also a very good item for self-preservation. In the society of ordinary people, whether you pointed a gun at someone else or at yourself, you could effectively threaten the other party. In the event that the threat didn't work, there was almost no danger of being killed in return.

"Perhaps... perhaps he couldn't afford a gun, or he didn't know how to use one?" Raven couldn't convince herself with either of these reasons. According to her observations, there was almost no one in this country who didn't know how to use a gun, and guns were also very cheap, available almost everywhere. The clothing store Killer Croc had taken her to visit earlier had a gun shop right next to it; you didn't even need any license to buy an ordinary handgun, as long as you were an adult.

Raven racked her brains to think of another excuse: buying a gun would leave a record, right? Did he not want to be discovered? After all, if he were discovered, he would still have to go to jail.

But soon, she realized this reason didn't hold up either. Jason and the others had said that this city had always been this way: either you have no gun, or you have no home.

According to what Raven had learned over the past few days, people who could have a stable job in this era couldn't be living too badly. Moreover, Schiller lived in a wealthy neighborhood, and people who could work in a wealthy neighborhood were even less likely to be bottom-tier laborers; they were the primary beneficiaries of the downward flow of the economy.

Just like when they worked for a moving company, moving goods for wealthy families, the other party would give more tips. The wealthier the community, the more tips were given; this was their main source of income. A mailman was a profession that walked the streets and alleys, so he probably received quite a few tips as well.

Therefore, it was impossible for him to have bought a murder weapon at the last minute just when he was about to kill; he could have just taken a gun from home.

"Then why?" Raven was completely baffled.

"Go to the kitchen and get a knife." Schiller tilted his head slightly in that direction. Raven didn't know the reason, but she did as he said.

She went around the back of the sofa, walked into the kitchen, and picked out a kitchen knife. Just as she was about to bring it over, Schiller shook his head at her and said, "Take the biggest one."

Raven fiddled with the knife rack, and only after turning it around did she discover a meat cleaver about the same size as the one that had fallen out of the mailbag.

"What is the most efficient way for an ordinary person to handle a crime scene?" Schiller suddenly asked.

This was truly too far beyond Raven's scope of knowledge. Her brain was almost smoking, so she could only shake her head numbly, indicating she didn't know.

"Dismemberment," Schiller said. "If he had chosen to bring a gun, he would still have had to bring a knife, because a gun cannot be used for dismemberment, and the chain reaction caused by the sound of a gunshot would very likely leave him with no time to dismember the body."

"So what does this prove?"

"It proves that he is a veteran. He knows that cold weapon combat has risks, but it is quiet enough to provide enough time for subsequent exoneration. Gunshots, on the other hand, do not."

Only then did Raven realize that firing a gun makes noise. If the other party chose to fire, they would have to run immediately after firing, otherwise, it would be too easy to get caught.

But if a knife were used, in a surprise attack, the other party would likely be unable to react. As long as you aimed for the neck with one strike, the other party wouldn't even be able to scream.

"Silencer regulations are very strict; ordinary people don't have the connections to get one," Schiller said. "If a handgun with a silencer had fallen out of this bag, I would have had to suspect whether he was some kind of secret agent."

"The mailman is a killer?" Raven looked at the corpse on the ground with some shock.

"Perhaps not a professional killer, but at least he was a murderer once, and he hid it very well," Schiller said. "He was able to judge through a few meetings that I was the type of person he could subdue with a cold weapon, which is why he came to the door."

Raven looked at Schiller, then at the corpse lying on the ground. This mailman's physique didn't have an overwhelming advantage; he wasn't taller than Schiller, nor was he extremely strong, but through the shape of his arms under his clothes, one could see some muscle.

Schiller was wearing a suit, and all one could see was that he was very thin.

"He judged it from my profession." Schiller took the knife and began to strip the mailman's clothes. Raven didn't dare to think about what he was going to do next, so she could only focus her attention on the topic he had raised.

"He knew you were a professor."

"Of course, this is obvious. In this kind of community, people usually don't choose to hide their profession because most are very respectable, so I introduced myself to him as a professor at Cat Getan University the first time we met."

"Oh, I understand." Raven suddenly realized. She said, "He thought you were the type of person who sits in an office all year round, and the heaviest work you've ever done is holding a pen to write, while he, even if not a star athlete, is at least a manual laborer, and his speed and strength should both be better than yours."

"An obvious conclusion, but it's still missing one point."

"Vigilance?" Raven speculated, rubbing her chin. "I feel like the eyes of those movers or drivers I see on the street are different from others. They seem to be always sizing up the people passing by, like a startled rabbit."

"Engaging in street work requires extreme vigilance," Schiller said. "Especially in Cat Getan, the reaction ability of people who have survived the streets of the previous era is not something that office clerks can compare to."

Raven nodded. She had also heard from Dick and the others about the situation in Cat Getan before. If that was the case, it wasn't impossible to understand.

Schiller had already stripped the mailman's clothes clean, but a tattoo on his body caught Schiller's attention.

"He is not a mailman," Schiller suddenly said.

Raven looked at him again. Schiller stroked the tattoo with his hand and whispered a name, "Penitence Cartel..."

"What is that?"

"A drug trafficking organization. It is the largest international drug trafficking organization between the United States and Mexico. They have been trying to infiltrate Cat Getan, and this might be a plant they buried earlier."

Raven gasped. She stared at Schiller and said, "You've dealt with them before?"

"I have seen this kind of tattoo on their corpses."

"Then what should we do? Will they cause trouble for you?"

"Whether they cause trouble for me depends on what I do," Schiller said. "This should be a very important plant; it's not easy to break into the interior of a wealthy neighborhood."

"Then we..."

Raven thought of that answer, but she felt somewhat afraid, her fingertips trembling. Schiller looked at her and said to her, "Go get the canopy from the backyard, Miss."

Raven said nothing and went silently. It was clear that she knew very well what he was doing now, but she went anyway.

Soon, the blue plastic sheet was brought over. Raven unfolded the plastic sheet. Schiller watched her movements. Raven knew what he wanted to ask, so she took a deep breath, twisted the hem of her clothes with her hand, and said, "Now that things have already reached this point, we can't just leave it alone, can we?"

"A normal person should call the police."

"I have never been a normal person," Raven said. "I cannot lose my house. I still have to work and go to school. If I change landlords, they might not allow me to delay the rent or use their kitchen as I please."

Schiller's eyes held a trace of faint envy. When would he ever be able to say such an ordinary reason with such genuine emotion and justification?

"So you decided to help me kill and dismember the body?"

"I... I... let's do it quickly, it's about to be dawn," Raven said, turning her head away as if to escape. "I've never done this kind of work before. If we aren't quick, we'll probably make a mess of it."

"We won't, Miss."

Schiller smoothed out the plastic sheet a bit more, lifted the corpse onto the plastic sheet with Raven, and began to process the body.

Raven watched his skillful operation, dumbfounded. By the time Schiller was finished, only a little blood from the initial bleeding had stained the plastic sheet; the rest of the limbs, blood, and internal organs had all been perfectly separated.

Everything was packed into boxes lined with plastic bags. Only a layer of cardboard was pressed on top of the boxes, and they weren't sealed. Schiller stacked the boxes together and had Raven use her telekinesis to move them into the trunk of his car.

Raven was still trembling when she sat in the passenger seat. She looked at Schiller nervously and said, "Where are we going?"

"The nearest fresh market. We still have some vegetables, fish, and seasonings to buy. By the time we get there, it should be just opening."

Raven looked out the window. Now, without realizing it, it was already dawn. She had watched Schiller work for such a long time that she hadn't even noticed the dawn.

"Shouldn't we first..."

"It's the same thing," Schiller said while driving. "All the markets around here are high-end markets; they won't sell fish and meat that isn't fresh."

"So?"

"But there will inevitably be non-fresh ingredients produced. The unsold fish and meat need a place to go. The management of such markets is very strict; they absolutely do not allow employees to divide up any leftovers. There is only one outcome for non-fresh ingredients."

"But why a fresh supermarket?" Raven grasped the key point. She said, "They should also just throw these ingredients into the garbage truck, so why not wait for the garbage truck to come?"

Schiller turned his head to look at her, as if waiting for her to think for herself. Raven quickly came to her senses and tentatively said, "The smell?"

Schiller nodded.