Chapter 354: The Demon Beneath the Coal Mine

Another brilliant pearl on the crown of industry appeared, once again confirming Wu Chang's previous conjecture.

In the Steam Phantom dungeon, the so-called "pearl on the crown of industry" refers to various extraordinary steam engines.

Lei Wendun looked at the coal essence in Wu Chang's hand and asked Thomas:

"Our previous promise remains valid; whatever you know, feel free to say it."

Thomas asked guiltily: "Sir, you could tell from the very beginning, couldn't you?"

Lei Wendun shrugged and said:

"The detective business relies heavily on intelligence and connections; as it happens, my connections are quite good."

"When I was learning detective skills, I got to know a few theft rings in the city of Grimlan. There were some young people among them with very good techniques who had all worked in the mines."

"At the time, I heard from them that some theft rings would disguise themselves as miners to enter precious metal mines and steal raw ore to exchange for money."

Lei Wendun looked at the increasingly reserved Thomas and continued:

"When you tried to take my wallet earlier, I had already noticed that your technique had been trained, but unexpectedly, you hadn't practiced it much."

"If they were theft rings making a living in the city, their eyes would be very sharp; they could easily identify who not to provoke and wouldn't risk stealing my wallet."

"A clumsy thief who has technique but lacks practice, and just happens to be a miner—it's hard for me not to think twice."

After hearing this, not a shred of wishful thinking remained on Thomas's face, and he honestly said:

"Sir, you are right. At Pine Coal Mine, there indeed exists the theft ring you mentioned, and I am one of its members."

Lei Wendun glanced at Wu Chang and said with a hint of smugness:

"You see, just as I said, the truth of the matter lies in the details."

Wu Chang shook his head slightly and said:

"Everyone has different methods for solving cases; for instance, I don't need details."

Lei Wendun asked curiously: "Then what do you use to find the truth?"

"Intuition, or perhaps inspiration," Wu Chang said, spreading his hands.

Lei Wendun suddenly thought of something and said alertly: "You wouldn't be praying to the Light of Eternity to let the gods tell you the truth, would you? That's cheating."

Wu Chang denied it: "Of course not. When your occultism reaches my level, you will understand the importance of inspiration."

Lei Wendun said noncommittally: "I hope one day I can witness your inspiration-based case-solving method."

"For now, let's hear what Thomas has to say."

Since the biggest secret had been exposed, Thomas no longer hid anything and told what he knew about the coal essence.

At the beginning, just as he had said, because he was small in stature and could easily maneuver through the mine tunnels, especially deep into the deep-layer coal mining areas, he was chosen by the mine management to deliver various orders.

About two years ago, a group of mine thieves came to Pine Coal Mine and took a liking to him.

They found Thomas late at night and demanded that while he was delivering management's instructions, he should scout for them, confirm the status in the mine pits, and pass messages between members of the ring.

As a reward, he could join the theft organization and learn theft skills.

Under the instructions of the theft ring, Thomas discovered that about every month, a special cart of coal would be produced in the deep-layer mine shafts.

This cart of coal would not follow other coal out of the mine; instead, it would be repackaged by the mine management and sent directly to the mine owner's office.

What they had to do was find an opportunity to strike while the special coal was being transported from the deep-layer mine shafts to the shallow layers, and steal the special coal inside.

That is to say, the coal essence.

The part Thomas was responsible for was, first, to determine from which deep-layer mine shafts the special coal for that month would likely be sent out, based on the instructions.

Second was to identify the escort personnel, look for guys with weak vigilance, and help the mine thieves pass messages so they could formulate plans in advance based on the route.

Most importantly, after the deed was done, he had to help the mine thief ring watch the movements of the mine owner and managers to see if they discovered that any coal essence was missing.

Thomas was unwilling to get involved at first, but he couldn't help it—the other side paid too much.

Every time an operation succeeded, the mine thief ring would give him 20 shillings as a share.

Thomas was only twelve years old; he received the lowest child labor wage at the mine, working 14 hours a day, six days a week, with a monthly salary of only 15 shillings.

Helping the mine thief ring once a month could earn him double his salary; this temptation was simply impossible to refuse for Thomas, who wanted to move his sister out of the slums.

After listening to Thomas's description, Lei Wendun asked:

"It's produced once a month; what is the approximate quantity of coal essence produced each time?"

Thomas recalled, "It can produce about eight carts."

"Eight carts? Standard mine carts with a one-ton capacity?" Lei Wendun was startled by this number.

Thomas nodded and said: "Yes."

Lei Wendun seemed to have grasped the key to the problem, his voice much more excited as he said:

"As far as I know, the total annual production of coal essence in all of Stilan doesn't even reach eight carts."

"The density of coal essence is less than half that of coal, but eight carts of coal essence still weigh nearly four tons. The unit price of coal essence is even higher than silver, reaching 6 shillings per ounce, and the value per ton exceeds ten thousand pounds."

"No wonder the output value of the deep layers of the entire Pine Coal Mine is higher than the shallow-layer coal. Now it seems they weren't just over-reporting; they were even being conservative."

Wu Chang had already known where the problem lay through the information provided by the King's Badge, and he followed up by saying:

"In other words, hidden in the deep layers of Pine Coal Mine are some special secrets, and this special secret makes the coal essence production here abnormally high."

Lei Wendun showed an expression of approval and said:

"Exactly. What we need to do next is enter the mine shaft and see what is hidden inside."

"As it happens, we have an excellent underground guide here."

To investigate the mine explosion case, one naturally has to first examine the mine tunnel where the explosion occurred.

The publicly announced reason for the Pine Coal Mine explosion was that gas had accumulated too much in the depths of the mine, triggering a massive explosion from the deep layers to the shallow ones.

The mine tunnel where the explosion occurred had already undergone temporary clearing. According to the data compiled by Pine Coal Mine itself, over four hundred miners died in the explosion.

But the explosion was too violent, and coupled with the fact that some mine tunnels had not yet been cleared, only two hundred or so miner remains had been found so far.

The shallow-layer mining area where the explosion occurred had been carefully processed; there was no danger, nor were there any clues.

Lei Wendun held up a lantern, reflecting the mine walls stained with dark red blood, and said:

"The excavation and clearing of the Pine Coal Mine explosion were personally handled and supervised by Prime Minister Luo En. I happened to be present during the excavation and conducted a close-range observation."

"Professional, fast, clean, and efficient; every detail was handled perfectly. It was a textbook-level mine disaster excavation."

"But unfortunately, precisely because it was too standard, I couldn't see any additional clues."

"I wonder what our inspiration-based detective has discovered here."

Just as Lei Wendun said, the cleared mine tunnel area was very clean, with no abnormalities. Relying solely on inspiration, he could not detect anything unusual either.

But he never relied solely on inspiration to investigate the truth.

In an accident where over four hundred people died, he didn't believe that not a single shred of resentment had been left behind.

He walked a dozen meters along the mine tunnel and sure enough found a trace of resentment. The owner of the resentment was just an ordinary miner, which made his resentment only pale red.

But this was enough.

He looked at the resentment, and the pale red bloodstains erupted, swallowing him in an instant.

Coming to his senses, he was already possessing the miner, experiencing everything that happened on the day of the explosion from a first-person perspective.

The owner of the resentment had finished work at the time and was about to leave the mine shaft to change shifts with others.

Just as he shifted into the perspective of the resentment's owner, Wu Chang could faintly hear someone ask in his ear:

"Art, why are you changing shifts so early today? Usually, you'd stay for two more hours."

The owner of the resentment, named Art, said:

"Not today. My wife has malaria and is resting at home; I have to go back and cook for her."

The fellow worker asked with concern: "Is she alright?"

Art said: "Just mild malaria. The priest next door looked at her and said she would get better soon."

The fellow worker smiled and said: "Give my regards to Peri. I will pray for her, so she doesn't get worse diarrhea from eating the dinner you cooked."

While a few people were laughing and joking, a miner's exclamation suddenly came from the front of the mine tunnel:

"The mine cart is stuck! Is there a problem with the tracks?"

"Damn it, hurry up and fix it! The coal from the deep-layer mining area is coming up soon!"

Art followed the sound and said: "Let me see."

Before he could get close, a miner who wanted to leave the mine shaft to find a track repairman suddenly sat down on the ground.

He covered his face as he sat up from the ground, cursing: "Which idiot is walking without eyes?"

But when he looked up, he found that there was only empty air in front of him; there was no one there at all.

The miner was stunned. He reached out to touch forward, but his hand was blocked by something halfway.

"By the Queen! It's not the mine cart that's the problem; a transparent wall has appeared here!"

At this time, Art happened to walk nearby. He approached skeptically and reached out to touch the place the fellow worker mentioned, and he actually felt the solid sensation of a wall in the air.

A bad premonition welled up in his heart. Before he could say anything, he saw a dazzling light in the depths of the mine tunnel out of the corner of his eye, flying rapidly toward him.

The air wall he was holding onto disappeared the moment the light shone, but before he could react, only one sound remained in his ears.

Boom!

The next moment, a violent explosion swallowed the entire mine tunnel.

Wu Chang's vision went black, and he broke free from the resentment.

Art didn't understand what had happened, but he, possessing Art, saw it very clearly.

The air wall blocking the entrance to the mine tunnel was clearly an occult magic array.

The Pine Coal Mine explosion was purely a man-made disaster!

Lei Wendun's voice sounded behind him, "Leader, did your inspiration bring you any clues?"

Wu Chang took a deep breath, first communicating through his mind to have Ailin continue forward with Thomas, then waved at Lei Wendun, signaling him to follow.

Lei Wendun appeared calm, but his heart skipped a beat; he looked at Wu Chang with suspicion, wondering to himself if the team leader really had a lead.

In the Pine Coal Mine explosion case, the explosion and the occult ritual had been coordinated very well.

The moment the explosion occurred, the air wall vanished along with it, making the deaths of the workers in the mine shaft appear very natural, without any traces of a boundary.

Yate had been blown quite far away by the explosion, and the location of the lingering resentment was some distance from where the air wall had been.

Wu Chang led Lei Wendun for over ten meters, arriving at the spot where the air wall had existed within Yate's lingering resentment.

He saw complex occult runes flickering in his palm, and then he wiped his hand across the mine tunnel wall; a faint, nearly invisible mark appeared on the surface of the wall.

"Mr. Great Detective, can you tell what this represents?"

Lei Wendun took out a folding magnifying glass, observed the mark for a minute or two, then folded the magnifying glass back up and said blankly:

"A 'No Entry' ritual."

Wu Chang praised, "It seems your occult literacy isn't too bad. If you could go a step further and be able to reconstruct the traces of occult rituals, that would be even better."

Lei Wendun asked in confusion, "How did you discover it?"

Not to mention that the 'No Entry' ritual on the wall had already been artificially cleaned, and the cleaner's methods were highly sophisticated, leaving almost no trace behind.

Even if the other party had left traces, he was certain that Wu Chang had never looked at that mark before.

Wu Chang had merely stood over ten meters away, wearing a thoughtful expression while looking at the air, and in the blink of an eye, it was as if he had received divine revelation and discovered the hidden clue.

Facing Lei Wendun's question, Wu Chang said matter-of-factly, "I told you, I rely on intuition."

Lei Wendun immediately shook his head in denial, "So-called intuition also requires collecting enough clues, combining them with the actual situation at the scene, and using logical deduction to eliminate most impossible options before that flash of insight appears in one's mind."

"What you just displayed is clearly a method that is more like cheating than intuition."

Wu Chang shook his head and said, "This is my talent. I don't really understand the principles of how it works either. Sorry, my knowledge isn't profound enough to explain to you people without talent what happened."

Lei Wendun laughed, so angry he laughed.

"I don't believe that your so-called intuition can be this accurate every single time."

Wu Chang raised an eyebrow and asked:

"Are you saying you want to compete with me to see who can be the first to find the truth behind the Pine Coal Mine explosion?"

Lei Wendun puffed out his chest and said solemnly:

"Of course."

Wu Chang asked, "What is the wager?"

Lei Wendun opened his wallet and said, "Forty—no, wait, I have to deduct next month's rent. The wager is thirty-three pounds."

Wu Chang had originally thought Lei Wendun would bet big; he hadn't expected it to be just pounds.

He chuckled, "Fine, I accept your challenge."

Wu Chang and the others investigated for a while longer in the cleared-out mine tunnel.

There was quite a bit of lingering resentment in the mine tunnel, but the information contained within it was not much different from Yate's lingering resentment.

The deeper levels of the mine tunnel were still in a state of collapse and could not be accessed further. To investigate the secrets of the deep mine, they could only have Thomas find a tunnel that hadn't collapsed to see if they could enter the deeper levels.

Before entering the new mine shaft, Lei Wendun took out a canary and walked at the very front of the team.

The uncollapsed mine tunnels were different from the ones that had already collapsed; no one had cleaned them, and there was a high possibility of other harmful gases inside.

Carrying a canary was the miners' customary method for testing the air in the tunnels. Canaries were sensitive to changes in the air; if it showed signs of lethargy or other abnormalities, it meant the air in the tunnel was dangerous and they needed to evacuate.

They walked all the way forward until they reached the boundary between the deep and shallow levels of the mine shaft, and the canary hadn't reacted at all.

The deep levels of several mine tunnels were connected to each other, but in the current situation, it was as if the leaked gas had all concentrated and flowed into a few specific tunnels.

This manifestation further confirmed that the explosion at the Pine Coal Mine was artificially controlled.

The group continued to walk deeper into the mine; the further down they went, the narrower the tunnels became.

The group soon arrived before a heavy wooden partition door. According to Thomas, this door was located two hundred meters underground and separated the shallow mining area from the deep mining area.

Thomas knew how to open the door, and the opening went very smoothly, but judging by Thomas's actions, he was extremely tense and looked very uneasy, his body subconsciously leaning toward Ailin.

Wu Chang asked, "What is in the deep mining area that makes you so afraid?"

Thomas said with a slight tremor in his voice:

"Sir, I heard from my fellow workers that a demon resides in the deep mine shaft, and it appears at night to abduct miners."

Wu Chang became interested and asked, "A demon in the deep mine shaft? Tell me more."

The group listened to Thomas as they continued to move forward.

In Stilan, mining was a dangerous job, especially for coal miners; it had a higher mortality rate than the recognized dangerous profession of railway worker.

A small coal mine of a hundred people would have three or four people die in accidents every year, let alone a super-large coal mine like the Pine Coal Mine with over three thousand people.

But looking at the data, if you didn't count the recent coal mine explosion, the mortality rate of miners at the Pine Coal Mine was actually far lower than that of ordinary coal mines.

This came from the Pine Coal Mine's good ventilation and drainage mechanisms, as well as its strict management system.

These standardized controls greatly reduced the risk of miners dying in accidents, but the Pine Coal Mine still maintained a death and injury toll of about twenty people per year.

The reason for this was the deep mining area.

Miners often disappeared in the deep mine shafts; they were neither seen alive nor were their bodies found dead.

The deepest part of the Pine Coal Mine was located 600 meters underground. Many times, miners couldn't make it back to the surface in time and would spend the night in temporary rest areas deep underground.

Quite a few miners claimed that in the middle of the night while fast asleep, they saw fellow workers enter the depths of the mine shaft as if sleepwalking, and they never returned the next day.

Speaking of this, Thomas's voice became dry.

"Compared to ordinary miners, members of the mine thief gangs, especially those who had touched coal essence, were more likely to be attacked by the demon."

"Before the explosion case began, five people had already disappeared from the mine thief gangs in succession."

After hearing this, Lei Wendun showed a thoughtful expression and asked:

"How much coal essence do you steal each time?"

Thomas said, "To avoid being discovered by the mine management, we always pick small pieces of coal essence, about half of the coal essence on the mine owner's desk."

"We take eighty to one hundred pieces at a time, and we don't take more than fifteen pieces per cart. We never take more, and for every piece we take, we simultaneously put in a piece of coal of similar size."

Lei Wendun was silent for a moment and said:

"According to what you said, each piece of coal essence you take weighs about an ounce. Taking the median value of ninety pieces, that's five pounds."

"This weight might not be much when spread across eight carts of coal, but have you ever thought that if the coal mine owner knew the total weight of each batch of coal essence, the five pounds you took would be particularly obvious?"

Thomas immediately said, "Impossible, Kali said that mining coal essence is very difficult, and it's very normal for it to be mixed into ordinary coal."

"Besides, the eight carts of coal essence come from different tunnels; they wouldn't know the total amount."

Lei Wendun seemed to have already formed a hypothesis about what was happening down in the mine, and he said in a flat tone:

"Then did that Kali you mentioned ever tell you that ordinary coal mines wouldn't produce such a large amount of coal essence on such a regular and quantitative basis?"

Thomas stopped talking, his eyes full of terror.

If the coal mine owner had discovered their actions from the very beginning, then why had the mine owner and the mine management always turned a blind eye to their behavior and even pretended not to know?

Wu Chang gently patted Thomas on the head and said:

"Don't overthink it; there are some things that knowing too much about won't do you any good."

(End of chapter)