Chapter 370: Criminal Police?

The memory's image suddenly collapsed in Xiao Zhang's mind.

Water seeped down from the air-raid shelter's dome, drip drip, striking the steel ammunition box beside his feet.

The air was filled with a strange odor emanating from the believers' bodies, not rotten, but closer to the lingering ozone after some chemical reaction.

Xiao Zhang lowered his head, looking at the old police badge in his palm.

The coating had peeled off more than half, revealing the grayish alloy underneath. The number was illegible, only the last two digits remained—37. It was his student number suffix at the police academy, and also his workstation number assigned the year he joined.

Zhou Weiguo patted his shoulder back then and said, "Three-seven, a good number—solving cases is three parts brains, seven parts legs."

Xiao Zhang's thumb rubbed once over the badge's surface.

Twice.

On the third rub he stopped.

His five fingers closed together.

The force that had grown from the seed surged into his palm without warning, and the metal in his hand emitted an extremely short squeak—not the sound of breaking, but a high-frequency resonance squeezed out when compressed to the molecular level.

The alloy deformed, collapsed, and shattered into powder.

Fine iron powder leaked from between his fingers, caught by a cross draft blowing from deep in the tunnel, swirling and scattering, tracing a few dark-gray arcs under the flickering incandescent bulb overhead before falling into the water puddle on the ground congealed with blood grime.

It was gone.

The badge that had witnessed his oath, been worn on his chest, accompanied him through many all-nighters, and had its corner disinfected by Zhou Weiguo with a lighter.

It was gone.

Xiao Zhang raised his empty palm before his eyes and looked at it. A few specks of iron dust were embedded in his palm lines, flashing in the light.

He didn't wipe it off.

He turned around.

In the depth of the air-raid shelter, over a hundred mutated believers packed the tunnel, black as ink. Some still retained a human shape, their tattered clothes hanging on deformed bodies; others were no longer recognizable, extra joints and bone spikes tearing the fabric, exposing muscle tissue that gave off an abnormal purplish sheen.

But everyone—or rather, everything—was kneeling.

Their knees slammed onto the concrete floor in unison, even their breathing rhythm was synchronized.

Xiao Zhang spoke.

His voice wasn't loud; the tunnel's echo helped amplify it.

"We need to start moving."

The believers' breathing paused for a beat.

"Three to five per team, take the municipal drainage system. The density of surveillance cameras above ground is extremely high; if caught on camera, personal information will be instantly locked. The Federation Investigation Bureau's facial recognition needs only 0.3 seconds."

He spoke at an even pace, as if issuing a mission briefing—in fact, he was issuing a mission briefing. Years of criminal investigation training wouldn't be wiped from his mind just because his body had changed.

"Target: Lingshui City."

A slight commotion stirred in the tunnel.

"Lingshui..." a mutated entity in the front row lifted its head, its lower jaw bone already flared outward thirty degrees; speaking with difficulty but clear meaning: "Prophet, there's an Investigation Bureau substation there—"

"The substation is staffed with twelve: six field officers...... four technicians, two logistics."

Xiao Zhang interrupted it.

"The station chief is surnamed Wu, transferred from headquarters two years ago to retire; he's never seen real combat. The entire Lingshui station has zero capable weird‑counter officers. The nearest reinforcement is at the provincial capital, a forty‑minute drive if you take the highway."

He reported those figures smoothly, like flowing clouds and water.

"But what does Lingshui have?" he asked and answered himself, that precise, hair‑raising smile curling at the corner of his mouth. "Three developers blacklisted by the Discipline Inspection Commission yet untouchable, a former deputy secretary of the provincial Political and Legal Committee involved in a cross‑provincial abduction‑trafficking case, and a mid‑level court ranked among the top three nationwide for judicial corruption case rates in the Federation."

He paused for two seconds.

"Good place."

The kneeling believers in the tunnel began to emit a low, resonant hum. It wasn't language; it was closer to a collective physiological response—the seed inside them had produced resonance.

"When you get there, don't rush to act. First, take root. Lingshui has plenty of underground pipe networks, abandoned buildings, and disused civil defense projects. Find a foothold, then contact me."

After Xiao Zhang finished speaking, he stepped back.

The believers rose to their feet. Their movements were uneven—some swift, others needing extra adjustment time because their joint structures no longer conformed to ergonomics—but eventually everyone stood upright.

No one looked back at him.

They filed out of the air-raid shelter's side passage, disappearing into the city's tangled underground drainage network. Footsteps, joint friction, occasional bone collisions echoed in the tunnel for a long time before finally fading away.

Xiao Zhang stood in the middle of the empty air-raid shelter; the overhead incandescent bulb flickered twice and went out.

Darkness swallowed everything.

Only a faint crimson glow seeped through.

Over a thousand li away.

Federal Weird Investigation Bureau headquarters, Information Analysis Center.

2:47 a. m. Normally at this hour the information center would have only two senior technicians on duty to keep the system running, but today was different.

Qin Zhixia sat before terminal C12.

The collar of her combat uniform was fastened to the top button. Her right knee's azure exoskeleton glowed faintly in the screen's cold light. Her ponytail was pulled tighter than ever, hair pressed to her scalp, making the blood vessels near her temples clearly visible.

She had been sitting in that position for four hours.

The screen before her was split into six windows. Upper left showed Xiao Zhang's personnel file; the hiring photo of that slightly baby‑faced, girl‑next‑door visage faced the camera, bearing the nervous excitement typical of a new officer. Upper right displayed Zhou Weiguo's martyrdom report, a scanned paper copy, with Qin Zhixia's own "read" signature in the lower‑right corner.

The four central windows were all data.

Fund flows. Communication records. Urban surveillance stills. Missing‑person heat map.

Qin Zhixia's fingers flew across the keyboard, but the rhythm was uneven—three quick taps, a pause, five taps, a long pause, then a burst of input like a storm. This was her habit when investigating: she typed wherever her thoughts led, her fingertips following her train of thought.

The glass door of the information center was pushed open from outside.

The footsteps were light, almost imperceptible.

L carried her laptop, plastered with cat stickers, walked in, sat down at the workstation beside Qin Zhixia, opened the screen, and rested her fingers on the keyboard.

"Captain Mei. I've run the relevant trajectory data through a preliminary model. Do you need me to give the clustering results—"

"No need."

Qin Zhixia didn't look back.

L's finger hovered above the keyboard, pausing for a beat. Through the heavy black‑framed glasses, her gaze fell on Qin Zhixia's side profile, tinted blue by the screen's light.

Qin Zhixia's voice was as dry as sandpaper on wood. "Your algorithm may be sophisticated, but fundamentally it still outputs 'where a Mutated Entity leader is most likely to go.' Yet Xiao Zhang isn't a Mutated Entity leader."

L said nothing.

"He's a detective," Qin Zhixia dragged Zhou Weiguo's death‑in‑the‑line‑of‑duty report to the center of the main screen. "A detective I've trained for three years. His brain is still that brain, his logic still that logic. The Seed altered his body, not the way he investigates cases."

Her finger hammered a carriage return on the keyboard.

"Conversely—his method of hunting a target would be exactly the same as his method of investigating a case."

L's notebook screen dimmed for an instant as power‑saving mode auto‑activated. She didn't touch it, merely nudged the chair back half an inch, giving Qin Zhixia more operational space.

"Received."

Two words.

L felt that saying anything else now would waste Qin Zhixia's time.

Qin Zhixia's six windows expanded to eight. The two new ones: one displayed a map of asset distribution and flow among the elite classes of major cities in the Federation; the other showed the ranking of judicial corruption incident rates released publicly by the Supreme Prosecutor's Office over the past five years.

Her hand stopped.

Her index finger tapped the ranking table, sliding from top to bottom.

Top three: Honghai City, Jiang Hai City, Lingshui Shi.

When she reached Lingshui Shi, her hand froze.

"When Xiao Zhang was in the Project Team, he once said something to me," Qin Zhixia's voice suddenly lightened, so faint that L had to tilt slightly to hear clearly.

"He said, 'Qin Team, I've found that the most despair‑inducing thing in this world isn't the abundance of villains, but villains in court robes seated on the judgment bench, while we can't even get through the door.'"

She pulled up another database.

City infrastructure information.

Lingshui Shi's underground spatial data unfurled in dense detail—37 Air-raid Shelters, 12 unfinished projects, 4 abandoned underground commercial complexes, and a municipal drainage network totaling 1,600 kilometers.

Qin Zhixia overlaid this map with the judicial corruption heat map, then imported the missing‑person data from Lingshui Shi and surrounding areas for the past three months.

Three layers of data intersected and overlapped.

On the screen, the red dots, blue lines, and yellow zones continuously contracted, filtered, and interlocked under the algorithm's drive.

In the end, only a single point remained on the holographic map.

Lingshui Shi.

Qin Zhixia stared at the flickering red coordinate on the map for five seconds.

Then she smiled.

It wasn't a sneer, nor a bitter laugh. It was the pure, instinctive professional reaction of a hound that, after catching a scent, involuntarily twitches the corner of its mouth.

"You think changing skin means I can't find you?"

She packaged a screenshot of the holographic map, attached a handwritten action proposal, and sent it to Wei Gong's Encrypted Terminal.

As the send‑success chime rang, Qin Zhixia stood up.

The chair's caster wheels scraped a brief friction sound across the floor. She reached for the tactical belt draped over the chair back, and the Tail-Head Snake's gun holster glinted once in the light.

L didn't know when she closed the notebook.

"Captain Mei, are you applying for field duty?"

"It's not an application."

Qin Zhixia fastened the belt. The zipper snapped cleanly in one swift motion.

"It's a notice."

She walked toward the glass door. Her steps were unbroken, her ponytail arcing behind her head. When she pushed the door open, the cold draft flowing through the Corridor surged in, rattling several memo pads in the information center.

L watched her silhouette vanish at the far end of the Corridor.

The notebook lit up again at some point. The screen displayed the clustering analysis results L had generated herself.

Highest‑weight target city: Lingshui Shi. Confidence 94.7%.

L flattened the lifted edge of the cat sticker with her index finger and closed the computer.

"Detective... what?"

She muttered to herself.

Her voice was flat, without inflection.