Chapter 372: Purge

Lingshui Shi. 02:17 AM.

Qin Zhixia crouched in an alley without streetlights, illuminating the ground with the red‑light mode of her Tactical Flashlight.

The rain had just stopped, the puddles not yet fully drained, and the asphalt glistened with a thin film of oil. Qin Zhixia's attention was not on the road surface but on the manhole cover.

The city's municipal surveillance coverage rate was 73 %, about twenty percentage points lower than Jiang Hai City. In other words, one out of every four streets was a blind spot.

For organizations that hide people, this is a natural breeding ground.

Xiao Zhang was not an ordinary hideout specialist. He was a criminal police officer taken from under Qin Zhixia's command, having systematically studied anti‑reconnaissance courses.

So Qin Zhixia didn't check the surveillance.

Surveillance is for normal people. Someone with anti‑reconnaissance awareness at Xiao Zhang's level had long treated camera blind spots as their own living room. What Qin Zhixia was looking for were the traces of life that they had left in the "living room."

For example, a manhole cover.

Qin Zhixia extended a finger and felt the gap between the cast‑iron manhole‑cover edge and the cement curb.

There were scratches.

New ones. Metal‑on‑metal friction left silver‑white fine powder that the rain had not yet washed away. The direction ran from the southwest corner to the northeast corner, with a consistent curvature, indicating it was not a random pry but a standardized tool applied with a fixed orientation.

Qin Zhixia stood up.

Qin Zhixia and the Special Forces Captain Zhao Kun accompanying her used bone‑conduction earpieces, the volume low enough for only the two of them to hear clearly.

"Mark. The seventh."

Captain Zhao Kun's voice was very light: "Seven already. Are you sure these traces were left by the target?"

In anti‑reconnaissance practice there is a technique called "Waterway Concealment," which uses the municipal drainage network to move personnel, perfectly evading ground surveillance and thermal imaging. Qin Zhixia walked deeper into the alley, her gaze passing over an inconspicuous rust mark on the wall corner.

"......"

"The way that person opens a manhole cover is what I taught them. First, use an L‑shaped wrench to clamp the drain hole, rotate counter‑clockwise forty degrees to release the latch, then push clockwise to slide it open. This operation leaves an arcuate scratch at the seven‑o'clock position of the cover edge, because the wrench's fulcrum is fixed."

Qin Zhixia crouched and pointed the flashlight toward the 7 o'clock position of the manhole cover.

An arcuate scratch. Silver‑white metal powder. Exactly matching her description.

Captain Zhao Kun fell silent.

Qin Zhixia marked the GPS coordinates of the seven manhole covers on the offline map on her phone, linking them with her finger.

It was not a straight line, not radial, but a winding, deliberately snake‑shaped route that avoided every surveillance‑covered area. The path began at the old freight yard of the southern city train station and ended—

Her finger stopped at a green square on the map.

The old Air‑raid Shelter cluster in the north of the city.

Qin Zhixia turned off the flashlight.

"Assemble."

Forty minutes later.

Entrance of the abandoned Air‑raid Shelter A‑7 in the north of the city. In front of a welded‑shut iron door.

Six Special Forces members formed a tactical formation, pressed against the wall, ready. Protective goggles lowered, suppressor engaged, infrared grip steady in their palms. Captain Zhao Kun made a "wait" gesture.

Qin Zhixia knelt on one knee beside the iron door, pressing her palm against the rust‑stained door panel.

"Wu Ming" flowed from the inner side of her forearm, coating the tip of the first carbon‑tungsten alloy bayonet at her waist.

The blade's sheen vanished, replaced by a dry, all‑consuming ash‑white.

Qin Zhixia raised the knife, aligning the edge with the one‑centimeter gap between the iron door and its frame.

With a gentle push.

Like cutting butter with a hot knife.

The three‑centimeter‑thick welded iron door silently split along the knife's path, the cut surface so clean it could serve as a mirror.

The Special Forces held their breath for half a beat.

Qin Zhixia withdrew the knife. The carbon‑tungsten alloy blade began to disintegrate from the tip, ash‑white powder cascading down. Three seconds later, a perfectly intact bayonet became a half‑handle.

She re‑inserted the ruined knife handle into her vest's sling and drew a second one.

"Three, two, one."

The iron door was kicked open. The Special Forces surged in one after another.

The interior of the shelter was dimly lit by a few white‑incandescent bulbs about to burn out and scattered Candles. The damp air carried the smell of iron rust and another, more pungent odor—the ketone‑acid stench emitted when Crimson Seed metabolizes inside a human body.

At the end of the corridor corner was a large civil shelter space where a partition wall had been broken through.

Over twenty people knelt on the ground around a black‑robed figure in the center. The black‑robed person was distributing something—thumb‑size dark‑red particles that glimmered with a weird, almost jelly‑like wet sheen in the Candlelight.

Seed.

The three people in the front row had already shoved the seed into their mouths; their faces began to show the transformation reaction—something moving beneath the skin, like earthworms wriggling through soil.

Qin Zhixia did not shout "Federation Investigation Bureau."

She did not present any credentials.

She gave no warning.

She raised her gun.

The muzzle flash of the "Tail‑Head Snake" gun flashed three times inside the shelter.

Three suppressor rounds precisely hit the heads of three believers undergoing transformation. The suppressor‑fluid inside the bullets detonated and spread within the skull, forcibly terminating the transformation reaction—and the life—within 0.4 seconds.

The sound of three bodies hitting the ground exploded together with the screams of the remaining believers.

The Special Forces poured in from the side passage, their suppressive fire textbook‑perfect. The black‑robed person tried to pull something out; Captain Zhao Kun's two rapid shots pierced his palm and scapula.

Nine seconds. From breaching the door to the last standing believer being locked to the ground with a joint technique, a total of nine seconds.

Qin Zhixia stepped in front of the black‑robed man, stepping on his uninjured hand, collected the scattered Crimson Seed on the floor into an evidence bag. Then she picked up his phone and skimmed the communication log.

Encrypted group chat. 427 members.

She handed the phone to Captain Zhao Kun. "Let the tech team decrypt it and extract all coordinate information."

Zhao Kun took it over, and glanced at Qin Zhixia's expression.

No particular expression.

It took the next three hours for Zhao Kun to fully understand what a "human bulldozer" is.

The second nest was hidden in the basement of an abandoned elementary school in the west of the city. Fourteen believers were forcibly mutating three local civil servants tied to chairs—crushing the Seed, mixing it into water, and forcing it down.

Qin Zhixia attached "Ignorance" to the third Bayonet and slashed open the blast‑proof door of the basement. Tail-Head Snake cleared all armed believers within four seconds. Among the tied civil servants, one had already begun mutating; after checking, Qin Zhixia gave him a finishing shot. The suppressor bullet's abrupt stop effect was ineffective on an already mutated individual, but that shot was enough.

The third nest was in an abandoned temple in the old‑city district. It was larger, with nearly forty people. Someone was packing the Seed into plastic bags, ten per bag, wrapping them as "benefit goods" to be slipped into the giveaway piles at the morning market stalls after dawn.

Qin Zhixia gave them no chance to see daylight.

This time she used two extra Bayonets.

Forty‑seven carbon‑tungsten Bayonets in total; after clearing the three nests, nine were spent. Thirty‑eight remain.

When Zhao Kun was doing the final cleanup in the temple's rear yard, his hand trembled a bit. Not from fear, but because adrenaline began to backfire after three hours of continuous high‑intensity combat. He was a veteran and recognized the reaction.

But Qin Zhixia's hand did not tremble.

Her motion of swapping magazines in the corner of the yard was as steady as a machine‑tool cut. Zhao Kun stole a glance at the heart‑rate monitor embedded in her waist Exoskeleton—sixty‑two.

Resting heart rate.

After dismantling the three nests, this woman's heart rate was a resting heart rate.

Lingshui Shi, East District, third level of the underground drainage network.

Xiao Zhang sat on a swivel chair brought from a nearby office building, with four smartphones spread on the folding table before him, all screens lit.

The believers' reports were typed text, no voice messages. That was Xiao Zhang's Regulation—he had been a detective and knew that voice messages were equivalent to voice‑print evidence, capable of pinpointing a specific individual.

A-7 lost contact.

West City Station Two lost contact.

Old City Station Three lost contact.

The three messages were spaced no more than forty minutes apart. Xiao Zhang flipped the last phone to the surveillance view—he had deployed independent micro‑cameras near each nest, operating off‑network with frequency‑modulated encrypted local signals.

In the footage, a woman with a high ponytail walked out of the temple gate. She wore a Black Combat Suit, with a hint of deep blue on her right knee. She raised her hand to wipe her face—whether it was rain or some other liquid—and as she turned, her Crimson Phoenix Eyes caught a fleeting reflection from the temple's lingering lights.

Xiao Zhang stared at that face for three seconds.

Then he smiled.

It wasn't a normal smile. His mouth stretched too wide, his eyes too bright, and his eyes swirled with too many intense things—reverence, nostalgia, madness, and an indescribable, ecstatic joy that only believers feel when witnessing a miracle.

"It's coming."

He stood up. The swivel chair was kicked with a "creak" and bounced back and forth in the empty conduit.

A Mutated Believer beside him lifted its twisted face to look at him.

"Pass the order down," Xiao Zhang patted the believer's shoulder lightly, almost soothing. "Everyone cease external movements. Retract the front line."

"Prophet, our expansion plan—"

"Plan postponed." Xiao Zhang's smile tightened, but that blinding light still lingered deep in his pupils. "My teacher has arrived; you don't even qualify to be her opponent. Sending the junior to die is a waste of my pieces."

The believers dared not ask further, bowed and slipped back into the darkness.

Xiao Zhang sat back on the swivel chair. He glanced down at his palm—dark red veins raised under the skin after mutation, pulsing faintly in sync with his heartbeat.

5:40 a. m.

Qin Zhixia entered the last uncleaned Storage Room behind the old‑city temple, preparing for a final on‑site investigation.

When her flashlight swept the corner, her steps halted.

To the north, on a wall whose plaster had peeled off more than half, someone had used a finger dipped in a dark brown liquid to write a line of characters. It had dried, turning black, but the strokes remained fairly clear.

It wasn't text.

It was an arrangement of numbers and symbols, interspersed with a few illegible scribbles.

Qin Zhixia's pupils contracted slightly.

She recognized the code.

It dated back to the Project Team era—when she was still a detective captain—and was an internal collective cipher. Only five members of the team knew it. The encoding rules were designed by Qin Zhixia and Xiao Zhang and had never been leaked.

She reached out, snapped the symbols off, and ran the key through her mind.

The decryption yielded a string of coordinates.

Qin Zhixia pulled up a map and cross‑checked; the coordinates pointed to a spot marked gray on the map—signifying "unfinished/abandoned building".

She enlarged the textual annotation beside that gray patch.

Yun Ding Tian Cheng.

Lingshui Shi's biggest unfinished development in the past decade. After the developer fled, twenty‑seven half‑built skyscrapers remained in the northeast corner of the city, the tower cranes still standing, rusting and jutting into the skyline.

Qin Zhixia turned off her phone screen.

The Storage Room fell silent, leaving only the drip‑drip of a leaking pipe in the corner, each drop striking the tip of her combat boot.

She held the phone, stood for a dozen seconds, then turned and walked out.

Zhao Kun waited for her outside the door.

"Captain Mei, the site cleanup is complete; shall we withdraw?"

Qin Zhixia slipped the phone back into her pocket.

"Hmm, we have a new destination."

She paused. Her gaze passed over the temple's broken eaves and fell on a row of uneven, half‑cloud‑piercing gray silhouettes to the northeast of the city.

Weak morning light filtered through the gaps of those buildings.