Chapter 416: Crime Scene

When Su Ming received the message, he was leafing through a three‑day‑old newspaper in the faculty lounge of Qiu Ce Yuan.

It's not that he loves the news.

These days there are few things that can relax a person, and the paper's sugar‑coated nonsense has become a rarity.

"Su Team, the Old District has an incident."

On the other side of the channel was his rookie agent Zhou Yan, voice tight, with a background hiss that included retching sounds—Zhou Yan wasn't vomiting; someone else was.

"How serious is it?"

"You'd better... come and see for yourself."

Su Ming tossed the newspaper into the Trash Can, grabbed the clean, tidy combat jacket from the desk, and as he left, flipped his mentor's badge inside his chest pocket.

Qiu Ce Yuan is not far from the Old District.

Fourteen minutes by car.

When Su Ming arrived, the whole street was already sealed with three layers of Blockade Line. Gray‑uniformed Investigation Bureau field agents blocked the onlookers at the intersection, and a few bold residents tiptoed to peek inside, necks stretched like geese.

Su Ming lifted the warning tape and slipped inside.

The first thing that caught his eye wasn't a corpse.

It was the ground.

The asphalt was dotted with large, charred burn marks, each a perfect circle about two centimeters in diameter, evenly spaced, extending along the street's center line for nearly forty meters.

They looked like something dripping onto the pavement, scorching it through.

Su Ming crouched, pressed his fingertip to the edge of one burn spot and felt it.

Ice‑cold.

Not right.

Physically, such burns should be carbonized marks left by high heat, with residual temperature lasting at least two to three hours. Yet now, touching it, the temperature is lower than the surrounding pavement.

Thermodynamics doesn't recognize this thing.

"Su Team!"

Zhou Yan jogged over, face pallid, clutching a portable free‑Weird energy detector. The waveform on the screen was still slowly pulsing, the reading low, barely above the detectable threshold.

"On‑site free‑Weird energy concentration 0.07, decay curve matches natural dissipation law," Zhou Yan handed over the detector, swallowed, "Preliminary judgment: a wild Weird feeding incident. Roughly C-level folklore, possibly escaped from an incompletely sealed contaminated zone nearby, or a naturally born folklore."

Su Ming took the device, glanced at the data, and said nothing.

He kept walking deeper into the street.

The farther he went in, the more absurd the things on the ground became.

Fragmented bones.

Scattered clothing fibers.

And patches of oxidized, blackened blood, forming irregular radiating patterns, as if someone had sprayed a high‑pressure water gun in all directions.

Su Ming stopped in front of a—more precisely, half—remains.

The upper body was missing.

From the third rib upward, everything vanished; the cross‑section was unnaturally smooth, the edge muscle fibers looking instantly solidified as if cut at high speed—no tearing, no gnawing, and even little excess bleeding.

"Zhou Yan."

"Here."

"Which C-level folklore have you seen that can produce such a cross‑section?"

Zhou Yan opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Su Ming stood, his gaze slowly sweeping along the spray pattern of the blood.

Blood‑spray analysis is basic forensic skill. He had taught himself it in his past life during the apocalypse; the version was rough but sufficient.

The problem arose.

If this were a wild Weird feeding incident, the blood‑spray pattern should be chaotic and concentrated. Weird folklore that feeds doesn't care about manners; it pounces and tears, leaving marks usually radiating around the kill point.

But the blood here—

is too scattered.

Su Ming spun around, connecting the street's blood‑trace routes in his mind.

At least six independent killing points, scattered at different spots along the street, spaced five to twenty meters apart. The victims weren't corralled in one place for mass processing; they were taken down one by one during movement.

Someone was running.

Someone was chasing.

But the pursuer wasn't in a hurry.

Su Ming half‑crouched beside the third killing point, staring at an intriguing set of marks on the ground for nearly two minutes.

They were a pair of barefoot footprints.

The prints were shallow, set in the blood pool, stride even, rhythm steady, walking from one end of the street to the other without accelerating, decelerating, hesitation, or pause.

Uniform speed.

Like a monitor walking the Corridor after the class bell rings.

"Su Team, the forensic unit says the DNA match results are in—"

Su Ming raised his hand to cut him off.

"Come see this."

Zhou Yan leaned in, followed Su Ming's finger to the barefoot prints on the ground, and stared blankly for two seconds.

"This..."

"Do Weird folklore leave footprints?" Su Ming asked.

"Um, some materialized folklore can leave physical traces—"

"What about the C-level?"

Zhou Yan's card case broke.

C-level legends have an extremely low degree of materialization; to leave a stable footprint on the physical plane, it would have to be at least B Ji or higher. Yet the instrument detected a free energy concentration of only 0.07, a value not even enough to fit into a tooth gap.

Su Ming patted the dust off his knee, stood up, and tapped one of the charred burn circles with his toe.

"These burn marks, their spacing matches the stride of the footprints exactly. With each step, a drop falls. That thing, while walking, has liquid dripping down from its hands or body."

He paused for a moment.

"It's not blood. The liquid that burned through the asphalt is at least a thousand degrees, yet it feels icy now. I've only seen this positive‑negative temperature reversal in one situation."

"What situation?"

"Rule‑type Weird device residual energy after use."

Zhou Yan's pupils contracted slightly.

Su Ming looked around.

The three accompanying agents were each busy at their stations—one sampling, one photographing, one linking back to headquarters for a report. Every face bore the same expression: another wild Weird cannibal case, hurry through the procedure, pack up and go home to sleep.

Su Ming walked to the middle of the street; his voice was low, but every word was clear.

"All stop."

The sampling agent looked up.

The photographing agent's finger hovering over the shutter.

"The debris cross‑section is overly smooth, not matching any known attack signature of legends below C-level. Blood spatter analysis shows the victims were cut down one by one while moving, the killing rhythm highly controlled. Barefoot footprints left on site have uniform stride with no acceleration or deceleration. The burn‑mark temperature is reversed."

Su Ming tossed the detector back to Zhou Yan.

"0.07 Hz of free Weird energy—this is not the natural decay after Weird foraging. It's a residual leak after someone deliberately constrained the power fluctuations."

He scanned the faces of everyone present.

"Wild Weird's killing method isn't like this. Legend murders are rule‑driven, relying on trigger conditions and fixed patterns; no matter how bizarre the death, there are clues. Fierce Ghost murders rely on resentment, leaving abundant negative emotional fluctuations on site. Neither is present here."

Su Ming bent down, picked up a fragment of bone from the ground, and turned it under the light.

The fracture surface bore extremely fine parallel striations.

"This is a stress fracture caused by precisely applied external force. It has control, direction, intent."

He placed the bone fragment back and brushed the powder off his hand.

"Reopen the case as a High-level Yujie homicide. Notify headquarters to send a technical team for full‑spectrum energy scanning; I need detailed data for every inch of this street's ground."

Zhou Yan swallowed, pulled out his Communicator, and began calling headquarters.

A few agents exchanged puzzled looks; the chaotic footfalls resumed, this time with a hint of panic.

Su Ming walked alone to the edge of the Blockade Line, looking at a preliminary identity comparison report handed over by the forensic team.

He turned to the first page.

Victim A: Zhao Guoqiang, male, 52, legal representative of Zhao Clan Construction Materials.

Second page.

Victim B: Zhao Lingfei, female, 14, student at the Gui Ce Yuan Elementary Department.

Su Ming's finger lingered on the name Zhao Lingfei.

Gui Ce Yuan.

Elementary Department.

A string in his mind was plucked.

Earlier today, a message circulated among the faculty group—Zhao Clan Construction Materials was short‑sold jointly by twelve conglomerates under Shen Wanshan; within two hours its market cap plunged from tens of billions to insolvent. Zhao Lingfei's tuition account and privilege card were frozen in real time.

At the time, Su Ming only glanced over it and moved on. Business matters have nothing to do with him, a specially appointed instructor of ghost‑monster survival studies.

But now—

During the day, twelve top conglomerates jointly strangled them; the blood hadn't even cooled, and that night the father‑daughter pair were crushed into fragments in the Old District by a suspected High-level Yujie using a rule‑type Weird device.

The capital avalanche came first.

The massacre and silencing followed.

The timeline is locked together with meticulous precision.

Su Ming closed his eyes, a dozen clues weaving into a net in the darkness: Shen Wanshan's anomalous actions, the Guo Family background of Ding An Industry, the Gui Ce Yuan capital‑infiltration suspicion, and the current targeted hunt masquerading as a Weird incident.

What was after the Zhao family father and daughter?

Or rather, who was after them.

First, step on you in the business realm, then erase you from the world physically. Clean, efficient, end‑to‑end service.

Those capable of mobilizing both levels of power are few across the Federation.

Su Ming opened his eyes, shoved the report into his coat pocket, and said something to Zhou Yan.

"Retrieve the complete movement log of the Zhao family father and daughter. I need to know, for every minute between their bankruptcy and death, who they met, where they went, what they did, and what they did beforehand."