Chapter 444: Revenge Drama

At 6:07 a. m., the sky was not yet fully bright.

Lao Zhou, a sanitation worker at Jiang Hai City's central Square, steered his garbage truck around a flower bed and looked up at the sky.

It was grayish, the cloud layer hung low, and the air carried a damp, rusty iron smell.

He wrinkled his nose, assuming it was from last night's rain.

No.

The smell grew stronger.

Lao Zhou set down his broom and took a few steps toward the center of the Square, following the scent.

Then he stopped.

The garbage truck's wheels rolled half a turn by inertia, emitting a creak that sounded especially harsh on the morning Square.

At the very center of the Square stood the stainless‑steel city sculpture "Soaring," an abstract bird with outstretched wings, one of Jiang Hai City's landmarks.

At that moment, a person was hanging between the bird's wings.

It wasn't a rope.

It was thread.

Thousands of silvery surgical suturing threads dangled from the steel framework at the sculpture's apex, each passing through a different part of the body—scapula, intercostal space, wrist joint, ankle bone, even the soft cartilage of the ear.

The tension of the threads had been calculated with extreme precision, keeping the adult male's body suspended in mid‑air in a bizarre, textbook‑like spread posture.

No, he wasn't merely hanging.

His chest cavity was opened.

His ribs were pulled apart on both sides, the sternum sawed longitudinally, the two lung lobes neatly folded outward and clamped with titanium hemostatic forceps onto the corresponding suturing threads. The heart lay exposed, still beating.

Still beating.

Lao Zhou saw the heart pulse three final times, then stop.

Blood streamed down the suturing threads, forming a winding rivulet on the curved surface of the stainless‑steel sculpture, dripping onto the Square's paving stones and coalescing into an irregular dark‑red pattern.

Lao Zhou's garbage truck tipped over, and the clang of the metal bucket hitting the ground startled the few birds perched atop the sculpture into flight.

He knelt on the ground, his stomach churning, sour liquid spilling from the corner of his mouth.

Twenty minutes later, the Square was sealed off.

Forty minutes later, the victim's identity was confirmed.

Song Deniu.

He was a former deputy secretary of the Municipal Political and Legal Committee of Jiang Hai City, who retired early a year ago for "personal reasons," but in reality had been neatly sidelined during an internal power reshuffle.

But even earlier— in the old case of Zhang Yuanqing— it was this man who, with a single phone call, suppressed the supplementary autopsy report and personally signed the disciplinary decision against Zhang Yuanqing.

A surgical knife was lodged in his chest cavity.

Five characters were stitched onto the knife handle with black thread.

"Supplementary Autopsy Report".

The news blasted through all information channels in Jiang Hai City within an hour.

It wasn't because of Song Deniu. A former official retired for a year, and even in this Weird era, such a bizarre death wouldn't cause much stir.

It was because he wasn't the only one.

In the early hours of the same day, Liu Peizhi, a retired judge of the First Intermediate Court of Jiang Hai City, was found dead in her home study.

Cause of death: 217 incisions across the body, each cut avoiding vital points, strictly following the direction of muscle fibers to slice skin and subcutaneous tissue; the spacing between cuts was uniform, with an error not exceeding 0.3 mm.

She was dissected for a full four hours while conscious. When the forensic doctor arrived, the study wall bore, written in blood, the number of the Maintenance Interview Record she had signed three years earlier.

In the early hours of the same day, Qian Guangming, former director of the Criminal Technology Division of the Jiang Hai City Public Security Bureau— the very person who had once shut the door and pulled the curtains to make Zhang Yuanqing "wipe the hard drive"— was found in his car parked in the Underground Parking Garage.

He was still alive, but his vocal cords had been precisely removed, all ten tendons in his hands severed, and a live mouse was sewn between each thumb and index finger.

When paramedics arrived, the two mice had already gnawed the soft tissue between his fingers down to bare bone.

Inside the front windshield of Qian Guangming's car was an A4 sheet stuck to the glass.

Printed on it was the full text of the suppressed supplementary autopsy report from three years ago.

Next to the name of every person who had taken part in persecuting Zhang Yuanqing, a red pen had drawn a circle.

Four circles had already been crossed out.

The fifth name remained blank.

Media censorship at this point was effectively nonexistent. High‑definition photos spread wildly through private channels, and related short‑video content had amassed tens of millions of views before being removed.

The comment section was sharply polarized.

"Evil actually gets retribution—who wrote this script?"

"I looked up that old case… damn, that female university student was really murdered???"

"Song Deniu suppressed more than just that case back then."

"It's a strange tale. Another strange tale. Anyone with a clear mind can see that a normal person couldn't consecutively kill so many people in such a short time."

The Federal Weird Investigation Bureau issued a brief statement at 9:30 p. m.: multiple abnormal death cases in Jiang Hai City have been filed, preliminarily judged as rule‑type strange‑tale incidents, urging citizens to stay away from the relevant areas and not spread unverified information.

When the statement was released, the seventh underground level of the Yunhu Technology Industrial Park, four hundred kilometers away, was already in uproar.

No, it wasn't noise. The central command room of Eden Garden has no concept of "noise." The entire space maintained an unsettling silence.

Chen Shao sat in the main seat.

In front of him, the holographic projection platform displayed seven screens simultaneously—high‑definition reconstructions of four crime scenes, data streams of two preliminary autopsy reports, and a profiling document just submitted by the Intelligence Division.

He enlarged that profiling document.

The submitter field read: Xu Chen.

Chen Shao glanced at the name, having no particular impression. The Intelligence Division had expanded three times in the past six months, with mid‑level analysts rotating constantly; he couldn't possibly remember them all. Yet Xu Chen's report was exceptionally concise, with restrained wording and a tightly linked logical chain.

The report's core conclusion was a single sentence:

"Combining the case's medical professionalism, the highly personal revenge characteristics of target selection, and the recurring 'forensic equipment' imagery in the Weird Rule, it is recommended to narrow the investigation focus to the following scope—individuals with a forensic or surgical background who have suffered systematic persecution. Only one target meets all three conditions."

Zhang Yuanqing.

Thirty‑nine, former Deputy Director forensic physician of Jiang Hai City's Criminal Technology Division, license revoked, public office dismissed, wife and children gone, now living in the east of the city.

Chen Shao's Demon Eye narrowed slightly.

The projection light fell on half of his face, outlining a cold, hard jawline. He reached out and tapped the photo of Zhang Yuanqing, and that weather‑worn face was enlarged to fill the entire projection surface.

His eye sockets were sunken, cheekbones protruding—a typical visage of chronic alcoholism and malnutrition.

But his gaze was not dead.

Chen Shao has read countless people. Anyone whose gaze remains alive in such a situation is either mad or waiting for an opportunity.

"Interesting."

He returned the profiling report to its original size, and his fingers tapped the tabletop.

The tactical analyst replied immediately: "Chief, the Federation Investigation Bureau is still going through procedures; the on‑site lockdown authority has been transferred three times, and internal squabbling is likely. From the wording of their statement, they have not yet pinpointed a specific suspect."

"Hmm."

Chen Shao did not follow that thread. He stared into the projection, his right index finger gently tracing the leather grain of the chair armrest.

He was thinking of something else.

Lu Yu.

That kid, via the request passed on by Chen Yao—to investigate the early Weird origins in Jiang Hai City—was, at the time, just a probing move by a clever youngster, a careful measurement of the board's edge. So he didn't block it and let the Intelligence network cooperate fully.

As a result, that thread actually hauled up a big fish.

No, perhaps more than just a big fish.

Chen Shao re‑extracted the reconstruction model of the crime scene, running through the angle parameters of Song Deniang's opened thorax and the tension data of the sutures.

The Weird's precision was too high.

It was not the instinct‑driven, brute hunting style of wild Weird. Every puncture point of each suture was accurate to the millimeter, the rib‑spreading angles strictly followed standard forensic dissection procedures, and even the fixed position of the folded lung lobes accounted for gravity and tissue elasticity.

This is a person with deep medical knowledge, who infused his professional expertise into the Weird Murder Rule.

If Zhang Yuanqing truly possesses the ability to create Weird…

Then the problem would be more than just "a big fish".

"Who gave him this ability?" Chen Shao whispered, half a sentence.

The conference room was so quiet that a pin could be heard dropping. No one dared to speak.

Chen Shao stared at Zhang Yuanqing's photo for a full ten seconds.

Then he turned off all the projections.

The room's light suddenly dimmed, leaving only the faint glow of corner equipment indicator lights, which reflected two crimson dots in Chen Shao's Demon Eye pupils.

"Call Xu An over."

"Spade Squad, all units stand by. Depart in one hour."

He stood up, the hem of his Windcoat sweeping across the chair.

"Target: Zhang Yuanqing. Alive."

Two minutes later, the Spade Squad's assembly alarm sounded silently within the Underground Base.

Four hundred kilometers away, in the east of Jiang Hai City, in a rented room costing six hundred yuan per month, Zhang Yuanqing was sitting by the window.

He hadn't drunk alcohol for three days.

He spread his left hand, and a palm‑sized dark red light panel hovered over his palm.

The numbers in the parameter column were still flickering.

【Current Business Value: 3,741】

【Edited Materials: 2】

Zhang Yuanqing's mouth twitched slightly. Not a smile, but an involuntary spasm of the corner muscles, a physiological reaction from a sudden release after long suppression.

There was still a name on the list that hadn't been crossed out.

He lowered his head and fished out the photograph that had been folded countless times from his pocket. The little girl in the photo grinned at the camera, showing two front teeth.

"Almost there," he said to the photo.

Outside the window, the morning rush‑hour traffic noise of Jiang Hai City began to rise.

Something was on its way toward him.

He didn't know.