Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
“Is it here?”
In the end, Gao Tian still brought Little Silver to the apartment where the crime took place.
Little Silver felt that the area was familiar. He wasn’t mistaken — he had been here before.
“Is there a family apartment block nearby? I have a friend living there,” said Little Silver
“That’s right.” Gao Tian nodded.
It was also one of the main reasons why his superiors had charged him to solve these serial murders as quickly as possible and find the culprit.
Those who lived in the family apartments were all retired high-ranking civil servants in Huaxiu’s political circle. Such a major homicide case in this jurisdiction was a major disruption in the lives of these retirees and was a security issue for the surrounding area.
Actually, the crime rate in Songhai city was very low, and the odds of a murder case happening even rarer. This was yet another reason why the higher-ups attached great importance to this case. Everyone knew that the area which this “family apartment block” was in would have excellent public security, yet despite knowing this, the murderer had still decided to act here. It was obvious that the murderer was extremely confident in his methods, and this could even be described as taunting the judicial system in contempt of the laws of the cultivation world.
Little Silver and Gao Tian stood at the entrance of the apartment building where the murders had taken place. There were six floors in all, and was called Divine Leisure Apartments.
“Take me in for a look.” Little Silver took out his phone to check the time.
“Are you in a hurry?”
“I need to get to East Huang Road by noon, so I have to solve the case by eleven.”
“…” Gao Tian took a deep breath. It was already nine o’clock now… Solve the case in two hours, do you think you’re Detective Conan? Even Conan needs twenty minutes!
But since they were already here, Gao Tian thought it was fine to show Little Silver around. In any case, he himself had planned to check out the crime scene again.
When they entered the residential building, Little Silver noticed that a temporary police box had already been set up at the security office on the first floor. The civil officers all straightened and saluted when they saw Gao Tian. “Captain Gao!”
“Have all the names been taken down?”
“Everything’s going to plan,” answered a police officer.
Without concrete evidence at the moment, all the residents in the building were treated as suspects and would be monitored when they went out. Their comings and goings had to be noted down until the culprit was found.
The arrangement served two purposes: to pick up any clues on the culprit as well as to safeguard the other residents. Now that there was a police box downstairs, the murderer presumably wouldn’t dare act again for the time being.
“Give me a police staff pass,” said Gao Tian.
An officer at the police box took down Little Silver’s name and then gave him the pass. “Excuse me, Captain Gao, this is…?”
“An outside expert from the Office of Strategic Deception. I’ve invited him here to see whether he can help us find some leads,” replied Gao Tian.
“An expert from the Office of Strategic Deception…” The officers exchanged startled looks.
Little Silver took the pass and hung it around his neck before lying down and sniffing the ground. As Gao Tian had told him on the way here, three people had died in this building recently, and Little Silver could clearly discern their scents.
The blood of the dead usually gave off the scent of resentment; normal cultivators wouldn’t be able to pick it out, but Little Silver as a holy beast could.
Little Silver got to his feet and clapped his hands together.
“Three people really did die. I thought you were lying to me.”
“So you lay on the ground to…”
“To sniff out the scents and confirm the facts. They each died on the second, third and fifth floors, right?”
“…” This was Gao Tian’s first time seeing a case handled this way.
But he had to admit that Little Silver was really amazing: just by sniffing the ground on the first floor, he could tell that the murders had taken place on the second, third floor and fifth floors. This wasn’t something an ordinary person could do.
On their way to the apartment building, he had told Little Silver how many people had died, but not the exact floors where the murders happened.
“Follow me.”
Gao Tian nodded and led Little Silver up the stairs to start investigating each floor.
“The first victim was a Golden Core cultivator in Unit 202, a young man who was 440 years old. He was an alchemist by profession, and basically never went out. When he died, the pills in his furnace were only half done and the kitchen ventilator was working normally. The first thing we did was to extract the smoke from the range hood, and we detected a minute trace of dark night spice.”
“Dark night spice?”
“It’s a banned drug sold on the Dark Network; just a pinch is enough to cause hallucinations. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any signs of a break-in, and didn’t find any clues on the alchemist’s body – it was burned instantly when the murderer threw it straight into the pill furnace after the deed.”
Gao Tian said, “The only thing we can determine, from the bloodstains left after the fight between the alchemist and the murderer, is that he was the first murder victim.”
“Someone he knew?”
“Not very likely. This alchemist was usually a loner; furthermore, he wasn’t local to this area. Even his neighbors don’t know much about him. To everyone else, he was a very mysterious man.”
“So the problem now is that you don’t know how the murderer broke into his place and killed him without leaving any traces behind, is that right?”
“Mm, that’s one of the issues.”
Gao Tian spoke as he walked. “After committing the first murder in Unit 202, the murderer only struck again twenty-four hours later on the third floor. The person who died was Li Daofei, an online live streamer. Like the alchemist, she also seldom went out. Her main source of income was live streaming and she would usually do some tricks like swallowing spirit swords. But the murderer hadn’t expected Li Daofei to be live streaming at the time. She was killed when she opened the door. Her fans heard a loud noise, and when she didn’t come back after a while, they called the police.
“The third victim was a programmer. Likewise, the murderer only acted again after another twenty-four hours. At that time, we were already in the initial stages of our investigation. The murderer committed the third murder right under our noses, which was a blatant provocation.”
“They all worked from home?” Little Silver trembled, since he also liked to hole up at home. He never thought he would see three shut-ins killed, just like that… Now, he finally understood how the term “damn shut-in 1 ” came about.
What was wrong with being a shut-in?
Was there anything wrong with just staying at home?
Little Silver grit his teeth as he pondered how he could destroy this murderer.
At that moment, he abruptly looked up the stairs. “The fourth.”
“The fourth what?”
“On the sixth floor – I can smell the fourth victim,” said Little Silver.
