Chapter 125: The Fabricated Case and the Entity
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He closed his eyes. A terrible conjecture had surfaced in his mind. After thinking it over for a while, he finally let out a sigh of relief and shook his head.
“It’s nothing. If that was their plan…” He did not finish. Instead, he fell silent for a moment and moved forward a plan he had been keeping in reserve.
Looking at the file in Jiang Wan’s hands, Chen Qing asked, “What about the other cases? There must be more than this one.”
“There are.” Jiang Wan nodded. “There is one case that is extremely similar. Though, to my eyes, the differences are considerable… the police station insists on consolidating the cases…”
She had not finished when Chen Qing interrupted her.
“Merge it. Merge this case in as well.”
He raised a hand and pointed behind him.
Jiang Wan followed the direction of his thumb and frowned. “But that case…”
“Because it happened too long ago?”
She nodded.
“They may have been committed by the same group of people.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do!”
He grinned cheerfully. “I don’t believe in coincidences. I don’t believe that three events with such vanishingly small probabilities could happen in the same place at the same time. I believe in mathematics, but I don’t trust my luck.
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I arrive here and immediately encounter three events less likely than a plane crash? I don’t believe it.”
He spoke softly, then pointed again toward the door.
“And there’s this incident too. That little girl the intermediary mentioned—don’t you find something strange about her?”
Jiang Wan was slightly taken aback. “What’s strange about her?”
“According to the period he described, English education in our city was hardly well developed. Yet a little girl hoping to call for our help actually used English to convey her message?”
Jiang Wan knitted her brows. “Perhaps she thought writing ‘Help me’ in our language would require too many—”
“Then she should have written SOS!”
He turned back, his expression grave.
“My guess is that the person who died here all those years ago was not the little girl the intermediary described. At the very least, at the very least, it must have been a student with an advanced education.”
The two of them fell into a rare silence. After a short while, Jiang Wan spoke first.
“But what could their purpose have been? Creating a corporeal entity?”
She looked at Chen Qing, hoping he might offer another explanation. Yet the two of them gazed at each other, and Chen Qing showed no sign of answering.
“Why not?” Bu Zhaozhao said. “It may seem pointless, but that is only from your perspective. Your understanding tells you there is no benefit in it. That does not mean the same is true for them.”
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Chen Qing nodded and shifted his gaze to Jiang Wan’s phone. In the second email, the victims’ appearances were almost too horrifying to look at.
He had no doubt that if those images were uploaded to any social-media platform, they would be removed immediately.
Nor did he doubt the objectivity of that conclusion.
On the palm-sized screen, scarlet pixels occupied most of the display.
The victims lay in silence. The skin had been stripped clean from their entire bodies. They lay outdoors, amid dust and grit, yet their bodies—the exposed muscles and every single blood vessel—were immaculate.
They looked like patients who had emerged from a dust-free laboratory. They were far too clean.
Even the ground beneath them, the earth where their feet had touched or where their bodies had lain or stood, was spotless.
Pure enough to inspire terror.
“This is…”
She bent forward, Bu Zhaozhao’s eyes fixed on the screen.
Her voice dropped low, unmistakably shaken by what lay before her.
“The Skinner.”
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