"Missing?" Zhang Heng raised an eyebrow.
"Yes. Apparently, the last time one of his coworkers saw him was around two in the morning. He sat up in bed, muttered a few words, then got dressed and walked out of the room. The man sharing the room thought he was just going to the bathroom, but he never came back.
"Later, the construction company gathered people to search for him and found his hard hat and wallet in a half-built tunnel. But they never found him. It was as if he had vanished into thin air. The incident caused a minor panic at the time, because the subway tunnel they were building had no branches, and the far end was a dead end. No one could figure out where a person could possibly hide."
Ma Lu hesitated before continuing. "Since our city had served as the capital of dynasties for the past several hundred years, a rumor spread through the construction crew that building this subway line had damaged the dragon vein underground, and the worker's disappearance was a warning. That theory became even more popular after more and more people inexplicably fell ill. But the construction company's management leaned toward the idea that the missing man had been killed in revenge by an enemy. The hard hat and wallet in the tunnel were merely a misdirection planted by the murderer. As for why there was neither a living person nor a corpse to be found, it was because the murderer had thrown the body into a mixer, where it was ground up and mixed into the concrete after the killing.
"That theory was indeed closer to reality. The missing man had previously had a dispute with another worker on the project over a romantic matter. They were from the same