A Middle-Aged Inspector Promoted Three Ranks in a Row

Stibium Kingdom, City of Knowledge Leipzig.

Early this morning, people discovered the bright red sausages hanging in City Hall Square.

They were all dressed in the most formal uniforms they had worn in life. Their skin had become shriveled and hard from being drained of blood, revealing a deathly blue-black color.

They had not been tied up and hung from the utility poles or streetlamps in City Hall Square... Instead, their necks had been stretched taut as they hung from newly constructed, still relatively fresh gallows, just like a group of criminals who had been hanged moments ago. Their hands had been nailed to a wooden board in front of them, on which the conspicuous words "Thief," "Liar," and "Fraud" had been written in dried blood.

Many of them were not particularly familiar to the residents of Leipzig. Some wore morning dress, some wore evening dress, and others wore the ancient aristocratic attire of the Imperial era... In short, they all looked like important people, though most people did not recognize them.

--But there was one person whom every Leipziger knew.

That was Inspector Frank Schumacher, chief of the Leipzig Security Police Department.

He was wearing his First-Class Police Inspector uniform, complete with shoulder boards and several medals of honor pinned to his chest. He, too, had been hanged in City Hall Square, with the word "Traitor" written on the wooden board nailed to his hands.

Someone reported it to the police immediately.

Yet even as noon approached, the Security Police Department's vehicles had still not arrived to remove the bodies.

Some people went directly to the Security Police Department to report the matter. But from far away, they could already see the huge, solemn Guard Line deployed there, conspicuously blocking the entrance--while large numbers of security police in black