Investigation

Fifu understood what Lan Mu meant and immediately began pulling up records from fifteen years ago.

Using that slave from back then as the starting point, he searched layer by layer and ultimately narrowed it down to sixty million people.

That slave had come into contact with 240 people in a year, and each of those 240 people had, on average, come into contact with more than 200 others.

By the second round of filtering alone, there were already around fifty thousand suspects.

Based on those fifty thousand people, each had interacted with anywhere from two to three hundred people, while some had interacted with more than three thousand that year. The number of suspects grew exponentially.

The third batch numbered ten million, and the fourth numbered two hundred million.

Across five batches, there should have been nearly four billion suspects in total, close to the current global population.

But that was not actually the case, since only people who had truly made physical contact were counted.

Moreover, because most people's social circles were not that broad and they did not run around everywhere, many of them overlapped.

So in the end, there were just over sixty million distinct suspects.

Compared with the entire world, sixty million was not much. It was even very few.

"Remove those confirmed dead between fifteen years ago and now," Lan Mu said.

Fifu did as instructed. Before long, only forty-nine million living suspects remained.

"Also exclude those who were ten or younger fifteen years ago..." Lan Mu only crossed out those aged ten and below. Technology had advanced too much; the age of crime had dropped sharply. Eleven- or twelve-year-old children were not necessarily immature.

Soon, only a little over thirty-six million suspects remained on the list.

"Temporarily remove those who have remained middle