Chapter Eighteen

Fang Chuan led his people to the house, but came up empty. Zhan Hongye was neither at home nor at the office, and he had been out of contact with his family since the previous night.

No one in the Zhan family had thought it strange. This sort of thing happened often. It wasn't until the police came looking that Jiang Jia, Zhan Hongye's wife, began to panic.

She called Zhan Hongye's number several times in a row, but couldn't get through. She had no choice but to call Zhan Huitian and Zhan Ni back, yet neither of them could offer any further clues.

According to Jiang Jia, Zhan Hongye had left the banquet alone midway through the previous night because something had come up. The two of them hadn't been in touch since.

Zhan Ni, who had stayed home because she wasn't feeling well, said she'd been asleep at the time and didn't know whether he had come back.

In the end, they tracked down Zhan Hongye's whereabouts through surveillance footage.

He had indeed returned home, but had driven away again shortly afterward.

The footage clearly showed that, after Zhan Hongye left home, two cars had followed him along part of the way.

By four that afternoon, they still hadn't found any ticket bookings under Zhan Hongye's name in the transportation system. They had searched all the properties registered to him, but still hadn't found him.

His phone remained switched off and couldn't be tracked. The two cars that had followed him were still under investigation.

"Did Zhan Hongye get wind of something and flee out of guilt, or did something happen to him?"

Fang Chuan watched the surveillance footage, his brows knitted tightly.

The Special Case Investigation Section had limited manpower. Half of the officers had been sent out to investigate, while the rest stayed behind to review surveillance footage.

Even Yan Xiu had been dragged over by Fang Chuan.

The long hours of tedious, unproductive work had made even the usually cool and composed Consultant Yan a little impatient. His suit jacket was draped carelessly over the back of a chair, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up, revealing a muscular forearm and an expensive watch on his wrist.

Hearing Fang Chuan, he tiredly pinched the bridge of his nose. "Give me Zhan Hongye's date of birth. I'll ask someone to check his condition."

Without the exact time of birth, the result wouldn't be very accurate, but it was still better than sitting here guessing.

Fang Chuan quickly sent Yan Xiu a screenshot of Zhan Hongye's ID card. Yan Xiu forwarded it to someone.

The reply came back soon.

Fortune-teller Su: The birth date and the person don't match. His Four Pillars are fake. It's useless.

Yan Xiu turned off his phone and let out a breath. "He changed his date of birth. There's no way to calculate it."

"Did that old bastard see this day coming?" Fang Chuan's frustration was hard to conceal. He put his hands on his hips and paced back and forth around the office.

"Whether he saw it coming, I don't know. But whoever gave him that thing certainly did."

Zhan Hongye was an ordinary person. Where would he have gotten a witching artifact? And there was no way he could have known how to use it. Someone else must have given it to him.

When a person's birth date had been altered, it was difficult to use metaphysical means to divine anything about him or the people behind him without seeing him in person. In a way, he was a very safe choice.

"Captain, we've identified the driver of one of the cars that followed Zhan Hongye." A police officer hurried in.

Fang Chuan's eyes lit up. "Who is he?"

"A thug named Zhou Qiang. We've brought him to the interrogation room."

The interrogation of Zhou Qiang went quickly. For a thug who took money for jobs and was as accustomed to winding up in a police station as he was to going home, there was no such thing as loyalty to his employer.

The money had already been spent, so he might as well sell out the person who'd hired him.

He also revealed the person who had paid them to do the job: Boss Dong.

Fang Chuan asked questions, and Zhou Qiang answered without the slightest hesitation.

Fang Chuan asked, "What did he tell you to do?"

Zhou Qiang replied, "Boss Dong told us to teach someone a lesson. We followed that guy's car last night, and we didn't get a chance until we reached the Old Town. When he parked, we waited until no one was around and beat him up."

"Did you know who you were beating?"

"I did." Zhou Qiang answered readily. "A rich boss with the surname Zhan."

"You knew who he was and still dared to hit him? Weren't you afraid he'd retaliate?"

"Come on, what's the big deal? We just beat him up. He didn't get a good look at our faces. Next time he wants someone taught a lesson, we'll take his business, too." Zhou Qiang didn't seem worried. If he fretted over every little thing, how could he make money?

"What, did he report it? You police have so little to do these days that you're investigating something like this?" Zhou Qiang had some experience. The people who'd arrested him weren't ordinary police officers, or he wouldn't have been so cooperative.

He found it a little strange. They'd been rough the previous night, but they certainly hadn't done anything that would cause serious problems. He was a professional, after all.

"He didn't report it. He's missing."

Zhou Qiang blinked, then hurriedly raised his hand and swore, "Officer, that has nothing to do with us. We have professional ethics. I guarantee we didn't break anything on him, and we didn't knock him out. We didn't touch any of his belongings. He could've called 120 himself without a problem."

"We'll find out whether you're involved when we investigate."

After learning from Zhou Qiang where Zhan Hongye had last been seen the previous night, Fang Chuan took his people to look around. They found Zhan Hongye's car by the roadside, along with a small amount of blood on the ground at the entrance to the alley where he'd been beaten. It probably belonged to Zhan Hongye, but that was all they could find.

There weren't many surveillance cameras in the Old Town, and that particular area happened to be outside their coverage. They couldn't find out anything.

With the trail gone cold, Fang Chuan discussed it with Yan Xiu and decided to bring Boss Dong back for questioning, even though he was still traveling on a high-speed train.

By the time Dong Zhenghao was brought back to Qingcheng, it was already two in the morning.

Thanks to the extensive railway network, he'd already traveled two provinces away from Qingcheng. From the time he was located by railway police to the time he was sent back, it had taken only four hours.

Boss Dong, who was over fifty, was kept in the interrogation room from the middle of the night until the next morning, and seemed dazed the whole time.

His eldest daughter, meanwhile, had just made it through the deadly forty-eight hours and was happily singing at the top of her lungs.

Genetics didn't always pass down the way you'd expect. For example, when Boss Dong hogged the microphone at KTV, no one ever beat him up, because he could actually sing in tune. His daughter, on the other hand, couldn't hit a single note.

Liu Mumu's distorted singing woke the other residents of the villa. Dong Yue came downstairs, rubbing her eyes. Dong Qi's door had been left open, so a few distinct curses drifted out of his room. A while later, he slammed the door shut, apparently intending to curse under his breath in private.

"Xiao Yue, want a reading?" Liu Mumu finally stopped after singing loudly enough to scare away even the birds around the house.

Dong Yue nodded. Her sister had stayed in her room for the past two days and hadn't done a reading once. She was a little unaccustomed to it.

Liu Mumu shook the coins and tossed them. She took a look. "Hmm... Something good is going to happen today."

"What good thing?"

"I don't know. What do you think counts as something good?" Liu Mumu asked, entirely irresponsibly.

Dong Yue thought for a moment. "Dad coming home?"

Liu Mumu pursed her lips in distaste.

Then it was her turn to cast a reading for herself. The first result made her eyes widen in surprise. She cast three times in a row, and each result was the same. Her expression shifted from shock to delight.

It was just... the pie falling from the sky had come so suddenly that she hadn't even figured out how to catch it.

Her Hongluan Star had moved today!

She'd been casting readings tirelessly for five whole years. Had she finally found a boyfriend?

Liu Mumu dug out the divination knowledge she'd left untouched for years. She compared it with the notebook her grandfather had given her and ran the calculations. At last, she settled on ten o'clock that morning as the time they would meet.

After eating the loving breakfast her younger sister had made, Liu Mumu announced that Xiao Yue should stay home and wait for her to bring back a brother-in-law. Then she set out an hour and a half early.

It didn't matter that she had no destination. She could cast readings along the way.

Standing downstairs at Binjiang Building, just half an hour from her home, Liu Mumu declared with satisfaction that a fortune-teller's life was so dull and uneventful that it didn't even give her the chance to get lost.

The reading led her all the way to the twenty-third floor. She arrived an hour early, and, just as expected, not a single person could be seen along the long corridor.

After waiting by the elevators for a while, she decided she shouldn't be so impulsive.

What if her Hongluan Star was moving erratically today? Even if it wasn't, what if the man didn't meet her standards of attractiveness?

She ducked behind the fire door to watch first. If he didn't meet her standards, she'd slip away quietly, pretend nothing had happened, and wait for fate to make its next match.

Once she'd made up her mind, she stayed in the stairwell, sitting on the steps and playing on her phone. There was still an hour until ten. Even when the corridor on the other side of the door suddenly grew noisy, it didn't interrupt her game of Eliminate Squares.

At nine thirty that morning, the Qingcheng City Bureau received an emergency call. A murder was suspected in a short-term rental apartment on the twenty-third floor of Binjiang Building. After questioning the landlord, they learned that the apartment had previously been rented long-term to a man named Zhan Hongye.

The case was transferred to Fang Chuan. He took Yan Xiu and his subordinates and climbed into a police car headed for Binjiang Building.

The door to Room 2307 at Binjiang Building was tightly shut. After calling the police, the landlord hadn't dared to open it, and had waited for the police to arrive and secure the scene.

Dark red blood had seeped through the gap beneath the door. If there was someone inside, they had clearly lost a lot of blood.

At Fang Chuan's command, the landlord opened the door with trembling hands. The sight inside the room shocked everyone.

The landlord took one look and fainted. Even Fang Chuan, who had seen all kinds of strange death cases, couldn't help frowning.

A human-shaped figure lay on the floor by the door. The reason it was called human-shaped was that it wasn't a complete person, merely something that retained a human shape.

The body had been cut into many pieces and stacked together like building blocks.

The blood had come from the deceased. There was a large pool of it, and if it hadn't seeped out through the gap beneath the door, it might have taken a long time for anyone to find the body.

Fang Chuan stepped forward to check. Bruises from blows could be seen on the deceased's face and exposed skin. One eye was black, and his face was somewhat swollen, but there was no doubt that it was Zhan Hongye.

"Seal off the whole building. Get the surveillance footage and find out when he arrived and who brought him here."

Everyone unrelated to the case was taken downstairs to give statements, while the officers from the Special Case Investigation Section got to work.

After putting on shoe covers, Fang Chuan and Yan Xiu entered the scene as well.

Yan Xiu crouched beside Zhan Hongye's corpse and examined it for a while. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to prod at the cut on the body.

The pen immediately crackled with electricity.

"Unnatural death?" Fang Chuan asked quietly.

"Mm." Yan Xiu handed him the pen. Fang Chuan unscrewed the cap, revealing that it wasn't a pen at all, but a small sword about as long as a finger.

The blade was carved with numerous symbols and the like. When its tip touched the corpse, the wound immediately turned charred black.

"His death looks a lot like Qin Kai's, but Qin Kai's body only had cut marks. It wasn't nearly as completely chopped up as this. So, was he killed by a backlash from his own witching artifact?" Fang Chuan asked.

"Not necessarily. Someone might have taken the witching artifact from him and used it to curse him."

"But the effect seems stronger than before. Or did he sacrifice someone else? His children are both fine."

Yan Xiu stood up. "Even if a sacrifice has something wrong with them, it can be hard to tell just by looking."

Perhaps Zhan Hongye really had been thinking about sacrificing his children, and might even have started acting on it. But they were still police officers. Even with special methods for investigating special cases, they couldn't force the deceased's children to undergo an examination.

"Captain, we've checked the surveillance footage from last night through this morning. Zhan Hongye walked into the building by himself. He entered Room 2307 and never came out again. No one else went in or out," reported the officer who had checked the footage in the monitoring room.

"What about anyone else? Were there any suspicious people?"

The officer hurriedly said, "There was one person acting strangely. About an hour ago, a young woman went up to the twenty-third floor alone. We haven't found any footage showing her leaving, so she may still be in the building."

"Block every entrance and exit. Search from the bottom up. I refuse to believe we can't find her!" Fang Chuan was excited to finally have a suspect.

Seeing Yan Xiu head out, Fang Chuan hurriedly pulled out a pair of handcuffs and held them out. Unlike ordinary handcuffs, these were marked with black patterns. They were specially designed to restrain suspects involved in paranormal crimes, supplied exclusively to their department and not easy to unlock.

"Consultant Yan, if you don't have anything else to do, why not help us find her?" Fang Chuan extended the handcuffs toward him again.

According to regulations, a consultant only needed to offer ideas for solving cases and wasn't required to take part in arrests. But their department was short-handed. They couldn't afford to leave anyone idle.

These days, a captain needed to have thicker skin than most.

Yan Xiu glanced at him and accepted the handcuffs. The silver-black metal rings dangled from his fingers, swaying lightly with his movements.

He didn't think about it any further. Instead, he headed straight for the fire door at the other end of the corridor.

At ten sharp that morning, Liu Mumu turned off her phone screen and brushed the dust off herself. She pushed the fire door open a crack and stuck her head out to peer outside, like a timid little rabbit poking its head out of a hole.

This floor had seemed lively just moments ago, but now it was quiet.

The only thing in her line of sight was the man walking toward her.

He wore a gray-blue suit. Two silver metal rings hung from his fingers, his thumb slowly stroking them as he walked toward her at an unhurried pace.

It was such a small gesture, yet Liu Mumu felt her cheeks grow warm as she watched. Her gaze moved from the metal rings in his hand up to his face.

His cold expression couldn't hide his strikingly handsome features. His deep black eyes were like a devouring abyss, impossible to escape. Beneath his tall nose were lips that seemed a little cruel, their corners naturally turned up, both aloof and sensual.

Liu Mumu stared blankly for a second. In the next, she unilaterally decided that this man would be her future boyfriend!

Then the man stopped in front of her, his dark eyes lowered to meet hers.

She heard his low, magnetic voice. "City Bureau. We're investigating a case. Come with me."

His hand lifted slightly. There were no metal rings at all. They were handcuffs!

Liu Mumu blinked her big, round eyes. Why wasn't things going according to her reading?

It was... pretty damn sudden.

She hesitated between calling him her future boyfriend and calling him Officer, then promptly gave in. "Officer, I—I didn't do anything!"

Officer?

Looking at the girl who only came up to his chest, dressed in overall shorts and a white T-shirt, with an over-messy bun tied up in a plump little cloud-shaped hair tie, he thought she looked far too childish.

For a moment, he couldn't tell whether the girl was calling him "Officer" to tease him by calling him an old man.

After sizing her up, Yan Xiu's brows twitched. He reluctantly accepted the title.

"There was a murder on the twenty-third floor. You'll have to come back to the station with me and explain what you were doing here."

Liu Mumu: ...

She hadn't done anything. She'd just wanted to meet her future boyfriend, on her own!

She thought that was a perfectly logical answer. The question was, would the officer believe her?