They had all disappeared... literally.
At one in the morning today, the appliances fitted with trackers began disappearing bit by bit. By around one twenty, they had vanished completely.
The person monitoring them had gotten sleepy and dozed off—long-term surveillance was terribly boring. Everyone called it "slacking off," not dereliction of duty.
So, on the face of it, his responsibility did not seem all that great—after all, there was still surveillance footage.
When he woke up at one thirty and discovered that more than twenty signals had vanished, he immediately reported it to his superiors.
His superiors promptly stated, "This constitutes serious dereliction of duty. You're suspended for now."
He felt somewhat wronged. "I was really sleepy, so I took a nap. Wasn't there still footage?"
There was indeed footage. It showed that the signal points had disappeared in batches, and they could even roughly determine which areas of Luohua Warehouse the signals had been located in.
The key question was: how exactly had these things disappeared?
From one o'clock to one twenty, the disappearance process had lasted a full twenty minutes. During that time, they had not taken any action whatsoever.
If the monitor had noticed the anomaly in time, then even if the monitoring center was hundreds of kilometers from the site, after orders were passed down layer by layer, they might well have figured out what method the other party had used.
The security personnel outside Luohua Manor might have angrily cursed at such a possibility: Why don't you try figuring it out?
But... dereliction of duty was dereliction of duty. There had originally been some possible emergency measures, but after he had messed things up like this, there were none left. If that was not dereliction of duty, what was?
All right, enough about that pitiful