Inherited a Large Fortune, Why Do I Feel Poorer?

Shen Le's cheek twitched.

I don't want to wake up one day to find a thief has crawled in, or worse, have the terrible luck of someone being murdered in the third courtyard of the left wing or the first of the right wing without me even knowing. But, if you ask me to install full-house surveillance—no, full-residence surveillance—with all the equipment networked, I honestly wouldn't know where to start.

I mean, with two wings and three courtyards each, that's six courtyards in total and countless rooms. How many cameras would I even need?

And what kind of equipment would I need to centralize all that information so I could see every camera feed at a glance, or toggle back and forth to cycle through them?

How much would this whole setup cost, including installation and maintenance? Do I need professionals to install it? Once a surveillance system reaches a certain scale, does it need to be networked with the local police station?

Shen Le couldn't help but ask:

"How much does it cost to install surveillance?"

"Let me think..."

Shi Guangbing frowned and fell silent. For a community police officer like him, this question was genuinely a bit difficult.

The auxiliary officer beside him, however, let out a laugh. He used the long pole in his hand to sketch a rectangle on the ground, roughly the size of two bricks by three. Then, he pulled out a piece of paper, tore it into shreds, and placed them one by one onto the floor tiles.

"High vantage points, front gate, back gate, and the four corners. Then, you'd need one every so often along the outer wall. The distance... let me think. I haven't seen your floor plan, so I'm just estimating..."

Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. He clicked away rapidly. Finally, the auxiliary officer, a man in his thirties, concluded with certainty:

"If you don't count the interior of the courtyards and rooms, just for the perimeter, you'd need at least 24 cameras. I have a relative who does this for a living. A camera costs about 1,000, the supporting network engineering is probably several tens of thousands, and the backend monitoring equipment is another ten or twenty thousand. Add in tension alarms, vibration sensors... maybe a hundred thousand?"

Shen Le wore the smile of a poor man.

A hundred thousand?

What hundred thousand?

He had a total of thirty thousand in his pocket—no, after eating, drinking, and purchasing various woodworking tools and materials, he had less than thirty thousand left. A hundred thousand for a security system?

He needed to consider whether he should sell two pieces of antique furniture first... No, better to wait. Wait until he finished consuming the restoration gains and charged the Copper Fragment as much as possible!

Antique furniture was common, but the energy in the Copper Fragment was not. This was a supernatural power that could reverse myopia, instantly stop bleeding, regenerate tissue, and knit bones. At a critical moment, it could mean the difference between life and death. How could he just sell it off for money?

"I think I'll just put up a circle of barbed wire around the walls for now! Oh, right, do I need to report to the police station to put up barbed wire? Do you have any workers to recommend? Or should I just find someone myself?"

"In theory, no... Uh, is this house a protected building? You can't just mess around with protected buildings!"

"I don't think so. When I inherited the estate, my lawyer told me it wasn't a protected building."

"A lawyer..."

Shi Guangbing shook his head slightly, his expression clearly saying, 'You can actually believe a lawyer?' He pondered for a moment.

"You should go check... look at the government website and see if your house is on the public list. Or go ask the cultural heritage department... or is it the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau? Don't rush, let me help you ask around!"

Shen Le touched his wallet and the thirty thousand yuan remaining inside, nodding perfunctorily. Sigh, it wasn't just the surveillance. With this massive mansion and its six courtyards, how long would it take him to sweep it all?

A robot vacuum could handle one courtyard at most, so six courtyards meant six robots. No, that wouldn't work—robot vacuums weren't great at navigating steps and would easily flip over. He'd need one for the rooms and one for the courtyards.

On top of that, there were windows to clean, doors to polish, furniture to maintain, tiles to repair, and drains to unclog...

Even if he locked up the unused courtyards and rooms, he still had to open the windows for ventilation and perform maintenance at least twice a year. The daily upkeep of this house alone was a massive expense!

He wore his anxiety on his face. Shi Guangbing glanced at him, but he was too busy to offer any real advice. He weighed the situation while checking his tablet, constantly communicating with his colleagues over the radio. From the device, voices drifted in from time to time; other officers were searching elsewhere:

"Searched the City God Temple, nothing."

"Searched Yuantong Zen Monastery, nothing."

"Nothing near the Grand Stage."

"Searched the residences in Lane One... Lane Two... Lane Three..."

"Suspect..."

"What? You requested professionals to come over? That's great! When will they arrive? Oh, the professionals have already gone to the child's home to look for clues? Understood..."

While he handled the communication, the older auxiliary officer held the long pole with the tablet attached, scanning back and forth over every cabinet. Shen Le leaned in curiously.

"What is that?"

"A Life Detector."

Shi Guangbing tilted the tablet toward him, his voice weary and hoarse.

"Just borrowed it from the fire department."

Oh... that was actually quite convenient; it saved him from having to find keys to open every cabinet. Wait, shouldn't a child be unable to climb into a locked cabinet anyway?

Into the rooms, out of the rooms, upstairs, downstairs. After searching the right wing, they searched the left. After finishing the study in the first courtyard of the left wing, they used the Life Detector to sweep the pond in the second courtyard. Finally, the three of them walked in single file into the last courtyard of the left wing.

"This is the last one. If they aren't here, they really aren't anywhere..."

Shen Le muttered. This courtyard was the largest in the entire estate. In the center stood a sizable rockery, and atop it was a wooden bridge leading to a pavilion in the north called "Wangxian Tower." As soon as he saw the rockery, Shi Guangbing's eyes lit up, and he hurried over.

"They're here!"

"Where?"

"Look, the kid's shoe!"

He approached the rockery and, on a stone at the base covered in orchids, picked up a blue child's shoe, size 33. He urged the auxiliary officer to raise the Life Detector and circle the rockery repeatedly. He himself bent down, using the shoe as a center point, and began to carefully search the ground for footprints.

"Not here... not here either... nothing... nothing... strange, why is there still nothing?"

The entire courtyard was lush with flowers and trees. In the southeast corner, a Great Camphor Tree draped its green leaves, casting a shadow that blanketed half the small yard. Aside from the rockery in the center and the pebble path leading toward it, the rest of the ground was nothing but dirt.

Logically speaking, if children had been running and playing, even climbing onto the rockery, it would be impossible for the surrounding ground not to leave behind a single footprint.

Yet, Shi Guangbing applied the top-tier tracking skills he had learned at the police academy, coming just short of licking the entire dirt yard, but he failed to find even half a footprint.

"Could they have crawled into the rockery? What, not in the cave either?"

"Nothing here... otherwise, shall we go inside the building and look?"

"Wait!"

Shen Le had also circled the yard three times, coming up empty-handed. Just as he was about to open the building door, the Copper Fragment against his chest suddenly grew hot. Following an inexplicable intuition, he turned, stepped forward, and tilted his head up:

"Look! Aren't those the children?"