Shen Le's cheek twitched.
I didn't want thieves climbing in one day, or to be so unlucky that someone got murdered in the third courtyard on the left or the first courtyard on the right without me even knowing. But you wanted me to install surveillance throughout the whole house—no, the whole residence—with all the equipment connected to a network? I honestly had no idea how to do that—
Speaking of which, there were two wings with three courtyards apiece, six courtyards in total, and N rooms. How many cameras would that take?
And what equipment would I need to bring all the information together, so I could see every camera's feed at a glance, or switch between them and view each camera in turn?
How much would all of this cost, and how much would installation and maintenance cost? Would I need professionals to install it? If the surveillance system got big enough, would it need to be connected to the Police Station?
Shen Le couldn't help asking:
"GOOGLE search TWKAN"
"How much does it cost to install surveillance cameras?"
"Let me think..."
Shi Guangbing frowned and fell silent. For a neighborhood cop like him, that was a genuinely difficult question.
The auxiliary officer beside him, however, chuckled. He drew a rough line on the ground with the long pole in his hand, sketching a rectangle two bricks wide and three bricks long. Then he took a sheet of paper, tore it into pieces, and placed them one by one on the paving stones.
"High points, front gate, back gate, and all four corners. Then you need one every so often along the outer wall. Let me think about the distance... Hmm, I haven't seen your house's plans, so this is just a rough estimate..."
He tapped away rapidly, pointing here and there. In the end, the auxiliary officer, a man in his thirties, reached a firm conclusion:
"If we're not counting the courtyards or rooms, the perimeter alone needs at least 24 cameras. I have a relative who works in the business. Each camera costs around 1,000, and the networking work would probably cost tens of thousands. The surveillance system's back-end equipment would be another ten or twenty thousand. Add tension-wire alarms and vibration sensors... A hundred thousand?"
Shen Le gave a poor man's smile.
A hundred thousand?
What hundred thousand?
He had only thirty thousand in his pocket. No, after all the recent meals and purchases of woodworking tools and materials, he had less than thirty thousand left. A hundred thousand to install a security system?
Maybe he should think about selling a couple of the old pieces of furniture... No, better to wait until he'd finished collecting the restoration earnings and charged the Copper Fragment as much as possible!
Old furniture was common, but the Copper Fragment's energy wasn't. It could reverse nearsightedness, stop bleeding immediately, and regenerate flesh and mend bones. It was a completely supernatural power, and in a critical moment, it might save a life. How could he just sell it off for money?
"I'll just start by putting a loop of barbed wire along the top of the wall!—By the way, do I need to notify the Police Station before putting it up? Do you know any workers you can recommend, or should I just hire someone?"
"In theory, you don't need to... Uh, is your house a protected building? You can't just make changes to a protected building!"
"I don't think so. When I inherited it, the lawyer told me it wasn't protected."
"The lawyer..."
Shi Guangbing shook his head slightly, his expression clearly saying, "You can't trust what lawyers say." He pondered for a moment.
"You should check anyway... Look on the government website and see whether your house is on the public list. Or ask the cultural heritage department... Or is it the housing and urban-rural development bureau? Don't rush into anything. I'll ask around for you!"
Shen Le patted his wallet and the mere thirty thousand yuan left inside, and could only nod perfunctorily. Sigh, cameras weren't his only problem. How long would it take to clean this whole mansion, with its six courtyards?
One robot vacuum could clean at most one courtyard, so six courtyards meant six robot vacuums. No, robot vacuums weren't very good at going up and down steps. They could easily flip onto their backs, so he'd have to set aside one for cleaning the house and another for the courtyards.
Besides that, he'd have to clean the windows, doors, and furniture, repair the roof tiles, and unclog the drains...
Even if he locked up the courtyards he didn't use and shut off the rooms he didn't live in, he'd still have to open the windows for ventilation at least twice a year and maintain the house. Just the routine upkeep was going to cost a fortune!
His worries were practically written all over his face. Shi Guangbing glanced at him, but he was busy at the moment and couldn't very well offer random advice. He weighed things up as he looked at the tablet, while constantly communicating with his colleagues over the walkie-talkie. Every so often, voices came through, probably from officers searching elsewhere.
"They checked the City God Temple. Nothing."
"They checked Yuantong Zen Monastery too. Nothing there either."
"Nothing near the Grand Stage."
"They've searched the houses on Lane One... Lane Two... Lane Three..."
"Suspected..."
"What? You've requested specialists? Great! When will they arrive? Oh, the specialists have already gone to the child's home to look for clues? Understood..."
While he handled communications, the older auxiliary officer held up the long pole with the tablet attached and swept it back and forth over the cabinets, one by one. Shen Le leaned over curiously.
"What's that?"
"A Life Detector."
Shi Guangbing angled the tablet toward him, his voice tired and hoarse.
"We just borrowed it from the fire department."
Oh... That was pretty handy. It saved him from having to hunt around for keys to open all the cabinets. Wait, a child shouldn't have been able to climb into a locked cabinet in the first place, right?
In and out of the house, upstairs and downstairs. They searched the right wing, then the left. After searching the study in the left wing's first courtyard, they swept the pond in the second courtyard thoroughly with the Life Detector. Finally, the three of them entered the last courtyard on the left in single file.
"This is the last courtyard. If the child isn't here, then they're really not here..."
Shen Le muttered. This was the largest courtyard in the entire residence. A sizable artificial hill stood at its center, with a wooden bridge built across the top leading to a pavilion at the courtyard's north end called Wangxian Tower. The moment he saw the artificial hill, Shi Guangbing's eyes lit up, and he hurried over.
"They're here!"
"Where?"
"Look, a child's shoe!"
He approached the artificial hill and picked up a blue child's shoe, size 33, from a stone near the bottom, where orchids spilled over it. He urged the auxiliary officer to raise the Life Detector and sweep it around the hill again and again. Then he bent down and carefully searched the ground for footprints, using the shoe as his starting point.
"Nothing here... Nothing here either... Nothing... Nothing... Strange, why is there still nothing?"
The entire courtyard was lush with trees and flowers. In the southeast corner stood a Great Camphor Tree, its leaves hanging low and its shadow covering half the small courtyard. Apart from the artificial hill in the center and the pebbled path leading to it, the rest of the ground was all dirt.
In theory, if a child had run around playing and even climbed onto the hill, there was no way they could have left not a single footprint on the surrounding ground.
Yet Shi Guangbing had put his best police-academy training in footprint tracking to use. He'd practically licked every inch of dirt in the courtyard, but still hadn't found a single footprint.
"Did they crawl inside the artificial hill?—What, there's nobody in the cave either?"
"No... Should we look inside the tower?"
"Wait!"
Shen Le had also circled the courtyard three times and found nothing. Just as he was about to open the tower's door, the Copper Fragment against his chest suddenly grew hot. Following an inexplicable sensation, he turned around, stepped forward, and looked up.
"Look! Aren't those a few children?"