Sherlock's Fruitless Search

After leaving the bedroom, Sherlock wandered through the mansion and quickly discovered a suspicious room.

Whether it was the alluring maids or the servants who actually did the work, nearly everyone seemed unable to see the room. Even the cleaners would simply go around it.

Moreover, the security patrols outside this room were far denser than those around any other room.

There had to be something shady inside!

After reaching that conclusion, Sherlock did not rush into the room. Instead, he gently placed his hand against the door. With Alchemy's aid, a cold smile soon appeared on his lips.

Just as he had expected, countless sensors lay hidden behind the seemingly ordinary door.

Opening the door recklessly would not only send an alert message to Obadiah's phone, but might even trigger the entire estate's security system.

Most importantly, this security system was far beyond even the most advanced systems available on the market. It even had countless redundant secondary security systems beneath it.

Nothing else needed to be said; the very presence of these security systems was enough to suggest that something extremely important to Obadiah was stored behind that door.

In theory, the security system in the room would ensure that anyone other than its owner, Obadiah, would trigger an alarm upon entering. Unfortunately, Sherlock was no ordinary person.

Finding an adjacent spot at random, Sherlock used Alchemy to open a hole in the wall and casually walked inside.

Clearly, these so-called security systems had accounted for entry through the door, through the windows, and even through the exterior walls. The one thing they had not accounted for was someone silently entering the room through an interior wall.

As Sherlock entered, everything in the room soon came into view.

The room's decor still followed an extravagant style, with solid wood paneling everywhere, giving it the air of old money.

The flooring and carpets were equally expensive.

Yet what surprised Sherlock was that this heavily guarded room contained nothing more than a desk, a chair, and a computer that was not connected to the internet.

Although the desk was incomparably lavish and massive, and the chair looked comfortable at a glance, such sparse furnishings still took Sherlock by surprise.

Walking over, Sherlock carefully tried to turn on the computer before him.

Perhaps the estate's security and the room's own security system had given Obadiah confidence, because the computer had not even been set with a system lock. After powering it on, Sherlock entered the system with almost no obstruction.

However, when Sherlock began examining the computer, he was stunned by what it contained.

The computer stored a huge number of weapon blueprints designed by Tony.

It was no exaggeration to say that with these blueprints, as long as the supply chain was not utterly terrible, mass-producing those weapons would pose no difficulty whatsoever.

And besides those weapon designs, the files Obadiah had stored most frequently were videos with the .avi extension?

Obadiah had that kind of little hobby?

Sherlock opened one with a critical mindset, only to be completely dumbfounded. There was no other reason—the star of the clip was someone Sherlock had just seen on the news channel two days ago!

Well, damn. Who would have thought that the man who had acted so righteous before reporters played this wildly in private?

In disbelief, Sherlock decisively pulled a USB drive from his Fourth-Dimensional Pocket and backed up every one of those clips before shutting down the computer in satisfaction.

Regrettably, Sherlock still found no evidence or clues that Obadiah had murdered his parents. He did, however, find evidence that Obadiah had stolen Stark Industries' weapon blueprints.

After thinking for a moment, Sherlock pressed both hands against the floor and activated Alchemy. Under his perception of all things, he quickly discovered a safe hidden within the wall.

A safe might have been troublesome for ordinary people, but to Sherlock, it was no different from something made of paper.

With a casual use of Alchemy, he severed the safe's bolts and opened the hidden safe in less than a minute.

Inside the safe, aside from a huge amount of cash, gold, and jewelry, Sherlock also found several documents.

One was company registration paperwork listing Obadiah as the legal representative. The company had been established in Southeast Asia and was a standard manufacturing firm. Sherlock took out his phone and looked up the company's name, then wore a speechless expression.

Case solved. Sherlock now completely understood how Obadiah had smuggled weapons into the Middle East while evading Tony's surveillance.

Or, to be more precise, Obadiah had never smuggled weapons out of Stark Industries at all!

He had merely stolen weapon blueprints from Stark Industries, had his own "contract factory" manufacture the weapons, then stamped them with the Stark Industries logo and openly shipped them across the world, reaping enormous profits!

What made Sherlock even more speechless was that even this had not satisfied Obadiah. He still wanted to swallow Stark Industries whole and truly transform himself from a "contract factory" into a "manufacturer"!

The most direct evidence was that Sherlock had also found quite a few compromising clips of Stark Industries shareholders on Obadiah's computer!

Yet Sherlock was disappointed to find that there was still no evidence or clue here that Obadiah had murdered his parents, leaving him deeply frustrated.

Could it really be because too much time had passed—so much time that Obadiah had had more than enough opportunity to destroy all the evidence?

Sherlock helplessly restored the scene to its original state and left Obadiah's estate while he was still invisible.

Other than providing Obadiah with enough little tricks to utterly ruin his reputation, this infiltration of Obadiah's estate had caused him almost no trouble.

As for confirming exactly how Obadiah had been smuggling weapons, Sherlock had no intention of telling Tony too much. Some things could only be understood once one uncovered them personally. Sherlock would merely go with the flow rather than expose the truth outright.

Besides, for Tony, only by dealing with Obadiah himself could he truly bid farewell to the past and transform into Iron Man.

What Sherlock never expected was that after leaving Obadiah's "estate" in the suburbs and driving toward his short-term rental to make do for the night, he saw an extremely familiar figure standing outside his home.

Coulson!