In fact, after just one night, the corpses in the sewers had suddenly "dropped dead."
The military combat team went into the underground passages fully armed, equipped with respirators, extra lighting, plenty of ammunition, and other gear suited to the job. They saw almost no sign of anyone living.
But even a corpse lying in a drainage pipe got a full burst of gunfire!
The terrain was a maze of narrow, interconnected passages, but most of these corpses were no more dangerous than ordinary people. Against an armed tactical team, they were little more than a nuisance.
Several users with abilities suited to dealing with mental phenomena and exorcism had also been called in to assist. Disease-control personnel stood by throughout. They had covered every angle.
Yet the truth was that the corpses, most of which had probably still been moving through the pipes, had become "dead bodies" in the most literal sense. They lay motionless in dark corners.
Qian Yisheng could hardly believe it when he heard the news.
After all, by their original estimates, no one knew how far the corpses had spread through the sewers.
The exact "head count" was unimportant. That was just a question of how much ammunition or flamethrower fuel they would need. The area of the spread was what mattered!
Now they had a firm figure almost immediately: a little over two hundred corpses, scattered through the sewers beneath no more than twenty square kilometers of the city.
Searches confirmed that none showed any further sign of movement.
Investigators also found "unusual traces" in a nearby private residence—the same one from which a report had come in that day.
A concealed basement held evidence that living people had been killed and their bodies disposed of there, along with an opening into the sewer