Hairpin Needle

Lin Xiaosu did not rashly enter the room. Standing by the Gate, he first activated Temporal Reversal.

A full four days had already passed. His Temporal Reversal seemed to have been pushed to its limit as well. When he felt a faint stabbing pain in his eyes, he finally saw the scene he wanted: a white-haired old man lay in a grand armchair, face tilted toward the ceiling, leisurely bracing himself against the floor with his feet.

That scene absolutely did not look like someone who was about to die suddenly.

Yet the next moment, something strange happened...

Lin Xiaosu's heart jolted...

Three meters away, Changye and Zhou Mei were both staring at him.

Zhou Mei whispered, "Sister Chang, even if he can sniff out scents, I don't think this is possible at all. Four days have passed, the wind on the mountain is strong, and the Window has been open every day. Any smell would have been blown all over the place..."

Changye's eyes, however, lit up as she stepped forward.

That step was utterly silent.

Lin Xiaosu suddenly felt a chill down his back. He withdrew from the Temporal Reversal state and turned around, only to see Changye silently standing behind him. Lin Xiaosu jumped. Was this girl a cat or something?

"Find anything?"

Lin Xiaosu said, "I can't tell anything from here. I'll go inside and take a look. Oh, right—do you have photos from the primary scene?"

"Been waiting for you to ask!" Changye raised her hand and put on a pair of glasses. "Retrieve photo number 1352!"

The moment her voice fell, a layer of light emerged from her glasses. A three-dimensional holographic projection appeared, the image crystal clear, every detail visible—the old man Lin Xiaosu had seen through Temporal Reversal sat in the grand armchair, his head tilted back and his mouth slightly open...

Lin Xiaosu sighed. "Your police technology is impressive. This is way too clear."

"Tell me, which part do you need enlarged?"

"I'll go in and have a look first. No rush."

He entered the meditation room and inspected it carefully. At least, in the eyes of the two policewomen, that was exactly what he was doing.

Ten minutes, twenty minutes...

Lin Xiaosu came out of the room and gently shook his head. "During the time of his death, there was no second person in the room!"

Tch!

Zhou Mei felt a little contemptuous inside.

After studying the place seriously for twenty minutes, that was the useless conclusion he came up with?

Now they had to face a question: did this count as fraud? He had taken ten thousand yuan and spent twenty minutes killing time here. Wasn't that money a little too easy to earn?

"Are you sure it was a natural death?" Changye asked.

Lin Xiaosu gently shook his head. "There's one more possibility that needs to be ruled out."

"Which possibility?"

Lin Xiaosu raised a finger and pointed outside the Window. Beyond it was a high bank, roughly ten meters away.

The area was thick with grass and trees.

Changye's brow creased faintly. "You suspect a long-range attack?"

"Is there any method of attack that could produce symptoms like a cerebral hemorrhage?"

"No!" Zhou Mei said. "A so-called long-range attack would only cause external injuries, while a cerebral hemorrhage has nothing to do with external injuries... right, Sister Chang?"

Changye did not answer. Her gaze was thoughtful. "Go take a look over there first!"

"Alright!"

Lin Xiaosu reached the base of the high bank, looked around, then climbed up another slope nearby. After struggling about for quite a while, he finally reached the top of that high bank. Suddenly, he let out a soft sound of surprise...

Changye had somehow appeared behind him. "What did you find?"

"Look!" Lin Xiaosu pointed at the ground beneath his feet.

Changye stared at the weeds underfoot but could not make out anything at all. "What?"

"This blade of grass was snapped by someone stepping on it four days ago," Lin Xiaosu said.

Changye's eyes brightened. The grass had been stepped on four days ago, and ordinarily, no one would ever come here. "Are you sure it was a person?"

"There's no direct footprint in the grass, but if you look closely, you can still determine a person's footprint from the way the grass was crushed. You can also judge when it was stepped on from how dried out the grass is." Lin Xiaosu traced the shape of a footprint through the air with his finger.

The more Changye looked, the more it resembled a footprint.

"If you can't see that clearly, look here. There's something even more interesting here!" Lin Xiaosu lifted his hand slightly and pointed at a leaf.

At the center of the leaf was a tiny hole, a trace left by a needle piercing it.

Changye's expression changed completely.

She was not very confident about identifying footprints, but when it came to seeing a needle pass through a leaf, she was a true expert—because she used needles herself!

From her perspective, this was indeed the mark left by a needle piercing through.

A needle had passed through the leaf here, its direction aimed straight at the head of Qu Taiqing, who had been lying in the grand armchair!

"Xin Yue!" Changye called softly.

"Sister Changye, what is it that summons me?" A delicate young woman's voice came from the glasses.

"Immediately check the corpse in Pathology Room 37. Is there a Hairpin Needle beneath the scalp on the right side of his forehead?"

"Received!"

On the other end, a rapid examination began. Changye stood on the hillside, her gaze locked firmly on that Window. Her eyes were infinitely deep at that moment. Lin Xiaosu had never seen such a look in her eyes before.

Time passed minute by minute...

Five minutes later, Changye's glasses lit up faintly, and a voice came from within them. "Sister Changye, you're freaking incredible! There's a Hairpin Needle in his right brain! The Hairpin Needle penetrated one inch and seven tenths into the brain. There were no marks on the outside, so it was overlooked during the initial examination. The Hairpin Needle has neurotoxin on it. It's T30!"

"T30's only effect is to instantly coagulate blood in a localized area, creating an obstruction," Changye said.

"Yes! This is the true cause of death for 2198!"

The light on Changye's glasses vanished.

She slowly turned around. At that moment, she was like a night hawk soaring through the sky, and her entire body seemed to have grown two or three degrees colder.

"Now only one question remains: can we track down that person from these traces?"

Lin Xiaosu turned around, stared at the tangled grass beneath his feet, crossed the road, and smiled on the other side. "Our luck isn't bad. He didn't take the main road. He took a forest trail..."

Going down by the trail, it was inevitable that he would leave traces of his movements.

Though those traces would reveal nothing to ordinary people, compared to the miraculous feat of finding a needle hole in a leaf, they were clearly far more routine for Lin Xiaosu.

After rounding a mountain spur, even Changye spotted a relatively clear footprint. Even the tread pattern was plainly visible—thank heaven it had not rained during these four days.

Her glasses focused on the footprint and took a picture.

They continued tracking.

The trail crossed mountains and ridges all the way until it finally reached the county's main road. Lin Xiaosu stopped, his brow tightly furrowed. "Now we really have to rely on luck. Are there any cameras nearby?"

His difficulty had never been finding the murderer.

The murderer wore a plaid hoodie, and his build and face were etched into Lin Xiaosu's mind with absolute clarity.

But it was no use for him alone to know.

He had to present that image to her in a relatively reasonable way.

For that, he needed surveillance cameras.

And in truth, his Divine Eye had already clearly spotted one. A camera was hidden beneath the eaves a hundred meters away. From that camera's angle, it should have captured the man in the plaid hoodie getting into a car...

He did not want anyone to know that his eyesight was good to such an absurd degree.

So he asked for help.

Changye's glasses lit up again. Countless grids appeared in the air, and three points of light emerged. They were, astonishingly, three cameras. Besides the one Lin Xiaosu had already discovered, there were two others that had not been exposed to their view at all, yet she had still located them using her miraculous technology.

"Retrieve the footage. The time..." Changye spoke a command.

The phantom image in the air immediately changed, becoming the night from four days ago.

Lin Xiaosu's eyes widened. Holy crap!

The police did not even need to find the owner of the footage before retrieving it?

She could just pull it up directly?

Wasn't that hacking?

Not to mention him—even Zhou Mei's eyes had widened. As a police officer, her daily work involved investigations and collecting evidence. She had retrieved surveillance footage not a thousand times, then at least several hundred times. When had she ever seen a method that neither disturbed civilians nor alerted anyone, silently completing the retrieval?

Though the method of retrieving it was godlike, it still lacked the final step needed to lock onto the target directly.

All footage had its range. The place where the man in the plaid hoodie came down from the mountain was a surveillance blind spot.

Even if the footage showed him getting into a car, so what? Too many people got into cars beside the road!

If they could not connect him to the route down from the mountain, everything would be in vain.

Just as the footage reached the moment when the man in the plaid hoodie got into the car, Lin Xiaosu called out, "Stop!"

The footage froze.

"Look at this man's shoes!" Lin Xiaosu said.

"Shoes? The tread pattern on the soles can't be seen clearly..." Changye said.

That was the drawback of civilian cameras. They could show a person's face clearly, but to precisely make out the tread pattern on the bottom of their shoes, they still fell short.

"There's no need to see the tread pattern. You only need to look at the logo on these Huili shoes to find their detailed product specifications."

Changye's eyes lit up...

"Search!"

At that two-word command, countless shoes were instantly compared in the air above the glasses. A moment later, one pair appeared.

Brand: Duli. Development date... manufacturer... product specifications...

The sole flipped over. It was exactly the same as the relatively clear footprint they had seen earlier on the mountain trail.

Zhou Mei cheered. "We found him!"

Light flashed across Changye's glasses. "Search for this person!"

In an instant, it was as though the vast world had unfolded before her. Countless figures flashed past, the similarity rate rising constantly—80%, 85.2%, 96%, 100%!

As the green 100% appeared, a person's profile materialized before them.

"Ding Haichun, male, forty-eight years old, from Fengcheng County, Eastern Chu Province. Founder of Huanggang Sci-Tech Trading Company, serving as the company's legal representative..."

Lin Xiaosu stared in astonishment. "Your system is way too powerful. Does that mean you can find anyone as long as you give it a face?"

"It's not quite that miraculous. How effective this system is depends on how complete its database is. The database has undergone eight upgrades. At present, its precise information can only cover public servants at every level, people with business registrations, and people with criminal records. Ordinary people cannot be fully covered. Of course, as long as you've been to a train station or an airport, your information will exist in the database. It just can only show when you were there, not your name or family information..."

As Changye explained, the system continued operating.

At last, it stopped. A red dot displayed the target's location, less than ten li away from them.