Jiang Yue lowered the right hand she had been rubbing her brow with and sighed softly. "Ah... have you found any leads?"
Jiang Wan handed over the topmost case file, shook her head, and said quietly, "Not yet. The prisoner we brought back from the Gambling House was a coward. We had barely tried a few forms of torture before he spilled everything."
"Unfortunately, he was only a peripheral cult member who had joined less than two months ago. All he knew was that he had to visit an abandoned house in Southside on the fifth of every month to hand over some regular dues. The figure they worshipped seemed to be called the 'Black Lotus Protector.' He knew nothing else. At first, we thought he was being stubborn, so we interrogated him for another night. He's half-dead now, and we still got nothing more out of him. He was probably telling the truth."
A cold, fierce glint flashed through Jiang Yue's eyes. "A pack of rats that only know how to hide their heads and tails, and they call themselves the Black Lotus Cult? They should rename themselves the Black Rat Cult."
Why did cults like this always insist on hiding? Couldn't they just come out and let me slaughter every last one of them?
"And that isn't even the biggest headache."
Jiang Wan sighed and placed several files bearing red tags before Jiang Yue. "Look, miss. These are the cases submitted from across the Outer City over the past fortnight. Seven civilians went missing, mostly refugees traveling alone at night. There were no signs of a struggle nearby. No living person to be found, no corpse to be seen. There were also more than a dozen cases of giant rats attacking people and damaging granaries. On the surface,