Dragon Clan: Avoid the College Entrance Examination to Slay the Dragon

Chapter 3 Investigation
The raindrops were like a curtain torn apart by the wind, and the cyan rainy night was shattered by the sound of sirens. Gu Yi's shoes rolled over the slippery wall tiles, and when he landed, he felt a burning pain in his left shoulder.

He caught a glimpse of wisps of hot mist rising from the rips in his school uniform, and the rain-soaked flesh was making a hissing sound. He was very familiar with this scene, just like the palms pierced by broken glass in his childhood. Those wounds always healed at a speed visible to the naked eye under the moonlight, like silk sewn with invisible threads.

"still the same."

The blood he spat out swirls in the stagnant water. The alley before him resembles a forgotten tape, with faded curtains hanging behind the darkened windows. Demolition notices curl at the edges in the rain, and dusty honeycomb briquettes are piled in the corners. The only thing missing is the air of everyday life.

The girl, with a cold white glow, leaned out from behind the telephone pole. "Finally got away?"

Gu Yi stared at the raindrops that penetrated the girl's body: "It doesn't matter, she will be found soon."

"But that's not the real world." The girl tapped her bare foot on the surface of the puddle, but there was not a ripple. "All the surveillance cameras nearby will only be a snowflake. It will be difficult for them to find you through the surveillance."

"There are a lot of eyewitnesses at the scene. I left a lot of DNA in the convenience store. The police station's centrifuge can find me after three turns. What's more, it's just a nearby surveillance. Modern criminal investigation is very advanced. After expanding the search range and target, it's only a matter of time to find me." Gu Yi sneered

The girl suddenly stood on tiptoe and reached out to touch the boy's head, but Gu Yi dodged it just before she touched him.
"Stingy!"

She puffed up her cheeks and said, "So what if they found out? You actually didn't do anything. How can they arrest you if they found out?"

Gu Yi said nothing and disappeared into the dark alley.

-

Captain Chen of the Criminal Police Detachment of Binhai City Public Security Bureau stood at the threshold of the convenience store where the air conditioning and summer heat met, with a cold face and no words.

"Captain Chen, the scene has been cordoned off." New trainee police officer Xiao Zhou's fingertips were still shaking slightly as he handed over the notebook.

Chen Jianguo glanced at his watch. It had only been twenty minutes since the call, but already dark sweat stains had formed on the back of his shirt. This was a huge incident!

In the convenience store's call to the police, the cashier said in a tearful voice that a "bloody man" had broken in, but when the patrol officer arrived, there was no sign of a single person except for the dark bloodstains in front of the cash register.

Old Wang from the technical department squatted beside the bloodstain, adjusting the spectrometer. The lens reflected a cold light. "I can't tell what kind of blood this is yet, but it's at least 800cc. That's a lot."

Before he could finish his words, Chen Jianguo raised his hand to interrupt him. He stared at the surveillance camera in the corner of the convenience store ceiling. "Where's the surveillance? Are they saying that the footage from 7:05 to 7:20 is all snow?"

"This is exactly what's weird." Technician Xiao Zhang turned his laptop around. The surveillance footage suddenly distorted into noise at 7:05 PM, as if someone had poured boiling water on the camera. "We checked the host computer, and the memory chip is intact, but this section is blank. Fifteen cameras within a 500-meter radius, including the industrial cameras on the power supply bureau's transformers, all failed at the same time."

Chen Jianguo's temples throbbed, and his hand, reaching for his cigarette, clenched into a fist in his trouser pocket. The witnesses had been separated and placed in police cars. As he peeled back the police tape and headed for the first car, he heard a young girl's tearful scream from inside the car: "It's really my brother! The mole on his collarbone is exactly the same as the one revealed on his stage costume!"

"What a mess!" Chen Jianguo flung open the car door, a wave of heat swirling in his face, mingled with the cool air of the car's air conditioner. A girl in a JK uniform was thrusting her phone in front of the policewoman. On the screen, a meticulously made-up boy band member winked on stage, and indeed, there was a small mole on his collarbone.

"Look, police sister!" The girl's nose was still stained with tear-stained mascara. "Although the bloody man's face is covered in blood, from this angle..." She suddenly fell silent, because Chen Jianguo's bloodshot eyes were staring at the shiny laser sticker on her phone case - it was a cartoon avatar with "Wife of Park XX" written on it in fluorescent pen.

The policewoman taking the statement coughed lightly. "Captain Chen, she's talking about a member of a top Korean boy band. Of the other four witnesses, the cashier insisted it was a hunchbacked old man, the office worker hiding from the rain said it was a middle-aged man in a gray jacket, and the homeless man outside insisted he saw a junior high school student in a school uniform." She paused as she flipped through the transcript. "The most bizarre thing is the delivery guy. He said he saw his dead mother and is very emotional. They've already arranged to take him to the hospital."

"Have you seen...a ghost?" Xiao Zhou shrank his neck and took half a step back. No one scolded him. Even Lao Wang stopped operating the spectrometer, and his eyes behind the lens moved back and forth between the bloodstains and the distorted surveillance footage.

Chen Jianguo's back teeth ached, his hand clenched into a fist in his trouser pocket, reaching for his cigarette. He stared at the bloodstains that snaked from the cash register to the door. Suddenly, he looked up and said, "Search all the surveillance cameras within a three-kilometer radius. Check all the industrial cameras at the power supply bureau and the anti-theft cameras at the newsstands! Contact the traffic control center to retrieve the dashcams from vehicles that passed through the road between 7:00 and 7:30—"

The veins in his neck were throbbing. "Take the blood back for testing. Where can a living person go after losing 800cc of blood? We will definitely find him!" "Yes!"

Just as the young police officers were about to disperse, the shrill sound of brakes suddenly ripped through the rain. Seven black cars, trundling through the puddles, lay outside the cordon, their headlights illuminating the raindrops like countless suspended silver needles. Chen Jianguo watched as the director trotted over, followed by a young man in black. Even as he walked through the pouring rain, his stand-up collared windbreaker seemed dry, as if shielded by an invisible barrier.

"Jianguo, the case has been handed over. Take your comrades and retreat." The director wiped the rain from his face. "We'll just assist you."

"Boss!" Chen Jianguo stomped his blood-stained leather shoes. "This is a murder case! In our jurisdiction."

"I know! But the case is complicated, so someone will be assigned to investigate it." The director waved his hand and interrupted Chen Jianguo's complaints.

Chen Jianguo felt a surge of inexplicable anger rising to his head. "Special person in charge? What special person? Which department? Are they from? They just come and take over the case?"

The director raised his leg to kick, "Shut up and obey orders!"

"Captain Chen."

The young man in black suddenly stepped sideways, blocking the director's raised leg. His outstretched hand was covered in calluses, with a crescent-shaped indentation at the base of his palm. His voice was clear yet carried an undeniable force. "We're not trying to steal the case from you. This case is special, so we're more suitable."

Chen Jianguo's gaze fell on the old, centipede-shaped scar on the man's index finger joint—a familiar scar to him, a mark only borne by those who had spent years wielding weapons and blades. The young man before him was only about twenty-five or twenty-six, yet he had already been through countless battles.

He swallowed his original question and reached out to shake the young man's hand. "I was impatient just now. What cooperation do you need? I'll have two teams from the criminal investigation team stand by."

The young man in black nodded slightly. "Thank you for your understanding. Subsequent trace examination may require access to the police database."

Chen Jianguo nodded and said, "No problem. Let's get to know each other again. My name is Chen Jianguo."

The young man responded, "Nice to meet you, Captain Chen. My name is Li Chengze."

Beyond the cordon, the roar of engines gradually faded. Twenty men in black filed out of cars, their silver-gray instruments glowing dimly in the night. Li Chengze stood in the center of the cordon, arms folded, watching as the men in black smeared a translucent gel onto the bloodstains in front of the cash register. The dark red marks immediately took on an eerie phosphorescent glow.

"Director Li." The woman in black, wearing goggles, stepped forward quickly. "The police have all withdrawn, but..."

"How is the blood sample analysis?" Li Chengze interrupted.

Three meters away, another man in black held up a sealed tube, and dark red liquid was condensing into crystals on the inside of the tube wall.

"All seven samples showed Deadpool's signature protein." The agent turned the sealed tube upside down, and the dark red liquid flowed slowly along the tube like a molten ruby. "But there was no human hemoglobin reaction, not even the epidermal cells."

The man in black holding the spectrometer suddenly laughed out loud: "It's impossible that someone killed a few Deadpools and didn't even lose a hair on his head?" His laughter stopped abruptly in the empty convenience store. Li Chengze was using evidence tweezers to pick up a piece of bloodstained cloth from the evidence bag.

"Then how do you explain this?" The edge of the cloth held by the tweezers was torn. "He who faced the unharmed group of Deadpools was left with such a large piece of clothing torn off? Even more bizarre is that there wasn't even a scrap of skin in the gaps between the fibers."

The sound of raindrops hitting the rolling shutter suddenly became deafening. The men in black all looked towards the pool of black blood in front of the cash register. A chill beyond the laws of physics ran down their spines.

Li Chengze sealed the cloth in a vacuum bag. "Someone's wiping his ass. Find out where this cloth came from. Have Pangu retrieve all unusual incident reports from Binhai City in recent months, focusing on cases closed with 'animal attack' or 'mass hysteria' as the reason."

(End of this chapter)