Jinyi Residential Area.
Building 4, Room 102.
Standing outside the door, the officers could already smell the pungent stench of blood and decay emanating from within the house.
Everyone frowned.
Something seemed off...
"Did you guys smell that? It smells like blood," Wang Dachuan pointed at the door of Room 102.
The others nodded in agreement.
The smell was so strong that anyone with a functioning sense of smell would have noticed it. They certainly did.
The odor was coming from inside the room, indicating that someone had died there.
In such a situation, it was unlikely anyone would help them open the door.
Xu Mo promptly pulled out a piece of wire and demonstrated his lock-picking skills.
As the door opened, the stench of blood and decay grew even stronger, hitting them right in the face.
The room was also swarming with flies.
The first thing they saw was a man with dyed yellow hair lying face down in a pool of blood in the living room.
For a moment, the officers were stunned.
Was the man dead?
What was going on? Was it a case of guilt-induced suicide?
None of them had expected this scenario.
"Captain, could this be guilt-induced suicide?" Wang Dachuan pointed at the body in the living room.
Xu Mo remained silent and approached the body to examine it. He flipped the body over.
The corpse had dozens of stab wounds on its abdomen.
Xu Mo pointed at the wounds on the body. The location and angle of the stab wounds indicated that this was not suicide, but murder.
"It's a homicide. This victim is not the suspect we saw in the surveillance footage. He was also killed by the suspect we're looking for. The suspect had a lot of resentment towards this victim. Fifteen stab wounds, each deliberately avoiding vital areas. The victim bled to death. That's quite ruthless..."
In fact, after seeing the wounds on the victim's front, even without Xu Mo's explanation, the officers realized that this victim could not have committed suicide. The position and direction of the wounds were too precise; no one could stab themselves like that.
And even if someone could, no one would stab themselves dozens of times during a suicide... Who could have that much determination? A normal person would probably curl up like a shrimp after the first stab due to the pain.
At that moment, Xu Mo's phone rang.
The coroner? Why would he call me? Did he find something new? Xu Mo pressed the answer button.
As expected, Xu Mo was right. The coroner called because he had found new evidence. "Stretch marks, I found stretch marks on one of the body parts!"
"Stretch marks?"
"Yes, I just discovered them on an unopened section of the abdomen. The victim was pregnant!"
"I see," Xu Mo murmured.
He glanced at the body on the ground in front of him.
The male victim looked quite young, with dyed yellow hair, wearing tight pants and sneakers. His index and middle fingers were stained yellow, a sign of heavy smoking, making him look like a delinquent.
Combined with what the coroner just said, Xu Mo figured it out.
The two victims, a man and a woman, were likely a couple. The female victim was young, but she was already pregnant...
"I know who the killer is," Xu Mo suddenly said after ending the call with the coroner.
The officers perked up and looked at Xu Mo: "Who?"
"The father of the dismembered corpse."
Upon hearing this, the officers were puzzled.
"Huh?"
"The father killed his daughter? Why?"
"And who is this yellow-haired guy? Why was he killed too?"
"Is this yellow-haired guy also part of that family? So he's the son? What's wrong with this father? He killed both his children."
Xu Mo explained, "The coroner just called me and said he found stretch marks on the dismembered corpse. You know what stretch marks are, right? They're something women get when they're pregnant. The dismembered corpse was pregnant..."
"Pregnant? The coroner said the victim looked young... Oh! I get it now!" Wang Dachuan suddenly slapped his forehead, realizing the truth: "This yellow-haired guy and the previous victim were a couple. The female victim got pregnant, and her family found out. Her father was ashamed and killed her. After disposing of his daughter's body, he went to his daughter's boyfriend's place and killed the yellow-haired guy who got her pregnant!"
"Yes, that's what I mean," Xu Mo nodded.
The other officers also felt a sudden clarity.
This explanation made perfect sense.
Jinyi Residential Area wasn't the killer's home, so the killer coming here directly from the seafood market in the early hours wasn't to go home but to kill the next person!
With this, the investigation became clearer.
Officers always follow the principle of bold speculation and careful verification.
Now that Xu Mo had provided a reasonable hypothesis, they just needed to follow this lead.
The yellow-haired guy's body hadn't been disposed of, so it was easy to identify him and find his information.
As a result, the officers quickly obtained detailed information about the yellow-haired guy.
He had been expelled for fighting and later worked as an apprentice in a hair salon with a very simple social circle.
The officers planned to visit the hair salon where he worked to ask his colleagues if they knew who his girlfriend was.
...
"Xiaojiba Haircut Studio."
Seeing the name of the shop, Xu Mo's eye twitched. The name sounded like a joke... No wonder there were no customers!
Inside the hair salon, a few young people with various colored and styled hair were sitting around playing with their phones.
When Xu Mo and the others walked in, the young people glanced up briefly: "Getting a haircut?"
"No, we're officers. We're here to ask you some questions," Xu Mo showed his badge and pulled out a photo of the yellow-haired guy: "This person..."
One of the young men with a crew cut immediately stood up when he heard Xu Mo was a police officer, his attitude suddenly very polite.
"Hello, Officer! Are you here for the yellow-haired guy? He's not here; he hasn't shown up all day."
"I know he's not here. We're here to ask if you know who his girlfriend is."
"We know her, but... Officer, which girlfriend are you looking for?"
The officers: "???"
Wow, it seemed the yellow-haired guy had quite a few girlfriends!
Xu Mo's face darkened.
"The one who was pregnant."
"Pregnant... well, there were a few of them. Which one specifically are you looking for?" the crew cut young man scratched his head.
Xu Mo: "???"
"The skinny little one!"
"Oh! Her..."
transmigrates into the world as the sect master of the Heavenly Yan Sect, which is on the verge of being wiped out. He binds a system that grants him cultivation power based on the number of disciples he has: for each disciple, he automatically gains a year's worth of cultivation every single day! Take one disciple: every day he gains 1 year of cultivation power. While others struggle through a year of bitter training, he gets the same just by sleeping through a single night. Take ten disciples: every day he gains 10 years of cultivation power. Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul—he breezes through all bottlenecks without lifting a finger. Take one hundred disciples: every day he gains 100 years of cultivation power. Even a Soul Transformation Venerable before him can’t survive a single blow. Take ten thousand disciples: every day he gains 10,000 years of cultivation power! With a wave of his hand, he topples empires. With a single step, he crushes the sacred grounds of the universe. ... While others fight tooth and nail for secret techniques, Lin Yan casually hands out Nascent Soul-level cultivation manuals as beginner textbooks. While others strain to find talented recruits, Lin Yan opens his doors to anyone—so long as they’re human. In just three short years, the Heavenly Yan Sect went from a backwater sect made up of three crumbling huts to a sacred land that every cultivator under heaven would kill to enter. ... One day, otherworldly demon gods invade, with a million demon soldiers pressing down upon the realm. Lin Yan, yawning, rises from his lounge chair and glances at the system panel: [Current Disciples: 1.28 million] [Daily Cultivation Increase: 1.28 million years] He waves his hand casually, and the countless demon soldiers are reduced to ashes in an instant. “So noisy… interrupting my fishing.”
world slacker. But a genius female disciple just had to get clingy, insisting that he take her as a disciple. Not only that, she was always making advances on him, thoroughly disrupting his peaceful slacker life...
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
