Chapter 79: Chapter 78: Execution
"Huh, how could this be?"
The young man managing the record book looked astonished.
"I remember it wasn’t like this a few days ago!"
The two men in suits were speechless.
"Do you remember what these people looked like?"
"It wasn’t that long ago, so I should be able to remember... They came as a group, and among them... among them... uh..."
He even tore the bandana from his head, but he just couldn’t recall who had made the entry.
It was like trying to remember a roadside stall from his childhood; he had a vague impression, but he couldn’t picture the person’s face.
"Well? Have you remembered anything?"
"Let me try and remember... Oh, right! We can just check the surveillance footage."
"You have surveillance here?"
The investigators had sized up the place when they came in. This scuba diving club was rather dated; it didn’t look like they had any cameras installed at all.
"Ha, I didn’t want to spend money on security cameras, but the webcam on my laptop is always running during the day."
As he spoke, the young man gestured to a laptop on the counter, which had some game or other running on it.
"It’s been a while since then, right? How often do you delete your surveillance footage?"
"Hahaha, you’re in luck. We basically never delete anything unless the hard drive is full. We even have a hard drive array to store everyone’s diving footage, so it’s not that easy to fill up."
Having surveillance footage was a huge break. Even though the written log was fuzzy, it would be simple to deduce the approximate date based on the entries before and after.
But in the end, after searching through the video files for a long time, they found plenty of short clips and underwater videos, and a lot of surveillance recordings from other dates. The footage from that one specific day, however, was gone.
It hadn’t just mysteriously vanished, either. A hard drive was missing.
They made a call and found out the drive had been short-circuited by mouse urine and had supposedly been thrown away.
"What the hell, do you have a lot of mice here?"
One of the investigators couldn’t help but let the question slip.
...
It wasn’t just here. In subsequent investigations, and in the reports from other teams, leads kept being cut off for all sorts of bizarre reasons.
Mouse urine, human error, roof leaks, electrical shorts—the records on these people were almost completely gone.
But the strangest thing of all was that everyone who had met them was completely unable to recall their faces.
One or two instances could be a coincidence, but when it happened to everyone, that was another story entirely.
What was originally a peripheral lead suddenly attracted the team’s full attention.
Even if this had nothing to do with the sender, it was, in and of itself, a paranormal event.
To confirm a certain theory, they went back to the antique dealer who had first provided the clue.
As it turned out, the antique dealer tried to remember for a long time but could no longer recall what the group of people looked like at all.
But what truly made department head Kodell take personal notice was that, at almost the exact same moment, the tech team’s network trace, which had been on the verge of a breakthrough, suddenly lost its key jump-point records because several servers had crashed.
"The sender and these people are probably the same group, or at least they’re connected in some way!"
With almost all his leads suddenly cut off, Kodell was growing agitated.
"But why would this group go to a diving club in Lyon to rent equipment?"
He muttered to himself.
’Is the treasure they’re looking for underwater? Or is it something else?’
...
「Time rewinds to the moment just after Qin Xiaoxia made his Wish.」
Operating on the principle that even if he couldn’t fall right asleep due to jet lag, he should at least take a short nap, he returned to his room without a second thought.
But as he reached his door, he froze.
’What’s going on?’
The sound of soft, steady breathing was incredibly clear to Qin Xiaoxia’s sharp ears.
And a moment later, he also caught a scent—sweat, filled with a girl’s pheromones.
’Su Su!’
He instantly knew who it was.
He stopped in his tracks and gently closed the half-open door.
Qin Xiaoxia suppressed the pervy urge to go in for a look, took a deep breath, and turned right around to charge toward the kitchen.
Doudou was wearing a huge chef’s hat he had gotten from who-knows-where. It covered half his head, forcing him to constantly push up the brim as it slipped down.
He stood on a stool, clutching a spatula in one hand and a bag of salt in the other.
The flame on the propane gas stove was cranked to the max. In the wok sat a mysterious lump of something, giving off a burnt smell.
Beside the stove was a tablet, apparently displaying some kind of advanced recipe guide.
"’A pinch of salt?’ How much is a pinch!!!"
His small, spatula-wielding hand once again pushed up the chef’s hat that had slipped down again.
He looked at the entire bag of salt in his hand.
"’A little bit’... does that just mean add a small amount? Hmm, that must be it!"
After muttering to himself for a moment, Doudou’s hand shook, and he poured a quarter of the bag of salt into the wok.
"That should count as ’a little bit.’"
He casually tossed the salt bag aside and picked up the MSG.
"’A little bit’ again? I’ve got experience this time!!"
Qin Xiaoxia burst into the kitchen just in time to see Doudou dumping a cascade of powder from the MSG bag.
His eyelid twitched uncontrollably.
"Doudou~!"
The roar was followed by a series of CLANGS and JINGLES.
Qin Xiaoxia’s shout scared Doudou so badly that he fell right off the stool.
"Big Bro, what are you doing? I’m in the middle of cooking!"
Qin Xiaoxia’s eyebrow twitched again. He strode into the kitchen, marched right up to Doudou, and grabbed his ear, lifting him into the air.
"Well, well, gotten brave, have we? Daring to talk back to me? Are you completely clueless about the trouble you’re in?"
Doudou’s face instantly turned pale, assuming his theft of the spare money had been discovered.
His arms and legs flailed in the air as he scrambled to defend himself.
"B-Big Bro! It was the three Artisans! Right, the one called South something... they said they were tired of the instant noodles you left, so I took your money to get them better food!"
"Oh, so you stole my money too, huh? Did you do anything else?"
Qin Xiaoxia’s tone was completely unreadable.
Doudou mentally cursed his own lack of resolve, but his mouth kept running.
"Oh, right! The crackers in your room are disgusting. O-Only an idiot would eat garlic-flavored crackers, so it definitely wasn’t me who ate them!"
The corner of Qin Xiaoxia’s mouth twitched. His expression had shifted from furious to completely blank.
"An~y~thing~ e~lse~?"
Doudou’s face, which normally couldn’t even sweat, turned from pale to beet red as he blurted out in a panic:
"Nothing, there’s really nothing else! The ham sausages, corn, chips from before, and the three bags of snacks from today—I got all of them with my own two hardworking hands and my intelligence!"
’Hardworking hands? Intelligence?’
’What a load of crap!’
"What I fucking want to know is why Su Su is sleeping in my bed! The folding bed, the sofa, your room—couldn’t she have gone anywhere else?"
Doudou froze. He stopped struggling, and a sleazy grin he must have picked up from somewhere spread across his face.
"Big Bro, I’m helping you~~"
After hearing this, Qin Xiaoxia nodded at the little punk.
’Very good. Very good.’
"Alright, you don’t have to say another word. Prepare for a ’peaceful’ death!"
Qin Xiaoxia heavily emphasized the word "peaceful."
...
South Wind and the others were engrossed in carving the fingernails and the toenails on the barefoot sculpture.
Suddenly!
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—"
The bloodcurdling scream made the three of them jump, their concentration shattering.
Before they could figure out what was going on, the screams came one after another.
"HELP~~~~~~~~ I WAS WRONG~~~~~~~~~ AHHHHHHHHH~~~~~"
SPLASH~
"AHHH~~~~~~~ LET ME OUT~~~~~ THERE ARE TOO MANY SOAP BUBBLES~~~~"
SPLASH~
The sounds of splashing water were mixed in.
"Let’s just... keep working."
"Right, right..."
The three of them picked up the carving knives they had dropped.
PS: A huge thank you to readers Snow Lotus, Radiant Night Earl, and tonyni for the 1,000-coin tips! Thanks to Blood Race Night Blade and Not-So-Smiley for the 500-coin tips! And thanks to Star Turner, Bading Bag, Blue//Stain, and IPluckedYourEyelashes for the 100-coin tips~~
This is the first Chapter for today. I had to go pick someone up, so the second Chapter will be out a little later.
Comments