Chapter 4: The Skinned Corpse

Si Qingxuan spent the night at Lin Chu’s apartment.

Surprisingly, he slept very soundly that night.

Although bizarre images still appeared in his dreams, he slept deeply, and upon waking, all his fatigue was gone.

In contrast to him was Lin Chu.

He had been repeatedly frightened the previous night, and his worldview had been trampled.

Even though he was dead tired, he still appeared the next day with dark circles under his eyes, a clear sign he hadn’t slept well.

On the living room table were two cups of freshly brewed morning coffee, as well as Si Qingxuan’s “Sword of Caligula”.

The sword had no scabbard and was thus openly emitting a faint, cold light that symbolized danger.

Si Qingxuan briefly explained to Lin Chu what had happened the day before.

Of course, he omitted things like the system and the imprints.

After listening, Lin Chu, amazed, took out his phone and searched for “Sword of Caligula”—he discovered that the best replica was displayed in a museum, while the few remaining ones were scattered among collectors around the world, each having been auctioned for an astronomical price.

“Is this a replica too?” Lin Chu said, a little hesitantly.

[It’s the real deal! Even the complimentary dried corpse that came with the sword was Caligula himself!]

It was definitely the real thing.

A replica wouldn’t have Caligula’s “Talent Imprint”.

“This sword is incredible, it can even ward off evil.”

Lin Chu took a soft breath, looked up, and said, “Your grandfather is really something else, to be able to get his hands on something like this.”

…Yes.

It was almost as if he had anticipated this day, specifically choosing the imprint with the highest compatibility and greatest power for Si Qingxuan.

The two of them were silent for a moment.

In the end, it was Lin Chu who yielded to instinct first—or rather, to his mother-hen habit of taking care of Si Qingxuan.

He smoothed back the hair tied at the nape of his neck and said, “Let’s have breakfast first.

I’ll go out and buy something, what do you want to eat?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Si Qingxuan wasn’t lying; not only was he full of energy now, but his stamina had also inexplicably increased quite a bit.

“But you, you should take the day off.”

Lin Chu raised his cup, downed a mouthful of coffee, pressed his brow, and said, “I happen to have appointments with two long-term counseling clients today.

I’m planning to cancel them.

The thing we encountered last night was too sinister; it’s best not to get them involved.”

As he spoke, Lin Chu turned to Si Qingxuan with some apprehension.

“Do you think this matter is really over?”

That depends on whether the other party is willing to back down, Si Qingxuan thought.

[The other party can command a D-rank Phase Ghoul. Theoretically, they should be a higher-level C-rank human Awakened One, or an intelligent anomalous creature. The latter is often more troublesome than the former.]

[Ah, I forgot to explain a few basic concepts to you—human society calls humans with talents ‘Awakened Ones’, while anomalous creatures that bring disaster to the world, like the Phase Ghoul, are collectively called ‘Anomalies’.

Both Awakened Ones and Anomalies are graded from the lowest E-rank to the highest S-rank. It’s worth mentioning that any Awakened One who loses control is also classified under the ‘Anomaly’ list.]

Si Qingxuan listened quietly to its explanation, feeling as if his former self and his current self were living in two different worlds.

He had never heard of any of the things it was talking about.

[You should think about how to deal with the enemy. Your current combat power is sufficient to handle a C-rank Anomaly, but the world’s anomalies are bizarre and varied, so you can’t judge them by rank alone.]

“The most important thing now is to probe the other party’s hand, without messing up,” Si Qingxuan said.

Lin Chu paused.

“Then where do you want to start investigating?”

“Is the Phase Ghoul that was possessing the woman in the black dress completely dead?” Si Qingxuan asked the system.

[Yes. Deader than dead. But when it died last night, it didn’t leave the skin behind. That skin was likely retrieved in time by the Phase Ghoul’s controller. Which means, that lady’s corpse should be a ghastly sight by now.]

Si Qingxuan frowned subconsciously.

Sure enough, they were soon invited to the police station again.

The familiar police station, the familiar statement-taking process, and even the officers questioning them were the same two from yesterday.

“You two haven’t gotten off work yet?” Lin Chu asked.

“A whole night has passed.”

The older male officer pointed to the goji berries in his cup, indicating he could still hold on.

As for the young officer who had questioned them before, his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.

His gaze toward them was even more cautious, as if he were looking at potential psychopathic murderers—it was clear he desperately wanted to get some clue from Si Qingxuan and Lin Chu, yet he was afraid of alerting the real culprit, looking incredibly conflicted.

“Excuse me for calling you two in.

I mainly want to ask, where were you between twelve and two o’clock last night?”

“…”

Lin Chu’s expression fell instantly.

Two o’clock in the morning? He was in the middle of a chase with a Phase Ghoul!

Luckily, he had called Si Qingxuan for help in time, so he performed a mysterious summoning ritual and summoned Si Qingxuan out of his bathtub, and Si Qingxuan had killed the monster with his sword.

The problem was, he couldn’t explain any of this!

If he did, they would either think he was making up a story or having a psychotic episode!

The two officers noticed the subtlety in Lin Chu’s expression and were about to look for a breakthrough with him, when Si Qingxuan suddenly spoke up from the side, “I was staying over at his place last night.

We didn’t leave the apartment between twelve and two o’clock.”

Hearing this, Lin Chu nodded along.

This kind of thing was easy to verify; they just had to check the surveillance footage from downstairs in the apartment building.

At this thought, Lin Chu’s back stiffened, and he looked at Si Qingxuan with some embarrassment—

They indeed hadn’t left during those early morning hours.

But he had summoned the man out of his bathtub yesterday.

Which meant, if they rewound the surveillance footage a few hours, they would find absolutely no record of Si Qingxuan entering the apartment!

Last night, Si Qingxuan had clearly gone back to his own home, yet this morning he walked out of Lin Chu’s apartment… This completely defied common sense!

Si Qingxuan glanced at Lin Chu, telling him not to panic.

“If you need to, you can check the surveillance footage to prove we aren’t lying.”

At a time like this, one couldn’t show any weakness.

Since Si Qingxuan had gone so far as to say this, he naturally appeared full of confidence.

The young officer sitting across from him gave him a serious look, left his seat to make a phone call, and it seemed he was really going to check the surveillance footage.

While he was away, Lin Chu quickly tried to get information from the kinder-looking middle-aged officer, “Um, Officer, may I ask why we were called in again today?”

The middle-aged officer didn’t shy away from the question.

He sighed, “You two are really unlucky… That female patient you met before, something happened to her again.”

Lin Chu was a little confused.

The person was already dead, what else could happen?

He wanted to ask more, but this time the officer just shook his head, refusing to reveal any more information.

The police must have discovered the unusual event that occurred with the woman in the black dress.

It was just that the information from their investigation would not be shared with Lin Chu and Si Qingxuan, who were currently sitting in the interrogation room.

“Are you talking about—the matter of that female corpse being skinned inside the funeral home?”

The black-haired young man, sitting ramrod straight in his chair, spoke.

His tone was cold, as if discussing some trivial matter like the weather forecast.

His ultramarine eyes, under the light, refracted deep and shallow jewel-like facets, profound yet chillingly cold.

The middle-aged officer was slightly taken aback and subconsciously drew in a breath.

“How did you know?”

Si Qingxuan held up his phone.

“This made the headlines in our city’s news.

I just saw it, so it would be hard not to know.”

The middle-aged officer’s eyelid twitched, and he leaned over for a look.

On the phone screen was a bright red news notification:

Shocking! Female Psychiatric Patient Dies Mysteriously, Corpse Desecrated!

The news was pushed by a notoriously gossipy local media outlet, which loved to push sensational reports.

Not only was their wording often nonsensical, but they sometimes deliberately exaggerated the truth.

It was hard to distinguish fact from fiction.

The news they released this morning was that a woman’s corpse at the city funeral home had been desecrated, her skin peeled off whole and stolen, and the police department had already launched an investigation.

They even posted a photo of the victim; although it was pixelated, everyone present could recognize her at a glance as the woman who had gone mad before.

“…These sons of bitches, we told them not to write nonsense before the official report comes out, but they just can’t keep their hands to themselves!” The officer couldn’t help but curse.

“They wrote the truth this time, didn’t they,” Si Qingxuan said.

“Otherwise, the police station wouldn’t have called us back in.”

Once the cat was out of the bag, the older officer opened up as if a floodgate had been released and explained the situation to them.

“It’s true.

Between twelve and two in the morning, the surveillance cameras at the city funeral home suddenly failed, and the electrical circuits also malfunctioned.

After everything returned to normal, they discovered that the corpse’s skin… had been completely peeled off.”

The old officer’s tone was heavy.

“The strange thing is, no traces could be found at the scene.

This means the suspect’s methods are extremely sophisticated, one could even say they pulled off a perfect crime, and it’s almost impossible for anyone to find them.”

“Peeling off the skin might be a highly targeted act of revenge, or it could be some special fetish of the suspect.

Whenever a sensational characteristic like this appears, the first thing we must be wary of is the possibility of a serial crime.

After initially determining there were no similar registered cases in our city, we tried expanding the search to several neighboring cities—and we actually found two more cases.

One of them wasn’t even discovered in a funeral home; it was a body, already mangled beyond recognition, found by workers cleaning the sewers.”

In other words, there were three known cases.

But none of them had any physical evidence to provide investigative leads.

As for the unseen, the undiscovered, the missed—there was no telling how many more there were.

“In a few days, this case might not be handled by us anymore.

It’s good that you can be completely cleared of suspicion today,” the officer said.

“Saves you from getting dragged into it, which is just bad luck.”

Lin Chu sensed the goodwill in the middle-aged officer’s words and thanked him repeatedly.

Soon, the young officer who went to check the surveillance footage returned.

He closed the door, and in the few steps he took, his eyes darted back and forth between Si Qingxuan’s and Lin Chu’s faces twice.

He said coldly, “I’ve checked the footage.”

“Thank you for your hard work.”

Si Qingxuan showed his first smile since entering the police station.

“Then, may I ask when we can leave?”

“Don’t be in such a hurry to leave.”

The officer walked over, sat down in front of them, and said, “Let’s chat a bit more.”

“Of course, we are willing to cooperate with any questions related to the case.”

A faint smile played on Si Qingxuan’s face.

Although this smile looked no different from a provocation in the young officer’s eyes, Si Qingxuan was actually just secretly pleased: it seemed he could get more information from the police.

With a rustle, a dozen or so photos were thrown down in front of Si Qingxuan and Lin Chu.

A few were photos of the woman in the black dress when she was alive, while the others were of her pale corpse… and her horrifyingly flayed body.

“Jingshan!” the middle-aged officer at his side warned in a low, dissatisfied voice, telling him to mind his actions.

But the young officer named Jingshan continued to do as he pleased.

He stared intently at Si Qingxuan and said in a not-so-polite tone, “I think you don’t know the deceased that well.

So allow me to introduce her.

Her name is Ning Xuelan, she was the owner of a clothing store, twenty-six years old.

She has a daughter at home who is not yet five.

She was healthy, with no history of chronic illness.

Before she went mad, her life was no different from an ordinary person’s—calm and stable.”

“That’s truly unfortunate,” Si Qingxuan said.

Jingshan looked down at Si Qingxuan.

“Is that all you have to say?

I know you are far from as harmless as your record makes you seem.

You must know something else…”

He did, in fact, know something.

But he himself was just an unlucky guy who had been inexplicably targeted.

Besides, this was an incident caused by an anomalous creature.

Did he really expect the police to cooperate with him to bring the one controlling the Phase Ghoul to justice?

[Actually, there really are professional ‘relevant departments’ for this kind of thing. It’s just that you are very special, so it’s best you aren’t detected by them.]

[Therefore, we must resolve this matter quickly.]

Si Qingxuan asked the system, “Do you have any good ideas?”

[That woman has a daughter, which makes things easier. We can read many memories related to Ning Xuelan through her.]

[High Priest, our clan are gods who traverse time and dreams, existing eternally through destruction and rebirth. All creatures with spiritual energy have their ‘imprints’, their ‘roots’, but we do not.

That is why you can freely collect all talent imprints; this is the principle behind the Phantom Library’s existence.

We strengthen ourselves through ‘absorption’ and ‘devouring’, so drawing on the emotions and memories of others is naturally no problem, though the power gained through this method is not much.]

[So, merely reading a little girl’s memories of her mother is a simple matter.]

Although Si Qingxuan had said a lot to the system, to the outside world, he had only been silent for a second.

But Jingshan wouldn’t let even this second go.

Jingshan: “Are you feeling guilty?”

“No.

Just feeling a little sentimental.”

Si Qingxuan looked up, met the other’s eyes, and began to speak—

“Officer, have you ever considered that perhaps this world is not exactly as you see it?”