The investigation into Chen Jashu had hit yet another dead end.
The setting sun looked like a red balloon leaking hydrogen, hanging heavily between the mountain ridges at the edge of the city. It felt as though a mere nudge would send it tumbling downward.
Where would it fall? Perhaps straight into the hearts of men, casting a sprawling, suffocating shadow.
“Is Chen Jashu really hidden that well?” Wen Yangyang sighed during a gap in their fruitless investigation.
Her sigh tangled with the gloom in the room, turning into an unventable melancholy. For a police officer, nothing was more demoralizing than staring right at a criminal yet lacking the evidence to bring them to justice.
“Logically speaking, this shouldn’t be happening,” Tan Mingjiu chimed in. Days of high-intensity, endless evidence gathering had drained the usual energy from the talkative officer. “If it was done, it leaves a trace. Besides, what Chen Jashu did wasn’t some petty crime. There are too many moving parts and too many people involved. By all accounts, pulling the radish should bring up the mud—we should have sliced right through this whole network by now.”
Tan Mingjiu had repeated this sentiment more than once over the past few days. At first, it carried genuine confusion, but by now, it had degraded into a stale complaint.
His grumbling failed to create a single ripple in the stagnant air of the office. Outside, the sun sank completely, and the night surged up in layers, mirroring the gloom in their minds.
The office fell completely silent. The quiet stretched for several seconds before Tan Mingjiu broke it listlessly: “Whatever. Anyone want to grab dinner? We can come back and continue working overtime.”
The moment the words left his mouth, Wen Yangyang shot him a warning look.
Following her gaze, he looked toward the captain’s office. Inside sat Huo Ranyin—arms crossed, shoulders leaning against his chair, facing his computer.
If memory served correctly, Huo Ranyin had been in that exact posture since the afternoon shift started. No, thinking back carefully, he had been like that this morning, and even yesterday.
Aside from the usual awe regarding his work ethic, his absolute stillness made him look less like a human being and more like a statue erected to intimidate them.
Tan Mingjiu exchanged a look with Wen Yangyang.
The Captain must be under insane pressure lately.
Massive. Both team captains got reamed out by Bureau Chief Zhou today because of the slow progress.
Where’d you get that intel?
Team One. It’s a fact.
Chief Zhou’s lectures are like a machine gun… Thankfully Captain Huo doesn’t yell. But it’s not much better. When something goes wrong, his glare acts like a walk-in freezer. It freezes you solid on the spot.
Tan Mingjiu shuddered, his expression morphing into a series of dramatic grimaces.
Even if progress is slow… panicking won’t fix it. Man needs food to function. Are you going to invite the Captain to eat?
Don’t dare to. You go.
I don’t dare to either.
The two stared at each other helplessly.
“Should we… get Mr. Ji to convince him?” Wen Yangyang suggested hesitantly.
“Yeah,” Tan Mingjiu mused. “Where is Old Ji anyway?”
That call didn’t summon Ji Xun, who was far away in Fu Province, but it did summon Huo Ranyin.
In the blink of an eye, Huo Ranyin seemed to teleport from his private office to stand right in front of Tan Mingjiu.
“Captain Huo,” Tan Mingjiu gasped, startled.
Huo Ranyin switched on the projector. The screen flashed, and the stark image of a naked female body appeared before everyone’s eyes.
Confronted out of nowhere by such an explicit image, Wen Yangyang’s face flushed instantly. But when she opened her mouth, what slipped out wasn’t a gasp of embarrassment, but an analysis of the case: “Is this… the adult film found on Chen Jiahe’s phone?”
“Correct,” Huo Ranyin replied, offering a rare nod of approval.
Emboldened, Wen Yangyang spoke more fluidly: “If I remember correctly, Chen Jiahe had three distinct adult videos saved on his phone, all with corresponding purchase records. Does this one… have a problem?”
“A guy having a few adult videos on his phone is pretty standard,” Tan Mingjiu added, recovering from the shock of seeing explicit material at work. “I remember Chen Jiahe’s hard drive had even more content—several gigabytes of it. When I reviewed it line-by-line back then, I completely…”
He quickly swallowed the word impotent before it could leave his throat. Casting a look of profound professional empathy toward Huo Ranyin—who had clearly suffered through the same tedious review—he cleaned up his vocabulary:
“…I completely lost all worldly desires.”
This comment failed to elicit any resonance from Huo Ranyin, though it did earn him a sharp glare from Wen Yangyang.
“Is keeping that stuff really ‘normal’?”
“Let’s just say the phenomenon exists,” Tan Mingjiu corrected quickly, prioritizing his reputation. “But that’s a mistake made by civilians whose ideological awareness isn’t high enough. Law-abiding police officers like us? If we encounter this kind of thing, we immediately issue a strict educational reprimand so they understand what can and cannot be done.”
Huo Ranyin ignored the banter completely. “During the period when I returned from Qin City to rest, you all were working overtime to screen the missing persons reports in Ning City—specifically focusing on those who had undergone medical examinations at the hospital shortly before their disappearance.”
The two officers instantly recalled the sheer terror of being buried alive under mountains of case files.
“Later, the investigation results from other cities were consolidated. I reviewed all of them and memorized the faces of every single victim.”
“…”
The Captain’s brain was simply built different. Left entirely speechless, the two could only stare in pure admiration.
“This woman on screen,” Huo Ranyin stated coldly, “is one of them.”
“Wait, which means…” Wen Yangyang’s eyes widened as the pieces clicked. “We finally caught Chen Jiahe red-handed? The hospital physicals were indeed the source of the disappearances. These women were flagged for organ compatibility during their check-ups, targeted, and kidnapped—becoming victims of Chen Jashu’s organ trafficking syndicate…”
She glanced back at the projector screen. Looking at the image now, beneath the initial disgust, a profound, unutterable sorrow welled up inside her.
A woman is a human being.
Yet, she is treated as mere merchandise.
Placed upon a scale to weigh her market value; inspected by her flesh and teeth; sold whole or sold in pieces; her organs sold, her body sold—sold once, then sold again. One way or another, a price will always be extracted from her.
“Now, think carefully about what you just said,” Huo Ranyin’s expression was ice-cold. “‘Becoming victims of Chen Jashu’s organ trafficking.’ Chen Jashu and Chen Jiahe are blood brothers. They operate under the same roof. Why would Chen Jiahe pay out of his own pocket to buy content featuring his own family’s merchandise?”
“Captain, are you saying…” Tan Mingjiu’s jaw dropped.
“Perhaps the direction of our entire investigation has been wrong from the start.”
The shadow that had been lurking in the depths of his mind finally sprouted tentacles, gripping his thoughts tightly as it dragged itself to the surface.
“Chen Jashu might not be the mastermind we’re looking for at all. He might just be a scapegoat.”
This brand-new hypothesis threw a massive boulder into the stagnant waters of the case.
Ripples of deduction resonated violently within Huo Ranyin’s mind, electrifying his nerves. In this state of hyper-active thought, he didn’t think of Bureau Chief Zhou, he didn’t think of Yuan Yue, nor did he think of any colleague or superior working alongside him.
By pure instinct, he pulled out his phone, intending to text Ji Xun about this groundbreaking anomaly.
But his mind was moving too fast. Even as his thumbs hovered to type out the message, his brain kept circling back, re-evaluating every single event surrounding Chen Jashu:
—Why did they firmly believe Chen Jashu was the mastermind of the organ ring in the first place?
Because of the abandoned factory in the village behind Juan Mountain, which contained large-scale surgical equipment and unidentified bloodstains. And because the nearby coastline bore distinct tracks of Chen Jashu’s vessels.
—How did they find that abandoned factory?
They relied entirely on Ji Xun’s intuition.
Ji Xun had used his intuition to lead them along Xu Xinran’s trail, tracking it to the village gambling den, and from the den straight to the hidden surgical factory.
If Chen Jashu was merely a scapegoat…
Then Ji Xun’s series of actions—which continuously added bricks and mortar to build the case against Chen Jashu—had directly misled the entire police force’s investigative trajectory.
Huo Ranyin slowly sat back down in his office chair.
The sky had gone completely dark, but he hadn’t turned on the lights.
Inside the pitch-black office, only the cold blue glow of the monitor illuminated his face, trembling slightly with the rhythm of his breathing.
Or perhaps it wasn’t the light that was trembling, but Huo Ranyin’s hand holding the phone.
Slowly, finger by finger, he deleted every single line of text he had written to Ji Xun.
