The frontline operation concluded with the police successfully seizing the smuggling vessel, yielding preliminary results.
Tan Mingjiu and Wen Yangyang, who had caught up later, led the rest of the officers to herd all the smuggling suspects on the vessel onto the deck to keep watch over them.
Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin also found a moment of respite and began leading the remaining group of officers to search the entire vessel.
As they walked inside together, Ji Xun first glanced at Huo Ranyin’s hand, noting that his palm had some minor abrasions. “Are you okay after jumping down?”
“Yeah,” Huo Ranyin responded first. Then, rotating his wrists and ankles, he added, “I pulled a muscle in my leg a bit, but it’s nothing serious.”
“Which leg?” Ji Xun squatted down and tapped his finger against Huo Ranyin’s left leg, then his right. Noticing a slight tremor in the left leg, he said understandingly, “The left one. I’ll rub some medicated wine on it for you later.”
“Okay.”
While engaged in this brief exchange, the two did not neglect their duties. During their sweep of the vessel’s interior, they inspected the engine room, the living quarters, and the galley. Nothing seemed amiss there; though some smuggled goods were discovered in the living quarters, the quantity was small and the items miscellaneous, suggesting it was merely the crew’s personal behavior.
Next, they arrived at the vessel’s cargo hold.
The cargo hold was empty, devoid of merchandise except for some junk piled in a corner. The critical items were still outside, having not yet been loaded onto the ship.
“Is this the cargo hold?” Huo Ranyin asked the captain, who was being escorted by an officer, as he peered inside.
The captain was a rather stout, pale middle-aged man. He offered a placating smile and mumbled submissively, “Yes, this is it.”
“Are there any other cargo holds besides this one?”
“No, Officer. This is the only one, just this single one,” the captain stated with certainty.
Ji Xun stepped forward.
At the very back of the rectangular cargo hold, a messy pile of junk lay stacked. Aside from cardboard boxes of various sizes, there were several coils of thick hemp rope and a substantial number of iron spheres contained within a large wooden crate.
Ji Xun kicked an iron sphere inside the crate. “What are these for?”
The captain blinked. “I don’t know either.”
Ji Xun turned his head. “You don’t know?”
The captain continued to smile apologetically. “Officer, it’s just some junk… Junk comes and goes, when it comes aboard or when it goes off, you see, I don’t manage it, and I can’t remember…”
As Ji Xun stared at them, he squatted down.
“What are you thinking?” Huo Ranyin asked.
“I’m thinking…” Ji Xun lifted an iron sphere. “How heavy must an iron sphere be to weigh a corpse down into the sea?”
The expressions of everyone present shifted instantly.
“Wait a minute,” this abrupt association was far too terrifying, causing the captain to speak up in a panicked, louder voice. “We don’t deal in human lives!”
Huo Ranyin waved his hand, and the other police officers immediately escorted the captain out of the cargo hold.
Then Huo Ranyin turned to Ji Xun, a faint crease appearing between his brows. “You…”
“You thought of the same thing, didn’t you?” Ji Xun said. “That tiny detail Xu Xinran told us.”
Of course.
The moment Xu Xinran mentioned that tiny detail, it had caught both of their attention.
“Are you suggesting that corpses were transported onto this vessel, and after the ship sailed a certain distance, they were bound with iron spheres and sunk into the water?” Huo Ranyin said slowly.
“If you think about it, it’s practically an assembly line, isn’t it? This smuggling ship is meant to cross national borders. Once it reaches international waters on a dark and stormy night, it takes a mere five minutes to destroy the evidence completely without anyone being the wiser,” Ji Xun said. “As for the preservation of the bodies, we saw during our patrol just now that there is a cold storage unit on this ship, which is more than enough to store them.”
Huo Ranyin remained silent for a moment before shaking his head to point out the logical flaw in the theory:
“No. According to your theory, the bodies would be inside the ship’s cold storage. How could the people on shore smell a corpse on the ship? Besides, if Xu Xinran could smell it from such a distance, what kind of atrocious environment would the crew have to sail in? Would they really not care at all about such a pungent stench?”
“Let’s change our approach,” Ji Xun said. “The ship wasn’t transport for the bodies; it came to collect them.”
“You mean—”
“Nearby—with the casino as the center, within a very short distance around the wet market—there is another hidden warehouse. Inside that warehouse… perhaps something important is hidden!” Ji Xun replied in a deep voice.
Huo Ranyin reported Ji Xun’s analysis along with his own to the bureau leadership. Soon, the instructions from the superiors arrived:
“Detachments One and Two are to use the wet market and the casino as points of origin to rapidly verify the specific circumstances of every single household in the village.”
The explicit directive was handed down to everyone on site. Before long, a large number of police officers were threading through the streets and alleys, knocking on doors to question residents house by house.
With a defined perimeter and ample manpower, it took a mere twenty minutes before good news came over the walkie-talkie.
Yuan Yue and his team had located a suspicious, abandoned factory building.
“Received,” Huo Ranyin replied, and immediately rushed toward the destination with Ji Xun.
The village was small; they arrived within three minutes over the short distance.
This was an old-fashioned factory building with yellow walls and mud-tiles, standing three stories high. The factory itself occupied a considerable footprint, surrounded by a large expanse of open ground. A perimeter wall, roughly the height of a person, enclosed the open space, while the interior was overgrown with wild weeds due to years of neglect. The sea lay directly behind this factory, and adjacent to the water was a flat piece of land; assuming a vessel needed to stop here, this large open space would facilitate the loading and unloading of cargo.
The factory was relatively isolated. The nearest neighbor was over fifty meters away in a straight line, ensuring that whatever occurred inside would go unnoticed.
By the time Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin arrived, yellow police tape had already been strung along the perimeter wall of the factory, with officers standing guard.
Yuan Yue was nowhere to be seen, meaning he was likely inside the factory.
And inside…
Ji Xun’s gaze pierced through the weed-choked courtyard to look inward. He saw a silver metallic door swung open, out of which poured a surging darkness.
Huo Ranyin lifted the caution tape and walked in.
Ji Xun followed.
The dense weeds felt like the mischievous hands of a child, brushing against the skin of his ankles.
As Ji Xun walked, his foot struck a faint glint hidden in the grass. He lowered his head to inspect it closely; it was an opened bread wrapper.
Because of this slight delay, Ji Xun fell a few paces behind Huo Ranyin.
As he ducked his head to pass through the factory entrance, it felt as though he were squeezing into a very narrow pocket, the darkness acting as a soft inner wall pressing in from all sides.
However, this fleeting sensation felt more like a subconscious spiritual intuition.
When Ji Xun composed himself and looked left and right, he instantly breathed a sigh of relief. The interior of the factory did not contain the gruesome things he had imagined; it was largely cavernous. A few tables and chairs, looking exceedingly antique, were piled in a corner. The ceiling light in the large space just inside the entrance was broken, so the area was illuminated by lighting equipment brought by the police.
There were only a few officers here, and neither Yuan Yue nor Huo Ranyin was in sight.
They were…
Ji Xun shifted his gaze, looking deeper into the factory.
They were further ahead.
Then Ji Xun noticed that while darkness had seemed to pour out when he entered, looking further forward revealed a baring of fangs of bright light.
The illumination ahead was incredibly brilliant, directly encroaching upon a small half of the floor of the entrance room.
However, the situation inside remained obscured, blocked by a half-closed door.
He hesitated slightly.
It felt as though the blades of grass he had waded through in the courtyard were still clinging to his ankles, making his steps sluggish.
Yet, the truth ahead would not alter because of his hesitation or reluctance.
Ji Xun walked inside.
Yuan Yue, Huo Ranyin, and the others were all here.
Every light inside was blazing. Not only the LED lights on the ceiling, but suspended from the ceiling was a massive, mobile track system mounted with concentric rings of densely packed small bulbs—a medical surgical shadowless lamp.
Looking beneath the shadowless lamp, one could see a ring of surgical drapes surrounding an operating table.
The silver metal of the operating table peeked through the drapes here and there, reflecting cross-shaped starbursts under the glare of the surgical lights.
But this was not the most conspicuous part of this makeshift room. Even the various large-scale medical instruments surrounding the operating table—many of which Ji Xun did not quite recognize—were not the most prominent things there.
The most prominent object, the one that locked onto Ji Xun’s gaze the moment he entered, was a large medical cold storage unit positioned against the wall.
The cold storage unit was open.
Inside, there was no corpse frozen like pork, wrapped in bags and bound with ropes, as Ji Xun had envisioned.
Yet the absence of it did not allow anyone to breathe a sigh of relief from the tension.
Because through the gap between where Huo Ranyin and Yuan Yue stood, Ji Xun could clearly see that the incandescent bulb built into the cold storage illuminated a massive amount of dried blood pooled at the bottom and smeared across the inner walls.
There was also a deflated, open yellow bag hanging inside.
The yellow bag was a medical waste bag of a very large size, and several segments of cut hemp rope lay scattered beside it. It was also stained with blood, the stains causing parts of it to stick together and shrivel.
It resembled the damp, sticky slough of a python’s shed skin.
What had once transpired here?
The unknown was perhaps the most terrifying thing of all.
