Chapter 1034 — A Strange Case

Qing Bo, for his part, cooperated by circulating the mnemonic of his own family's inner art...

Ten minutes later, Wei Zhao gave up without hesitation. It had been a complete failure, with no effect whatsoever; the situation remained exactly as before. Wei Zhao could not channel his own energy for Qing Bo's use, and Qing Bo could not absorb the energy Wei Zhao passed to him.

It seemed that Elder Jiao had been right after all: this transfer of energy came with a limitation of rank. He could only pass energy to cultivators of a lower rank than himself, and the peak of the rank immediately below his own was the ultimate bottleneck for such transfers.

In other words, so long as he did not reach the Earth Rank, he would never be able to turn Qing Bo and General Weiwu into Mystic Rank experts.

Wei Zhao had once thought his ability to mass-produce experts was quite impressive, but now it seemed rather useless.

True, he could create Yellow Rank experts, and in the mundane world a Yellow Rank expert was still a rare treasure, one in a thousand. A single Yellow Rank expert could cut a very imposing figure. But the crux of the matter was that the opponents and pressures Wei Zhao now faced did not come from the mundane world, but from the great clans on a higher plane. Within those clans, Yellow Rank experts were commonplace; most were Mystic Rank experts, and there were even Earth Rank experts among them.

Against such people, Qing Bo and General Weiwu, two top-tier Yellow Rank experts, were of no use at all. Wei Zhao would still have to face them on his own strength.

Never mind. Something was better than nothing. Wei Zhao sighed. Some people longed for a Yellow Rank expert and could not get one, and he could mass-produce them.

With that thought, Wei Zhao abandoned any further attempt to forge Qing Bo and returned to his room...

Lately, the surface-level public order in Songshan City had been quite good. The pickpocket gangs had vanished, the kidney-harvesting ring had been smashed, and the criminal forces led by Li Cihua had lain low, making no major moves.

By all logic, Qiu Lingshan ought to have been pleased amid such an atmosphere of peace, and indeed her superiors had publicly commended her several times. Since she took up her post as captain of the Criminal Investigation Division, public order in Songshan City had improved considerably, and Qiu Lingshan had cracked major case after major case, achieving remarkable feats. It was the fastest case-clearance rate in Songshan City's history.

Yet Qiu Lingshan felt a vague unease. In many cases, behind the calm lurked an even greater darkness.

Because several disappearances had occurred in Songshan City recently. They looked like ordinary cases, but Qiu Lingshan felt the matter could not be so simple.

Wang Lieqian was a migrant laborer. Three days ago, he had clashed with his contractor over unpaid wages, beat the contractor soundly, and then vanished without a trace.

The file showed that Wang Lieqian was a strongly built migrant worker with great physical strength, and that taking down the contractor and his several bodyguards would have been an easy matter for him.

The contractor had not even reported it to the police. It was only a snack vendor near the construction site who saw the fight and made the call.

Everyone assumed Wang Lieqian's disappearance meant he had fled to escape punishment, and naturally the officers handling the case would not go out of their way to meddle. After all, the contractor had said it was nothing and showed no intention of pursuing it; the whole affair could perfectly well be treated as an ordinary civil dispute. If the injured party would not pursue it, what was there for them to pursue?

Besides, the contractor had not been seriously hurt; it did not even amount to a minor injury.

So the responding officers simply jotted down a brief record and left.

Had a similar incident not occurred within a short time, this seemingly accidental case would never have caught Qiu Lingshan's attention. Now the case file had once again landed on Qiu Lingshan's desk, and the unusual aspects of it made her frown.

Although Wang Lieqian had beaten the contractor, the contractor had in truth suffered no great harm, only some bruises and a bit of scraped skin on his face. The bodyguards were the same; not a single bone was broken.

Under such circumstances, was there any need for Wang Lieqian to flee? Even the police had no intention of arresting him, so what was he running from? And judging by the contractor's attitude, he had clearly written it off as bad luck. Wang Lieqian could have learned all this with a few simple inquiries, and yet he had disappeared.

Sun Kaoli was a loader at a freight company. On the job, he had accidentally smashed a shipment of glassware. His boss had said nothing about it and had not even proposed docking his pay, and yet Sun Kaoli had gone missing.

What exactly was Sun Kaoli running from?

It was only after Sun Kaoli vanished that the boss sensed something was wrong and reported it to the police. But after the report, they found that nothing in the company had been stolen, which left the reason for Sun Kaoli's flight open to question...

Of course, that alone still did not amount to much. If those two disappearances could be put down to coincidence, then what about the case that came up today—was that a coincidence too?

Yang Maoling was a small-time thug who ran a protection racket around the vegetable market. Today, while he was collecting his protection money, he ran into a stubborn sort who would not play along, so Yang Maoling grabbed a scale pan lying nearby and beat the man until his face was a bloody mess.

This so-called bloody mess, once the blood was actually washed away, amounted to nothing more than a bleeding nose. It was hardly any great matter at all. Everyone assumed the business would blow over just like that, and that the man who had been beaten would duly show up the next day and hand over his protection money like a good boy.

Yang Maoling had beaten vendors before; plenty of those beatings had been far worse than this one, and none of them had ever counted as any great matter.

Only this time, the man he had beaten refused to take it lying down and called the police. But when the police came, all they did was mediate. After all, Yang Maoling's official position was manager of this farmers' market, and the money he collected, the cut he took, could be understood as a commercial transaction on the market's part—collecting rent. True, the rent was a bit steep and collected a bit too often, but you were perfectly free not to come.

If you really pressed the matter, there was no clear conclusion to be drawn. The market was privately owned, and Yang Maoling's collecting fees was perfectly normal. You refused to pay, you took a punch—that was an ordinary civil dispute.

But the strange thing was this: after beating the man, Yang Maoling simply vanished. He was never seen again.

On the face of it, it looked as though he had feared he might have injured the man badly and had fled to escape punishment. But in reality, the man he had beaten was not injured in the slightest.

Take any one of these three incidents on its own, and it could be classified as coincidence. But put all three together, and there was something decidedly unusual about them.

In the space of a few short days, three cases of "fleeing to escape punishment" had occurred—and those were only the ones with police records. What about the ones without police records? Were there similar scenarios still to be found?