Chapter 1034 — A Bizarre Case

And Uncle Qing, for his part, cooperatively began circulating the oral formula of his own family's inner art...

Ten minutes later, Wei Zhao decisively gave up. There had been no effect whatsoever; the situation remained exactly as before. Wei Zhao could not lend his own energy for Uncle Qing's use, and Uncle Qing could not absorb the energy Wei Zhao sent over.

It seemed it truly was as Elder Jiao had said: this transfer of energy came with a restriction of rank. He could pass energy only to cultivators of a rank lower than his own, and the peak state of the rank immediately beneath his was the final bottleneck of that transfer.

In other words, so long as he failed to reach the Earth rank, he would never be able to forge Uncle Qing and General Weiwu into Mystic-rank experts.

At first Wei Zhao had counted his ability to mass-produce experts a formidable thing, but now it struck him as rather like chicken ribs — savorless, and yet a pity to discard.

True, he could produce Yellow-rank experts, and in the mundane world a Yellow-rank expert was still a thing of phoenix feather and unicorn horn, rare beyond rare. A single Yellow-rank expert could cut a most imposing figure. But the crux of the matter was this: the rivals and the pressures Wei Zhao now faced did not come from the mundane world, but from the great clans of a plane above it. Among those clans, Yellow-rank experts were utterly commonplace; most of their people were Mystic-rank experts, and there were even Earth-rank experts among them.

Set against such people, Uncle Qing and General Weiwu, those two top-grade Yellow-rank experts, were of no use at all. Wei Zhao would still have to meet them on his own strength.

Forget it. Better than nothing, Wei Zhao sighed. There were those who would give anything for a Yellow-rank expert, and he could already turn them out in batches.

At that thought, Wei Zhao abandoned any further plans to build up Uncle Qing and returned to his own room...

These past days in Songshan City, the surface of public order had been rather good. The gang of thieves had vanished, the kidney-cutting ring had been smashed, and the criminal forces led by Li Cihua had likewise furled their banners and muffled their drums, making no grand moves.

By rights, in such an atmosphere of peace, Qiu Lingshan ought to have been pleased, and indeed her superiors had singled her out for praise several times. Ever since she took up the post of captain of the criminal investigation division, public order in Songshan City had improved a great deal, and Qiu Lingshan had cracked major case after major case, piling up remarkable feats — the fastest rate of case clearance in the city's history.

Yet Qiu Lingshan felt a faint, unaccountable unease. In how many cases does the calm conceal a darkness even greater behind it?

For several disappearances had lately occurred in Songshan City. They looked like the most ordinary of cases, yet Qiu Lingshan could not shake the feeling that matters were not so simple.

Wang Lieqian was a migrant worker. Three days ago, over the question of wages, he had come to blows with his contractor; after beating the man soundly, he vanished without a trace.

The file showed that Wang Lieqian was a sturdy laborer with great strength in his hands. Bringing down the contractor and his several henchmen would have been an easy enough job for him.

The contractor had not even filed a report; it was a snack vendor near the construction site, who had watched the fight, who called the police.

Everyone assumed that Wang Lieqian had fled to escape punishment. The officers who handled the case naturally would not go poking into other people's business; after all, the contractor himself said it was nothing and had no intention of pursuing it. The whole matter could perfectly well be regarded as an ordinary civil dispute — when the injured party would not pursue it, what was there for them to pursue?

Besides, the contractor was hardly the worse for it; it did not even amount to a minor injury.

So the officers who answered the call merely jotted down a brief record and left.

Had not another similar incident occurred within so short a time, this seemingly chance case would never have drawn Qiu Lingshan's notice. Now the file had been laid upon her desk once more, and the peculiarities within it made her frown.

Wang Lieqian had injured the contractor, yes, but in truth the contractor had suffered no great harm — a few bruises on his body, a bit of broken skin on his face, and the same for those henchmen; not a bone between them was broken.

Under such circumstances, was there any need for Wang Lieqian to flee? The police had not even meant to arrest him — what was he running from? And from the contractor's attitude, it was plain he had written the whole thing off as his own bad luck; Wang Lieqian could have learned all of this with the simplest of inquiries. Yet Wang Lieqian had disappeared.

Sun Kaoli was a loader at a freight company. On the job he accidentally smashed a shipment of glassware. The boss said nothing, and did not even bring up docking his wages — and yet Sun Kaoli had vanished.

Just what was Sun Kaoli running for?

It was only after Sun Kaoli disappeared, when the boss sensed something amiss, that a report was finally made. But once the police arrived, they found nothing missing from the company at all, and so the reason for Sun Kaoli's flight remained open to speculation...

Of course, that alone was nothing. If those two disappearances were coincidence, then the case that came up today — was that coincidence too?

Yang Maoling was a small-time thug who ran roughshod over the trade near the vegetable market. Today, while collecting protection money, he came up against a stickler who would not let it slide, so Yang Maoling seized a scale pan lying nearby and beat the man's face into a bloody bloom.

A face in "full bloom," once the blood was properly washed away, amounted to no more than a bloody nose — no great matter at all. Everyone assumed the affair would simply pass, and that the beaten man would surely hand over his protection fee obediently the next day.

Yang Maoling had beaten vendors before; there had been far worse than this, and none of it had ever counted as anything major.

Only, this beaten man would not swallow it and called the police. But when the police came, they did no more than mediate. Yang Maoling's official title, after all, was manager of this farmers' market; that he collected money and took his cut could well be understood as the market's commercial activity — collecting rent. A little steep, perhaps, a little frequent, but you were perfectly free not to come.

If one truly pressed the matter, there was no clear wrong to be named. The market was privately owned, and Yang Maoling's collection of fees was perfectly normal. You didn't pay your money, you took a punch — an ordinary civil dispute...

But the strange thing was this: from the moment Yang Maoling finished beating the man, he vanished. Never to be seen again.

It looked as though he feared he had beaten the man into some real injury and had fled to escape punishment — but in truth, the beaten man was not hurt in the least.

Take any one of these three matters by itself, and it could be dismissed as coincidence. Put the three together, and something was decidedly out of the ordinary.

In the space of a few short days, three cases of "flight to escape punishment" — and these were only the ones with police records. What of those without? Were there other scenes like them?

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