Chapter 47 "Corrosive Gas"

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Shi Rang steered his electric scooter onto the main road, speeding toward the city outskirts.

It was now midday, the sunlight almost perpendicular to the ground, blanketing both man and vehicle in a scorching glow. He pulled down the plastic sun visor of his helmet to filter out the harsh glare, but this blocked the breeze as well, and a layer of sweat-induced mist quickly condensed on the plastic plate.

Fortunately, it was only April; otherwise, driving all the way like this, he would have suffered a heatstroke.

His fully accelerated brain listed the things he needed to do, one by one.

Find the vehicle, decide whether to drive it into the lake or dump it in a junkyard based on the remaining traces inside, then pretend to be passing by the Yunling New District, observe from the periphery if anyone had arrived at the scene ahead of him, and finally decide whether to flee directly or return to destroy the evidence...

Shi Rang was no criminal investigation expert, but he had crammed a lot of information to pit his wits against game masters and players in tabletop roleplaying games, giving him at least some ideas.

The bodily fluids of the stitched corpse had to be photolyzed, the bloody clothes and shoes at home had to be destroyed, the camera needed to be bought outright, and the broken mobile phone had to be smashed and dismantled...

Jack cowered in the gap between the back of his collar and his neck, bracing against the helmet to avoid the strong wind so he wouldn't be blown away, and seemed to shout something at Shi Rang, but Shi Rang didn't hear it clearly.

His electric scooter had been modified and powered up, and the sound of rushing wind filled his ears.

He had to rush to the scene at full speed.

Shortly after turning onto the highway leading straight to the city outskirts, he felt a tingling sensation in his ear, followed by something like an insect crawling into his ear canal—he used all his self-control to keep from reaching into his ear. It was definitely a miniature person.

"Hey, can you hear me?" An unfamiliar voice rang out, coming from inside his ear as if Shi Rang were talking on a phone with earphones on.

"Yes!"

"No need to shout, I can hear you. I'm the Sheriff. Do you have a plan yet?"

Shielded by the sound of the wind, Shi Rang briefly outlined his intentions.

"Not enough. If someone investigates you, no cover-up can be completely flawless. You need to make them unable to associate you with it at all, so they don't even open an investigation. How did you find that industrial area, and did you leave any traces?"

The Management Bureau headquarters.

After learning about the existence of the Yunling New District from the headquarters' action logs, Shi Rang went straight to the destination relying on his familiarity with the city. He didn't use navigation halfway and simply took a taxi nearby.

The Bureau hadn't come to arrest him, which meant headquarters hadn't been exposed.

If they found that taxi driver...

He told the Sheriff about the driver, and the latter clicked his tongue loudly.

"We could find a way to make that driver shut up, but that would be overcomplicating things. The Bureau prefers covert operations. If you haven't left any particularly noteworthy traces, it shouldn't reach the point of a thorough investigation," the Sheriff analyzed.

"Where did you leave the car? Are you almost there?"

"It should be right around here..."

Shi Rang turned into a potholed alley that wound between two rows of dilapidated brick houses, diagonally connecting to another major road leading northwest between two cities.

In his memory, he had taken this shortcut and abandoned the car along the way.

Speeding past a few wandering strangers, Shi Rang was about to slow down to observe, but the Sheriff instructed him to keep driving straight ahead.

Only then did he remember that he still had more than three hundred pairs of eyes helping him search.

A tiny person clinging to Shi Rang's hair and gripping a hair stubble as tall as itself shouted, "Left front, I found the traces!"

"Left front, someone found it!"

"Tell him it's on the left front!"

The tiny people nearby relayed the message in a relay chain, quickly transmitting the news to the miniature Sheriff.

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"Left front, Shi Rang!"

Although the miniature people were small in stature, their flat-surface vision was quite good.

Shi Rang looked around, confirming that the nearest person was still over a hundred meters away, so he pushed his electric scooter down below the road level, parked it properly, and cautiously advanced toward the location they mentioned.

Soon, he saw it.

Tall grass had been flattened over a large area by something driving down from the dirt road. Shi Rang recognized two deep ruts and the outline left behind when the vehicle finally stopped.

But the car wasn't here.

"Where did it go? It was clearly here this morning!"

"What do we do now?"

"Could someone be lying in ambush here? Let's run!"

The tiny people began to shout anxiously, discussing among themselves.

Shi Rang subconsciously stood on tiptoe to look around, then quickly realized.

How could something the size of a car go unnoticed?

He looked along the tracks on the ground and found that the vehicle appeared to have been reversed and driven away along the same path.

In his memory, the car had indeed run out of fuel. When the engine stalled, Shi Rang had used the last bit of momentum to drive it off the road before abandoning it. But recalling the tactics commonly used in his tabletop games, he found a solution—just pour in a bottle of water to make the sediment at the bottom of the fuel tank float up, and the car could start and drive for a while longer.

He had never actually done it, but it seemed feasible.

Besides, this was the Tenth District. Even if Yunling City's security was considered decent, robberies still occurred every now and then in the "messier" parts of the city, and Shi Rang had no doubt that car thieves operated in this area.

Shi Rang paced around the area for a while, then squatted down to inspect it carefully, confirming that there were no bloodstains or debris left where the vehicle had been parked.

The people coming to capture him wouldn't move the car away; even if they did, they would leave someone nearby to keep watch.

He never expected that one day, he would be grateful for the terrible security of the Tenth District.

The car had definitely been stolen.

"Quiet, quiet!" Jack suddenly yelled.

"—Look!"

"What? What are you looking at?"

"I can't hear anything anymore, stop shouting all at once!"

"What's wrong?"

"Shi Rang, hurry—"

The tiny people were making a racket. Even though Jack tried his utmost to get them to speak one by one, managing over three hundred voices was easier said than done. He was completely deafened by the noise, and even the miniature Sheriff residing inside Shi Rang's ear had no idea what they were shouting about.

Until the next second, a blade pressed against Shi Rang's lower back.

...Well, now he understood.

"Don't move," the person behind Shi Rang said, pressing the tip of the blade slightly forward, piercing Shi Rang's skin through his T-shirt. "Hand over the money."

Shi Rang slowly raised his hands. "I don't carry cash."

"Don't play tricks, I saw a phone in your pants pocket, take it out right now!"

Shi Rang cursed inwardly. He had been too focused on inspecting the ground, and the tiny people had spoken incoherently, making it difficult to give an effective warning.

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Come to think of it, how could security possibly be good in a place where a parked car could be stolen within a few hours?

Yes, this was the Tenth District.

"Don't panic, stall him," the miniature Sheriff told him in his ear. "We'll handle it."

Shi Rang desperately wanted to ask how they intended to handle it. Could they use their "corrosive gas" in such an open space? But he dared not move, knowing that Jack was clinging right beneath his collar. If the robber discovered him, the situation would become even worse.

"I'll get it for you, the phone is in my pocket, don't get excited." With that, Shi Rang signaled with his left hand, lowering it slowly and reaching toward his pocket.

The phone was snatched away the moment it cleared his pocket.

"That's a nice scooter you've got."

"Don't touch my scooter, you already have the phone, isn't that enough?"

"I saw a wallet in your other pocket, give it to me."

"It's empty inside."

"Are you going to give it to me or not?" The blade pressed a bit harder into Shi Rang's lower back, the tip puncturing his skin.

"There's no money inside, I can show you."

"Do you think I'm negotiating with you?"

Shi Rang froze in place, not moving.

The opponent probably only wanted money and didn't want to get mixed up in a homicide, but he was definitely not going to hand over his wallet.

His silence caused the robber to lose patience, and he reached out directly to snatch the wallet.

Shi Rang suddenly spun around, violently pushing the robber backward and seizing the opportunity to grab for the wallet.

He was no martial artist and didn't know how to fight. He focused entirely on grabbing the object, completely ignoring the knife.

The blade slashed upward across Shi Rang's arm as the robber staggered, instantly drawing blood, and the wallet missed his grasp.

The robber tried to retreat to regain his balance, but tripped over the upward-sloping curb and fell backward onto the ground.

"Damn it."

Cursing, the robber realized that this stubborn fat sheep not only hadn't run away but was still trying to snatch the wallet back, which only added fuel to his anger.

He jumped up with the knife, determined to carve a hole in the other person's body. The moment he stood up, however, a thick mass of television-static-like spots exploded in his vision.

"Ugh..."

The robber clutched his face, scratching frantically near his eyes, mouth, and nose, uttering incoherent sounds. Within seconds, he staggered and collapsed right at Shi Rang's feet, his legs stiffening rigidly as he convulsed continuously on the ground.

After a short while, one by one, miniature people standing less than one millimeter tall crawled out from the robber's ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, following the thin trickles of blood.

Their clothes were dyed completely red, making them look like a swarm of crimson bugs, yet they enthusiastically raised the drill bits in their hands, cheering for having defeated a giant.

[Project Codename: Lilliputians]

[Hazard Level: C]

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