S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 4 Chapter 33

A Requiem for a Murderer 33 – The Man Who Played With Fate

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"It's so small." Ma Xin leaned over the railing and looked off into the distance through the scope of Ma Han's sniper rifle, "I thought I could see very clearly."

"Silly or not," Zhao Hu scowled at the side, "if you can see clearly then anyone can be a sniper, but all the best ones are blind snipers."

"How can you hit them when they are like ants?" Ma Xin asked Ma Han curiously.

Ma Han was watching Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang's whereabouts through the locator and replied casually, "It's easier to hit them when they're like ants."

"Why?" Ma Xin tilted her head to look at her older brother.

"When the ants are fighting, do the humans have to?" Ma Han replied absentmindedly, while looking up to ask Bai Ye, "Where's Eleven?"

Bai Ye shrugged slightly, "Probably has something to do with him."

Ma Han frowned, exchanged a look with Zhao Hu and waited in silence.

Gongsun stood beside Bai Ye and asked him with great interest, "Let me ask you a question."

Bai Ye glanced towards him and then smiled, "You are somewhat similar to Jue in certain ways."

"Oh?" Gongsun was curious, "How?"

"What question do you want to ask?" Bai Ye didn't answer, instead he jumped back to the original question.

"Well..." Gongsun rubbed his chin, "I briefly combed through the case and there are a few areas that I don't quite understand."

Bai Ye raised an eyebrow.

Ma Xin urged, "Sorting out the case or something, it's really necessary! I'm still in the clouds!"

"Ai, first of all, Zhao Jue coaxed and set up Bao Sir to get us to come to T City, saying that it was to catch a ghost." Gongsun began to sort out the case as he remembered it.

"Inside the old police station, Zhao Jue hid information about the kidnapping case from three years ago, in other words, he actually started investigating the case three years ago, and finally determined that it was in T City. Then, through funding from Jintang, he installed a large number of surveillance systems here. I've asked Jiang Ping, and it would take at least one to two years to set up a surveillance system that complex and with that amount of information to process." Gongsun tapped his chin, "There's one thing I can't figure out though."

Bai Ye smiled lightly, "What?"

"That little boy called Chen Xin." Gongsun crossed his arms, "Zhao Jue saved him and hid him. He had been deployed for so long without being discovered, indicating that he had kept a low profile. But the act of saving Chen Xin and bringing SCI to T City in a grand manner can't be said to be low profile, and he even took over as the headmaster to enter the school... was he not afraid of spooking the snake?"

The corners of Bai Ye's mouth raised slightly.

Gongsun squinted at him, "I sometimes feel that Zhan Zhao and Zhao Jue are relatively childish people, but for people with such a high IQ, childishness is just a relief for themselves, and they are definitely not childish. I believe that after accompanying Zhao Jue for so long and playing with everyone with extravagant and baseless talk during this whole process, Zhan Zhao understands in his heart that the farce is just superficial, and that whether it's infiltrating the school to perform seamlessly, catching the ghost at the party in a dramatic manner, or even finally entering that fortress… it's not his ultimate goal."

Bai Ye lowered his head slightly and leaned against the railing to hear Gongsun finish, a faint smile still on his face.

Zhao Hu leaned against the railing with his gun in his arms and tilted his face to look at Gongsun, "I actually think it's strange too."

"What's strange?" Ma Xin asked hurriedly.

"Since we came to T City, we've come across a lot of unusual things, back and forth between killers, ghosts, PTW and graves. I do wonder, why beat around the bush? These killers are straightforward to investigate, the biggest matter is to issue the list of arrests. The location of the fortress is also clear to us, we can directly send people into it. This kind of abduction of children constitutes a gang crime, regardless of what research he is doing, it is a crime, he will be arrested and tried according to the evidence. What exactly does Zhao Jue want to do?"

"And Eleven," Ma Han whispered, "if he wanted revenge, he could have teamed up with you to take out the seven killers from PTW, there's no reason to go through all the trouble."

Bai Ye shook his head slightly, smiling but not saying anything.

"Unless..." Gongsun looked up at him, "Zhao Jue said he had a surprise for you, isn't it a ghost or PTW?"

"Zhao Jue has been setting up for three years, so naturally what he's going to catch won't be such a small fish."

At that moment, a voice came from the escalator.

Everyone froze and snapped their heads around, only to see a man slowly walking up from downstairs, carrying a very large suitcase in his hands.

Everyone frowned... The person in front of them was somewhat out of the crowd's expectation, but the brightly coloured flowery shirt still made the crowd shout out in unison, "Cauliflower!"

The person who came up was Eugene, who hadn't been seen for a long time. When he heard the word 'cauliflower', Eugene leaned on the stair railing, held his forehead and hit the railing, "My reputation..."

"Did you bring the stuff?" Bai Ye asked him.

"It's here." Eugene placed the box on the floor, right in front of Ma Han, "Ai, it's for you."

Ma Han didn't quite understand and frowned at him.

Eugene opened the box and inside was a sniper rifle.

"Wow... what kind of gun is this?" Ma Xin came up curiously to look, "I've never seen one in this colour before."

Eugene turned his face to see Ma Xin and immediately smiled, "Yo, beauty! You're no longer part of the SCI bachelor force."

Ma Xin glanced at him, thinking that this man had questionable taste in clothing.

Ma Han stared at the sniper rifle for a long time and looked up at Eugene, "You want to shoot a satellite, huh? What are you doing with this thing?"

"Hey hey." Eugene said cheerfully, "This is the police equipment that Bao Zheng applied for, I'm just acting as a human courier for a while." He said, showing Ma Han the emblem on the gun.

"Brother, what kind of gun is this?" Ma Xin was curious, "Why the earthy yellow colour, and such a long barrel?"

"It's an M200, with a range of over two thousand metres." Ma Han picked the gun up, looked at the bullets and then the elongated barrel, and frowned at Bai Ye, "What do you want to do?"

"For cover." Bai Ye whispered, "To deal with the cello."

Ma Han thought of the eccentric killer in the punk outfit, "Didn't he leave?"

"Tsk." Eugene held his chin and shook his head, "That kid made a sloppy move and left because he had other serious tasks to do." He said, patting Ma Han on the shoulder, "He's got an M200 too, you'll spell him out later."

Ma Han was confused.

Bai Ye looked at the time, "It's almost time."

Eugene smiled and sat down cross-legged, reaching out with a flick of his hand, as if he was waving a baton, "It's about to begin ooh, Zhao Jue's carefully planned, requiem for the dead."

......

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang entered the belly of the fortress from the middle level.

As Zhan Zhao walked, he looked around... the internal structure of this fortress, and for some reason, it gave him an inexplicably familiar feeling.

There was already a loud alarm ahead. As they walked to the entrance of a long corridor, they were just about to move forward when Luo Tian reached out to stop the crowd, "There is an alarm in front, an iron gate will automatically close if you go in directly."

Bai Yutang looked at him.

Luo Tian shrugged, "It's exactly the same construction as the experimental base I was locked up in before."

Bai Yutang thought for a moment and fumbled around the wall for a while. He found an iron box and pulled open the small door, and inside was a digital code console that resembled an anti-theft lock.

"How old-fashioned." Bai Yutang took a look, "Not by irises or fingerprints, but by code..."

Bao Zheng looked at Luo Tian, meaning – Do you know the password?

Luo Tian shook his head.

Zhan Zhao reached out and suddenly pressed a series of numbers, signalling the crowd – Go.

Bai Yutang led the way into the corridor.

Bao Zheng and Luo Tian looked at each other in disbelief, but the whole way in, surprisingly, they did not encounter any mechanisms at all.

Bao Zheng then asked Zhan Zhao, "I say... you're showing a lot of improvement in your skills lately."

Zhan Zhao smiled, this action of solving the code, Zhao Jue had done it countless times. In fact, Zhao Jue had already given them enough hints early on, the sound of the bell, the requiem, the code... everything was inside that simple finger movement.

They passed through the corridor and saw several laboratories, many of them already dusty, and there were several old men in white coats running in all directions.

Bao Zheng led his men and easily arrested them all.

There were several laboratories, and Zhan Zhao examined them one by one. The PTW experiments were indeed more systematic and had progressed a lot.

Zhan Zhao flipped through all the information in the computer as fast as he could. Bao Zheng took a look and felt that the speed of the mouse scrolling and the words clattering across the screen were beyond human receptivity, making him dizzy and a little nauseous, but Zhan Zhao was reading with great concentration.

After capturing a total of five researchers, Luo Tian checked them out and came back to tell the crowd – It was cleared.

Zhan Zhao finished flipping through the last page of research material and looked up to tell Bai Yutang, "Samples!"

"What kind of samples?"

"PTW's most valuable samples, ten in total." Zhan Zhao said seriously, "Such samples have been successfully researched to prevent ageing and increase physical performance.

"What do the samples look like?" Bai Yutang asked.

"It should be ten petri dishes and ten genetic maps." As soon as Zhan Zhao finished speaking, Luo Tian and the others started looking.

Bao Zheng stood by the side in silence.

Bai Yutang suddenly looked at him, "Bao Sir?"

"Hm?" Bao Zheng looked up.

"In the past, you would have already jumped at this kind of situation." Bai Yutang looked at him, "Why aren't you in a hurry?"

Bao Zheng scratched his chin, "This is..."

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang froze slightly for two seconds before glancing at each other – If the samples were found, Bao Zheng would have no choice but to hand over all the information to his superiors. This thing was like a magic mirror, who could guarantee that everyone would be able to withstand the temptation of all these materials and samples and not study them? To put it bluntly, if a time machine was really discovered one day, then destroying it would probably be the best way to deal with it. The key is... how to destroy it?

Zhan Zhao shook his head and sighed, "It seems that Zhao Jue has it all figured out."

Bai Yutang put away his gun and asked Bai Chi through his communication device, "How is it going at your end?"

"Brother, we found nine kidnapped children. There were two guards, one was caught by the special police and one ran away, and Zhen and I are chasing after them.

Zhan Zhao padded over and asked, "Where's Zhao Jue?"

"In the back I think..." Bai Chi replied, "We chased that guard upstairs."

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang both frowned and contacted Bai Jintang.

From the other end of the communicator came a burst of gunfire and the sound of Bai Jintang smoking slowly, "It's really a great view down here."

Bai Yutang was speechless, "Any luck?"

"Caught four minions and the twins just took care of two more."

"Where are the officers?"

"Throwing up."

"Why are they throwing up?" Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang were both a little puzzled.

"Oh, it turns out that the bottom floor is really an incinerator..." Bai Jintang paused for a moment, "Well... it seems as though a fish has slipped through the net, I'll go and have a chat with him." After saying that, the communicator disconnected.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang were somewhat speechless and turned back to look at the few researchers who had been caught.

Zhan Zhao used the smartphone Jiang Ping had given him to take pictures of their facial features and sent the photos to Jiang Ping for comparison and identification.

After identification, the identities of these people came out as the missing doctors and scientists. All of these scientists had been punished for having conducted dangerous experiments and had since disappeared, probably three or four years ago, mostly from South America.

Zhan Zhao talked to them for a few minutes and found that they seemed to be brainwashed, one or two of them felt like geniuses while the others were idiots, and what they were studying was beyond the understanding of ordinary people.

Zhan Zhao yawned and let the police officers escort the people out. The crowd went downstairs to round everyone up, only to find that several people were missing... Zhao Jue was not there, Bai Chi and Zhao Zhen were not there, neither were Bai Jintang and the twins.

"Where is everyone?" Bao Zheng frowned.

Several officers said that Zhao Jue had gone off somewhere in the blink of an eye, Zhao Zhen and Bai Chi had gone after a guard, and Bai Jintang and the twins seemed to have gone after the fish that had slipped through the net.

Bai Yutang did the math, "Still no sign of that ghost's whereabouts."

"Its not unexpected, his purpose of coming back in a hurry is probably to get the samples." Zhan Zhao said, with one hand on Bai Yutang's shoulder. "There is nothing anywhere close to this canyon, with so many special police officers, can he run away? A cunning rabbit has three dens? We can go deploy some police dogs to help catch him."

Bai Yutang looked at his relaxed face and shook his head, "It looks like Zhao Jue has arranged everything, neither he nor the samples can escape. But I'm a bit confused, what surprise is Zhao Jue planning to give to Bai Ye?"

Zhan Zhao hummed, "Zhao Jue is quite suitable for a phrase."

Bai Yutang frowned, "What phrase?"

"I can guess the beginning but not the end." Zhan Zhao shrugged. He saw that Bao Zheng had dispatched his staff with ease but did not seem to want to leave yet, so he raised the corner of his mouth to Bai Yutang and nudged him.

Bai Yutang glanced at Bao Zheng and understood what he meant – The so-called 'not moving early for no benefit'. Bao Zheng reached a compromise with Zhao Jue, it seems that the harvest this time should not only save a few children and catch a few mad scientists, but also the big fish in the back.

Bai Chi was running out of breath. The upper floor of the fortress was full of iron railings and handrails, and he was worried about Zhao Zhen, but Zhao Zhen was running too fast, and he was so agile that he felt inferior to him.

He had just reached the stairs and felt that he could not run anymore when he heard a 'bang' coming from upstairs.

Then there was a 'grunt, grunt, grunt' and a person rolled down.

He landed right in front of Bai Chi's eyes, and Bai Chi was quick to grab and cuff him.

Zhao Zhen slid straight down the stairs on the handrail, his hands still in his trouser pockets, needless to say it was with great ease.

When Bai Chi saw that the last guard had been caught, he wanted to go upstairs to have another look.

Zhao Zhen reached out to stop him, "Don't go."

"Why?"

Zhao Zhen thought for a moment and flattened his lips, "It's all kids' toys up there."

Bai Chi froze, slightly confused – Were they used to coax the children who had been kidnapped?

Zhao Zhen added, "It's been a long time."

Bai Chi frowned and looked down at the guard.

Upon closer inspection, Bai Chi recognised him, "Aren't you the coach of the school's sports team?"

The man's hands were handcuffed behind his back and he was staring at Bai Chi and Zhao Zhen with an oddly fierce look in his eyes.

Zhao Zhen looked at him carefully and told Bai Chi, "He appears to be normal, probably working for money."

"Why did you do that?" Bai Chi escorted him out, "Don't you have feelings? Those kids are so young."

"A test subject is a test subject." The man spoke, his voice calm, "Everyone has a destiny of their own."

Bai Chi frowned, "It's not for you to say what the fate of others is."

"That's why it's interesting." The man slowly turned back and cracked a smile at Bai Chi, somewhat stiff and wooden, "The strong can control the destiny of others, the weak can only be controlled by others, that's the world. "

As they spoke, the crowd had already arrived downstairs.

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang happened to hear these words. Looking back, they saw the always good-natured Bai Chi pressing a man to the ground, after which he walked to the side to catch his breath. It was not clear whether he was tired from running all the way just now or if he was just angry.

Zhao Zhen shook his head.

At this time, from downstairs, Bai Jintang walked up slowly, and behind him the twins dragged a man dressed as a watchman like a dead dog.

Bai Yutang walked over to take a look and found that he had been beaten into a pig's head. He looked at Bai Jintang with dissatisfaction, "How could you lynch him?"

Bai Jintang shrugged, "He fell on his own."

The corners of Bai Yutang's mouth twitched and he lowered his voice, "We're police officers, not gangsters!"

Bai Jintang nodded and said seriously, "Well, that's why I want to educate him and let him feel how fun it is to have his fate controlled." After saying that, he told the twins to throw the man to the ground and go wash their hands.

Zhan Zhao looked at the two guards, "The calibre is surprisingly the same..."

After cross-examination afterwards, all the staff members at the fortress were very consistent in their statements and had a similar kind of wooden expression.

Zhan Zhao looked at their pupils and thought – Hypnotic control, a master...

At this point, he heard Zhao Zhen suddenly ask, "Did you guys... hear any strange noises?"

Luo Tian nodded, "En, a buzzing, I heard it just now."

"What buzzing?" The SWAT team leader asked in confusion as he escorted all the people to the police car.

Everyone was silent for a moment to carefully distinguish the sound, and just when no one had the slightest clue, Bai Yutang spoke up, "A helicopter."

"Ghost hid a helicopter to escape?" Zhan Zhao was surprised.

"No." Bai Yutang shook his head with certainty, "The helicopter is in the process of landing, not taking off."

Everyone immediately looked at Bao Zheng.

Bao Zheng hurriedly shook his head, "I didn't request it!"

Everyone's heart thumped – Could there be outside help?

In the distance, Ma Han aimed his gun at the long ropes coming down from the helicopter – Want to run? It's not that easy, none of them are going to get away.

‿︵‿︵ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ・❉・ ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ‿︵‿︵

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Translator Notes

Please feel free to comment any mistakes I made so I can improve and do better as I go through the book.

Translated: March 10, 2023 by Angel

Edited: March 20, 2023 by Angel