Controlled Experiment Chapter 63

Two Missing One – 13

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On Wednesday night, Xiao Bai sat in the office, staring blankly at the clock on the desk.

In a few minutes, it would be Thursday, yet he felt no drowsiness at all. In fact, he was brimming with the urge to work. Xiao Bai rubbed his eyes and thought to himself, One of you gave me a false statement and took off, and the other hasn't really done much from beginning to end, leaving me here, not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing.

As for Li Yao's identity, Xiao Bai actually knew very little. He only knew that he was carrying out Er Zhuofan's orders, he hadn't asked much beyond that.

But now that things have progressed to this point, Li Yao's identity, whatever it truly was, had to be tied to the case. Or rather, he was the source of it all.

Xiao Bai yawned and rubbed his eyes again. It was snowing tonight. Whenever it snowed, the sky always looked especially bright, and the reflections turned everything a deep red. Snow had been rare since the start of winter, and Xiao Bai watched the softly falling flakes with extra care. They were neither too big nor too small, and his mind remained unusually clear.

Feeling a bit tired, Xiao Bai leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the marble window ledge, his eyes fixed on the snow drifting down outside.

Back when he worked at the grassroots level, Xiao Bai used to dread rain and snow, because if a murder coincided with weather like this, it always turned into a tricky case, they were difficult to solve. Thinking of that now, Xiao Bai cursed under his breath. Damn it, thinking about these things late at night, so unlucky.

Maybe it was the chill from the open window, but his nose had started to block up. Xiao Bai stood, reaching for a tissue, but before his hand touched the box, his phone rang from his pocket.

It was Er Zhuofan.

A sharp jolt ran through Xiao Bai's chest.

After three seconds, he answered immediately.

"Where?" Er Zhuofan asked.

Xiao Bai glanced instinctively at his watch, it was half past midnight. He frowned slightly. Could it be that Director Er, too, was still wide awake, driven by the same restless urge to work?

"... I'm at the bureau."

"I'm asking where Wang Zhe is!"

Xiao Bai froze.

Wang Zhe was the last living person from the photo, and the team had assigned officers to protect him around the clock.

Surely nothing had happened to him, right?

"Wang Zhe... Wang Zhe should be at home," Xiao Bai replied quickly. "There are people watching him, don't worry."

"Don't worry? What exactly should I not be worrying about?" Director Er snapped. "Can you get hold of Wang Zhe right now?"

"... What do you mean, Director Er?"

"What do I mean?" Director Er forced himself not to start swearing. "Do you know he's been murdered? The box truck parked in the Guangming Road residential area, you need to hurry over there now. I really don't know how you managed to follow him. Is it so hard for me to retire in peace? The person is already dead, and there's still no news?"

Xiao Bai felt like the blood in his body had frozen solid.

Wang Zhe is dead?

He wiped the cold sweat from his face, his fingers trembling slightly.

While he was still on the phone, Director Er had already set off for the crime scene, and he picked Xiao Bai up outside the bureau along the way.

As soon as Xiao Bai got in the car, the first thing he saw was Director Er's furious expression.

Director Er glared at Xiao Bai before looking back at the road ahead. "Reporters are calling my personal phone to verify the news. This is big, do you understand?"

Reporters?

Xiao Bai was stunned. "They called you directly? You mean, it was a reporter who discovered the truck?"

"You still haven't caught on?" Director Er gave a cold snort and tapped the car window with his finger. "We've been set up."

When they arrived at the crime scene and got out of the car, Xiao Bai finally understood what Director Er had meant.

The police cordon had only just been put up, and the area around the crime-scene truck was covered in footprints. After the snow fell, the footprints were layered one on top of the other on the ground. Besides the crowd that had been forced back behind the cordon, there were several bold reporters standing not far from the truck, reporting live from the scene.

Xiao Bai stopped one of them as they stepped forward to ask questions.

He pulled out his phone and checked the trending topics online.

#IslandTycoonWangZhe

#WangZheBoxTruck

Several similar hashtags were trending.

Xiao Bai tapped on the top one.

"In the early hours of this morning, Wang Zhe, a wealthy businessman from Huan Island, was found dead inside a box truck parked in the Guangming Road residential area. The scene was reportedly horrific. It is said that the Huan Island Police Department was unaware of the incident, and as of the time of publication, no officials had yet arrived on scene..."

Xiao Bai couldn't read any further.

Something has gone really fucking wrong.

Xiao Bai sighed and pushed his hair back from his forehead.

Unrelated personnel, including reporters, were already being cleared from the scene, and Xiao Bai rushed over to Director Er.

"Someone tipped off the press, that's the only reason they got here before us."

Director Er nodded, lifted his chin and gestured towards the box truck at the scene. "Go take a look and see what we're dealing with."

On a snowy day, with no crime scene preservation and noisy people around, there weren't any reliable footprints nearby.

Xiao Bai sighed and crouched as he entered the box truck.

This kind of truck was commonly used to transport goods, some carried seafood or chilled items that required refrigeration.

Clearly, this was one of those, as the interior still held a faint chill.

The inside was bigger than Xiao Bai had imagined. It was pitch black, and a few colleagues entered behind him, holding flashlights. Xiao Bai stood to the side, watching as the light flicked on, and that was when he saw the full scene inside the truck.

Blood. Nothing but blood.

Everywhere.

It was as if a drunken man had stood in the centre of the truck, wildly splashing red paint from a bucket. Chaotic smears of blood were strewn across every surface; scratches, splatters, drips of varying size, and most of it so scattered that it formed no recognisable shapes at all.

It looked as though a live animal had been dissected right there in the open, thrashing in its own blood across the floor of the truck.

Xiao Bai gagged on the metallic stench and instinctively covered his mouth, stumbling back outside and coughing uncontrollably.

It was obvious that someone had most likely been murdered inside that truck.

Or rather, it resembled the scene of a dismemberment.

Xiao Bai felt a chill prickling across his scalp.

"The body?" he turned and asked the colleague who had been first on the scene.

The colleague was stunned by the question and dazedly pointed towards the box truck. "... There's no body."

Xiao Bai froze for a moment.

"It was already like this when we arrived, nothing was here."

Xiao Bai's mind exploded with a loud buzz.

The body is gone.

Where is Wang Zhe's body?

Xiao Bai stood there dazed for a second, then seemed to think of something.

Taking two steps back, he asked, "Whose blood is this?"

"We don't know yet. Didn't they say it was that tycoon Wang Zhe's?" the colleague replied. "But we'll have to wait for the test results and compare them with the DNA database to confirm."

Xiao Bai nodded. That meant that, at this point, there was no concrete evidence that the blood belonged to Wang Zhe, or that Wang Zhe was even the victim.

That thought gave him the tiniest bit of relief.

He bent over, coughing twice more.

Then he spotted something half-buried under the truck, hidden beneath a layer of snow.

He crouched and brushed the snow off it, it was a watch.

An expensive wristwatch.

Xiao Bai had seen this watch a few times before.

And every single time, it had been on Du Yusheng's wrist.

"Fuck." Xiao Bai straightened up and swore as he looked at the box truck.

He jogged over and stopped beside Director Er.

It looked like Director Er had been standing there for quite a while without moving, his hat was now covered in a thin layer of snow.

"What's the situation at the scene?"

Xiao Bai scratched his nose and pointed towards the truck. "It's covered in blood inside, the smell is overwhelming. From the extent of it, it looks like a dismemberment scene."

Director Er gave a short nod. "And Wang Zhe?"

"That's the key issue," Xiao Bai said. "There's no body inside. And I just received information that the person who has been following him said Wang Zhe is indeed missing."

Director Er froze.

But he quickly came back to his senses.

"These reporters didn't even see a body and still dared to publish whatever they pleased," Director Er grumbled, then continued, "Looks like someone told the press that Wang Zhe died here, otherwise, they wouldn't have reported it like that. This person staged all this, tipped off the reporters, and only then did we hear anything about it. We still have to wait for the DNA results, what we need to determine first is whether anyone was actually harmed, whether Wang Zhe is dead or alive. Go question those who were following him, find out what really happened. And another thing, if the blood isn't Wang Zhe's, then someone else must be the victim."

Xiao Bai licked his lips, a troubling thought forming in his mind.

He slowly took out the wristwatch and showed it to Director Er.

"I've seen this on Brother Yu's wrist before."

Director Er froze, looked at the watch, then at Xiao Bai.

"What do you mean?" Director Er asked. "Du Yusheng's watch is here? Then he..."

A terrible thought surged through Xiao Bai's mind.

The best-case scenario is that Du Yusheng had simply passed through the area or that he was involved in the case. Worst case, the blood in the truck is his.

Clearly, Director Er had thought of the same possibility.

"Where is Du Yusheng?"

Xiao Bai shook his phone. "I can't reach him, I just tried. He's been suspended, hasn't he?"

Director Er drew a deep breath.

"Now that the press have published this, it does us no favours. Send someone to those news sites, tell them not to put out misleading reports. We, the police, don't even know if anyone's died yet, we don't know whose blood that is, we can't let them create panic. Then find out where Wang Zhe and Du Yusheng are, quickly. How did Wang Zhe disappear? Ask properly. As for whether this is connected to those previous cases, it's still too early to tell."

Xiao Bai glanced at the footprints on the ground and added, "Whoever did this is clever, he tipped off the reporters first and disrupted the scene. On top of that, it snowed today. This Guangming Road residential area is old, with no surveillance at all. Other than that box truck, we've found nothing of value."

Director Er nodded, agreeing with Xiao Bai's assessment.

But why was the watch left behind?

Xiao Bai felt a bit cold, rubbing his fingers as he looked at the box truck. Right now, he was hoping for one thing, that the blood inside this truck absolutely, definitely did not belong to Du Yusheng.

Don't you dare be dead.

‿︵‿︵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: June 23, 2025 by Angel

Edited: August 5, 2025 by Angel