Chapter 255: Chapter 254: Hanging by a Thread

On the second day after the New Year, Chen Xuan returned to Jiang City.

Although his parents didn’t quite understand why he wanted to return to work so quickly, Chen Xuan insisted, and they didn’t ask further.

Chen Xuan certainly wasn’t going back to work for a job.

He needed to establish a new means of contact with Jiang Siqi as soon as possible.

"The safest way is face-to-face," Lin Qing opined, "Without electronic devices, it’s absolutely safe. It’s hard to achieve this in the future, but for now, there are many places without cameras."

Chen Xuan agreed with this view, "Then how do we notify her about the meeting?"

"How about delivering a letter?" Liu Shuyue suggested, "I don’t really understand the eavesdropping and tracking methods you mentioned, but as long as the letter is handed to her personally and destroyed afterwards, it shouldn’t leak, right?"

"Uh... using an invisibility spell? I’m a bit afraid it would scare her." Chen Xuan thought it sounded a bit frightening. Recently, Jiang Siqi had been staying at the company. A transparent person suddenly handing her a letter and then standing by her side until she finishes reading it—that would be troubling if Jiang Siqi screamed out of fear.

"No need to be that complicated." Liu Shuyue laughed, "Just use a Talisman Messenger."

"Talisman Messenger?"

Before heading to the Everest, he had borrowed a Talisman Technique from Liu Shuyue, but now he had already returned it.

After listening to her explanation, Chen Xuan realized that Talisman Technique had such a handy tool—the letter paper itself is the talisman. Folded into a bird, it could automatically fly within visual range to the receiver. It could even set a destruction time, and when the time comes, the paper would self-incinerate without leaving any ash.

"This spell’s concept is quite advanced."

"It’s just a simple trick." Liu Shuyue shook her head, "Long-distance communication mainly relies on the Smoke Soul Pillar."

The problem is that placing a Smoke Soul Pillar in the Dimensional Limit Mechanism’s office is clearly unrealistic.

"No worries, as long as we can make contact normally this time, I can implant a hacker hardware into her phone. Its encryption algorithm is far stronger than software encryption," Lin Qing chimed in.

"Disassembling her phone face-to-face?" Chen Xuan doubted. Currently, Jiang Siqi is willing to cooperate with them mainly because she doesn’t want to lose her ability, and their demands are quite lenient. If it’s openly installing a backdoor on her phone, allowing her to realize she’s a spy when going to work at the mechanism, the situation would be completely different.

After all, Jiang Siqi isn’t exactly someone who came to them willingly.

She doesn’t even qualify as an insider.

"I have a way to do it without her knowing," Lin Qing said confidently.

"Alright." Chen Xuan glanced at the clock on the wall, noticing it was around 10 AM. Jiang Siqi’s phone was still located at the company. By noon, she would come downstairs for lunch, creating an opportunity for a visual contact should not be hard. "We three will go together—"

Before he could finish, the light outside the shop suddenly changed.

The trio watched as the quiet neighborhood street scene transformed into a narrow room emitting a cold white glow.

"Looks like you have a visitor," Lin Qing whistled.

Liu Shuyue, sensing the change, immediately moved back behind the cashier, taking on the role of a shop assistant.

"Why does it feel like a hospital?" Chen Xuan observed the room outside.

It was not large and could be seen at a glance. The ceiling hung an operating room’s shadowless lamp, and in the center stood a movable bed. The scrubbed white walls, gray-white tiled floors, densely bottled shelves, and the unchanging beep of instruments all indicated a hospital.

There was no one in the room.

But through another door directly opposite the store entrance, someone appeared to be having a conversation.

"They are speaking French," Lin Qing reminded.

French folks again?

Chen Xuan put on the translation earphones previously given by New Paris City, stepping into the center of the ward.

"Poor girl... Was her identity found out?"

"No, there’s no matching DNA record in the database, and no data from immigration, she might be undocumented."

The voices came from two men.

Chen Xuan leaned against the ward door, peeking out to find a long corridor. The conversationalists, with police uniforms that clearly indicated their identity, had their backs to the door.

Strange... these two don’t seem like customers of the Ability Store.

"If she’s undocumented, it makes sense. I heard from a colleague that the place of her death was scattered with cash, must have been targeted long ago. It’s just a street robbery, surely done by that damned Vakare gang."

"Who told her to go out with so much money at night, didn’t she deserve to be robbed for that?" the other sounded somewhat disinterested, "She was dead on the spot, yet insisted on being taken by ambulance to the hospital for ’rescue,’ when will this procedure ever change?"

"Stop complaining, declaring death is the hospital’s job. Once the coroner arrives, our job is done."

Girl... murdered?

And the police were speaking French.

An ominous feeling arose in Chen Xuan’s mind.

He quickly turned around, seeing that there indeed lay a person on the operating table, covered entirely with a green non-woven fabric. He hesitated, then retreated to the bedside, reaching out to lift a corner of the cover.

Elorie’s pallid face came into Chen Xuan’s view.

Instantly, he felt his heart skip two beats!

The last time they parted, Little Angel had been lively, brimming with youthful energy, but now she lay there motionless, eyes shut, lips turning purple, with a distinct bullet hole in the center of her forehead, and the oozing blood not even completely wiped clean.

She... died?

The enormous shock rendered Chen Xuan momentarily incredulous.

This was his second encounter with a guest’s death.

But at least Gildre had died peacefully of old age—witnessing his death had been like attending a destined funeral.

Elorie’s case was entirely different.

Clearly, she was murdered!

Wait... something went wrong. Chen Xuan suddenly noticed a clue—if the shop’s door opened to a hospital, it indicated a response to a guest’s summoning, but a deceased cannot summon the shop!

"Hello, I’m Jason the coroner. Is the victim in the ward?" a third voice came from outside the door.

"Yes, but we can’t officially declare her dead until you confirm," a policeman joked.

With the doctor arriving, they would enter the room soon!

Chen Xuan made a split-second decision, unplugging all the monitoring devices from Elorie’s body, and pushed the bed into the shop.

"Where’s the guest?" Lin Qing was puzzled as he wheeled in the hospital bed.

Chen Xuan didn’t have time to explain; after entering the shop, he immediately turned around and pressed the roller shutter button.

To speed up closing, he also grabbed the bottom of the door, pulling it down swiftly.

As the roller shutter hit the floor, the ward door swung open.

"She was the victim of the robbery—" the policeman paused dumbfounded, "Where did she go? Wait... where’s the bed!?"

"What’s going on?" the coroner was equally bewildered, "Did you bring her to the wrong ward?"

"Impossible! We stood guard at the door the entire time!" The shocked policeman surveyed the room around, but as it was so small, there was nowhere to hide. There was indeed another door at the back, leading to a dispensary, but it was closed off and not connected outside, and the space was equally cramped.

To confirm this, one policeman even checked that room, finding no one inside.

The deceased they delivered had disappeared without a trace, bed and all.

...

"This is Elorie!?" Lin Qing was equally startled at the sight of her paper-white face, but immediately placed her hand on Elorie’s neck, "No... there’s no pulse anymore."

As the cover was lifted further, her horrifying condition was revealed to the three of them.

Anyone seeing Elorie would assume she was dead—the gunshot wounds visible, her right arm almost torn by bullets, and her clothing drenched in blood. The bullet hole in her forehead was undoubtedly the fatal wound, with the surrounding skin showing slight burn marks, as if from close-range fire. Moreover, the blood on her body had coagulated into clots, it had been one or two hours since the incident occurred.

But Chen Xuan thought differently.

He took out the bar code scanner, flipping to the customer record item—sure enough, Elorie’s name was still there, not disappearing like Gildre’s after death!

That’s why the shop door connected to a hospital in another world.

Elorie probably summoned the shop before being shot.

Her name still on the list meant she hadn’t truly died, at least not in the eyes of the Ability Store!