Transform into a human

Donald lit a cigarette, intentionally testing Li: "Who do you think it is?"

Because she was looking for a conman, the policewoman subconsciously thought of Yue Lai; similar approaches always have some common ground.

She quickly came up with an idea; she imagined herself as the murderer:

"The living environment I choose must be conducive to the advancement of my spiritual practice. In other words, I need to be able to deceive people anytime and anywhere. Apart from spiritual practice, this is also necessary to conceal my identity."

Li directly ruled out one option:

"It shouldn't be Lu Huai. A sugarcane farmer spends most of his time in the fields. Although he may have opportunities to 'deceive' people when he comes to the city to sell sugarcane, it accounts for a very small percentage of his total activities."

"As for Bravo Ser... I think we should go to 'Sweetest' candy store and see. It's easy to tell if a candy store owner is a fraud—from his candy."

Donald nodded approvingly:

"The logic is sound, but the only problem is..."

He pointed to the top of his head:

"It's already very late. The candy store won't be open at this hour. You should learn to rest, Wales."

The policewoman joked:

"Are you going to admit you're getting old, Officer Donald?"

The old police officer said helplessly:

"Before you met Yue Lai, you wouldn't have broken into a private residence at night, especially without a search warrant."

"What does it have to do with him?" Li pouted in dissatisfaction. "But no one has ever stipulated that innocent children have to follow the rules."

Donald stomped his half-smoked cigarette into the ground:

"You're really not giving the old folks a way to survive. If I refuse, won't you and Wande talk behind my back about me being a 'completely inflexible old man from the last century'?"

Li stuck out her tongue:

"How could I dare? These are all things Wande said!"

"So, do you want to be a 'completely inflexible old man from the last century'?"

The old police officer said irritably:

"Let's go to the candy store."

The sweetest candy store in the old town exudes a cheap feel from its name and decor. Of course, this is undoubtedly in line with the target customer group. You can't expect to open a high-end candy store in the red-light district.

Unsurprisingly, the candy store was already closed when the two arrived. Despite doing something that was theoretically illegal, Li and Donald, one in red and one in black, did not act suspiciously at all. They seemed to have a real search warrant and were full of confidence.

Donald gripped the lock, and when he released it, the finely crafted brass lock transformed into a pattern of woven silk threads. With a gentle flick, the lock disintegrated into a floor covered in lines.

Li eagerly pushed open the door, and by the dim neon lights of the street, he could roughly see the layout of the store:

Several jars of various sizes stood on the ground; the small ones were only big enough to pickle a head of cabbage, while the large ones could fit a child. The small jars were transparent, and you could see the cheap candies inside through the glass. They were all the same color and packed together, which must have been very popular with the children in the red-light district.

Li took out a red candy from the small jar. The rich strawberry flavor enveloped her taste buds. Although it tasted like it was full of cheap additives, it was definitely worth the price.

"This price doesn't seem like that of a swindler, and it doesn't seem to be him either."

If the female reporter wasn't the one either, then they would have come up empty-handed.

"Yeah, how could I be a shrewd businessman?"

Li's skin instantly turned red, and Donald was the first to swing the bat!

The tricks of the trade are in wielding knives and sticks!

The two large jars shattered instantly, and a boy and a girl shot out, one completely green and the other completely red, intending to shield the shop owner from Chizi's fist and the Divine Constable's stick.

Seeing that they were two children, Li Shi's fierce punches did lose some of their power, but Donald was not so easy to deal with!

His skill with the knife and stick reached a level of perfection. The old policeman changed his chopping to sweeping, using the lower half of the long stick to strike the child's waist, and then, without losing momentum, he chopped down at the shop owner again.

Bravo Serscha tried to block, but the staff he wielded was more than just a staff! Just before contact, the tip of Donald's staff suddenly transformed into a precious sword, turning the long staff into a crescent blade!

Without any resistance, the crescent blade chopped down the shopkeeper's fists, the sensation as if splitting a piece of withered old wood. Donald immediately frowned, realizing that he was fighting a corpse.

He held back, swiftly slicing the two children who lunged at him in half at the waist. He then slapped Bravo Ser down with the blade, the long handle piercing his heart and penetrating several inches into the ground, pinning the man firmly to the earth.

But he had clearly overdone it; Bravo Ser felt nothing as he saw that he had lost both hands, and things he had forgotten were suddenly remembered.

"So I'm already dead, hahaha, I can't believe I died..."

"It's a pity I haven't tasted the apple and strawberry flavors yet; it was so difficult to make them..."

"Dead..."

The sound gradually faded and eventually disappeared into the night of the red-light district.

Li stared blankly at the two children. They were originally just two children who wanted to buy candy, but they had ended up being turned into candy—strawberries, apples…

Looking at the densely packed jars in the store, she could no longer suppress the churning in her stomach and went to the roadside to vomit violently.

"vomit--"

I vomited so violently, my nose and snot were running everywhere, I vomited so much... my heart was breaking.

While contacting the officers on duty at the branch office, Donald closed the store door to secure the scene, then went to the street and patted Li on the back.

"The candy you ate should be fine..."

"I know, I know!" Li Chong Donald shouted, attracting the few eyes that could be seen in the dead of night. In the end, the policewoman could no longer hold back her tears.

"I know... but I didn't know lives here could be so cheap!"

"This is the police hub!"

In the darkness, someone seemed to have heard the joke and let out a disdainful laugh.

"What are you laughing at!"

Li's imposing presence almost broke through the limitations of an outsider, but at this moment she paid no attention to this matter. Instead, like a furious lion, she instantly arrived at the source of the laughter, grabbed the stranger's throat, and slammed him hard against the wall.

"I asked you what you're laughing at!"

The man never imagined that simply laughing would bring him such a disaster:

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make fun of you..."

"ah--"

Unusually, Donald did not try to calm Li down, but instead silently pondered everything that had just happened.

They were very familiar with the shop owner's state; he was a walking corpse, a man briefly resurrected by a conman. Once the lie that he was "still alive" was exposed, he would turn back into a corpse.

One question after another flooded his mind. Did the swindler know their whereabouts and want to give him and Li a hard time? Or was this just a trick by the swindler to deceive people?

Of course, the murdered Bravo Thur was no good either. Donald recognized him as one of the Thirty-Six Eccentrics, a sugar painter.

This was originally a magical craft that could bring the dead back to life, but in this person's hands it became an evil art, turning the living into the dead, specifically to lure fatherless children in the red-light district, making them into sugar figurines to showcase the "magic" of his skills.

Most of these children's mothers are subhuman, many of whom don't even have legal status, let alone their children. Their deaths wouldn't even cause a ripple.

In a sense, that swindler was acting on behalf of God.

On the other side, Li had already vented her emotions. Although she controlled her strength, the man was still beaten so badly that he couldn't stand up straight and curled up on the ground, emitting painful howls.

Thanks to the police's recent heightened alert, several rapid-response airships arrived over the crime scene shortly afterward. Falken and another superintendent personally led the team, and without waiting for the airships to land, the two jumped from the sky.

Falken glanced at Li, whose skin was flushed red, and it wasn't hard to guess why the man beside him was curled up on the ground:

"What's wrong, Donald?"

The veteran officer knew his superior wasn't asking about the case.

Some wept, some laughed.

Another superintendent, knowing that the councilor's daughter had just graduated and hadn't yet encountered cases that dissected human nature, said coldly:

"That was really too lenient."

Unfortunately, the man was oblivious to the danger. Overjoyed at the arrival of the police, he stubbornly stood up despite the pain and went to the candy store entrance.

"Officer, that crazy woman..."

"Bang!"

Before he could finish speaking, Falken punched the man in the stomach.

This is where the advantage of experience comes in; while it may not cause serious injury, the pain it inflicts is more nuanced and profound than that of Li.

"Is this a customer of a prostitute? Revoke his access to the Chain Crystal Network and detain him according to the law."

"yes!"

Another superintendent patted Falken on the shoulder: "I'll handle the sewing, you deal with the media."

Falken was very unhappy: "Why is it me again!"

As they were talking, several private miniature airships had already docked in the distance. Although it was late at night, the spaceships that streaked across the sky were too eye-catching, and the police's actions still attracted a lot of people, such as... reporters.

Donald saw an unexpected person in the crowd—

"Wei Cheng?"

Unlike the others who had just arrived from the new district, this female reporter from the local newspaper looked like she had just fled from an alley in a red-light district. Her clothes were disheveled and her hair was messy—ignoring the lipstick marks on her neck that hadn't been wiped clean, she did look like a refugee.

In fact, this reporter was the main suspect Donald was looking for. If the candy store owner was a conman, he could only get a meager profit from each customer. But the reporter was a master conman.

Li also noticed the woman—it was hard not to notice her given her "appearance." Having calmed down, she clearly shared the same thought as Donald, and the two tacitly began investigating the reporter.

"Huh? He's a columnist for 'Urban Fringe'?"

No wonder he always hangs out in the red-light district.

Using the computing power of the Chain Crystal Rune, Li quickly browsed through all the articles she had written. One article caught her attention; judging from the date, it was published when she was still in the university town:

At midnight, I walked into "Emerald Street" again, where the air was thick with cheap perfume and unfulfilled promises. But under the flashing neon lights, I found "Sunshine"—though that was just a name I gave her, there was a light in her eyes.

"It's all for my daughter." She lit a cigarette, her slender fingers trembling. She told me that her daughter suffers from "scaling" disease, a common condition among siren-like subhumans, and the exorbitant medical expenses left her with no other choice.

She pointed to the little girl's pale smiling face on the phone screen, but half of the scales on her cheeks had fallen off, making her look even uglier on her cute face.

But that was her whole world.

"I did this so that she would never have to understand this in the future."

She recounted the story of "Morgan"—the man who controlled the street, taking a 70% cut, and binding them with fear and debt.

"He said he was 'protecting' us." Yang Guang smiled wryly, his eyes sweeping over several burly figures in the shadows of the street.

“I calculate every night,” she said, her voice as soft as a whisper, “that one bottle of my daughter’s sap requires me to stand here for five nights. I’m selling my nights to buy her future days.”

I asked her if she was scared. She remained silent for a long time, looking out the window.

"I'm afraid of the day my daughter finds out the truth. But I'm even more afraid that I won't live to see that day."

……

Wei Cheng’s other articles also use a similar writing style to focus on these “marginalized figures,” with women in the red-light district being the most numerous. Li noticed this article because of the name “Morgan.”

While the police were overwhelmed by Zhenhai Sword and Yue Lai in the University City, this article caused quite a stir in Singapore. The officers who remained on duty had to dismantle the criminal group led by "Morgan" that same day. This is why Donald failed to find his "informant" and embarrassed himself in front of his juniors.

But this reporter... she did nothing wrong, didn't she?

The report looks very authentic, so it's highly unlikely to be a scam.

"We finally found three people, but it turned out they were all gone."

Donald did not respond to her, but instead stood to the side with a deep frown.

After their investigation, Falken finally finished dealing with all the various dignitaries who came to report, and walked over to pat Li on the shoulder:

"The police headquarters also needs some positive news. Your report in the university town received a good response, and Navigator Middle School invited you to give a speech."

"Huh? A speech?"

Li wasn't intimidated. Although Navigator High School was her alma mater, so was Federal University. When she gave her graduation speech as an outstanding graduate representative, she faced even more people and still spoke fluently. But was this the right time?

"You should relax too. Even a child shouldn't always be so tense."

"The time is tomorrow... no, I should say today now. I was going to help you postpone it, but now it seems best to rest."

Falken glanced at the john, who was leaning against a street lamp and seemed to feel that it was already dark outside.

Li also felt that she might be too tense. Yue Lai just told her to do whatever she wanted.

"Okay... I'll take a nap tomorrow morning and go over in the afternoon."

Wei Cheng, who had just walked over, overheard these words.

"Eh? You're Li Hualei, the 'Goddess General of Zhenhai Pass'?"

What an embarrassing nickname...

"It's me. And you are?"

She had at least learned a few tricks from Yue Lai, so she pretended not to know Wei Cheng.

"I am Wei Cheng, a columnist for the newspaper 'Zuxia'. May I have the honor of covering your speech tomorrow?"

What's there to report? It's almost dawn, and she hasn't even prepared her speech yet!

However, she had a good impression of the reporter and found it difficult to say no.

"Miss Wei Cheng, it is my honor."