I was just telling a story, why is the whole internet urging me to turn myself in?

Chapter 75: The serial throat-slitting case reappears in Jiangzhou!

Room 2801, Yunding Yipin, living room.

Xu Zhengyang leaned against the wall, while Su Qing, holding a first-aid kit, skillfully treated the knife wound on his arm.

Grizzly pinned Venom and Hound side by side to the living room floor, both bound tightly with tethers like dumplings.

"Sir," Xu Zhengyang said, enduring the sharp pain of disinfecting his wound, his gaze fixed intently on Shen Feng, "those three moves you just made—"

""

"Yeah, I just messed around with it before and practiced for a couple of days." Shen Feng picked up the cup of warm goji berry water again and took a slow sip.

You just practiced casually for a couple of days?!

Xu Zhengyang and Grizzly Bear exchanged a glance, both seeing deep shock in each other's eyes.

The angle and timing of that chokehold takedown were at the level of a chief instructor in any top special forces unit!

How many times must a man have rolled through mountains of corpses and seas of blood to develop such terrifying muscular instincts?!

After Su Qing finished bandaging Xu Zhengyang, she stood up and looked at Shen Feng with a complicated expression.

She had just heard the explosion coming from the hallway from apartment 2802 across the hall.

But by the time she drew her gun and rushed over, everything was already over.

This man is intelligent enough to manipulate both the legitimate and criminal worlds of Jiangzhou, and has a strong mentality to be able to talk and laugh in front of provincial inspectors. Now—he even possesses such terrifying individual combat skills.

What kind of monster is he?!

Shen Feng felt a chill run down his spine under Su Qing's gaze. He quickly put down his thermos and changed the subject: "Captain Su, these two on the ground, plus the sniper Jackal is about to bring back from the abandoned building. Three top-tier members of the dark web, plus a heavy anti-materiel sniper rifle. This generous gift—isn't it enough for you and Director Zhou to get a first-class merit award at the provincial department?"

Su Qing glanced at the crippled hunting dog on the ground, took a deep breath, and asked, "What exactly do you want?"

Shen Feng screwed the lid on his thermos, gestured towards the ground with his chin, and said, "We helpful citizens cooperated with the Defense Agency to catch a thief. Do you think we should send someone to take over?"

Su Qing's lips twitched.

Catching a thief? She recognized the two folding short knives and the carbon fiber dagger on the ground; they were all controlled knives used by special forces.

Not to mention there was also a sniper equipped with a modified Barrett M82A1 sniper rifle.

These three "thieves," from their equipment to their tactical skills, would be S-class extremely dangerous wanted criminals in any country!

Su Qing crouched down and ripped open the hunting dog's collar, revealing a brand-like tattoo on its collarbone.

A hummingbird with outstretched wings, below which is the Latin word "Lucerna".

Lampman.

The top five professional hunting teams on the dark web.

Su Qing's fingers unconsciously clenched her pajama bottoms.

These top-tier assassins were all captured alive, yet they didn't even manage to harm a single hair on Shen Feng's head?

"Shen Feng," Su Qing stood up, her voice low, "you call this catching a thief?"

"Otherwise what?" Shen Feng spread his hands innocently. "They didn't have their IDs with them. How would I, a law-abiding ordinary citizen, know who they were? It's just that someone crawled in through the ventilation duct in the middle of the night, and we acted in self-defense."

Su Qing took a deep breath and swallowed the profanity that was about to come out.

She knew all too well that this man could never utter a single truth.

But the most important thing right now is not to argue with him, but to bring these three extremely dangerous prisoners back for interrogation!

"I need people," Su Qing said firmly.

"Take it." Shen Feng was very generous, even gesturing for him to enter. "Consider it a small gift for Captain Su as a token of my appreciation."

Twenty minutes later, four fully armed riot police vehicles silently drove into the underground parking garage of Yunding Yipin.

The three assassins were hooded and stuffed into separate riot cages inside three vehicles.

The convoy slowly drove out of the underground parking garage and into the empty night of Jiangzhou.

At a traffic light intersection, Su Qing rolled down the car window, looked up, and gazed with mixed feelings at the towering building that seemed to reach into the clouds in the night.

The lights in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows in room 2801 were completely turned off.

Su Qing leaned back in her chair and let out a long breath.

This man, who just survived a deadly assassination attempt by a top-tier dark web assassin team and even personally crippled a mercenary, can actually turn off the lights and go to sleep?!

What kind of mental fortitude does it take to be able to disregard the threat of death like that?

However, what Su Qing didn't know was—

At this moment, in bedroom 2801.

Shen Feng lay stiffly on the two-meter-wide bed, his eyes wide open like copper bells.

"I can't sleep, I just can't sleep!" Shen Feng roared inwardly. "Don't these freaks have any more tricks up their sleeves?! System, you son of a bitch, what's the use of giving me a fighting technique? Just give me a bulletproof vest already!"

"No, I need to quickly gain popularity points, and it would be best if I could even arm myself with teeth!"

At 9:00 AM the following morning, at the Jiangzhou Defense Station, in the high-level interrogation area on the second basement floor.

Construction began simultaneously on three interrogation rooms.

The three members of the Lamplighters were very stubborn, and conventional interrogation methods could not get them to talk.

The hound suffered a comminuted fracture of its right arm and was sweating profusely from the pain, but it gritted its teeth and didn't utter a single word even under the bright light.

To make matters worse, in order to prevent being hypnotized or tricked into revealing information, he bit his tongue, his mouth full of blood, and cursed in English before falling silent.

But Su Qing wasn't in a hurry at all. What she was waiting for wasn't the confession, but the data that Shen Feng was about to send.

At 10:30 a.m., my phone on the table vibrated; it was a message from Xiaoyu.

The Trojan horse that had been implanted in Liu Jianhua's computer, an insider in the IT department, finally intercepted a set of financial records for the "Lantern Bearer" order!

Su Qing stared at the bank transaction records on the screen, her brows furrowing deeper and deeper.

The reward amounted to three million US dollars, which was laundered through seven layers of offshore companies before finally being transferred to the Lamplighter's anonymous account in the Cayman Islands.

This level of money laundering is practically flawless.

But Xiaoyu, this abnormal technical genius, managed to dig out the initial payment node and trace the ultimate source of the funds through reverse engineering algorithms, pointing to a local Jiangzhou company called "Dingsheng Industry".

The moment Su Qing saw the name, a chill ran down her spine.

Dingsheng Industry.

Five years ago, the third victim in the sensational "serial throat-slitting case" that shocked the entire province was the former financial director of Dingsheng Industrial!

That case was the only unsolved Class A cold case in Su Qing's career. It was also the root of her PTSD.

Just as Su Qing was about to retrieve the case files from five years ago, the landline on her desk suddenly rang.

"Team Leader Su! A body has been found at an abandoned chemical plant in the eastern suburbs! The situation at the scene is extremely strange; the on-duty team is afraid to move and requests backup from the Special Case Team!"

Forty minutes later, in the eastern suburbs of Jiangzhou, at the abandoned Hongxing Chemical Plant.

When Su Qing lifted the yellow warning tape around her and crawled inside, Qin Zheng, the provincial inspector, had already arrived.

This veteran detective, known for his impartiality, was now squatting at the factory gate, smoking, his face looking extremely grim.

"Go in and see for yourself." Qin Zheng threw his cigarette butt on the ground, stood up, and stomped it out. "I've been a criminal investigator for twenty years, and I've never seen such a brazen murder scene."

Su Qing took a deep breath, put on shoe covers and gloves, and walked into the dimly lit factory.

The moment I stepped inside, a pungent smell of bleach mixed with a strong stench of blood assaulted my nostrils.

The deceased was a man in his thirties who was chained to a concrete pillar in the center of the factory.

There is a clean horizontal cut on the neck with smooth edges.

One fatal blow.

But what truly sent chills down Su Qing's spine was not the corpse itself, but the words written in black marker on the deceased's chest: "Come and arrest me."

The corpse's right hand was placed in a clenched fist position, with a piece of stiff cardboard held between the index and middle fingers.

Su Qing suppressed the churning in her stomach and carefully stepped forward, using tweezers to pull out the card.

In the very center of the card, half a blood-red fingerprint is imprinted.

"The forensic doctor's preliminary assessment is that the time of death was between 11 p.m. last night and 1 a.m. this morning." Qin Zheng walked behind Su Qing. "The deceased was named Ma Donglai. He had a criminal record, was involved in organized crime, and was the actual controller of several underground casinos in the eastern suburbs."

Su Qing didn't speak, but squatted down to carefully examine the wound on her neck, her body beginning to tremble slightly uncontrollably.

The incision begins below the left ear, runs across the entire anterior neck region, and terminates at the anterior border of the right sternocleidomastoid muscle.

The depth of the cut was carefully controlled, perfectly severing the carotid artery and trachea, yet the blade stopped precisely in front of the cervical vertebrae, without damaging the bone in the slightest.

Su Qing's pupils contracted sharply, and a fine layer of cold sweat instantly seeped out from her forehead. She seemed to hear again the heartbreaking cries of the families of the deceased from five years ago.

"What's wrong?" Qin Zheng noticed Su Qing's unusual behavior and frowned.

Su Qing closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths, and forced herself to calm down.

She stood up and looked around the entire factory.

The ground had been thoroughly treated with high concentrations of chemical reagents, emitting a pungent odor.

"Have you checked the three surveillance cameras around the factory?" Su Qing's voice was a little hoarse.

"I checked," Qin Zheng replied through gritted teeth. "The post-incident review revealed that all the signal interruptions occurred precisely during the time of the incident. This is definitely a top-tier veteran with extremely high counter-surveillance capabilities."

Su Qing closed her eyes in despair.

"Team Leader Qin," Su Qing asked, her face pale, "do you still remember—the serial throat-slitting case from five years ago?"

Qin Zheng was stunned for a moment, then his expression changed drastically as if he remembered something: "You mean—"

"Exactly the same. From the method of murder to the scene cleanup, even the provocative act of deliberately leaving half a fingerprint—the same thing the killer did in the case five years ago."

After Su Qing mentioned it, Qin Zheng remembered it too.

Five years ago, a series of throat-slitting cases resulted in three victims, zero physical evidence, zero eyewitnesses, and zero leads.

The task force consisted of several hundred people who worked tirelessly for fourteen months, but ultimately had to suspend the case due to "insufficient technical conditions."

That was the greatest humiliation for the Jiangzhou Defense Bureau in nearly ten years, and a huge weight on the hearts of all the veteran criminal police officers who participated in the war!

Qin Zheng took out his phone, his finger hovering over the dial button, and hesitated for two seconds: "Captain Su, given the extent of the cleanup at the scene—using conventional criminal investigation methods, I'm afraid—"

"I know," Su Qing interrupted him.

Five years ago, the case became a deadlock precisely because of this. The killer's counter-investigation capabilities had completely exceeded the scope of normal criminal investigation techniques.

The only clue was that half fingerprint, but the three incomplete fingerprints extracted from the scene five years ago have not matched any database in the country!

Su Qing stood in the center of the factory, surrounded by busy technicians and flashing evidence-gathering lights.

But at that moment, a young man who habitually carried a thermos cup suddenly appeared in her mind.

The source of funding for the lantern bearer is Dingsheng Industrial.

Dingsheng Industry has been implicated in a series of throat-slitting cases that occurred five years ago.

And just today, the perpetrator of the throat-slitting case struck again, brazenly provoking others!

Is all of this really just a coincidence?

Or perhaps—that man, hailed as the "Grandmaster" by the entire internet, had already foreseen this?!

Qin Zheng's voice came from behind, tinged with a deep sense of powerlessness: "Captain Su, I can coordinate with the provincial department. But you need to understand that if there's no breakthrough within seventy-two hours, this case—"

He hadn't finished speaking.

"Buzz!"

Su Qing's personal cell phone in her pocket suddenly vibrated briefly.

Su Qing subconsciously took out her phone.

The screen lights up, and a special notification pop-up from a live streaming platform appears prominently on the lock screen.

[Your favorite host, "Afeng Tells Stories," is coming soon!]

[Tuesday at 8 PM, see you in the live stream. We'll be telling a story about the throat.]

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