Life Game In Other World
Chapter 660: Clues (Long - for Monthly Tickets)

Chapter 660: Chapter 660: Clues (Long Chapter for Monthly Tickets)

"Do you feel it?"

In a convenience store by the street, He Ao sat in a corner seat, looking across at Jia Xi.

"Hmm,"

Jia Xi looked at the meatball in front of her that she had bitten into and nodded slightly, "There’s a clumpy thing in my throat."

"Follow the route that Grandfather just told you and circulate these energies."

He Ao continued.

"Mm-hmm!"

Jia Xi nodded.

She closed her eyes slightly, chewing the piece of meat in her mouth, while seemingly entering a meditative state.

In the early stages of Martial Arts Training, there were two ways to acquire energy: one was through the ’Heaven Qi’ that entered the chest cavity via breathing, and the other was the ’Earth Qi’ that appeared in the throat after food entered the body.

What He Ao was now teaching Jia Xi was this method of absorbing and utilizing ’Earth Qi’.

"Grandfather,"

With her eyes closed, Jia Xi opened her eyes, glanced at He Ao, and said carefully, "I didn’t catch those clumpy things."

"It’s okay, keep trying."

He Ao looked at his granddaughter and smiled.

The energy content varies with different foods. From experiments he conducted in the Regit Copy World, He Ao found that normal animal meat products had the highest energy content, followed by plants, then artificial meat, and finally, synthetic starch products.

The synthetic minced meat of the Federation was made from artificial meat.

This type of meat did not have high energy intensity, but it was cheap and available in large quantities. In the initial stages of learning to master Earth Qi, it was the best material for practice.

He Ao had not expected Jia Xi to be divinely inspired and to master the guiding of Earth Qi in an instant.

When teaching the guidance of Heaven Qi earlier, He Ao noticed that perhaps due to her age, Jia Xi was not quick to grasp this patient and meticulous guidance. However, Jia Xi was a strong learner; once she got the hang of it, she could quickly master this circulation method.

Coupled with the potent energy utilization efficiency after He Ao performed the bone marrow cleansing on her, Jia Xi’s training using Earth Qi wouldn’t be slow.

As time passed by, the takeout boxes in front of Jia Xi were opened one by one, and the number of meatballs inside them dwindled.

And He Ao kept encouraging his granddaughter and guiding her to continue trying after each failure.

Finally, when eating the eighth meatball, Jia Xi’s furrowed little eyebrows finally relaxed. She looked up excitedly at He Ao, "Grandfather, I did it!"

"Wonderful!"

He Ao encouraged his granddaughter with a smile, raised his hand, and high-fived her small hand, then he looked down at the takeout box in front of him, smiled at Jia Xi, "Shall we continue to consolidate?"

"Yep yep!"

Jia Xi withdrew her hand and nodded vigorously.

Seeing his granddaughter’s training on the right track, He Ao breathed a sigh of relief.

He opened the takeout box in front of him, eating the meatballs while channeling the energy within, and raised his wristband, opening the data uploaded by YiXiya.

This data did not include his son and daughter-in-law’s information; YiXiya must not have obtained it from the Saint Joen City Police Department yet.

The data YiXiya had uploaded to the cloud were her previous investigative findings on the Night Hawk case.

The document at the very front of these materials was the investigation report on the Night Hawk case by the Pollution Cleaning Department.

He Ao roughly skimmed through this report, finding that its content was almost identical to the information previously disclosed by YiXiya.

The beginning of the report detailed how the investigation team discovered the warehouse where Night Hawk kept the Polluted Monsters and found evidence of Night Hawk breeding the monsters and kidnapping ordinary people to feed them. After collecting sufficient evidence, they proceeded to capture Night Hawk.

The final outcome of the incident was Night Hawk injuring members of the investigation team and escaping.

However, there was one point in the report where it was not clearly stated whether Night Hawk had used the Polluted Monsters to injure the investigators.

And the verb used here was "injure," not "kill."

This proved that Night Hawk might not have intended to kill at that time.

In other words, the situation had not reached its most extreme point, and there might still have been room for maneuver.

But the subsequent content of the report indicated that Night Hawk had from then on "disappeared."

The investigation team sealed off Saint Joen City, checking everyone at all four city gates without finding any traces of Night Hawk’s departure. Night Hawk had not attempted to contact the Pollution Cleaning Department to clear his name either.

The next section mentioned that over a month later, the Chief of the Pollution Cleaning Department found Night Hawk and killed him, but the report did not touch on what happened in between at all.

It was as if nothing had happened during the month Night Hawk "disappeared" - as if he had simply evaporated from the world, and the Pollution Cleaning Department had done nothing.

This was clearly unreasonable.

Obviously, there were certain events from that month hidden within this report.

What exactly Night Hawk did during his "disappearance," and how the investigation team found "Night Hawk," was all a blank.

In this report, the investigation team originally just planned to "capture" Night Hawk, and Night Hawk only injured people and fled; neither side had crossed the final line.

But in the end, why did the investigation team and the Chief of the Pollution Cleaning Department decide to kill Night Hawk?

What escalated the situation to the point where Night Hawk had to die?

According to YiXiya, the Chief of the Pollution Cleaning Department had high hopes for Night Hawk, so on a personal level, if the conflict was like in the beginning, limited to just "capture," he likely wouldn’t have chosen to kill Night Hawk on the spot.

Unless at that time, the Chief already had reasons that left him with no choice but to kill Night Hawk.

Moreover, Night Hawk’s reaction was quite strange. If he truly had bred Polluted Monsters and was a hypocritical sanctimonious man, with his strength, coupled with the Polluted Monsters he bred, there was absolutely no need to "hold back."

He was the person in charge of the Pollution Cleaning Department in Saint Joen City; he could have easily wiped out the entire investigation team and then, while the Department was in disarray and headless, slip out of the city and escape to freedom.

Instead of only injuring the investigation team, he gave the investigators a chance to respond, allowing them to use the power of the Pollution Cleaning Department to lock down the city, blocking any chance he had to leave the city.

But if he had done nothing wrong, and the breeding of Polluted Monsters was slander, and if the Chief of the Department was still his ’Bo Le’, he did not need to injure the investigators and flee capture.

With his strength and background, the Pollution Cleaning Department would not treat him too harshly.

Unless he had some reason that made it impossible for him to be "captured."

That reason might be that Night Hawk did not trust the "investigation team" and feared that they would harm him, but during the time of his "disappearance," he had never once contacted his former subordinates to try to "prove his innocence."

In this whole process, many of Night Hawk’s actions were "against common sense."

And actions that are usually incomprehensible always have underlying reasons that adhere to logic.

He Ao flipped back to the first page of the report.

He stared at the paragraphs at the very beginning of the report.

Even though the report used many intentionally misleading statements and narrative techniques at the very front, blurring the entire investigative process of the investigation team, it directed the reader’s attention towards Night Hawk breeding Polluted Monsters.

But He Ao still meticulously analyzed a fact from the beginning of this report.

The investigation team’s inquiry began not with those missing person cases, but with the warehouse where Night Hawk was breeding polluted monsters.

First, the investigators found the warehouse where Night Hawk was breeding polluted monsters and then looked into the disappearances of food delivery people and the homeless population.

This is not the normal process for investigating cases.

Typically, investigations start from minor details, finding traces of a case and moving from the periphery to the core, from the shallow to the deep.

Like how YiXiya started with investigating the apparent disappearance of a delivery person, then followed the leads to uncover Vite, who was breeding polluted monsters at a deeper level.

That is a normal investigative procedure.

But in this case, the warehouse, a ’truth’ theoretically buried at the deepest level, was laid bare right from the start.

Then they followed this truth to look for clues about Night Hawk kidnapping ordinary people.

It was as if they knew the answer in advance and then used that to trace back the steps to solve the puzzle.

There are only two possibilities for such a scenario.

One is that this ’warehouse’ is merely a prop, not actually belonging to Night Hawk, something the investigation team fabricated to frame Night Hawk.

The other possibility is ’informing’; the clues about the warehouse weren’t discovered by the investigation team but were instead provided by someone who completed the early clue-gathering phase and found the breeding warehouse, then exposed this hidden ’warehouse’ to investigators.

He Ao personally leans more towards the latter possibility.

If it were the former, then this entire investigative report would be based on a completely false case, making it entirely unnecessary to beat around the bush—just write it however to blame Night Hawk.

Of course, the latter does not necessarily mean complete truth either—the warehouse could be real, there might be an informant, but some details may be ’not entirely true.’

Sometimes, even a small amount of ’not entirely true’ information can lead an event to turn out quite differently.

Such documents often appear more credible than those fabricated out of thin air.

He Ao chewed on a meatball, his gaze fixed on the text atop the report.

If there indeed were an ’informant’.

This informant managed to locate ’Night Hawk’s warehouse’ right under Night Hawk’s nose and reported ’Night Hawk’ to the higher-ups of the Pollution Cleaning Department; this informant’s influence in Saint Joen City must not be insignificant.

It’s just uncertain whether they’re a subordinate of Night Hawk or belong to some third party.

If a subordinate, reporting is mostly likely for personal advancement.

But considering the move by the Pollution Cleaning Department to appoint an interim officer from another city, apparently no one climbed the ranks due to the Night Hawk incident, so the informant likely isn’t one of Night Hawk’s subordinates.

If it’s a third-party force, then why would they report Night Hawk?

He Ao felt as though uncountable clues in his mind had tangled into a knotted ball of yarn.

He calmed his mind and temporarily set those thoughts aside.

Usually, when faced with such a mess, it’s often because a key piece of information is missing.

And such key information can only be found through further investigation, where some trace might be hinted at.

He Ao closed the report and opened the other files uploaded by YiXiya.

These files weren’t many because the report revealed pitifully little information to investigate, and much of it had already been destroyed by the investigation team.

Thus YiXiya could only perform a secondary investigation based on a few mentioned cases involving missing vagrants, delivery people, and couriers.

At this moment, most of the material uploaded by YiXiya consisted of information obtained from the secondary investigation.

The most core part was the clue about the delivery men that YiXiya had mentioned.

In the original text of the investigation report, it was mentioned that Night Hawk had kidnapped three delivery men around three months ago near the South City district to feed the Polluted Monsters.

YiXiya had put in a lot of effort to find the delivery companies these three men worked for, and successfully obtained the locations where they went missing, as well as the order information they were delivering at the time of disappearance.

All three delivery men had gone missing while delivering food on Wint Street in South City, and the recipients of the deliveries happened to be three neighboring locations.

They were Wint Street No. 9, No. 12, and No. 13, respectively.

YiXiya then immediately headed to Wint Street, but she didn’t get any clues from these three addresses. The owners and staff of these locations all claimed that they had not ordered takeout at the time and mentioned that several groups of people, who seemed to be from the investigation team, had already asked them about it.

It was not long after her visit to Wint Street that YiXiya learned about the missing delivery men on Saint Joen Ninth Street and began her investigation.

He Ao was already aware of the events that followed.

After skimming through these files, He Ao then opened another file in a different folder.

In fact, aside from the case of the missing delivery men on Saint Joen Ninth Street, YiXiya had gathered clues from several other missing cases that occurred after Night Hawk’s ’defection.’

From the information on these disappearing cases, it was apparent that YiXiya had investigated each to some extent, and had even narrowed down the rough area where incidents occurred to a place called Green Olive Street.

But the district was located at the crossroads between South City and East City, being one of the largest districts in Saint Joen City with a complex population, making the investigation much more difficult than in Saint Joen Ninth Street. Therefore, YiXiya chose to investigate the more straightforward Saint Joen Ninth Street first, instead of this district.

After going through all the information, He Ao handed over the details of the missing cases to Eve for summarization, then exited the private cloud software.

At this time, Jia Xi had already finished eating the three servings of meatball cheese bread in front of her.

The little girl looked up obediently with wide eyes at He Ao.

He Ao glanced at her small stature and then at the takeout boxes on the table, each larger than her head.

Does this girl have a dimension pocket in her stomach?

"Are you full?"

He Ao smiled at her.

The bread and meatballs in front of He Ao, which he had casually eaten while reviewing the documents, were also finished.

"Mmm-hmm!"

Jia Xi nodded quickly, then she asked with some confusion, "Grandpa, are we going home now?"

"No, we’ll go somewhere first."

He Ao shook his head and stood up.

The two of them tidied up the table and left the convenience store.

And just after He Ao walked to the roadside and booked an autonomous taxi, his wristband vibrated. It was a message from YiXiya,

YiXiya: [Old sir, the information about your son may have to wait until tomorrow, as they haven’t obtained the documents there yet. Also, I’ve just uploaded some data to the cloud software, please remember to check it.]

He Ao: [Okay, I’ve already checked it.]

There was a pause on the other side, as if pondering, and after quite a while, another message came,

YiXiya: [So which area are you planning to start your investigation from? Wint Street?]

He Ao: [No, we’ll start from the Green Olive Street district.]