Chapter Ninety-Nine: The Five-Element Pill

“Did you kill her?” Chen Jin asked after a brief silence.

“No, I just happened to be passing by, hehe. All right, I have to hang up now. I already called the police, so they should be here soon.” The man replied.

“You—”

Beep, beep, beep...

Chen Jin was still about to press for more when the other party ended the call at once.

He set the phone down, then opened the recording and listened to the conversation again.

That’s right—he had recorded it. The moment he heard something off in the other man’s voice, he had turned on the phone’s recording function. In that fleeting instant, many thoughts had crossed his mind, especially when he heard that Hao Wenjia was dead. He even began to suspect that this man might be trying to frame him in some way, shifting the police’s attention onto him for a while so the culprit could make all the necessary arrangements to sever any connection.

Then Chen Jin sat at his desk and waited for the next call. About ten minutes later, an unfamiliar number rang.

“Hello, good afternoon,” Chen Jin answered.

“Hello, good afternoon. I am an officer with the Egret City Public Security Bureau. May I ask if this is Mr. Chen Jin?” the voice on the other end asked.

By the sound of it, the speaker was a man in his thirties.

“Yes, that’s me,” Chen Jin confirmed.

At the same time, he kept turning over the other man’s words in his mind, trying to find some flaw in them. After all, phone scams were common these days; who knew whether this call and the one before it were part of the same scheme? And then there was Hao Wenjia. Perhaps she wasn’t dead at all, and was using this method to swindle him instead.

In short, there were too many possibilities. Chen Jin could not make a correct judgment yet, so he did not give the supposed police officer too much information.

“Mr. Chen, we have a question we would like to ask you, and we will also make a voice recording for our files. Would that be all right?” The man on the other end spoke very politely.

“Yes, no problem,” Chen Jin agreed without hesitation. After all, he was already recording the call himself.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Since he had done it, he could hardly demand that others not do the same.

“Mr. Chen, what was your relationship with the deceased, Hao Wenjia?” the voice asked immediately.

“High school classmate,” Chen Jin answered simply.

“Anything beyond that?”

“No. We had no real contact. I only happened to run into her on the high-speed train a few days ago, and that was when I got her number.”

“I see. We discovered the deceased Hao Wenjia’s phone beside her remains. After turning it on and checking the recent call log, we found that you, Mr. Chen, were her last contact, and that your conversation lasted... thirteen seconds. This call was placed eleven minutes ago. May I ask what you discussed with her?”

“She was already dead before that call was made. The call was placed by someone else. My guess is that it was the killer. Also, I have a recording of that call,” Chen Jin replied calmly.

“Really? Would it be possible for you to send us that recording so we may continue our investigation?” The voice on the other end seemed pleasantly surprised.

“Yes, of course. Police and citizens should cooperate.”

“I’ll give you an email address, *****.cn. Please send it there. Would it also be possible for you to bring the original recording to the bureau and hand it over to us?” The caller recited an email address and then made another request.

Chen Jin quickly memorized the address and responded to the request. “That might be difficult. I’m in Xiahu County, Banana City, so... I can only send you the recording. I’m sorry.”

“Then could you please come to the Xiahu County Public Security Bureau to complete the filing paperwork?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Chen Jin said, agreeing to it.

“Thank you for your cooperation. We may still need some further assistance from you later. If it causes any inconvenience to your life, please contact us in time. Thank you,” he went on.

“May I ask about some of Hao Wenjia’s circumstances?” Chen Jin asked.

“Because the deceased’s identity is rather special, some matters... we are not able to disclose to you. I’m sorry,” he replied.

“She told me she had obtained aptitude for cultivation. She said that on the high-speed train, and as you know, there have been quite a few bad reports in the news lately... so perhaps you could investigate the people on that train. Oh, and after I got off the train, she arrived on Egret Island and called me again, saying she was being followed. I don’t know whether these things are connected, but maybe you can look into them,” Chen Jin added.

“There was such a thing? Thank you for bringing us this information. We’ll begin investigating at once,” the voice on the other end said with obvious excitement.

“...”

The two exchanged a few more polite words, though both were absent-minded, and the call ended soon after.

Chen Jin shook his head and let out a sigh.

Hao Wenjia was truly unlucky. She had not even begun to seek the path to immortality, and yet she had died like this, with all these complications piling up around her.

The road of cultivation is full of twists and turns; all kinds of bizarre calamities exist in it. Hao Wenjia had died beneath such a disaster, slain by another’s hand.

Only a few days ago, Chen Jin had still been chatting and laughing with her, and today he had received news of her death. Truly... he could only sigh.

Chen Jin paced around the office, then sat back down at his desk, opened his computer, and searched the news in Egret City.

After scrolling through several pages, he did not find a single report about some woman being murdered and her body dumped. Instead, he found a forum post describing how a woman had been brutally killed and her body abandoned in a run-down old alley.

There were a few pictures in the post, but none of them were very clear. They looked as though they had been taken from a great distance.

Since the images were blurry to begin with, even Chen Jin’s keen eyesight could not pierce through the pixelation. He could only infer the scene from the blood and from the corpse covered in a white sheet by the police.

The article also described some of the details: the victim’s chest and abdomen had been ripped open, her internal organs had all been removed, and only an empty body cavity remained. The death scene was extremely gruesome.

He did not even need the pictures; the article alone was enough to reveal the horror and bloodshed. Anyone with a vivid imagination could probably picture their own chest and abdomen being torn open, with all their organs removed.

After reading the article, Chen Jin sat there completely stunned.

All the internal organs had been removed? At once, he thought of an ancient cultivation method. There was no need to gather the five elements’ spiritual materials, nor to laboriously transform the vital energy of heaven and earth into five-element essence. So long as one extracted a person’s organs, collected enough for three hundred people, and refined them into a Five Elements Pill, then swallowed it, one could condense the Five Qi True Essence and break through to the Spirit-Focusing Realm in a single leap.

“Has this demonic art actually been passed down?” Chen Jin found it utterly unbelievable.

...