Chapter 196: Is It Still Here?

After searching the place thoroughly, Guo Qiang and the other two experienced detectives stood in front of Xiao Yu. They shook their heads in frustration. Even they couldn’t find anything.

Xiao Yu frowned. He couldn’t assume these veteran detectives were just here to do busywork. Their skills were far beyond what most people could imagine. It was clear that trying to find the item using ordinary methods probably wasn’t going to cut it.

Activating his Eagle’s Eye, Xiao Yu personally searched the room.

Nothing.

“Could my theory be wrong?” Xiao Yu muttered to himself. “Maybe there’s no SD card, or maybe the killer found it when they came to murder the family?”

No, that didn’t add up. If it were that easy to find, why would the killer bother with murder? Why not just take the item and leave? Taking three lives—did they think it was as simple as slaughtering chickens?

Aside from the hitmen in that assassin group case he cracked earlier, it was rare for ordinary people—even when cornered—to kill like that. 

But killing three people? That was not something you see often.

In his two lifetimes in law enforcement, Xiao Yu had rarely encountered cases like this. It took a certain level of mental toughness to pull off something like that, and not just anyone had it.

If the killer was driven to murder, the item might have been still here.

Xiao Yu’s eyes continued to scan the room.

“If I were going to hide something in this room, where would I put it?”

Time to turn it up a notch.

There was no other way—without going full throttle, Xiao Yu wouldn’t be able to figure it out. As he pushed his mental gears into overdrive, he also activated his Psychology Expert ability.

He was going all in.

His expression turned cold, and any trace of emotion disappeared from his eyes. Step by step, he moved around the room, scanning every corner.

Finally, he stopped in the bathroom, standing in front of the toilet.

After ruling out all other possibilities, was it here?

As his eyes regained their usual sharpness, Xiao Yu stared at the toilet. 

“No one in their right mind would think to hide something in the toilet, right? And even if they did, they wouldn’t expect to find a card hidden in the dirtiest spot of all. No one would even bother checking here.”

Twenty minutes later, Guo Qiang showed up with a sledgehammer.

After turning off the water supply and draining the toilet, two officers lifted the toilet off the ground and carried it into the living room.

“Smash it,” Xiao Yu ordered, eyeing the toilet.

Bang!

Guo Qiang swung the sledgehammer, cracking the porcelain.

Bang!

Another hit and the toilet shattered into pieces.

“Hah!”

Xiao Yu crouched down, staring into the toilet drain. Right there, inside the smashed trap section of the pipe, he saw something stuck to the side. It was a tiny plastic case, secured with glass glue. No matter how many times the toilet was flushed, it would never wash away. 

Anyone who knows a thing or two about glass glue knows it’s incredibly waterproof and resistant to corrosion. If they hadn’t smashed open the toilet, no one would’ve found this thing—probably ever.

“Damn, this guy’s a real genius!” Guo Qiang exclaimed. 

His comment wasn’t directed at Xiao Yu but at whoever hid the card here—what a clever move.

Li Xin and Liu Hongqiao, on the other hand, were staring at Xiao Yu with strange expressions, as if they were looking at some kind of freak.

Is that really a normal human brain in there? How the hell did he think of this place?

If a human brain could come up with something like this, we’d be pissed! Why didn’t we think of it?

Ever since Xiao Yu joined the Criminal Investigation Unit, his colleagues had always felt like he had a lot going on upstairs. But if you spent an hour trying to figure him out, you’d just end up wasting that hour. You still wouldn’t understand how he ticks.

That was why he kept racking up all those first-class merits while the rest of us were nobodies.

So, did finding the memory card mean they cracked the case? 

No.

This damn card had a password lock.

Xiao Yu was so frustrated he wanted to curse. 

Are you out of your mind? 

We’re trying to get justice for your family of three, and what do we find? You not only hide the thing but also slap a password on it?

Is it really that hard to make things easier?

If Xiao Yu had been one of those internet trolls, this would’ve been the moment he started ranting away, smashing the keyboard, spouting angry words, ready to rage.

It was impossible not to be mad. This was just too much.

The password on the card only confirmed that there was something seriously wrong, a big secret—probably the reason the whole family was killed.

Should he call in some kind of password expert?

Slap!

Xiao Yu smacked himself on the forehead. 

‘Am I dumb? Did I forget you have the Hacker Expert ability? How many people in this world are better at computers than me?’

Xiao Yu started working on his laptop, writing a program to crack the password.

People rely on their accounts and passwords every day. So what happens if you forget your password?

There were only a few ways to crack it: brute force cracking, password database collisions, password library cracking… Anyone who understood password cracking knew it took, at most, thirteen steps—no matter what method you used.

Half an hour later.

Xiao Yu finished writing a small program.

With just a simple click of “start,” the process began.

Suddenly, his screen lit up like a rainstorm.

An endless stream of characters flooded the screen, as countless password combinations were rapidly being tested, attacking the encryption on the phone’s memory card, trying every possible password.

It was simple. It was rough.

One minute passed, then two, then three…

Suddenly.

All the data streams and characters vanished, and a new window popped up from the memory card connected to the computer.

Xiao Yu grinned, baring his teeth.

But before he could even enjoy his victory for five seconds, he opened one of the nine folders on the card. He clicked on it randomly. The smile on Xiao Yu’s face froze.

The first photo was of a naked person lying on a silver operating table.

In the second photo, the person’s body was hoisted up by mechanical arms, suspending him mid-air.

In the third photo, a doctor in scrubs—only their eyes were visible—stood beside the table, holding a scalpel.

In the fourth photo, the scalpel was cutting into the flesh of the person’s back.

Xiao Yu took a deep breath and pressed the arrow keys to move to the fifth photo.

The skin on the person’s back was being slowly peeled away from the body.

By the sixth photo, the lower half of the person’s back was completely skinned.

The seventh photo, the eighth, the ninth… until the twentieth.

A complete human skin had been peeled off the living body.

And then.

The part that made Xiao Yu freeze. The part that defied all understanding. The part that was both eerie and horrifying, appeared in the 48th photo.

The person, completely skinned, hadn’t died. Their blood-soaked, skinless body, with exposed, lidless eyes, was still moving.

Yes, even though the photos were still images, Xiao Yu could tell—the eyes were moving.

From the 45th photo onward, a doctor took the human skin from a container filled with some unknown liquid and carefully laid it over a white wax figure.

As the doctor stitched the skin onto the wax figure, it began to look eerily human.

After that, the folder had no more photos.

Xiao Yu sat there, frozen, for a full minute, unable to process what he’d just seen. One question kept running through his mind.

Was the person, who had been skinned alive… still alive?!