Chapter 95.4

By the sink, Lin Shuyou felt ashamed, angry, and somehow in agreement with what the other had said. His emotions were so tangled that sweat beaded on his forehead.

Li Zhuiyuan sat down at his desk and set the scroll aside.

Then he opened his notebook, picked up a fountain pen, and while recalling the contents of the Sutra of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva, began designing a method to trigger potential during spirit-writing.

For example, a way to let Lin Shuyou forcibly summon officials and generals he otherwise couldn’t.

He might have said he didn’t need the guy, but in reality, he was already planning how to exploit him to the bone.

Li Zhuiyuan didn’t feel the slightest guilt about it. He might be growing a thin skin of humanity—but that was only for a few in his circle.

To everyone else, he remained indifferent.

Besides, if it weren’t for all the secret methods and ancient texts in his head, that night on the training field he might have been killed by the White Crane Child that this idiot managed to summon.

Not only did he not kill the guy, but Binbin even paid his medical bills.

And when he was lying in the infirmary bed, eyes flashing with vertical pupils, it was Binbin who shut them for him. Otherwise, he’d have died to a corpse demon right then.

All things considered, the guy owed him two lives.

So if he only asked for one in return—that was a fair deal.

Suddenly, Li Zhuiyuan stopped writing. That train of thought just now… did it mean he was starting to resonate with the “examiner”?

At that moment, the dorm door opened.

“Xiaoyuan-ge, I’m back.”

“That fast?”

“My dad’s service attitude is top-notch.”

Tan Wenbin handed over a dossier and documents to Li Zhuiyuan.

Li Zhuiyuan took them and, upon opening the dossier, tapped directly on the ID photo of Tang Qiuying.

It was her.

Tan Wenbin, noticing, walked over to the windowsill and picked up the pair of high heels he watered every day.

“High heels, so your name is Tang Qiuying, huh?

Greetings, senior sis—no, senior aunt.”

He turned to look at Li Zhuiyuan. “But Xiaoyuan-ge, she’s missing. What now?”

“Now that we know her name, it’s much easier. And her date of birth is on the file too. I can find her corpse.”

“Xiaoyuan-ge, seriously, it’s a shame you didn’t become a homicide detective.”

“Very few of the dead actually become malevolent spirits.”

Li Zhuiyuan opened a separate folder for the Qiu Minmin case and started flipping through it quickly.

Tan Wenbin, hearing the crisp flipping sounds, couldn’t help but mutter, “Jealous.”

Still scanning pages, Li Zhuiyuan said, “Compared to what Runsheng and Yin Meng are going through right now, I’ve been pretty slack.”

“That’s because you’re too smart, Xiaoyuan-ge. What they’re doing now is just the price of chasing a genius.”

Tan Wenbin leaned against the desk. With today’s task done, he felt a creeping sense of aimlessness and frustration.

If he could, he’d gladly drive nails into his own coffin or test poisons on himself.

The problem was, he knew it would only get him killed.

Sigh…

The saddest thing about being useless was that even if you wanted to risk everything like the others, you didn’t even have the right to try.

Still caught in melancholy, Tan Wenbin absentmindedly picked up the scroll from the desk.

At the very least, he thought, he could offer some praise for Yuan-ge’s new piece.

But the moment he unrolled it, he froze.

“Xiaoyuan-ge… is this Granny Yu?”

Li Zhuiyuan immediately put down the file in his hands and turned to look at Tan Wenbin, asking very seriously:

“Binbin-ge, you recognize her?”

“What a coincidence—this morning I saw that photo in the archives. It looks exactly like your drawing. Only difference is, in the photo, the lanterns she held had words on them. Yours don’t.”

Li Zhuiyuan set the file down completely, leaned back in his chair, tilted his head up, and a smile slowly spread across his face.

“Xiaoyuan-ge… what’s going on?” Tan Wenbin asked, surprised. In his memory, Yuan-ge almost never made such emotional gestures.

Staring at the ceiling, Li Zhuiyuan muttered:

“So it works after all.

All right then,

from now on,

I’ll start calling them out—one by one!”

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