Chapter 130: The Overlooked Clue

The moment the three of them met, Chen Mo and Su Yuqing naturally greeted their teacher right away.

Tian Jing immediately flashed a gossipy smile at the two of them. "I heard you two are dating. Is it true?"

It wasn’t school hours, and Tian Jing didn’t like to put on airs as a teacher. She was just treating it as a casual chat between friends.

Hearing this, Su Yuqing glanced shyly at Chen Mo, not knowing how to answer.

Chen Mo, however, smiled and asked back, "Who did you hear that from?"

"It’s all over the place. The rumor is that you two are already living together," Tian Jing said with a chuckle.

As she spoke, she didn’t forget to use the break in conversation to correct Chen Mo and Su Yuqing’s jogging pace.

"When you’re jogging, your posture is also very important. You need to keep your upper body straighter and pay attention to your breathing rhythm..."

Following her demonstration, Su Yuqing gradually found a suitable rhythm for her jog.

But hearing her words, Su Yuqing couldn’t manage a single reply.

After all, she was naturally shy and introverted.

Chen Mo said with a smile, "We’re only living together for some special reasons. People are always spreading baseless gossip."

"So you’re saying it really is just the two of you living together?" Tian Jing asked with a grin.

"Ahem, more or less," Chen Mo didn’t deny it.

Tian Jing immediately looked the two of them up and down and said with a laugh, "You kids have it good these days. Back in my day, things were so strict. Not just at school, but even more so at home. If you were caught doing something like this and your parents were told, you’d get the beating of a lifetime when you got home."

"It’s pretty much the same now, but it’s a matter of whether we’re lucky enough to have good teachers and good parents," Chen Mo replied with a smile.

"That’s true. Take your homeroom teacher. Don’t be fooled by how serious she always seems on a normal day; she’s actually very open-minded." Tian Jing chuckled, putting in a good word for He Xiaoyun.

"If only there were more good homeroom teachers like Teacher He and good P.E. teachers like you, then students’ physical and mental health would improve a lot. Back when I was in elementary school, the P.E. teacher would give up their class time for academic subjects at the drop of a hat. We already had so few P.E. classes in a week, and kids are at a crucial stage for growth and development, the perfect time to exercise. But they’d still take our important P.E. class and replace it with some non-essential academic lesson," Chen Mo couldn’t help but complain.

Tian Jing naturally agreed wholeheartedly with this. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have made it a rule to never swap her classes with academic teachers.

In her eyes, physical exercise was extremely important, no less so than academic subjects.

How could one be favored over the other?

"But now that you’re in high school, elementary schools today aren’t like they were in your day. The government has explicitly mandated more P.E. classes, so both elementary and middle schools have increased them," Tian Jing said, smiling happily.

This government regulation affirmed her years of persistence.

Previously, many academic teachers had been unhappy with her for refusing to reschedule her classes.

It had put her under a lot of pressure, but she didn’t blame those teachers.

After all, their job was just to teach their scheduled lessons each day. As for how well the students performed, unless a large number of them suddenly got excellent grades, teaching one extra class or not made no difference to a teacher’s salary.

So why would a teacher want to work harder for several more minutes by teaching an extra class?

Many of those teachers who asked for the class time were still driven by a passion for education, hoping to help more students achieve better grades.

So, Tian Jing didn’t blame them. They just had different perspectives, but they all wanted what was best for the students’ development.

As the three of them ran and chatted, Tian Jing noticed that although Su Yuqing seemed gentle and delicate, she also looked like someone who exercised regularly.

Her jogging form was practically textbook.

"Yuqing, do you exercise regularly?"

"I go for a jog on weekends when I have time," Su Yuqing replied with a smile.

"Do you always run at night?"

"Mhm, usually an hour after dinner, I’ll come out and run for an hour or two," Su Yuqing answered earnestly.

"It’s fine now that you have Chen Mo with you, but if you’re alone, a girl should try not to run by herself at night. It’s quite dangerous," Tian Jing reminded her.

As she said this, a look of sorrow clearly flashed across her face.

Chen Mo noticed it too.

And as for why, Chen Mo actually knew the story behind it.

It was something he had only learned after becoming a police detective.

It turned out that Tian Jing had once mentored a female student who had a very promising future in the world of sports.

She was a senior who had graduated several years before Chen Mo and Su Yuqing.

The girl was beautiful, had a fantastically toned body from her training, and possessed outstanding athletic talent.

If she had made it big in the future, as a sports star she would have been even more captivating than a typical one.

Her future would have been absolutely limitless.

But unfortunately, she later met with an accident.

It happened when she was out for a run by herself at night.

Her physical fitness was already excellent; she could easily hold her own against boys her age.

On top of her regular training, she had even learned taekwondo or some other form of self-defense.

So she wasn’t worried at all about anything happening to her.

But who could have imagined that one night, after going out for a run, she would never come back.

Later, her body was recovered from the river. She had knife wounds, but the actual cause of death was asphyxiation. She had been strangled to death.

She had also been sexually assaulted.

Because the girl’s parents didn’t want the matter publicized, the incident was only ever known within a small circle.

Although there were no surveillance cameras at the scene of the crime,

there were cameras near the section of the road where it happened. By painstakingly piecing together clues from the nearby footage, they were still able to quickly identify the killer.

So the killer was caught quickly.

But catching the killer was of little use. The person was already gone.

Tian Jing had been heartbroken over it for a long time.

She had held such high hopes for that girl. She still remembered the girl sitting with her, chatting, her face bright and full of youthful optimism as she dreamed about the future.

Who would have thought that in the blink of an eye, she would be a cold corpse.

All her hard training, all her plans for the future, had all turned to nothing.

At the time, Tian Jing had wanted nothing more than to tear that criminal to shreds with her bare hands.

Because of the lesson learned from this incident, she would always make it a point to warn any girl who had a habit of exercising at night to avoid going out alone.

They should at least go with a few other people.

And so, she couldn’t help but give the warning subconsciously.

Hearing her words, Chen Mo suddenly froze.

He realized he seemed to have overlooked something.

Other than her family, no one else paid any attention to the fact that Su Yuqing went for a run every weekend night, so it was impossible for anyone to know she had this habit. City neighbors aren’t like those in the countryside; people mostly keep to themselves and know pitifully little about those living right next to them.