Chapter 434 – What Did She Run Into?!

"You think my sister's death might not have been an accident?" A complicated light flickered in Liu Ru's eyes.

Mo Fan nodded. "That old man is a powerful Mage. I don't think what he said was necessarily untrue — and are you actually certain your sister had a heart condition?"

Liu Ru thought for a moment. "My sister's health was always poor, but I only heard about that particular condition after she was gone. Honestly, even I found it hard to believe."

"This matters to me — I want to get to the bottom of it. So if anything about your sister ever seemed unusual to you, or if any strange people turned up around her, tell me everything you remember. Especially any men."

The information Mo Fan had gotten from Huo Tuo was precise: only male Vampires preyed on women, and when they selected a target they would typically shadow her for a period of time — sometimes even making direct contact with their prey. If any unidentified man had been spending an unusual amount of time around Liu Xian in the weeks before her death, Mo Fan figured he would be the prime suspect.

"Well, if we're talking about a man like that, you'd fit the bill pretty well," Liu Ru said.

Mo Fan felt a flash of embarrassment. The person he was impersonating had apparently been interested in Liu Xian — pursuing her.

Still, that gave him a more useful lead. He'd look into this person later. There might be something there.

"Anyone else besides me?" Mo Fan asked.

Liu Ru shook her head. She glanced at her watch. "It's getting late. I need to get back to school. If you have more questions, you can find me at Qingyuan Girls' High School."

Mo Fan couldn't very well press further. He watched Liu Ru go.

Not long after she left, his body dissolved into a mass of dark shadow and slipped silently through the creeping ivy — stealing his way, unseen, into Liu Xian and Liu Ru's bedroom.

The room was filled with the unmistakably feminine: pink, blue, a soft blend of both.

Stuffed dolls were everywhere — piled on the bed, lined up on the desk, hung from the walls. Mo Fan turned a careful eye to the room, searching for any trace of something useful. Disappointingly, aside from an impressively varied assortment of underwear, nothing in the space held any interest for him.

*Looks like I'll just have to see what Lingling turned up,* he muttered to himself.

It wasn't long before Mo Fan met up with Lingling.

"The body was cremated too soon," she said. "If it had still been preserved, we could've determined whether she was truly attacked by a Vampire." She shook her head. "I can't believe it — something this secretive, even by Western standards, has made its way here. Aren't those so-called Temples supposed to handle this sort of thing?!"

"So what did you actually find?" Mo Fan asked.

Lingling flipped through her notebook, sorted her thoughts, and said, "Every document on file shows she died of a medical episode — no anomalies whatsoever, and the death certificate checks out completely. To be honest, if Huo Tuo hadn't insisted he'd witnessed it with his own eyes, this never would have been classified as a Demon-Beast case. No wonder nobody else took the bounty."

"This is going to be a problem." Mo Fan frowned. "We have nothing to go on — and if this Vampire just randomly targeted some girl, even if we prove he exists, there's no way to track him down in a city this size. What a headache."

"I've already pulled the subway footage from that day from the police station. I haven't reviewed it yet — hopefully there's something in there."

"If there isn't, I suppose we go back and talk to her sister Liu Ru again," Mo Fan said.

"That's about all we can do."

The two of them pulled up the security footage from the moment Liu Xian had died suddenly in the subway.

To make sure they covered every detail, Mo Fan and Lingling deliberately waited until nightfall before going to the station where it had happened. Following Liu Xian's exact route, at the same hour she had walked it, they retraced her final steps.

At that late hour, the area around the subway station was nearly deserted.

At the entrance, the long staircase descending underground sat completely empty — not a single person in sight. The entire corridor, washed in dim and pallid light, had taken on something of an eerie quality, made worse by a faint, strange sound of metal striking metal drifting in from somewhere deep below.

"Mo Fan, have you noticed — at this hour all the lines are shut down. The last train left five minutes ago, which means five minutes ago everyone still inside boarded it and left." Lingling walked with her notebook cradled in both arms as she spoke. "Liu Xian obviously knew what time it was. So why did she go into the subway at all?"

The notebook displayed a compilation of spliced-together security camera clips. In the grainy, gray-tinted footage, Liu Xian could be seen in black heels, walking slowly into the station. At that moment, the entire platform — everywhere around her — was completely empty.

Lingling was retracing Liu Xian's movements on screen. Wherever the footage showed Liu Xian going, Lingling followed the same path, right down to mimicking her gestures. It was a standard investigative technique used by police, and one the City Demon-Hunting Squad had long since made their own.

"You're right — the last train had already gone, and she still went down." Mo Fan pointed at the screen, at Liu Xian — the sister who could have been Liu Ru's mirror image. "And look at her pace. She's not trying to catch anything."

"So she was lured here," Lingling concluded.

"Very likely. Let's track down the footage from before she entered the station. There are shops all along here, traffic cameras at the intersections — something must have recorded what she came into contact with before she went in."

"It's starting to feel frightening," Lingling said quietly. "If this Vampire really has some kind of luring ability, ordinary people would have almost no chance of escaping him."

Mo Fan's mind went to the Enchantment Spider from Jinlin Desolate City — a creature capable of bending human minds to its will. A Vampire hunting freely in a modern city, hidden beneath the surface of ordinary life... possessing that kind of power was hardly surprising.

"And Vampires are far more intelligent than any of the Demon-Beasts we've dealt with before. If Liu Xian really was attacked by one, then this creature also knows how to disguise the cause of death. A diagnosis of sudden cardiac arrest means the case would never land on the City Demon-Hunting Squad's desk — and the Vampire gets to carry on without a care in the world. A city of tens of millions. Someone dying unexpectedly every day isn't even news."

"Mo Fan, look — she stopped right here. It's like she walked straight into someone!!" Lingling suddenly cried out.