Solid Evidence!

Lingling was quiet for a moment before speaking. "When all the blood drains out, the body does cool down quickly — I'd assumed we just arrived too late and it had already gone cold. But looking at it now... that's not it. Human body heat doesn't dissipate that fast."

"Maybe it's a trait specific to Vampires," Zhao Manyan offered.

Lingling shook her head. She glanced at Mo Fan and said in a speculative tone, "Actually, there was something earlier I couldn't quite work out."

"What was that?" Mo Fan asked.

"Her sister Liu Xian clearly died from blood loss — so why was the official cause of death listed as sudden cardiac arrest? And all of Liu Xian's death certificates and related documents were perfectly in order, not a single thing to raise suspicion. But the more perfect it looks, the more wrong it feels. Old Man Huo couldn't have been lying to us. He saw it with his own eyes." Lingling said.

She hadn't even finished speaking before it hit Mo Fan all at once.

"We shouldn't have handed Liu Ru's body over to the police..." He had just spotted his own mistake.

"Mm. But it doesn't matter — I think this Vampire has already exposed itself." A faint gleam flickered in Lingling's eyes, sharp and preternaturally perceptive.

"Still working this late? We've all clocked out." A sweet-faced girl from the police bureau smiled at a young forensic examiner.

The young examiner offered a helpless shrug. "A girl was found in the woods on Pearl Academy grounds with a gaping hole bitten into her neck. The body's been brought in — I need to run an examination."

"Isn't that place crawling with Mages? Hard to believe someone would commit a crime there of all places. A bit ironic, isn't it?"

"Maybe a Mage did it themselves. Wait for my report." The young examiner chuckled.

He pulled on a white lab coat and walked into a dimly lit room. The space was entirely white, lined with instruments for determining cause of death. At the center stood a table for the deceased, a white sheet draped over a slender, delicate figure beneath.

He had just started to pull the door shut when the female clerk poked her head in and asked carefully, "Need any help? Might get done faster — we could grab a late-night snack after."

"Absolutely. I'm already a little hungry." He smiled.

The clerk nodded. "Then I'll go get you something to eat."

"No need. Just stay here." Nie Dong's smile turned sly.

The words had barely left his lips before he slammed her against the wall.

The impact rattled her skull. She moved to struggle — and then felt a pair of ice-cold lips press hard against her neck.

She'd been fond of this young, handsome examiner, had even hoped tonight might be the start of something. But she hadn't expected him to be so rough. A simple dinner would have done the trick; she hated this kind of brutishness.

Those frigid lips parted. Two needle-sharp fangs emerged and sank into her neck without resistance. Her body went rigid, her face twisting with pain.

His throat worked as blood poured from those fangs down into his stomach. Nie Dong drank greedily, emptying her dry.

He hadn't been a Vampire for very long. The killing instinct buried in his bones, the insatiable greed — he hadn't learned to rein either in. So when savoring a meal, he rarely paid attention to whether his prey still had a pulse, and more often than not simply took everything they had.

His elders called it a bad habit — too likely to attract hunters. But to Nie Dong, the elders were making a mountain out of a molehill. With a Vampire's abilities, hunters were toys more often than threats. Why fear them?

The Blood Clan was supposed to stand above humanity. Humans were nothing but playthings and food. Yet the way his elders spoke of the Blood Clan, it sounded more like a pack of thieves skulking in the dark corners of human society — hiding, concealing, never exposing themselves...

*How utterly laughable.*

What did it matter if he drained them? This city had millions of people. Even killing one every single day wouldn't make a dent.

"P-please... stop..." A feeble sound escaped the clerk.

When a Vampire fed like this — frenzied and unrestrained — there was nothing but agony for the prey.

Life was hemorrhaging out of her. She could never have imagined that the nerve she'd finally mustered to invite her crush for a late-night snack would end with her becoming his late-night snack instead. She fought with everything she had. It made no difference.

At last, the blood ran dry.

Her face drained to ashen white. Her body seemed to shrivel and collapse inward, her clothes suddenly loose around her frame.

Only then did Nie Dong withdraw his Blood Fang from her neck. He licked the sweetness from the corner of his mouth, his eyes holding nothing but contempt.

"You really are unlucky. I have a ritual to complete tonight — I need a great deal of fresh blood. If you hadn't walked in on your own, I'd have just picked some woman leaving the late shift." He laughed softly, and the fangs above his upper lip slowly retracted.

The police bureau had security cameras everywhere, including in the morgue — but he had already tampered with them. No one would know this clerk had ever set foot in here, and no one would know she would vanish from the world tonight.

If he was being honest, this was the first time he'd hunted in his own workplace. Apparently he still had some self-restraint after all.

"Liu Xian... and here your sister is, back with me as well." Nie Dong didn't spare another glance at the dead clerk. He turned and walked slowly toward the table that should have held Liu Ru's body. "Tsk, tsk. A pair of ordinary fools. I played you both so easily, and in the end both sisters fell right into my hands..."

Across the street from the police bureau, a wolf-shaped creature streaked through the darkness at blinding speed. When obstacles rose ahead, it skimmed along the walls without breaking stride — impossibly, effortlessly agile.

"We're too late. She's dead." On Swift Star Wolf's back, Lingling's eyes were locked on the screen of her mini laptop.

Mo Fan's brow creased. He had assumed the Vampire would avoid killing indiscriminately to protect its cover — and yet in the brief time they'd been watching, another person was dead. This creature had absolutely no conscience.

The moment she'd begun to suspect the Vampire's identity, Lingling had started cross-referencing everyone connected to the police side of the case. She had eventually zeroed in on the young forensic examiner.

The security cameras had been tampered with, but Lingling was a wizard with computers. She cracked through the obstruction with ease and pulled up feeds from every angle.

And barely after she'd gained access, she caught the moment the Vampire attacked the female clerk.

The clerk's death was a tragedy. But that footage had just become the most damning evidence imaginable. This Vampire had nowhere left to run.

"Zhao Manyan has already submitted the recording to the Hunters' Alliance," Lingling told Mo Fan. "But we still need to take him down as fast as we can — every second we wait puts Liu Ru in more danger!"

Mo Fan nodded. There was no time to spare. He had to capture this wretched Vampire and get Liu Ru back.