Chapter 778: Three Numbers

"Dead people?" I sat on the edge of the bed, freezing in place. "Dead people can call you?"

"I was terrified at first, but then I figured it didn't really matter. As long as they could help me get revenge, who cares if they're dead or alive?" Kong Ying lay paralyzed on the bed, his voice weak.

"You left your phone in the Red Building. Can you remember any of those numbers?" All my clues regarding that live show streamer had gone cold. If I wanted to find him, my only starting point was Kong Ying, the sole ordinary person who had come into contact with him.

"Who could remember those? But Sister Yan looked up where the numbers were registered for me back then, so she should have a backup." The wounds on Kong Ying's face had started seeping blood again. He looked miserable and pitiful, so after a moment of thought, I decided not to bother him any further.

"Get some good rest. Don't breathe a word about the Red Building to anyone, or you'll bring disaster down on yourself."

"I understand. Honestly, after living in the Red Building for a few months, I finally realized just how many unknown secrets were hidden in the world I lived in." Kong Ying seemed to hear me standing up. He paused for a moment before suddenly calling out, "Can you tell me your name? You did save my life, after all. I'm the kind of person who repays a favor a hundredfold!"

I gave the half-crippled Kong Ying an indifferent glance and shook my head. "There's no need."

"Hey!"

I didn't wait for him to finish. I shut the door and walked out. Zhu Li had escaped, the situation at the Red Building was still unresolved, and a new livestream was set to start in just three days. My time was extremely tight.

Trying to find someone in Jinghai, a tier-one metropolis with a population of over ten million, without the help of the police or any other external forces was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

'I'm already struggling to handle a single Live Show broadcast. Two stacked together will likely cause a qualitative change. There are too many uncontrollable factors. I must find Zhu Li and complete the commission before the next broadcast starts.' Counting every second, I only had three days.

I frowned deeply. I needed to find the other live show streamer, and I needed to find Zhu Li, but how could finding someone in Jinghai be that easy?

The first-floor door opened. Yan Shengnan walked in, having finished taking out the trash. A major surgery would severely drain the energy of any ordinary person, yet I couldn't detect a single trace of fatigue on this woman. Perhaps she was just very good at hiding it.

Her icy face was like an ice sculpture from the north, forever frozen in the same expression. I stared at her for a long time before she finally walked over to me. "Do you need something?"

"You're a university lecturer. Won't being absent from campus all day draw the school's attention?"

Yan Shengnan didn't reply right away. After a long pause, she finally squeezed out, "No one will find this place. Don't worry, I won't kick you out either. You can stay for as long as you like."

"You trust me that much?" Her words piqued my interest, and the corners of my mouth curled up. "Aren't you afraid I might be a bad guy? Harboring ulterior motives against you two?"

"To me, 'bad guy' is a very childish term." The woman looked up, speaking with a level gaze and a remarkably flat tone. "People can't simply be judged as good or bad. Even a murderer with hands stained in blood might have his own underlying difficulties. Oh, right—I've already dealt with the bloodstains and scratches on the car outside. I covered it with a tarp, so passersby won't notice a thing."

Yan Shengnan's words seemed to carry a hidden meaning. My eyes narrowed involuntarily; this woman appeared to have already figured me out.

To date, I had only met two doctors capable of independently performing such a major surgery: one was the wife of the Heavenly Doctor Divine Fiends, and the other was her.

I rubbed my temples, unsure of how I had given myself away. Surgeons possessed a profound understanding of the human body; they were the people who dealt with flesh and blood the most in times of peace. "This is why I hate doctors..."

Waving my hand, I invited Yan Shengnan to sit down. "Dr. Yan, Kong Ying said he once had you look up the locations of several phone numbers. Do you still have backups of those numbers?"

"They're in my phone." Yan Shengnan pointed at my pocket. I had taken her phone and hadn't returned it yet.

"Sorry, I forgot about that." I took out the phone. Yan Shengnan didn't take it; she merely tapped the screen, opened the contacts, and scrolled straight to the bottom.

"These are the numbers. The owners are all deceased. Most of them have already been disconnected, and only these three still connect." Yan Shengnan wrote three of the numbers down with a pen. "The one ending in 054 is a delivery number for a restaurant. I don't know how the other party managed to call from it. That restaurant is located in the Northern Suburb of Jinghai. It was very small and rundown. At one in the morning last night, the restaurant caught fire. Of the owner's family of three, aside from the child who happened to be out of the building at the time, both adults perished in the flames."

"The Northern Suburb? A family of three?" A terrible premonition suddenly hit me. "Can you tell me the exact location?"

"An urban village located between the Northern Suburb and Hongqiao, in Baogang District." As soon as Yan Shengnan finished speaking, my expression changed. I had just arrived in Jinghai last night, and the place I ate and stayed at was precisely that urban village in Baogang District!

'It shouldn't be that much of a coincidence, right?'

I didn't ask any more questions. A fire had broken out there right after I left.

There was something deeply wrong here.

"It's certainly very strange. The firefighters inspected the scene for a long time but couldn't find the cause of the fire. Later, they suspected arson, since it was pouring rain outside last night." Yan Shengnan thought for a moment and added, "The fire spread very quickly. A neighboring hotel also burned to the ground, and barely any of the guests inside managed to escape. This incident even made the morning news today."

From what Yan Shengnan had told me, I could already confirm that the burned building was the very hotel I had stayed at last night. "A family of three, and only the child managed to escape by a stroke of luck."

That family had given me a good impression. At the time, I had noticed something strange about their house and had even left the child a Profound Truth Dao Talisman to seek good fortune and ward off disaster.

'The places I stayed were all swallowed by fire. Was the arsonist's true motive related to me? Did those people from Jiangcheng chase me all the way to Jinghai?' The Five Great Upper Sects would never massacre civilians. The Underworld Live Show operated bizarrely, so it was hard to say for sure. Murder and arson were the usual style of the Two-Faced Buddha and his disciples, but he had no reason to come to Jinghai at this specific time and accurately burn down the room I was staying in.

'I spoke with another live show streamer on the phone that night. Could he be the arsonist?' I looked down at the phone numbers on the screen. One of the numbers that provided help to Kong Ying was dialed from that small restaurant. Putting the two together, it was highly likely that the culprit was that live show streamer.

'What exactly is he trying to do? Even to prevent exposure, he didn't have to casually kill so many people!' Recalling the broadcast at the Xinhu Cancer Research Hospital, to make it easier to complete their livestreams, those live show streamers would even drag uninvolved ordinary people into the fray, using their lives to scout the path ahead. Perhaps in the eyes of a live show streamer, living humans were nothing more than tools.

'When humans possess the abilities of a god, they no longer consider other humans their own kind.' I felt somewhat fortunate that I had casually stuffed that Talisman Paper into the child's backpack. To me, it was merely lifting a finger, but it had inadvertently saved a life.

'My style of doing things is completely different from theirs. I'm afraid even greater divergences will arise in the future.' I took a light breath, stopping my runaway thoughts, and looked at Yan Shengnan. "Where were the other two phone numbers dialed from?"

"The one ending in 154 is a beauty salon's number. The owner went missing a month ago. Here's the address." Yan Shengnan opened the map on her phone and typed in a few words. "This is it. White Rose Beauty and Body Center. It's located at the border between the Northern Suburb and Southern Suburbs of Jinghai."

"A beauty and body center?" I pressed harder against my temples. "What the hell is going on? First a restaurant, and now a beauty salon. There's absolutely no connection."

I had originally wanted to use the phone numbers' registered locations to deduce the person's daily habits and general area of activity, but clearly, I was overthinking it. "And where the hell was that last phone number dialed from?"

I waited for a moment, but no one answered. I turned my head and saw Yan Shengnan wearing a strange expression. "The one ending in 254 is a private mobile number. The owner is me."

"You?!" I was so shocked I nearly bit my tongue. Thinking about it carefully, all the clues did indeed point to this extreme-tempered woman.

I stood up from my seat, my fingers gently brushing my Ghost Ring, ready to strike at any moment.

"That call was indeed dialed from my phone, but I have absolutely no memory of it..."

"This is no longer a matter of whether you remember it or not." Beneath my clothes, yin energy surged, and the Fate Ghost's hair slithered out from my shadow. "Everyone who made a call is either missing or dead. You're the only one still alive. Isn't that enough to explain the problem?"

"That's exactly what I wanted to tell you." Yan Shengnan's voice hadn't changed in the slightest. Her heart was like a permanently frozen sea of ice, never stirring up a single ripple. "One of my students learned that something had happened at home, but she had just lost her phone. So, she borrowed mine to call her family. Because it was an emergency and no one was picking up, I lent the phone to her so she could take it home. I figured she could just return it to me after she handled her business."

I realized things weren't as simple as I thought, and I pressed, "And then?"

"That night, before she even made it out of Jinghai, she got into a car crash at an intersection. When I rushed to the scene, I happened to see her being carried away. Blood was everywhere. Her light-colored top had been dyed a deep black from the blood." Yan Shengnan sighed softly at the mention of her student. "Such a good girl, gone just like that."

"Something happened at home? An intersection? A light-colored top?" I suddenly felt like this scene was a bit familiar. "What day did your student have the accident? What was her name?"

"I really have no reason to lie to you." Yan Shengnan thought for a moment before speaking. "It was on the day of the Double Ninth festival. Her name was Liu Xin."

"Liu Xin?!" Uncontainable yin energy instantly erupted from my Eighteen Yin Apertures, howling like a phantom wind. The ninth day of the ninth month, the Double Ninth festival—that was the time I did the Death Train broadcast! I had seen Liu Xin right on that train heading for the Underworld!

She was the daughter of the restaurant owner who lived next door to me. Because the Blood Fox had accidentally killed her parents, she had hurriedly rushed back from out of town. But who would have thought she'd get into a car crash?

My face turned gloomy. I stared intently at Yan Shengnan, my heart filled with unease.

'This couldn't just be a coincidence, could it...'