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In the wealthy district, after visiting the homes of the second and third victims, Xu Huo stood by the roadside, leaning against a car as he slowly exhaled a heavy breath. Qian Hua and Wang Hu were by his side. Wang Hu pinched the bridge of his nose. It was the first time a case had put him under such immense pressure... Blown up! Blown up again! The killer had replicated Zhou Dapeng’s murder. The only difference was that this time, there were two people in the car. Just as they had done with Zhou Dapeng’s case file, they pulled the two victims’ records and sped to their listed addresses. Pushing open the door... They were met with another scene straight out of Hell! "The blast site was near the squad car... Did they time it perfectly?" Wang Hu stubbed out his cigarette and looked at Xu Huo. "An attack on the police?" "A coincidence." Xu Huo shook his head. "Returning to headquarters was my idea, a last-minute decision. No one else influenced it." "Besides, the bomb’s blast was only powerful enough to kill the two victims at point-blank range. It couldn’t have possibly killed a third person." "Unless someone was pressed right up against the car and didn’t move away after it caught fire, they wouldn’t get caught in a secondary explosion. There’s no way it would cause other fatalities, let alone be considered an attack on the police." Xu Huo chalked it up to bad luck. At first, he had considered getting out of the car to try and track the culprit by scent, but... ...there was no trace of the driver’s scent. Xu Huo suspected that this person hadn’t been at the murder scene at all, but was someone specifically responsible for the vehicle and for making the time bomb. The only scent they left behind had vanished in the smoke of the explosion. ’If I’d been farther away, I might have caught it,’ he thought. ’But with hundreds, if not thousands, of other scents around, there’s no telling which one it was...’ Still, they had managed to gather some new information. "From what we can tell, the perpetrators are a group of at least six." "And all six of them held a grudge against all three victims?" Xu Huo’s brow furrowed. ’It’s possible for one person to have a grudge against another.’ ’It’s even possible for several people to hate one person. But for six people to all share a mortal hatred for three different individuals at the same time? The odds of that are incredibly slim...’ ’And what if there’s a third explosion...’ "That’s ten people dead so far..." Qian Hua’s hands trembled as he said the number. Ten people, murdered in such a short amount of time... If the province hadn’t established a special task force, Wang Hu would have been the lead investigator. Otherwise, when would they have gotten the chance to intervene? Moreover, the Capital City could send people down at any moment. No one knew whether the next person to show up would be one of their own or an official sent from above... "Revenge killings..." Xu Huo murmured, feeling a headache coming on. ’This kind of serial murder case is tricky,’ he thought. ’If we don’t crack it soon, it’s highly likely the situation will spiral out of control.’ It had only been half a day, but with two explosions, public opinion had reached a fever pitch. The entire country was talking about it. The death toll had already reached ten... ’Suppress the media?’ ’For one, it’s impossible to keep a lid on something like this. And even if we used our resources to try, would we dare?’ ’The Capital City is definitely watching our every move...’ "Have you finished the background checks on the three primary victims?" Xu Huo suppressed his frustration and looked up at the Police Officers around him. "We just finished." A young Police Officer spoke up first. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and handed over a freshly printed file. "The three victims are Zhou Dapeng, Sun Qin, and Zhao Guo." "Zhou Dapeng was the owner of the Lin Yu Chemical Factory. His assets..." "As for Sun Qin and Zhao Guo, the former owned a paint company, and the latter, like Zhou Dapeng, was a chemical factory owner, though Zhao Guo’s factory produced pesticides..." "The times of death for their family members were close. Based on the timeline, it’s highly probable that after killing Sun Qin’s family, the perpetrators immediately went to Zhao Guo’s home to continue the slaughter." "Then they abducted the two and detonated the bomb..." The files from the records department were detailed, but they didn’t go back very far. The digital archives weren’t fully established yet, so anything older was a paper file, making the investigation a hassle. Fortunately, City Bureau Chief Zhang Jian and others from the province had worked overnight to bolster the records department. Otherwise, they never would have been able to retrieve these files so quickly. "They were all owners?" Xu Huo raised an eyebrow. "Owners of companies dealing with toxic chemicals?" "Correct." The Police Officer nodded. "How many people had conflicts with them?" "Too many to count. It’s impossible to get a number," the Police Officer said in a grave voice. "Zhou Dapeng’s chemical plant had a faulty wastewater discharge pipe. The villagers downstream paid the price. More than half of them left years ago, and the ones who stayed do nothing but curse his name." "It was a similar story for Zhao Guo. In fact, the toxins in his pesticides were even stronger than what Zhou Dapeng was putting out. Crops barely even grew in the nearby fields!" "Sun Qin was the only one who was slightly better, but who knows how many of her own employees cursed her..." Hearing this, Xu Huo frowned, completely astounded. Just from those descriptions, the number of people these three had offended... ...was at least a thousand! And out of that thousand-plus people, with dozens of different grievances, only six of them were likely to be the killers... "Which conflicts were the most severe? Which ones involved fatalities?" Xu Huo asked, frowning in thought. The Police Officer was speechless. His lips moved for a long moment, but no sound came out. Finally, he said: "I think... they all involved loss of life?" Zhou Dapeng’s pollution problems led to cancer cases in the double digits, at least. Xu Huo wasn’t sure about Sun Qin, but Zhao Guo was definitely no better than Zhou Dapeng. And besides the external factors, there were internal conflicts... ...that were even more intense! To put it another way. People died in chemical factories all the time! It was perfectly normal for two or three people to die in a chemical plant over the course of a year. A twenty-year-old could work there for a month, and if he came out claiming to be thirty, people would accuse him of trying to sound younger than he looked. It was the same for the painters. Over the long haul, anyone who didn’t inhale a bit of paint was fired for slacking. The list of their grievances was just as long. ’How are we supposed to investigate this?’ ’Out of over a thousand people—some of whom had moved away, others who were impossible to find—only six were possibly the killers...’ "An individual’s motive can’t be the sole driver for a group crime." "This means the three victims must share a commonality that united the killers as a group. Most likely, that commonality is the very source of the conflict between the victims and their killers." "In other words, the conflicts *are* the common point. So... what did the three victims have in common?" After a moment of thought, Xu Huo decided to take a different approach. ’Simply throwing resources at the problem and investigating suspects one by one would eventually yield results. After all, compared to the previous example of screening 51,000 people, this number was tiny.’ ’But if we really do it that way, even if we solve the case, there’s no telling how many more people might die in the meantime...’ "The commonality between the three victims, the one that could cause this kind of conflict, is broadly related to illness." "But the problem is..." "The three owners operated in different fields and had no interaction on a daily basis. So, logically, the people who had conflicts with them—that is, the killers themselves—shouldn’t have any connection to one another either." "And yet, they’ve come together..." ’It’s unlikely that all six only had a grudge against one of the victims.’ So, the question is... If they weren’t all targeting the same person, then... how did this group form? "There must be an event, or a location, that connects them." "And it’s highly probable that the victims are the reason they all ended up there." "What kind of place would that be?" Xu Huo thought for a moment, preparing to work backward and investigate them from another angle. ’People don’t just randomly meet strangers. There has to be a channel for communication, whether online or in the real world.’ ’This place has to be connected to the problems caused by the three victims, it has to be a place the killers have in common, and it has to provide them with a place to communicate...’ ’Most critically, it must fulfill the necessary conditions for hatred to form!’ ’That is, a hatred that festers over time. A place where, as time passes, grudges don’t fade but instead grow more and more extreme!’ What is... ...that place?! They all pondered this for a long time, until... Suddenly, something clicked in Xu Huo’s mind. He narrowed his eyes.