After the two surfaced like swimmers breaking a dark pool, they found Ling Yi dozing in the tent like a cat curled in dusk.

“Back to sleep. Let’s go,” Yekase said, her voice like a tired breeze slipping through canvas.

She tapped Ling Yi’s cheek like drumming rain, and the haze shattered like glass in sunlight.

“Mm… oh!” Ling Yi’s head drooped like a wilting stem, then she sprang up like a bow bent and loosed.

“You’re back,” she gasped, breath coming like small waves against shore.

She caught her breath, then said, like dropping a stone into still water: “Staff came by with a message—an incident in Cloudlong City’s urban district.”

“An incident?” Yekase glanced at Jiang Bailu, eyes like needles under frost, and Jiang Bailu shrugged like a leaf letting go.

“Any details?” Yekase asked, words like flint in her mouth.

“A member of a convoy was killed in an old-city alley,” Ling Yi said, voice steady as winter light. “The scene’s sealed, waiting for us to investigate.”

“Ha…” Yekase exhaled, the sound like smoke rising from cold coals.

Two dead on the track, another off the track—the count pricked like thorns in fog.

She’d thought keeping an eye on Luzhixing was enough, like watching one hawk in a gray sky. Now the storm felt wider than she’d guessed.

“…Let’s go. We’ll see the scene,” she said, resolve like a blade tucked under cloth.

They followed the staffer back to the city, skipping the hotel doors like skirting a river gate, heading straight to the crime scene like arrows finding a mark.

On the way, the staffer laid out the known details, like stones laid in a line:

During dinner—the ignition ceremony—the victim ducked the cacophony like stepping out of a thunderhead. He left alone, saying he’d explore shops in town. When the race began, he never returned, and calls fell silent like snow. Then a citizen called it in, and the night turned iron.

The body lay in a stairwell in an old residential block, a place with first-floor snack shops like lanterns strung along a street. Foot traffic was heavy as migrating birds, but diners rarely walked deep into the stairwell’s shadowed throat. They suspected the killer lured him inward like a lure in dark water and struck there.

Yekase heard enough and chose the rest by her own eyes, striding ahead like a fox on the scent. She followed the line of officers like stepping stones and slipped past the tape like wind through reeds.

“Hey! This is a crime scene! No kids inside!” a gruff voice barked, the shout like a clap of thunder in a narrow valley.

She straightened and found a middle-aged officer watching her, uniform crisp as frost on slate.

Fixed program, she thought, a routine like a bell toll in a town square. This was getting more and more like a detective novel, with pages turning like leaves.

She didn’t want the hassle, so she said, voice smooth as polished jade: “Hello. I’m an investigator sent by the organization.”

The officer looked her over like weighing a blade, gaze landing on the Polaris Staff in its iron-rod form like a cudgel in moonlight.

“You’re investigating with a stick?” he asked, brows like steep cliffs.

“It’s a staff,” she said, calm as a still lake.

The butt of the Polaris Staff tapped the concrete—thunk, thunk—like a muffled bell under earth.

“Chuangxing.”

“Oh!” The head bloomed open like a steel flower, thin branches unfurling like frost-laced twigs. They nearly grazed his face, and he stepped back, clicking his tongue in wonder like a sparrow at dawn. “It can change shape! Your Sinister Organization is real good at making toys like that.”

Not a Sinister Organization, she thought, letting the mislabel drift like a leaf. No point explaining under a heavy sky.

“Can I go in now?” she asked, patience held like a match not yet lit.

“No,” he said, the word flat as a stone.

“Huh?” she blinked, surprise like a ripple on ink.

“Who proves you aren’t sent by the killer?” His tone was granite under boots. “Unless staff vouch for you, you’re not going in.”

By then Jiang Bailu and Ling Yi arrived like two lanterns catching up. The officer saw the staffer’s face, and only then did he step aside like opening a gate.

“So why did I rush here first…” Yekase muttered, frustration like a small storm inside a cup.

Jiang Bailu knocked her lightly on the head, the tap like a finger on a drum. “No way they’d just let you walk in. This isn’t a paperback mystery,” she said, dry as autumn grass.

“The Doctor gets fixated on strange things,” Ling Yi added, with the shrug of someone used to summer rain.

“Your nickname’s Doctor? You do look sharp,” the officer said, hand rising like a curious dog’s nose to pat her head. Yekase slipped away like a fish dodging a net.

She kept feeling they took her for a kid, the taste like green tea gone thin.

Probably not an illusion. Her apparent age had been rolled back twice—ten years each time—like slicing rings from a tree. She was used to it now, her mood steady as mountain fog. She went straight to the body and crouched, quiet as a shadow under a lamp.

A slim, tall man of about thirty lay face-down, a kitchen knife buried in his back like a thorn in bark. He had died where he fell, sprawled like a toppled reed.

He’d struggled; you could see it like scratch marks on ice. His limbs still reached forward like a crawler in the sand, but life had left like embers cooling, and only gray ash settled here.

Blood poured from the wound, soaking his clothes into dark, clotted red like dried lacquer. It ran onto the floor, pooling around him like stagnant water after rain, and the passage reeked with copper like a slaughterhouse at dusk.

“Classic homicide,” Yekase said, her voice a blade wrapped in cloth. “Checked prints on the knife handle?”

“Sampled,” said a young policewoman, her tone like a bright beam through mist. “The prints are clear, but the result is… strange.”

“Strange?” Yekase asked, breath holding like a kite in wind.

“Yes. Database match says the prints belong to a racer,” the policewoman said, words falling like hailstones.

Yekase stared at her, eyes keen as a hawk’s. “But all racers—”

“All have solid alibis,” the policewoman said, nodding like a reed that knows the current. “At nine, they went to the launch camp for vehicle prep. They’ve been in a business hotel twenty kilometers from the city. Sealed, separate management.”

Yekase had seen them get in their cars, like knights mounting iron steeds. There were only nine racers; if one slipped back to the city, that crowd of staff wouldn’t miss a bird flying across a white wall.

But—

She didn’t know the link yet, but—

Her mind flashed to that car under moonlight, losing control and catching fire like a meteor, ending in ruin like a star collapsing.

Sal9000.

The drivers were… Liu Shiyuan and Wang Yihan, names like two seals stamped in ash.

“Are the prints from a member of the People’s crowd?” she asked, words breaking like ice. “Liu Shiyuan or Wang Yihan—Which one?”

She heard her own voice like a step off a cliff, not sure how she’d explain the landing.

“Doctor, those two are already—” Jiang Bailu started, the memory like a burn on the eye.

“Which one?” Yekase pressed, gaze locked like a snarestring.

They stared at each other for nearly three heartbeats, the air taut like silk. Then the policewoman, startled, answered: “Wang Yihan.”

“What?!” Jiang Bailu’s mind spun, a carousel of fire and screech. That car—the flaming whirl and brutal collision—still burned on her retina like afterimages. Those two had become charcoal in their cockpit; it could be anyone else, but not them.

Ling Yi thought for a moment, then brightened like dawn: “I’ve got it—the killer’s a necromancer!”

Everyone laughed—Jiang Bailu, the officers, the corridor itself chuckling like a gutter in rain—but Yekase didn’t.

“Honestly, it could be,” she said, voice low as midnight water.

The fingerprint, once matched to a racer, had jumped layers like a stone skipping ponds. It couldn’t be any of them, so whose print it was barely mattered. Introduce a new constant, and the tide shifts like the moon pulling sea.

“Bailu, listen up,” she said, tone like a bell ringing a lesson.

“Wait, I’m getting scolded here?” Jiang Bailu asked, bracing like a cat with its fur up.

“A dead person leaving prints elsewhere is impossible in strict puzzle mysteries,” Yekase said, words like chalk lines. “But this is reality.”

Reality had Infinite Power, ghosts, and aliens, like a festival of strange lanterns. Reality had those unreasonable supernaturals that would pop Newton’s coffin lid like a chest hinge—oh right, Newton himself was an alchemist, a thinker with mercury in his veins.

“Since when does a detective start by introducing a genre-breaking element?” Jiang Bailu protested, breath like sparks chasing wind.

Yekase shook her head, the motion smooth as crane flight: “I’m no detective. I’m a genius pretty-girl inventor.”

Aren’t you a mage? the older officer thought, the question hovering like smoke.

You’re not a detective? the policewoman thought, eyebrows arched like moons.

That’s a lot of adjectives, Ling Yi thought, the list long as a river.

Weren’t you the detective and I was supposed to be Watson? Jiang Bailu thought, the grievance like heat under snow.

Silence fell, soft as ash.

Yekase, culprit behind the sudden quiet, paced around the body to where he’d stood before the fall, eyes reading the scene like tracking prints in frost.

Her Infinite Force Perception caught a trace of Sorcery like tasting salt in sea wind.

But Sorcery wasn’t like other Infinite Power; it flowed like a river that never sleeps. After casting, the traces that drift into the environment are scraps like chaff, while real information stays in the caster’s body like ink in a well—that’s where your mana cap comes from.

“Watch closely. Learn carefully,” she said, pointing like a teacher with a willow switch.

“…What am I learning this time?” Jiang Bailu asked, a tremor like brushed strings. Ling Yi, fresh out of high school, shot her an “I feel you” look like a lantern nodding.

“Since you’ve got magical talent, study magic,” Yekase said, wagging a finger like a metronome. “Even if you don’t become a mage, you can do magitech. Don’t waste the skill points like spilling rice from a bowl.”

“Uh… are we looking at your stuff?” Jiang Bailu asked, curiosity like a moth near flame.

“My research goes deeper than you think,” Yekase said, fine with both officers listening, lecturing like ink pouring onto paper. “For example, fantasy creatures have this concept of Mystique. Magic made by humans doesn’t—neither classical nor modern. Want to know why?”

Jiang Bailu and Ling Yi shook their heads, blank as snowfields.

“Only sapient beings born in the objective world, with a sense of space-time, can be observers,” Yekase said, words ticking like a clock. “Cats in boxes or ghosts in haunted houses don’t qualify. The price is, you observe yourself, so you don’t get the Mystique buff—like how a proper fair-play detective can’t be the killer. The detective is the classic face of the observer, like a mirror that refuses to lie.”

…She’d looped it back to mysteries anyway, like a river finding its old bed.

Jiang Bailu marveled at Yekase’s talent for nonsense, tongue tied like a kite string.

“This theorem is called the Strong Anthropic Principle,” Yekase said, the name landing like a seal on paper.

“That’s a real theorem?” Jiang Bailu asked, suspicion like a cat’s narrowed eyes.

“Don’t believe me? Look it up,” Yekase said, chin lifting like a sparrow’s pride.

Jiang Bailu wasn’t about to whip out her phone here. If it turned out true, Yekase’s nose would tilt skyward like a mast. She swallowed the retort like tea gone bitter.

“Since this is a sorcery job, standard methods won’t do,” Yekase said, decision like steel under silk. “Tomorrow, I’ll warn the remaining racers. We plan long. For now, sleep.”

She waved her small hand and hugged the Polaris Staff like a willow pole, striding out of the stairwell with a yawn like night fog curling.

That left four around the body, staring at each other like stones about to speak.

“Your little—detective—little inventor friend has a… particular personality,” the older officer said, scratching his cheek like bark. “How old is she?”

“Twenty-seven,” Jiang Bailu said, the number falling like a pebble into a quiet pond.

…

“Huh?” the officer blinked, surprise bursting like a startled pigeon.