Chapter 41 The Dead Body

Lin Yilin stepped through the morning mist and arrived at the entrance of her detective agency.

She took out her key, but her motion of opening the door suddenly paused.

Her gaze swept quickly around the doorway before she proceeded to unlock the door and step inside.

"Mr. Illusion?"

Toast was sleeping in the corner, while Zheng Fan was nowhere to be seen.

Lin Yilin squatted down beside the long sofa, stared at the floor for a moment, then shifted her gaze to the side, softly murmuring a sequence of numbers.

Finally, she followed her line of sight all the way to the coffee machine. She sniffed the air lightly, picked up the jar of coffee beans resting on top of the machine, put it back down, and cast her gaze toward the mug on the coffee table.

The sound of flapping wings reached her ears. A gray-eyed bat flew out from the depths of the room and transformed back into human shape, Zheng Fan landing right beside Lin Yilin: "Good morning, you're a bit early today."

"Mr. Illusion, what happened last night?"

"As expected, I still can't keep anything from you, can I?" Zheng Fan sighed, then said, "Don't worry, though. Even though a minor accident occurred last night, Toast and I handled it for you quite perfectly."

"Oh?" Lin Yilin tilted her head.

"First of all, there's our good neighbor, the Tanome Detective Agency, as usual. Last night, they sent people over to smash up and harass your agency in an attempt to drive you away."

Lin Yilin nodded.

"Then Toast and I scared them off." Zheng Fan spread both hands, as if displaying his achievements.

Lin Yilin nodded.

She waited for a moment.

"And then?"

"There is no 'and then'. The people ran away, what else could happen?" Zheng Fan retracted his hands and played dumb.

Lin Yilin blinked. "The traces of people moving in and out of the doorway, the bloodstains beside the sofa that weren't completely cleaned up, the dent on the floor made by a heavy object, the smell of gunpowder near the coffee machine, and the high-priced coffee beans missing an amount equivalent to ten cups—though Mr. Illusion, you shouldn't be at the stage where you drink that much in a single night."

Zheng Fan maintained his smile.

Lin Yilin continued, "So, didn't Mr. Illusion's account omit a bit too much? How exactly did you scare them off? And approximately four people died here—how were the corpses dealt with? Also, why does it seem like one person is still alive and hiding inside the agency?"

"If you ever get married, your husband would never dare to cheat on you."

"I'd allow the husband to cheat, and then we'd orchestrate a perfect crime to make the wife vanish from the face of the earth."

"Tsk, you possess a boundless love, Miss Lin Yilin."

With that, Zheng Fan stopped playing dumb and led Lin Yilin deeper into the building.

There were indeed a few spare rooms inside the agency: some used for temporary lodging, some for storing Lin Yilin's secret little gadgets, and even a relatively simple laboratory.

Walking into the lab, Lin Yilin immediately caught sight of Cheng Fei lying on the central operating table.

At this moment, Cheng Fei still had his eyes open and was taking slow, shallow breaths. Aside from that, there was no other response.

Lin Yilin walked closer to observe him, pulled out a flashlight, and flashed it to test his pupillary light reflex. After a brief observation, she asked, "A vegetative state? What did Mr. Illusion do?"

"Possession, complete seizure. But afterwards, it turned into this." Zheng Fan shrugged.

Lin Yilin nodded, then walked over to the lab's freezer. "So the other corpses are in..."

Opening the freezer door, she found that this freezer was generally only used for temporarily storing a few samples and items requiring refrigeration. Its capacity wasn't large, and the person who had stuffed the bodies into it had used rather brutal methods.

Fortunately, by squeezing the four of them together, there was still a tiny bit of space left.

"Mr. Illusion..."

"Apologies, if this freezer has other uses..."

"Don't you know how to dismember corpses?"

"...Huh?"

Lin Yilin dragged the corpses, which had already frozen together, out of the freezer. The four bodies crammed and frozen into one another looked quite horrifying, but Lin Yilin remained unfazed. She walked over to a table in the laboratory and pulled open a large desk drawer.

"The tools are right here. Any normal adult can pick them up and use them with ease. The cleaning agents to more cleanly remove bloodstains and eliminate odors are over here. The soundproofing of this agency was specially reinforced, especially this laboratory. Give it an hour... or a bit longer if you're not skilled, but as long as you're willing to do it, cutting several corpses into small pieces before dawn, putting them into the freezer, and cleaning up the scene isn't a very difficult task at all."

Zheng Fan was stunned for a moment before saying, "So the perfect crime thing was real?"

Lin Yilin tapped her chin with her finger as if in thought. "Would the husband find four people for a threesome? That would make things a bit difficult."

"Sigh, it's just that Cheng Fei's body is too pathetic. There's not an ounce of strength in it when you use it; just cleaning up outside exhausted me to death. Even when I used to be a shut-in at home for months without exercising and eating takeout all day, I wasn't this useless." Zheng Fan returned to the main topic and pointed at Cheng Fei on the table.

Lin Yilin walked back to Cheng Fei's body, looked it over, and asked, "The left arm of this body is new?"

"I spent a tremendous amount of effort regenerating it for him, otherwise this body would have died anyway."

"Not quite. This body should already be dead; the 'mark of death' is very obvious."

"Hmm?" Zheng Fan was startled. "But I can't possess a dead body."

"It's a bit complicated to explain... Mr. Illusion is not your average illusion. The threshold to catch a glimpse of Mr. Illusion is extremely high. I had to make a lot of preparations back then just to see you."

"Jiang Si?"

"That's why I said she is special."

"So that's how it is."

Lin Yilin continued, "Cheng Fei couldn't see you either, Mr. Illusion, but he was successfully contacted by you. Judging from the scene, it was probably due to the threshold being breached by the combination of a life-or-death crisis and intense mental shock. Even so, it was only 'temporary'; essentially, he still couldn't see you, lacking the proper aptitude. I'm afraid that even if he did see Mr. Illusion, his appearance would differ from your true form."

Zheng Fan listened in a daze. "So what does this have to do with me possessing him?"

"It has everything to do with it. Although it was temporary, the conditions of completing contact and suffering a mental breakdown were both met, allowing you, Mr. Illusion, to initiate the intrusion. But at the moment of intrusion, Cheng Fei was already dead."

Lin Yilin looked down at Cheng Fei. "Then, in the process of stepping into the world of death, this body was complemented and patched back together by Mr. Illusion's formidable power, achieving complete seizure. This body has already been branded with 'death'; in this world, it shouldn't start moving again. Yet, Mr. Illusion forced it to move, which means fighting against the rules of death. That's why it's so strained."

"The rules of death?" Zheng Fan repeated the phrase.

It didn't sound like anything related to physiological death or psychological death.

As for physiological problems, Zheng Fan had long since patched those up; as for mental death, Zheng Fan could simply replace that part.

Yet even so, it couldn't change the kind of rule judgment within the Metropolis that "Cheng Fei is already dead."

The world of death? It seemed this was another issue concerning the so-called "multiple worlds" in a place like the Metropolis.

"Furthermore, if it were a complete seizure, Cheng Fei would have completely turned into Mr. Illusion's nourishment. But the result is that you, Mr. Illusion, didn't actually absorb this body—you neither completely intruded into reality nor could you completely detach from it. The body after detachment is in this delicate, vegetative-like state, suspended between life and death." Lin Yilin added.

Having roughly understood the situation, Zheng Fan vexed himself, "Tsk, if I had known better, I wouldn't have put on airs and drank coffee. I was a step too late!"

"It's hard to say for sure, though," Lin Yilin comforted him. "After all, Mr. Illusion is different from ordinary illusions. Whether such a temporary sighting at death's door can be recognized by Mr. Illusion's full power as a suitable vessel is hard to tell."

While a normal illusion would probably find it acceptable, Zheng Fan was a different story.

After all, she had never heard of a dead body being forcibly pulled back just as it died.