Otherworld Bone Dragon Operation Guide

Chapters 24, 25-26: Miao Xin and the Skeleton Hunter

The press release didn't explain why Su Ming was a suspect. He logged into the city forum where the machinery factory was located and, sure enough, found several long posts. He focused on the longer posts and quickly figured out most of the details.

Investigators of the natural gas explosion accident unexpectedly discovered boneless remains while inspecting a grove of trees. The victim, a girl named Miao Xin, had been missing for two months.

Meanwhile, the machinery factory reported to the police that employee Su Ming was missing and his dormitory had been burglarized. Although he should have been on the truck transporting materials, the driver's body was found at the scene, but Su Ming's body was not. Highway surveillance footage showed that he did indeed enter the highway in a vehicle and passed by a roadside surveillance camera several kilometers away.

Therefore, the investigators concluded that Su Ming got out of the car nearby before the explosion.

Furthermore, there were many inexplicable phenomena at the scene of the natural gas transport vehicle explosion, which are initially estimated to be caused by human intervention. The other whistleblowers also don't know why.

But Su Ming remembered it.

When the troublemaker hid in the factory's storage room, Su Ming used a damage transfer technique to sever a piece of its shoulder blade. Miao Xin's remains naturally contained her DNA. The machinery factory was less than 20 kilometers from where the dismembered body was found, and Su Ming lived alone in a dormitory room after get off work, providing him with ample opportunity to commit the crime.

Therefore, Su Ming became a prime suspect in the murder!
The chain-reaction car accident that caused the natural gas vehicle explosion was actually caused by Galio's wormhole travel; it would be strange if the scene was normal. Investigators, finding phenomena beyond their comprehension, naturally suspected the possibility of it being deliberately orchestrated.

And coincidentally, Su Ming mysteriously got out of the car before the accident, thus avoiding the explosion.

Very well, the emotional explosion case is also looking for him. No wonder he's receiving such high-level treatment! Su Mingxiang understood this, and without hesitation, he turned off his phone and rode off on his bike.

He had purchased model ships online using this phone. Cyber ​​police were able to monitor the phone's activity and locate the restaurant via the Wi-Fi he was using.

As for efficiency, Su Ming didn't want to doubt the investigators' dedication to KPIs. In this country, this type of case would at least receive an SR+ rating.

A professional team, backed by the state apparatus—in every sense of the word, with a massive administrative agency, law enforcement departments, surveillance cameras, supercomputers, and all sorts of things you know and don't know.

Su Ming had no idea how to fight against this power.

Five days ago, Su Ming was a law-abiding citizen. Asking him to disguise himself and conceal his whereabouts has already exhausted 90% of his potential.

Faced with this predicament, Su Ming's only thought was to clear himself of suspicion, which meant investigating the explosion site and finding the real killer of Miao Xin. And the quickest way, naturally, was to question the parties involved.

That's right, go ask the driver and Miao Xin herself what happened!
Based on Su Ming's current knowledge, Miao Xin's remnant soul is most likely still intact. Especially given her untimely death in her youth, her lingering attachments are usually quite strong. The other drivers, having died less frequently, likely have even more lingering remnants.

Su Ming sped his motorcycle to over 60 kilometers per hour, single-mindedly heading straight for the location where the initial accident had occurred.

****
As they approached the highway, Su Ming abandoned his car and entered the jungle a few hundred meters away.

The dismemberment scene was cordoned off with caution tape; no one was there, and no one was hiding in the shadows to monitor the situation. However, psychic vision detected several small heat sources—there were security cameras there!
Fortunately, the bushes provided cover. Su Ming followed the blind spot of the surveillance cameras and approached the location of the dismembered body to within a dozen meters. Looking through the bushes, he saw that the ground had been cleaned up, a rain shelter had been erected, and many small signs had been placed there.

Several trees in the vicinity were half dead and withered, as if they had suffered some kind of damage.

inspiration!

Su Ming synchronized with the little troublemaker's senses; seven remnant souls were floating at the scene of the explosion, and they all appeared to be the drivers.

The deceased couldn't release the dialogue across realms, but the skeleton told him that the little troublemaker had a soul core, at the Dawn level. This high-level soul core could directly read memories, and even through rune programming, it could allow the little troublemaker to expand its functions further.

Su Ming was quite surprised that a skeleton, a low-level consumable item, would be equipped with a soul core. It was like an electric scooter with a Level 3 autonomous driving system installed.

The device is good, but Su Ming doesn't know how to use it. That's not his fault; if an alien came to Earth and you gave him a high-end drone and asked him to write AI using the LISP language, he'd be just as clueless!
But the basic functions are still working fine. Su Ming activated the little troublemaker's soul core, pulled the wandering remnant souls over, and deciphered what they saw in their last moments before death.

Su Ming's work was rough, but he roughly figured it out. Nothing unusual happened; the wormhole-induced chain-reaction collision resulted in no injuries. Then, that unfortunate natural gas transport truck arrived, and the impact caused a massive leak of natural gas. After mixing with enough air, the natural gas exploded like a thermobaric bomb, taking everyone on the scene and securing MVP!

"This is something I can't deny," Su Ming pondered. He walked along the perimeter of the explosion site and suddenly detected another psionic fluctuation.

Unlike the remnants of the drivers' souls, this fluctuation was much more solid and carried a familiar frequency, so this was—

"Undead creature?"

The fluctuations kept circling in place. Su Ming approached and quickly saw the other party—a ghost?
The ghost was very weak, almost on the verge of dissipating, and it possessed the same aura as the little prickly one. Su Ming suddenly realized, this was Miao Xin!
He could guess what had happened. When summoning the little troublemaker, Galio also summoned Miao Xin's soul as a ghost. But Su Ming was too inexperienced at the time and failed to inherit the intermediate-level ghost mark.

Sensing the little troublemaker approaching, Miao Xin's ghost instinctively lunged at her own skeleton. But unable to touch it, it continued to pace blankly back and forth.

Su Ming has improved rapidly these past few days, with his magic power level rising significantly. After all, he underwent the highest-level Spirit Awakening known in this other world. A rough assessment suggests he should be able to capture mid-level undead.

He made the little troublemaker resonate with the ghost, acquiring its psionic signature. Then he constructed a capture imprint in his mind, pointing it towards the ghost.

Su Ming's mental energy was rapidly depleted, and after a short wait, the new mark captured the target.

The ghost's state stabilized, and the spirit fire became clearer. Su Ming connected with it and discovered that it was a command-type undead creature with basic intelligence. It couldn't do complex tasks, but it could execute ordinary commands.

Then he accessed Miao Xin's remaining memories, trying to find out who the murderer was. But to his surprise, the girl herself didn't even know how she died!

Miao Xin was just an ordinary worker. One day two months ago, she got off work early, so she took a detour to pick some wild prickly pears in the woods next to the highway to take home and boil for her younger sister who had been having stomach problems lately.

She had just arrived under the tree when she saw a flash of blue light, and then the world went black.

Su Ming sighed. What was he going to do? He couldn't clear his name this time. If he went to the police and told them this, would they believe him?
But Miao Xin's memory wasn't entirely useless. Su Ming walked to another thicket of bushes a few hundred meters away from the scene and pulled a backpack from under a clump of weeds. Inside were a phone, a wallet, and a set of keys. The phone was dead, but there was a power bank in the backpack the little prickly girl was carrying, so Su Ming plugged it in. Two months had passed, and the surface of the waterproof tarpaulin was covered with grass roots. Inside the bag were a dozen or so prickly pears, already blackened and shriveled. According to Miao Xin's memory, she had found the backpack too heavy to carry, so she had stuffed it into the bushes and hidden it while she went elsewhere to continue looking for fruit.

Rest in peace! Su Ming had the little troublemaker put his hands together and silently prayed.

Poor girl, we'll only have another chance to investigate the cause of your death.

****
Afterwards, Su Ming rode his bicycle away from the scene quickly, followed by a floating ghost.

As Su Ming passed a railway viaduct intersection, several police cars drove up and passed by. The police cars stopped at the intersection, set up a checkpoint, and checked passing motorcycles and pedestrians.

Su Ming quickly stopped, found a building, climbed up the outer wall, and hid on the rooftop platform.

Su Ming had her stroll around the police checkpoint, and they discovered that the police were indeed looking for him. It has to be said, being a ghost, unseen by humans, makes reconnaissance incredibly convenient.

However, he also tried it along the way and found that he could not execute the Summoning of All Things through Miao Xin.

The ghost's structure is vastly different from a skeleton's; it lacks a physical soul core system. The Dawn Soul Core possessed by the little rascal seems to be a crucial component for achieving interdimensional summoning of all things.

Su Ming opened his phone and started searching for something.

According to the data, acute hepatitis and acute myocarditis alone can lead to the failure of the corresponding organs at any time, not to mention pneumonia, which is a deadly weapon. Once the infection becomes severe, the progression of respiratory failure can be very rapid.

Su Ming couldn't help but feel anxious. He had found the necessary drugs, but these required the troublemaker to access them, and the current intensity of the search made it impossible for him to move an inch.

The house was situated on higher ground, and apart from the railway viaduct they had passed not long ago, Su Ming could see many other intersections, with faint red police lights flashing one after another.

For the first time, he felt the immense power of the vast net of justice that had once ensnared the country he once lived in.

But we can't give up! Whether it's the skeleton that doesn't know how much longer it can hold on, or his own hope of survival and returning home!

Su Ming forced out his discouragement. If he couldn't solve the problem, he had to change his approach. He remembered how he had previously used Earth's solutions to the crisis at Cui'an Cliff. Now that he was in trouble on Earth, perhaps the answer lay in another world.
-
Su Ming returned to the Zhiyuan and went to the library of the Bone Scholars. He found the "Handbook of Undead Creatures" and began to look up information about Little Troublemaker and Miao Xin.

Su Ming had seen the little prickly head's skeleton. The shiny bones were not the round ones he had initially thought, but rather made up of a large number of polygonal bone plates stacked together, with many strange shapes on them. They were made up of irregularly shaped components interlocked and inlaid, and their shape and size were very detailed.

These features were very obvious, and sure enough, he found a similar picture in the book. The little spiky guy actually belonged to the advanced skeleton model: the Scout Hunter!

"Yay!" Su Ming clenched his fist and cheered. He knew that the creation of the Necromancer wouldn't be so simple!
According to the index, Su Ming found the detailed description. The Scout Hunter is a high-level consumable item with strong mobility and basic combat capabilities.

Skeletons are purely skeletal bodies and cannot withstand high levels of psionic energy output. Therefore, the Scout Hunter adopted a design that separates the bone and spirit components. On the one hand, this reduces energy consumption under normal conditions; on the other hand, if the skeletal body is damaged, the more expensive spirit component can escape and be recovered, achieving the goal of energy conservation and consumption reduction.

"Does this mean I need to plug in the batteries?" Su Ming looked at the two undead marks in his sea of ​​consciousness and, following the method described in the book, "Fuse!"
-
On Earth, as the imprints merged, Miao Xin flew onto Little Spicy Head. A green glow flashed, and the ghostly flames in Little Spicy Head's eyes lit up.

"Very good!" After a slight movement, Su Ming felt that the little prickly boy's mobility had improved significantly, and its dexterity had also greatly increased. Moreover, the control was smoother, as the Ghost's intelligent core was helping him correct the details of his movements.

He synchronized his senses and they became much clearer. At the same time, the ghost's psychic energy was also being depleted.

Su Ming took off his backpack and his clothes. After being lightened, he could even easily leap five meters into the air.

"So this is the correct way to use the undead after all." Su Ming moved his skeleton. He noticed that his ribs could move, and upon unfolding them, he discovered that his chest cavity was a storage structure.

Su Ming quickly put all the odds and ends from his backpack into it and closed it—this was much more convenient!
In the distance, the searchlights of a train appeared on the overpass. Su Ming's eyes narrowed; this was an opportunity to break free of the encirclement!
He maneuvered the little rascal to run wildly along the rooftops until it reached the closest point to the viaduct, where he decisively leaped off.

The fusion's little spiky head jumped very high, far above the roof where it took off, and many people saw it.

After leaping more than ten meters through the air, Su Ming reached out and hooked his hand on the outer edge of the overpass. He swung his body, tilted back, and then did a backflip to jump onto the bridge.

Upon landing, it immediately sprints at maximum speed in a straight line!

A white, bullet-shaped train swept past Little Spiky at over 300 kilometers per hour. Little Spiky leaped up with all his might, soaring high over the train carriages and landing on the roof. His bony claws left scratches dozens of meters long on the roof before he finally came to a stop.

In the fierce wind, Su Ming looked back and watched the police lights behind him disappear into the distance.

****
On the roof of the speeding train, Su Ming leaned down and turned on Miao Xin's phone.

He leaned down, glanced at the train number on the carriage, then logged onto the railway website, checked the train timetable, found the route and location of his train, and knew he would arrive at the station in fifteen minutes.

He began searching for nearby major hospitals.

A familiar name flashed before Su Ming's eyes: Songshan Sanatorium Hospital.

This place was located in Su Ming's hometown, so he knew it was a sanatorium specifically for the wealthy. Compared to going to a bustling, large hospital, a sanatorium was a better choice. There were fewer people and more medicine there, and it was especially quiet at night.

He had a grudge against that dean, and he was helpless against it before. But now—he looked down at the little troublemaker's bony claws, and things might be different!
Su Ming quickly checked the high-speed rail timetable and found that there was indeed a high-speed train passing through the station ahead and heading in that direction. He jumped off the train before entering the station, climbed onto the outer railway line pole, and waited for the target train to pass before jumping up.

(End of this chapter)