You went on a blind date and presented an A-level wanted criminal as a meeting gift?

The lights in the Major Crimes Unit's office lobby stayed on all night.

The air was filled with the bitterness of instant coffee, the greasiness of takeout containers, and an oppressive, deathly silence.

No one spoke.

The only sounds were the clatter of the keyboard and the futile scrolling of the mouse wheel.

On the large screen, all the surveillance footage inside and outside Jiangcheng Conservatory of Music was played over and over again.

The screen is divided into dozens of small squares, and the figures in each square are like puppets on strings of fate, mechanically repeating the actions of the twenty-four hours before the incident.

However, there was nothing there.

The killer was like a ghost that didn't exist in this dimension, leaving not a single trace.

The investigation has reached a complete standstill.

Su Ke'er curled up on the sofa in the corner, wearing Su Qingge's coat.

She had cried all her tears, her beautiful eyes were swollen and red like ripe peaches, and she just stared blankly at the ceiling. The emptiness and sadness of losing her dearest friend made her seem colorless.

Jiang Tingxue brought her a glass of warm water and sat silently beside her, keeping her company without a sound.

Li Mingyu, on the other hand, sat in the seat furthest from the crowd.

He kept his head down, pretending to be flipping through case files, but in reality, he didn't absorb a single word.

The scene of Lin Chen tearing open the speaker with his bare hands and taking out the black killing device last night kept replaying in his mind.

The humiliation of being completely crushed, and the fear that came from the bone, made him not even dare to look up at Lin Chen.

The entire major crimes unit, all the experienced detectives, felt as if they were trapped in an invisible net, and no matter how hard they struggled, they could not find a way to break through.

Only Lin Chen.

He leaned against the window, his gaze calmly fixed on the gradually whitening sky outside, as if this bizarre murder case, worthy of being recorded in the annals of criminal investigation, had not stirred the slightest ripple in his heart.

……

The next day, at noon.

The tense atmosphere in the Major Crimes Unit was broken by a series of urgent phone calls.

It was a call from the city bureau's communication office.

"Team Leader Su, here is a package addressed to you, but there is no sender information."

Fifteen minutes later.

A package, completely wrapped in black industrial tape and resembling a black brick, was delivered to Su Qingge's desk.

All eyes were instantly drawn to this.

The package had an indescribable eeriness about it.

Su Qingge's eyes narrowed, she put on survey gloves, and carefully used a utility knife to cut open the layers of tape.

As the last strip of tape was cut, a vintage record box exuding a strong sense of history was revealed to everyone.

The box is made of dark red wood, with worn edges, giving it a vintage feel.

Su Qingge opened the box.

Everyone instinctively held their breath.

Inside the box, on the black velvet, lay a record quietly.

A deep red vinyl record.

The red was an abnormally bright red, like congealed blood, reflecting an eerie glow under the light.

"What...what does this mean? Is it a prank?"

A young police officer couldn't help but whisper.

Su Qingge did not answer. She carefully took out the record and placed it on an old-fashioned phonograph that the evidence department had found.

The needle fell.

"rustle……"

After a burst of electrical noise, the music that flowed from the speaker was not what everyone had expected.

Instead, it was a bizarre musical piece synthesized through multiple electronic processes, filled with a sense of blasphemy.

The sound was like a solemn hymn being brutally dissected, all the notes wailing and twisting, forcibly pieced together into a melody full of discordant accents, striking precisely the most vulnerable beats of the human heart, one after another.

"What the hell?"

"This is just noise!"

Just as everyone was completely confused, and Li Mingyu was even about to mock them for making things complicated again.

Lin Chen, who had been silent all along, moved.

He slowly closed his eyes.

[God-level Hearing Ability], now activated!

Om-!

In an instant, all the noise in the office lobby, the breathing of colleagues, the sound of the wind outside the window, and even the faint electrical hum of the light bulbs faded away.

His world transformed into a pitch-black universe composed of countless sound waves.

The eerie accent emanating from the phonograph transformed into a murky, violent sonic storm.

Lin Chen's consciousness precisely cut into the storm.

He stripped away the outermost layer of low-frequency noise.

Synthesizer interference in the intermediate layer was filtered out.

It penetrated the core distortion effect.

Deep within that chaotic sound wave, he captured a synthesized human voice, compressed and distorted to the extreme, like a demon's whisper!

Lin Chen's eyelashes trembled slightly.

He heard it clearly.

He reconstructed the encrypted declaration in his mind, word by word.

The next second, he suddenly opened his eyes!

Two icy glints shot from those calm eyes!

"This is not noise."

Lin Chen's voice wasn't loud, but it was like a thunderclap that exploded in the deathly silent hall.

He walked to the phonograph, raised his hand, and pressed the stop button.

The eerie accent abruptly stopped.

The whole world fell silent instantly.

Lin Chen turned around, his gaze sweeping across the entire room, and revealed to the public, word by word, the declaration hidden beneath the demonic sound.

"The lamentations of mortals are the most beautiful chords offered to art."

"The first movement—'The Lament of a Young Girl'—has begun."

"Stay tuned for the second movement—'The Mentor's Hypocrisy'."

"It will be dedicated to the most hypocritical mentor in this city."

Dead silence.

Utter silence.

Lin Chen's words instantly chilled the blood of all the criminal police officers present.

Everyone's face was filled with uncontrollable horror and fear.

What is this?

This is a murder threat sent by the killer... an extremely audacious announcement!

He not only admitted that he killed Chen Man, but also foreshadowed his next target!

"Lin...Lin Chen...what happened to you...?"

Su Qingge's voice was trembling.

She couldn't understand how Lin Chen could hear those words from that pile of noise.

"He has issued a challenge to us."

Lin Chen did not explain.

His eyes were terrifyingly cold, the kind of eyes that look like someone who has been thoroughly enraged.

After the initial shock, an overwhelming anger surged through the hearts of all the criminal police officers present!

"Damn it! That's too arrogant!"

"Investigate! Investigate! 'Hypocritical mentors'! Which mentors did Chen Man have contact with during her lifetime?"

"Get the complete list of all professors and lecturers at the music academy! Check them one by one!"

The entire Major Crimes Unit was instantly ignited, and everyone sprang into action, engaging in a frantic brainstorming session.

However, Lin Chen walked to his workstation without saying a word.

Amidst the heated discussion, he pulled out a chair, sat down, and turned on his computer.

Lin Chen's hands hovered over the keyboard.

In his eyes, the world has changed once again.

[God-level hacking skills], unleashing full power!

[Divine Insight], take simultaneous control!

This time, his fingers didn't transform into a torrent of code; the movement was actually quite simple.

On the screen, he ignored the multiple login interfaces of the academic affairs system that required an account, password, and dynamic verification code, and simply entered an extremely concise command in the background command line.

It was as if he wasn't invading, but rather exercising his inherent supreme authority.

"Snapped!"

Lin Chen's finger tapped the Enter key lightly.

There's no code waterfall, no fancy special effects.

The Jiangcheng Conservatory of Music's supposedly impregnable servers didn't even issue a single alarm. Its highest-level backend data was presented to Lin Chen like a docile lamb, without any reservation.

Over the four years since Chen Man enrolled, all her private communication records, encrypted emails, deleted social media posts, and even records of every online and offline interaction she had with each tutor and classmate...

Everything was forcibly dug out, reassembled, and restored from the grave of data by a brute force!

A massive amount of data, enough to crash any supercomputer, flooded into Lin Chen's brain like a tsunami.

However, this data did not cause any confusion.

[God-level insight] Instantly construct an incredibly complex, three-dimensional model of intertwined relationships between these individuals in the brain!

In the model, each node represents a person, and each connection represents an interaction.