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

The interrogation room is located on the basement floor.

The three assassins were strapped to specially made metal restraint chairs.

Each chair is welded to the ground, with the backrest, armrests, and legs all made of cold-rolled steel pipes, and the joints are fixed with aerospace-grade rivets. Even an elephant couldn't escape if it sat on one.

But these three people didn't need to run at all.

They can't function normally even though none of their joints are intact.

The dislocated arm hung at either side of the body like a wet towel being dried, and the leg with the knee bent backward rested on the foot pedal at an impossible angle.

Su Qingge stood across the interrogation table and opened a blank transcript.

"Name, number, organization, commander's code name, say it."

The three gas masks have been removed.

Three faces were exposed to the bright lights of the interrogation room; their features were so ordinary that they would be easily lost in a crowd.

They are between twenty-five and thirty years old, with a yellowish complexion, high cheekbones, and a hard, narrow jawline.

A typical Southeast Asian mixed-race appearance.

The three people remained silent.

It is not a silent confrontation.

It was the kind of chilling silence that seeped from between the teeth.

Six eyes, their pupils dilated to almost swallow the iris, stared intently at Su Qingge, devoid of fear, anger, or even the instinct for survival.

There was only a layer of deathly gray emptiness.

Su Qingge has seen far too many tough nuts to crack.

She's managed to pry open the mouths of drug cartel henchmen, gangsters, and desperate criminals—no matter how stubborn they were.

But these three people gave her different feelings.

It's not hard.

It is empty.

Like three soulless shells, only the most basic biological instincts remain to drive breathing and heartbeats.

"Last chance."

Su Qingge closed the notebook, her voice dropping half a octave.

"Cooperate with the investigation and you will be treated leniently."

"Otherwise, it would be considered participation in international terrorism, and you would be punished for multiple crimes. Even without the death penalty in this country, you could spend the rest of your life in prison."

The middle assassin's lips moved slightly.

Su Qingge leaned forward.

Those lips weren't speaking.

He is laughing.

A tiny, barely perceptible smile slowly crept up from the left corner of his mouth.

"The will of the court is unstoppable."

His voice was hoarse and his Chinese pronunciation was not standard, but he pronounced each word very heavily.

After saying that...

He shut his mouth.

It's not about shutting up.

It's a bite.

The upper and lower jaws snapped shut with such force that the muscles in the cheeks bulged out from under the skin.

A dull, muffled sound, like the cracking of a hard candy, came from deep inside his mouth.

"puff."

A stream of dark black liquid spilled from the corner of his tightly closed mouth.

Almost at the same time.

The one on the left.

The one on the right.

The exact same movements.

The exact same timing.

The exact same "click" sound.

The three of them simultaneously bit into the tiny venom sac hidden in the space between their second molars on the right side.

"Quickly! Medical team!"

Su Qingge suddenly stood up, knocking the chair to the ground.

Useless.

The dark black liquid seeped out from the corners of the three people's mouths, nostrils, and even the corners of their eyes at the same time. The speed was so fast that it didn't seem like the flow of liquid, but rather like some kind of active substance undergoing a chain reaction of tissue dissolution in the body.

From the moment the venom sac bursts to the moment the pupils of the three people completely lose their luster, the entire process takes no more than eight seconds.

Eight seconds.

There wasn't even time to get into the cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) position.

The interrogation room was filled with a sweet, metallic smell and a very similar organic acid odor that Lin Chen had smelled in the gift box bomb.

Su Qingge stared at the three corpses that were still sitting, her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palms.

The trail went cold.

She took out her phone and dialed Lin Chen's number. He answered after it rang for half a ring.

"Dead?"

Lin Chen's voice was unusually calm, devoid of disappointment or surprise.

Su Qingge was stunned for a second.

"Did you know they would commit suicide?"

"If the court dared to send someone into the police station's evidence room, it's impossible that they hadn't considered the aftermath of a failure."

Lin Chen's tone was as if he were saying the weather was nice today.

"For assassins of this caliber, from the day they undergo modification, the poison sacs between their teeth become an integral part of their bodies."

"It's okay if they can't find anything, but has the body been properly preserved?"

"No one has touched it."

"Okay, have someone secretly move the body to Jiang Tingxue's forensic room, through an underground passage, avoiding any area covered by surveillance cameras, and keep the number of people involved in the transfer to no more than three."

Su Qingge frowned.

"You suspect that there are informants within the police department, like those of Hannya?"

There was a two-second silence on the other end of the phone.

"Locking the electronic door to the forensic lab and hacking into the ventilation system to release toxic gas require real-time access to security controls on the police department's intranet."

"Remote intrusion is not impossible, but the response delay is at least 0.3 seconds, while the door locked precisely four seconds after Jiang Tingxue extracted the drug sample."

"A delay of 0.3 seconds is simply not enough time to make such a precise judgment."

"Unless someone is on-site monitoring and transmitting the signal in real time."

Su Qingge gripped her phone tightly.

"I will investigate."

"Don't alert them yet."

"Give the body to Tingxue, I'll handle the rest."

Lin Chen hung up the phone.

Forty minutes later, the three bodies were laid on the dissection table on the second floor of the medical school's forensic medicine laboratory building.

Jiang Tingxue changed into a new white coat, her gold-rimmed glasses were spotless, and the scalpel twirled gracefully under the light.

Her face returned to its usual coldness, showing no trace of having survived a calamity.

Lin Chen stood on the other side of the dissection table, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

"Listen to the snow, focus on two things."

Jiang Tingxue looked up at him, waiting for him to speak.

"First, brain neurons."

"They were injected with some kind of targeted drug that could block out pain. I confirmed this when I fought them in the evidence room. Even a fractured femur did not affect their fighting movements."

"A drug that can achieve this will definitely leave traces of its metabolites in the synaptic cleft of DRG neurons."

"Second, blood."

"The half-life, metabolic pathway, and possible synthetic precursors of that drug were all extracted."

"This is Prajna's core technology. Understanding the ingredients is equivalent to obtaining clues about its supply chain."

Jiang Tingxue nodded, and the scalpel cut open the scalp of the first corpse.

Her movements were quick and precise; wherever the blade passed, the skin and fascia were clearly opened up, without a single millimeter of unnecessary cutting.

Lin Chen watched her work from the side, his gaze occasionally sweeping towards the corridor of the laboratory building.

He is waiting.

Prajna would not allow these corpses to be thoroughly analyzed.

The poison sac in the mouth of the assassin is the first line of defense; if the body is not destroyed in time, there will definitely be a second line of defense.

It was 11:47 p.m.

The rain outside the window intensified, and raindrops pattered against the old aluminum alloy window frames of the laboratory building, producing a continuous, soft tapping sound.

Jiang Tingxue finally separated a tube of dark blue liquid, less than three milliliters, from the jugular vein blood of the second corpse.

As the liquid spun in the centrifuge, it refracted an extremely strange fluorescent blue light that did not belong to the spectrum of any known human metabolic products.

"Found it."

Jiang Tingxue held the test tube up to the light, and the blue hue reflected in the lenses of her gold-rimmed glasses.

"The molecular structure of this substance is extremely complex and does not match any known compounds in any database. It should be a novel, artificially synthesized neurodepressant."

She turned to look at Lin Chen, about to say the next sentence.

The fluorescent light tube overhead flickered.

It only flashed once.

Voltage fluctuation of less than 0.2 seconds.

For an average person, it wouldn't even be enough time to blink.

But Lin Chen's [God-level Danger Perception] unleashed the most intense alarm signal of the night in those 0.2 seconds, shooting straight from the base of his spine to the top of his head, with an intensity two orders of magnitude higher than when he sensed the gift box bomb at the tea room entrance.

His gaze instantly locked onto the central air conditioning vent in the corner of the ceiling.

The angle of the blades behind the louvered grille of that air vent has changed.

Two seconds ago, the airflow was at a normal downward 45-degree angle, but now it has become a fully open, completely horizontal position. Moreover, the fan's operating sound has changed from a low-frequency "hum" to a high-frequency "hiss," and the airflow has at least tripled.

It's not the air conditioner blowing air.

Something is being forced in through the pipes.

"Listen to the Snow!!"

Lin Chen charged forward with a loud shout.

He didn't have time to get to her side.

Something sprayed out of the vent.

A thick, almost visible, pale green gas poured out from the gaps in the blinds, like a giant green python with its mouth open, lunging into the entire forensic room.

At the same moment, the electronic door of the forensic room made a "click" sound as the metal latch came off.

It's locked.

From the outside.