Mechanical Pioneer Under One Person

Seeing Liu Ke nod, the old beggar seemed to be completely relieved and said, "Last night, that man slapped me with his hand and I fainted. When I came to my senses, I was lying here. He put his hands on my shoulders and pinched his fingers into my shoulder sockets, and my arms were removed."

"And then there are the legs."

No knife?

Seeing the old beggar suddenly calm down, Liu Ke asked, "Uncle, do you know who that is?"

"I knew...I knew it decades ago."

"...Beggars' Gang."

Chapter 16 Grafting

The old beggar wanted to say something when the child who had brought Liu Ke here shouted over, "Uncle Ning, are we still going to look for Guo'er?"

Lao Ning, the old beggar whose arms and legs had been removed, turned around and shouted, "Don't worry, Guo'er is fine. Wait there quietly! Don't go anywhere!"

Liu Ke turned his gaze back and asked, "The child from yesterday..."

"Well, the one you gave food to yesterday was Guo'er. After my legs were removed, Guo'er must have dropped something during dinner and returned here."

"The man didn't bother with me anymore, just grabbed the fruit and ran away."

Uncle Ning sighed and said, "Young man, to be honest... I'm familiar with the Beggars' Sect's methods. Guo'er is fine for now, but I can't say for sure what will happen in a few days."

Liu Ke was tired after squatting for a long time, so he put away his Naduotong uniform, laid the cello case flat, and sat on it himself.

The company did have records of the Beggars' Sect, but they were very limited. The materials Mr. Xu San provided to him contained no record of the Beggars' Sect's tactics, and even the battles between the company and the Beggars' Sect were only briefly mentioned.

"Can you please tell me what methods the Beggars' Sect has?"

Uncle Ning shivered, coughed a few times, and said, "It's too itchy. Do you have a cigarette? Please give it a squeeze first."

"No, I...I don't smoke."

"Hey, you see how unlucky I am that I even met a non-smoker."

Uncle Ning stretched his neck and let out a long, low roar. When he opened his mouth again, it was full of blood from his bitten gums.

"The Beggars' Sect was destroyed by you in the first place. It was destroyed too quickly. It's normal that you didn't take any part in it."

"Speaking of which, there aren't any nice tricks."

"It's nothing more than the skill of slapping a bead with one hand, which can make people faint when they touch it. Another skill is to tear off people's arms and legs, and just grab the joints and pull them off."

Old Ning said this, shaking the flesh of his broken shoulder again, and said to Liu Ke: "This one was removed the earliest, and it will be healed soon. You can peel it open again and take a look."

Liu Ke raised his eyebrows and rolled up the old man's left sleeve.

"what?"

A few minutes ago, Uncle Ning's broken arm was still a bloody mess, but now it has healed. A layer of skin has grown on the broken part, covering the protruding joint bones and flesh.

Just like... those beggars with broken limbs that I've seen on the Internet before.

Old Uncle Ning sighed and said, "The Beggars' Sect captures people to make money. This move is because they're afraid the tree will die."

"That's why Guo'er isn't anxious. Those people would first starve the little ones, especially the girls, for three days after they caught them to see if they were destined to become the "Altar Girl." The reason is, the price of a "Altar Girl" is high."

Then he added, "That's all their tricks are. They're all harmful and not very effective. Otherwise, how could they have been beaten to pieces by a few slaps from you guys back then?"

At this point, Old Uncle Ning paused again, his face solemn for a moment, and then he said, "But...but, there are also powerful ones. If you see the dogs they raise, you must be careful. This Beggar Gang is not good at anything else, but their dogs are powerful!"

"...Anyway...Anyway, that's what they used to say. I've never seen the dog, so I don't know what it looks like."

"If you want to find them, I don't know where to look, but since they've set their sights on us, they usually won't go too far."

After listening to him, Liu Ke thanked him and took a few steps before turning around and asking, "If you catch the person, will your arms and legs still be able to...?"

The old beggar's face was ashen, and he laughed dryly, "Hahahaha, thank you, young man. I don't know, haha, I've never seen it... Guo'er, I'm relying on you. It would be useless for us beggars to go there."

----

After leaving the construction site, Liu Ke had no idea where to go.

He fed the little girl yesterday out of kindness, and looked for her just to try his luck.

But unexpectedly, such a child has been abducted by the Beggar Gang and even he himself cannot be found.

When I was asking Uncle Ning about something just now, he asked Heiqiang to check the surveillance footage and screen the people in the video.

Although the abandoned construction site where the beggars gathered had no electricity and no surveillance, there were many surveillance cameras on Jiefang North Street where the construction site was located.

Black Wall screened through hundreds of surveillance videos and found that except for Old Ningtou's group of real beggars, no one entered the construction site.

He had no other choice but to have Black Wall check the cell tower signal records. The base station at this construction site had separate coverage, so it was easier to check, but there was no signal last night either.

This means that the beggar gang member came here last night without a cell phone.

Whether in the cold storage or on the construction site, they don't have their phones with them. Are they all just savages? Don't criminal gang members need to reply "received" on their phones?

Sitting on the bench in McDonald's again, Liu Ke covered his face with his hands, feeling that he had done something wrong again. He always felt that the little girl might have been implicated by him.

"Woof! Woo! Woof..."

Until a Teddy Bear peed next to the Uncle Mike statue.

Watching the fat woman yank the dog's iron leash, causing Teddy to yelp, Liu Ke was lost in thought...

Yes! Dog...

According to the old beggar, this beggar gang keeps dogs... and dogs don't have cell phones... so even if there's surveillance, no one will notice the dogs.

Is that so? Let's try our best...

"Black Wall, change the video footage we've retrieved over the past two days to target dogs, and re-analyze it."

"Okay, master."

About 3 minutes later.

"Master, in the video related to the Xingquan cold storage, a dog was filmed twice at the 'south side wall' location. After comparing and analyzing the videos, it's most likely the same dog."

"In the September video footage of the abandoned mall construction site, the 'Zhonggong Education' camera on the north side of the site captured a dog twice. The dog in the video resembles the dog in the Xingquan cold storage video by 97% and 62% respectively."

Frowning, Liu Ke called out the four videos marked on the black wall in his mind and watched the two videos of Xingquan Cold Storage first.

Sure enough, as Officer Cong said, on the night when the unknown beggar was found in the cold storage, a camera in the factory captured a black Labrador at 8 o'clock in the evening.

In the second video, at the same location, an hour later, accompanied by a large-scale commotion among the police in the video, the black Labrador appeared again and returned along the same route.

Was it a coincidence? Liu Ke felt something was amiss, but he couldn't put his finger on it, so he simply started watching the two marked videos of the abandoned construction site again.

Squinting his eyes, Liu Kexian clicked on the video marked on the black wall as having high similarity.

The video also showed a black Labrador. It showed the dog passing the entrance of Zhonggong Education and heading into the construction site at 10 p.m. Liu Ke had a feeling it was the same dog that had appeared at the Xingquan cold storage facility.

Liu Ke pulled out the video with low similarity again, but when he saw it, he couldn't help vomiting!

This video and the highly similar video were shot by the same camera. The time was 10:30 pm, and the video content shows a black Labrador emerging from a construction site.

Is this still... a Labrador?

What made him vomit was this dog. Its head and body were normal, but its limbs looked like they had been grafted on, with human arms and legs...

Chapter 17 Sewer Well

After rinsing his mouth with a sip of water and taking a few deep breaths, Liu Ke finally suppressed the nausea brought on by the "dog-shaped centipede". Once the nausea had completely subsided, he began to watch the four videos frame by frame.

This, uh, creature? Actually, it shouldn't be called a dog. It's more like a canine-like creature, or perhaps an 'abomination' or 'stitches' would be more appropriate.

The canine creature in the four videos is, if nothing unexpected happens, the same one. It is the one responsible for finding clues about the beggar in the cold storage and for kidnapping Guo'er.

Sniffing his nose, Liu Ke rewatched the video of the "dog-shaped centipede" and discovered that it wasn't just its four legs that were wrong. Its abdomen was also problematic, and was noticeably swollen.

Bloated? Why is it bloating?

His heart skipped a beat, and he had a bad feeling about the cause of the swelling.

Patting his face, Liu Ke asked Heiqiang to screen according to the two images of the black Labrador and expand the camera search range from the circle around the abandoned construction site to within 8 kilometers.

After closing his eyes and resting for about five minutes, Black Wall found a clue.

During the time period he'd screened, he'd found no more 'dog centipedes,' and only a few black Labradors had appeared within the camera's field of view. Throwing aside the actual 'dogs' that had been led out of range by their owners, the number of animals that met the screening criteria was even smaller.

The black wall directly locked onto several of them, reminding Liu Ke to pay attention.

After a quick mental scan, I found that the shooting locations of these videos are different, but the content is similar.

The video shows a black dog coming out of a sewer with the manhole cover pushed against it. The black dog in the video is not covered in dirt even after coming out of the sewer.

The shooting time of one of the videos can be matched with the time when Guo'er was abducted. Although the dog's legs are normal, the abdomen is swollen like the "dog-body centipede", exactly the same.

Looking at the dog's belly, it can be said that the clue has emerged.

--------

"Hello? What's up?"

"Yes, I haven't finished my work yet, though."

Xu Si glanced at his watch and said to the phone, "It will take another three or four minutes."

"Oh, he found it? Pretty quick."

".I see, it's pretty disgusting. Jiefang North, right? Once we're done here, we'll go over there. Oh, and where's Tu Houzi? Let him show off his skills!"

"Okay, okay, hang up."

In a village in Tianjin, at the entrance of a five- or six-story building, Xu Si lit a cigarette and leaned against a Volkswagen sedan. Behind the Volkswagen was a large express delivery truck, and several people in Nadutong uniforms were also waiting.

After taking a few puffs of cigarette, Xu Si looked at the small building next to him with strange patterns painted on the wall. There was a man named Li Sheng in the village who had got a method of Qigong from somewhere and was generous enough to teach the whole village to practice. Practicing secretly was fine, but he also wanted to cause trouble.

This matter is outrageous. When the company issued the order, it directly required a heavy-handed crackdown on it.

Feng Baobao was currently conducting an infiltration mission inside the building, aiming to break up the new gang. The villagers had only practiced for a few months, so Feng Baobao didn't need to intervene.

However, according to the latest information

Xu Si glanced up again, blew out a puff of smoke, and muttered, "The root of evil is born."

"Fourth brother, when can we go in?"

Perhaps they couldn't wait any longer, so several employees who were responsible for finishing the work asked Xu Si.