"Hmm? You're interested in corpses too?" An Qingyu immediately became interested.
"Don't compare me to a madman like you." Lin Qiye shrugged. "I just have another use for you."
"Well, I thought I'd gained another confidant..." An Qingyu shook her head regretfully, his gaze falling on the tavern owner who was slowly standing up. "However, people with super-fast regeneration aren't so easy to kill."
Lin Qiye placed his hand on the hilt of the sword at his waist. "I know."
The iron nail between the tavern owner's eyebrows popped out automatically, and the blood hole healed at a speed visible to the naked eye. He squinted at the two uninvited guests in front of him, his expression somewhat unpleasant.
"Interesting... How did you find your way here?"
"As long as we deduce that you are the murderer, and add a little bit of wild imagination, finding you doesn't seem to be too difficult," Lin Qiye said calmly.
The tavern owner frowned slightly. "I shouldn't have left any clues."
"No clues at all?" An Qingyu chuckled. "To be honest, your overall strategy is pretty good, but your ability to handle details is worse than a snake."
Lin Qiye calmly said, "At first, you did successfully deceive everyone, making us believe that this series of murders was a ritual prepared by a 'mysterious' ghost seeking advancement, thus subconsciously ignoring the possibility of human involvement."
"In the first three murders, you simply staged the scene to appear as a serial killer's crime, leaving no information related to the 'mystery' to prevent the Night Watch from discovering your intentions in advance and interfering before the final ritual, thus ruining your plans."
"When you realize the time is right after the fourth murder, you use video recording and rewinding to create a mysterious, non-existent entity, immediately attracting the Night's Watch's attention and prompting them to investigate. Your goal is to make the Night's Watch aware of the ritual at this stage, thereby deducing the location of the final ritual."
"Of course, you could have easily framed the fourth murder as a psychopathic killing to secretly complete the final ritual, but you didn't do that."
"On one hand, you were worried that the souls sacrificed in the final stage were not strong enough and that the souls of the owners of the Forbidden Ruins would be needed to better restore [Bell Crand]. There were only a few owners of the Forbidden Ruins in this city, all of whom were among the Night Watch. So you used a clever lie to trick a Night Watchman who was neither strong nor weak."
"The second reason is that you want to use the final ritual to kill all the Night's Watch members in the city in one fell swoop!"
"As for the method... perhaps it was the 600 kilograms of explosives lying in the cargo hold?"
When Lin Qiye said this, An Qingyu and Wen Qimo were both stunned, and a look of shock appeared in their eyes. Only the tavern owner's face darkened instantly.
As early as when he and A'Zhu were clinging to the tail of the plane, Lin Qiye's mental power had detected a large amount of explosives in the cargo hold and he instantly understood the other party's intentions. As for how the other party managed to send these explosives onto the plane without anyone noticing, it was not difficult for someone with mental powers.
"From the very beginning, you planned to crash this plane into the neighborhood guarded by the Night Watch, causing a large number of casualties. Other Night Watch members would then arrive immediately, and you could... Boom!"
"I don't know if sacrificing enough powerful souls in this ritual can increase the rate of advancement. If it can, perhaps sacrificing all the Night Watchers could raise [Bell Crane's] strength to a terrifying level!"
"Even directly elevating it to 'limitless' shouldn't be too difficult."
Lin Qiye's expression was very calm. "I must say, your plan was very well laid out. While completing the ritual, you were able to wipe out the Night Watchers of a city all by yourself. But unfortunately, you left too many flaws."
"On the day of the party, in order to better extricate yourself from the case, you deliberately drank a lot of alcohol in front of the video camera to create the effect of being drunk. However, the alcohol also numbed your brain to some extent, causing you to make many small mistakes."
"For example, when performing the ritual to kill Sun Xiao in the basement, the steps were wrong. First, the Ten-Cut Ghost Child cut off his finger, and then he realized that he had not yet fixed him to the wall. So he hurriedly nailed him to the wall and killed him."
"Of course, there was no set order in the ceremony, and in your imagination, we would never have discovered this basement, so this might not be considered a mistake for you at all, just a minor incident."
"However, you overlooked one point: because he was lying on the ground when his finger was cut off, the direction of the finger cutting was different from usual, as was the direction in which the nail was inserted when his hand was immobilized. As long as you compare it with the direction in which his hand was immobilized in the video, you can find the contradiction."
"Given this, it's not hard to deduce that there's something wrong with the video."
Lin Qiye glanced at An Qingyu and continued, "I admit that luck played a part in what happened next. You probably would never have imagined that a freak with the same superhuman regeneration would go so far as to use himself as a model to simulate the content of a video recording, thus discovering the secret of the reverse playback..."
"If it were me, I wouldn't even think of that."
"But once we know the secret of the video and find the crime scene, we can identify the killer... which is you."
After Lin Qiye finished speaking, the entire cabin fell into a deathly silence. The tavern owner stared intently at Lin Qiye, and after a long while, he slowly spoke:
"I never imagined that this small city of Cangnan would have such a prodigy..."
"Let me correct you." An Qingyu silently pushed up his glasses and held up two fingers. "It's two."
Tavern owner:...
He glanced at the time, his expression immediately turning ugly. He glared fiercely at Lin Qiye, then turned to the Ten-Cut Ghost Child and spoke:
"Kill them! I'll continue the ritual!"
The Ten-Cut Demon Child let out a low growl, its body writhing violently. In the blink of an eye, an identical copy of itself split off from its body, then split again, becoming four, and then splitting once more...
A few seconds later, the driver's cab was filled with ten demon children, wielding short swords with incredible speed—exactly ten of them.
With so many ghost children crammed into the cramped driver's cab, there was almost no empty space left, and Lin Qiye and his two companions were instantly surrounded!
Lin Qiye supported Wen Qimo, his brows furrowed slightly. In contrast, An Qingyu's eyes shone as if s\he had seen a rare treasure!
"Leave this to me, you deal with that boss." A hint of frost appeared in An Qingyu's palm. He licked his lips, his shy and quiet face filled with excitement.