Night fell.
The lights across the Eastern District began illuminating one after another.
Traffic on the streets gradually thinned.
The office building in the distance remained exactly as it had been over the past few days.
Quiet.
Ordinary.
Unchanged.
Several hundred meters away from the building, Lucian stood on the rooftop of another structure.
The cold wind swept past him, stirring the ends of his black hair.
He gazed silently at his target.
He no longer bothered setting up a telescope.
Nor did he activate any surveillance equipment.
After several consecutive days of observation, he had already collected more than enough footage.
Every minute.
Every timestamp.
When the manager entered the office.
When she first got up from her seat.
When the employees left.
When only a single light remained in the office.
Everything had been recorded with absolute clarity.
Continuing to observe would only produce a fifth, sixth, or seventh recording that was completely identical to the previous ones.
There was no longer any point.
The real reason Lucian had decided to stop monitoring the building was not that he had run out of patience.
It was because he had confirmed one thing.
The target's behavior was deliberately designed to be observed by outsiders.
The lights remained on.
The person remained seated in the office.
Everything followed a routine so precise that there was not the slightest deviation.
It was almost as if someone were telling every investigator watching from the shadows that the target was still right where they belonged.
Keep waiting.
Keep watching.
Keep wasting time.
Meanwhile, whatever truly mattered had already taken place beyond the reach of their surveillance.
An ordinary investigator facing such a situation could only add more surveillance points, deploy more personnel, install additional equipment, and search for an overlooked exit.
But Lucian was different.
He had never been an ordinary investigator.
He was an ability user.
And an ability was, by its very nature, a means of breaking through the limitations of conventional investigation.
If the naked eye could not find the answer, he would simply use another method.
If the building was deliberately deceiving the senses, he would read the building itself.
...
Lucian slowly raised his right hand.
His palm faced the distant structure.
He did not clench his fist.
Nor did he draw a weapon.
A faint azure glow gradually emerged from his palm.
Rather than gathering into a concentrated mass, the light began to disperse, its particles growing finer and fainter.
Eventually, they transformed into countless tiny blue motes, almost impossible to detect with the naked eye.
They floated silently in the air.
Azure was not merely a power of offense and defense.
What truly made it the core ability of the Jace Family was its control over structure.
Every material had its own arrangement.
Steel reinforcement.
Concrete.
Glass.
Wood.
Even the different substances suspended in the air.
As long as Azure came into contact with them, it could continuously receive information about their internal structures.
It was like gradually taking something apart, piece by piece, before reconstructing it.
In the end, the process produced a complete understanding of the object.
This was not X-ray vision.
It was analysis.
Analyzing materials.
Analyzing connections.
Analyzing every hidden component concealed beneath the surface.
Azure rarely employed this ability in everyday situations.
The reason was simple.
There was too much information.
An ordinary office building contained tens of thousands of tons of reinforced concrete and steel, countless connection points, and an intricate network of pipes and cables.
If Lucian attempted to analyze everything indiscriminately, the sheer volume of information would overwhelm even his mind in an instant.
Therefore, the true principle behind using Azure was never to cover everything.
It was precision.
He only needed to read the information from the locations that mattered.
The blue motes drifted slowly into the night sky.
The cold wind did not scatter them.
Instead, they seemed almost alive, actively avoiding pedestrians and vehicles on the streets below.
Keeping close to the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings, they moved toward their target.
Tonight, Lucian would no longer waste his time waiting for the manager to leave work.
He would make the building itself tell him what it was hiding.
The night breeze swept gently past.
At last, the first azure mote reached the office building's exterior wall.
There was no impact.
No sound.
The instant it touched the glass curtain wall, an enormous volume of information began flowing back.
The outermost layer.
Tempered glass.
Beyond it, the supporting framework.
Load-bearing steel beams.
Concrete walls.
Each material gradually separated into distinct components under Azure's analysis.
Lucian did not rush to probe deeper.
Instead, he maintained an extremely slow and steady pace, advancing little by little.
Every ability had its own rhythm.
Analyzing too quickly would flood his mind with enormous amounts of structural information all at once.
Analyzing too slowly would waste valuable time.
After countless training sessions, he had found the speed that suited him best.
Azure continued advancing.
It passed through the exterior wall and entered the building.
Bit by bit, the entire structure began taking shape in Lucian's mind.
Offices.
Conference rooms.
Corridors.
Load-bearing columns.
Fire suppression pipes.
Air-conditioning ducts.
The various cables concealed within the walls.
Everything began forming a clear, three-dimensional outline.
It was not an image.
It was a more direct form of perception.
As if he had personally touched every individual component of the building.
Lucian paid no attention to the lower floors.
The moment his ability entered the structure, he directed it straight toward the sixth floor.
The reason was simple.
There had only ever been one place worth suspecting.
The manager's office.
For four consecutive days, every anomaly had revolved around that location.
If a hidden space existed, there was a high probability that it began there as well.
Azure gradually spread across the sixth floor.
The office area was already empty.
Rows of desks stood neatly arranged.
Filing cabinets.
Printers.
Water dispensers.
Partition walls.
Every detail matched what Lucian had seen with his own eyes during the day.
There were no concealed mechanisms.
No unusual cavities between the walls.
No traces of recent modifications that differed from the original construction.
Every wall maintained the thickness expected of an ordinary office building.
Lucian was not disappointed.
If anything, he became even calmer.
The most sophisticated concealment was never placed where people would think to look first.
If a wall suddenly turned out to be several dozen centimeters thicker than expected, any professional inspector would notice something wrong.
If the hidden space had remained undiscovered for so many years, its designer would never have left behind such an obvious flaw.
The blue motes continued advancing.
They slowly entered the manager's office.
The desk.
The bookcases.
The sofa.
The reception area.
Even the decorative painting hanging on the wall.
Everything was quickly analyzed.
Still, there was nothing unusual.
Behind the desk, there was no hidden door.
Behind the bookcases, there was nothing but an ordinary wall.
Even beneath the desk, there was no additional space.
The entire office was as ordinary as it could possibly be.
Lucian did not stop.
Azure began spreading outward in every direction.
He was no longer searching for a hidden mechanism.
Instead, he was reassessing the load-bearing structure of the entire sixth floor.
The positions of the supporting columns.
The spans of the beams.
The thickness of the floor slab.
All the data was continuously compared and cross-checked.
This was where Azure truly excelled.
It was not an ability designed to search for secrets.
It was designed to identify what was out of place.
The moment a structure exhibited even the slightest deviation, the ability would detect it.
...
One minute.
Two minutes.
Three minutes.
An enormous amount of structural information continued flowing into Lucian's mind.
Everything remained normal.
Nearly every office conformed perfectly to the building's architectural design.
There was nowhere that could accommodate an additional space.
Until, at last, Lucian changed direction.
If there was nothing wrong horizontally, then...
He would look downward.
His attention slowly settled on the floor beneath the manager's office.
The blue motes began seeping into the floor slab, passing through the tiles and the leveling layer before gradually penetrating deeper into the concrete.
This time, a barely perceptible change finally appeared on Lucian's face.
Azure continued penetrating downward.
Concrete.
Steel reinforcement mesh.
Sound insulation.
Layer after layer of structural material returned information to him.
Under normal circumstances, the construction of a floor slab followed a relatively fixed design.
Once the load-bearing layer had been penetrated, it should connect directly to the ceiling of the fifth floor.
However, the moment his analysis went deeper, Lucian suddenly stopped.
Something was wrong.
He did not immediately draw a conclusion.
Instead, he controlled Azure and scanned the same location again.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The results were identical.
This section of the floor slab was clearly thicker than the surrounding areas.
It was not a construction error.
Nor was it ordinary reinforcement.
An entire additional structural layer existed beyond the normal floor slab.
Lucian did not immediately continue downward.
Instead, he directed Azure sideways.
One meter.
The structure returned to normal.
Two meters.
Still normal.
He returned to the original position.
The thickness changed again.
He then gradually expanded the scanning range.
Before long, he had confirmed the extent of the anomaly.
It did not cover the entire sixth floor.
Instead, it formed a regular area centered on the manager's office, extending outward in every direction.
It was like an independent section of the floor that had been deliberately carved out of the surrounding structure.
Lucian slowly opened his eyes.
The night wind swept past him.
His gaze returned to the distant building.
The light in the manager's office was still on.
Behind the curtains, her silhouette remained seated in the same position, as though nothing had happened.
Yet his ability had already given him the answer.
The space beneath that office was not an ordinary floor slab.
Azure did not stop.
It continued analyzing deeper.
Beyond the anomalous structural layer, it advanced farther downward.
At the point where it should have immediately encountered the ceiling of the fifth floor, it detected an empty interval.
To be precise, it was not empty.
It was a real, physical space.
A relatively small cavity, as though someone had deliberately preserved a hidden section between the floors.
It lay silently concealed between the fifth and sixth floors.
No publicly available blueprint would ever record its existence.
...
Lucian did not immediately probe the interior.
Instead, he continued analyzing the structural framework around the hidden space.
The more he examined it, the more apparent the designer's caution became.
This was not a space created by simply cutting through an existing floor slab after the building had been completed.
If that had been the case, the load-bearing structure would inevitably have shown obvious signs of alteration.
The real ingenuity lay in the fact that the structure surrounding this space came from two different stages of construction.
One portion had been completed during an earlier period.
The other had been gradually added during subsequent renovations, when the office layout was reorganized.
The two sections had been joined together, eventually forming a completely independent hidden space without compromising the structural integrity of the building.
Even a professional building inspector would merely assume that the area had undergone ordinary renovation and adjustments.
They would never suspect that the real alteration involved not the walls, but the space between the floors themselves.
In that instant, Lucian finally understood everything.
He now knew why the manager had seemingly disappeared every day for the past four days.
She had never left the building.
Nor had she passed through any exit.
She had simply left her office on the sixth floor and entered the concealed space that did not exist in the building's publicly documented structure.
Meanwhile, the office light had remained on the entire time.
To anyone watching from the outside, as long as the light remained on, the person inside would naturally be assumed to be there as well.
It was a remarkably simple trick.
Yet it was enough to deceive the vast majority of people tracking her movements.
The blue motes slowly withdrew, converging once more in Lucian's palm.
He did not continue analyzing the interior of the hidden space.
Finding it was enough.
If he probed any deeper, Azure might come into contact with the person inside.
The resulting fluctuation in his ability could expose his presence.
That was something he had no intention of allowing.
He slowly lowered his right hand.
Once again, he looked toward the light that remained illuminated on the sixth floor.
His expression did not change in the slightest.
But the objective in his mind had completely shifted.
Over the past few days, he had been searching for the manager.
Now, the place truly worth entering was the hidden space between the two floors, a place that had never appeared in anyone's field of vision.
That was where the investigation would truly begin.