A Sharp Edge Emerges From The Mist Chapter 1

The Rainy Night Corpse

Rain fell like broken beads, slamming hard against the neon-lit streets of Shuangcheng, soaking the night into a blurred halo of light.

Lin Jianfeng stepped on the brakes, and the police SUV came to a halt in front of an old residential building, the tires letting out a brief hiss as they rolled through the standing water. She didn’t get out immediately. Instead, she stared through the windshield—regularly cleared by the rhythmic scraping of the wipers—at the third-floor window illuminated by a sickly white light. The alternating blue and red lights of the scene investigation vehicle cast a flickering glow on the wall, like some sort of ominous breathing.

“Captain Lin,” Xiao Chen, the young officer in the passenger seat, handed over a tablet. The screen displayed a preliminary report. “The deceased is Zhao Ming, thirty-eight years old, a freelance investigative journalist. The first person on the scene was a delivery driver. No one answered when he knocked, but the door was ajar, and he smelled something wrong…”

“Preliminary assessment?” Lin Jianfeng interrupted, her voice carrying a crisp, metallic quality like the air after a rain, much like the woman herself. She pushed open the car door, and a cold spray of rain immediately lashed against her cheeks.

“Uh… the scene is very ‘clean,’ looks like a suicide. Overdose of sleeping pills, left a suicide note, doors and windows locked from the inside.” Xiao Chen followed her out of the car, opening an umbrella to shield his captain from the rain, but a single look from Lin Jianfeng stopped him. She was used to the rain; it kept her sharp.

The two of them walked quickly into the stairwell, met by the smell of old lime mixed with the fishy scent of rainwater. Outside the door of Room 302 on the third floor, police tape was already up. Colleagues from the technical section were moving in and out, their shoe covers rustling against the disposable plastic sheeting.

“Captain Lin is here.” Lao Zhang, who was in charge of the scene, came forward, his brow furrowed into a knot. “It looks like a suicide, but…”

“But what?”

“It’s too ‘standard,'” Lao Zhang lowered his voice. “So standard it looks like a textbook demonstration of a suicide scene.”

Lin Jianfeng put on shoe covers and gloves, then ducked under the police tape. The indoor lights were blindingly white, exposing every detail of the cluttered room. The living room wasn’t large, with books and newspapers piled high like mountains, and a computer desk facing the window. The deceased, Zhao Ming, was slumped over the desk, his face turned to one side, his expression calm—even somewhat peaceful. An empty bottle of sleeping pills lay on its side near his hand, next to a half-cup of water that had long since gone cold. A printed A4 sheet of paper was neatly pressed under the keyboard, titled “Suicide Note.”

She didn’t look at the body first. Instead, like a precision scanner, her gaze started from the doorway and moved inch by inch.

The floor showed signs of having been hastily wiped recently; the water stains weren’t completely dry and had nothing to do with the damp air outside—it was too even, as if someone had intentionally mopped it. Although there were many books on the shelf, several on the edge were clearly tilted, a subtle contradiction to the state of mind described in Zhao Ming’s suicide note about “tidying everything up and leaving quietly.” There were extremely faint, fresh scratches on the window lock, visible only from a certain angle.

Finally, her gaze fell back onto Zhao Ming. His left hand hung naturally, but his right hand was resting on the edge of the desk in a slightly stiff posture. Lin Jianfeng crouched down and gently lifted his right wrist. At the cuff, there was an almost invisible, unnatural wrinkle, as if it had been pulled with force.

“Check the fingernails,” Lin Jianfeng said.

The forensic examiner immediately stepped forward to carefully extract samples. Under a magnifying glass, within the crevices of the right fingernails, were tiny, deep blue fibers that didn’t belong in this room, along with a trace of dark red that had been almost entirely washed away—not blood, but something more like paint or inkpad residue.

“Have you checked the suicide note?” Lin Jianfeng stood up and walked to the computer desk.

“Checked it. It’s a printout. The content is… very personal. Despair over life, work pressure, that sort of thing.” Xiao Chen handed over the paper in an evidence bag. “The tone matches the characteristics of a suicide note.”

Lin Jianfeng didn’t take it. Her eyes were fixed on the computer tower. The side panel of the case had been opened, and there was a gap inside.

“Where’s the hard drive?”

“What?” Lao Zhang was taken aback.

“His computer’s hard drive is missing.” Lin Jianfeng pointed to the empty bracket and the dangling SATA cables inside the case. “Would a person determined to commit suicide, who even wrote a note to settle his thoughts, go out of his way to remove his own hard drive before dying? Remove it and then throw it away? Or was it ‘removed’ for him?”

The air in the room instantly froze. The technical officer immediately rushed to the computer to confirm, his face changing. “It really is gone! The computer was off when we arrived, so we didn’t notice the inside…”

Lin Jianfeng had already walked over to the bookshelf. She remembered the tilted books she had scanned earlier. She pulled those books out, revealing a narrow gap behind them. Hidden inside was an inconspicuous miniature wireless camera disguised as an ordinary power outlet; the indicator light had long since gone out.

“He installed surveillance in his own study,” Lin Jianfeng’s voice was calm, but it sent a chill down the spines of everyone present. “But the storage device—most likely that missing hard drive—is gone. The killer disposed of the direct evidence but left this empty shell of a camera. Either it was an oversight, or they were pressed for time and couldn’t search thoroughly.”

She turned around, her gaze once again sweeping over the “perfect” scene. “A faked suicide, but not perfect enough. The floor was wiped, yet fibers were left behind. The hard drive was taken, but the camera shell remained. They forged a suicide note and a scene of drug ingestion, but ignored the signs of a struggle on the victim’s cuff and the foreign matter under his fingernails.” She paused, looking out at the heavy night rain. “This wasn’t an impulsive crime; it was a premeditated silencing. But the person who executed it was either not a professional killer, or… they acted under extremely rushed circumstances.”

“Captain Lin, then the content of the suicide note…” Xiao Chen asked.

“Investigate what he was looking into recently.” Lin Jianfeng took off her rain-spattered gloves. “For an investigative journalist, the biggest motive for murder is usually hidden in his unpublished reports. Focus on the people he contacted recently, his financial transactions, and especially…” Her gaze fell on a city planning promotional flyer on the corner of Zhao Ming’s desk, partially weighed down by a coffee cup. The title was: Shuangcheng New City Development Zone, the Future Core of Finance.

“Check if he had any connection to the New City Development Zone project.”

Just then, her phone vibrated. A news flash from the internal system flashed across the screen:

Flash News: Qingyuan Capital CEO Shen Qingwu attended the New City Development Zone Investment Forum today, stating that the project will reshape Shuangcheng’s financial landscape.

The accompanying image was a press photo. The woman in the photo stood behind a lectern, wearing a perfectly tailored pearl-white suit. Her hair was meticulously tied back, revealing a smooth forehead and a sharp jawline. Her gaze pierced through the lens—calm, detached, like the surface of a frozen lake, reflecting none of the turbulence beneath.

Lin Jianfeng’s gaze lingered on the photo for two seconds before she switched off the screen.

Outside, the rain grew heavier. The neon lights shattered into a thousand pieces in the puddles, reflecting the magnificent yet blurred face of this city that never slept.

On the other side of the city, in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of a penthouse apartment, Shen Qingwu had just finished a multinational video conference. She walked to the window, the ice cubes in the crystal glass of whiskey in her hand clinking softly. Rainwater meandered down the glass, distorting the city lights into a flowing river of light.

The television was playing the evening news on mute. The image happened to cut to the scene of the police setting up a cordon in an old residential area. Although it was blurry, it was clearly a crime scene. Her gaze swept across the screen without pausing, as if it were just another insignificant background noise of the city night.

She took a sip of the drink, the cold liquid sliding down her throat.

Her phone screen lit up, and an encrypted message popped up with only a single code name: W.

The content of the message was concise: Hard drive has been handled. But a sharp cop showed up, surname Lin. She might not easily believe it was a suicide.

After Shen Qingwu finished reading, there was no expression on her face. She deleted the message and placed the glass on the coffee table with a soft clink.

Then, she picked up the remote and turned off the television.

The room was left with only the sound of the rain and her own steady breathing.