Chapter 100: The Puzzling Disappearance Incident

The surveillance room on the Magic Crystal ship was just over one hundred square meters, and most of it was occupied by a semicircular workstation.
On the table, apart from a handful of operation buttons, there were hundreds of projection crystals, each linked to outside cameras.

As soon as they entered, Security Captain Chen Wei beckoned to Lin Huang. “Come and look at this.”
It was a paused video projection: the frame held an empty corridor.
Lin Huang hurried over, and Chen Wei pressed play.

The image began moving. Lin Huang recognized it at once—the corridor was on deck seven of the ship. Although it resembled other decks, each level had different wall murals, and he knew these belonged to deck seven.
After about half a minute of footage, the door of Lin Xing’s room suddenly opened and she stepped out on her own, walking toward the levitating lift, then disappearing from the camera’s range.

“This is the footage of your sister leaving her room,” said Chen Wei. “The time is 5:03 p.m.” He then led Lin Huang to a second still frame.

The frozen image captured the instant Lin Xing entered the levitating lift.
When Chen Wei hit play, they saw her press for the first deck. She remained inside the lift for barely ten seconds; no one else entered during that time.
“This is her footage in the levitating lift,” said Chen Wei. “She exited at 5:04. Once we found her on the first deck, we pulled up all the first-deck footage and located her in several different cameras.”

“In the order she appeared on the first deck, the first was the camera by the lift doors.” Chen Wei opened another clip. It showed Lin Xing stepping out of the levitating lift.
At the lift entrance, a few people were waiting to go up. A middle-aged man in a white shirt glanced at her when she came out, then hurried inside the lift himself.

Lin Huang still frowned. With no real leads, any suspicious person had to count. He asked Chen Wei, “Which room is that man in on the ninth deck?”
“He’s on deck nine. From what we know, he doesn’t seem strongly connected,” Chen Wei replied, not giving a room number.
Lin Huang felt he might be overreaching and did not press further. “What’s the next video?”

“The second video for the first deck was shot at the bar entrance.” Chen Wei opened another.
On screen, Lin Xing hesitated at the doorway, then went in, but came out again only a short while later.
“She didn’t lie,” said a security officer who had just gone to the bar with Lin Huang. “She was in and out in under a minute.”

“Where did she go after leaving the bar?” Lin Huang asked immediately.

“We saw her walk around the first-deck hall, buy some snacks, and snack while she wandered,” said Chen Wei. “At around a little past 5:40, she suddenly stepped into a blind spot in our coverage and vanished.”
He opened the final clip.

This last recording was taken at a partition between two shops, and the camera couldn’t see the patch of floor below it.
In the clip, as Lin Xing passed the divider she was holding a trash bag from the snack stand and walked toward the camera with it.
But after disappearing into that blind angle, she never appeared again.
Lin Huang stared at the footage for several minutes, still waiting for her to reappear.
In between, a few people passed by carrying refuse and then left empty-handed.

“That blind spot is where a trash-bin station is placed,” Chen Wei explained with some regret. “We assumed no one would steal garbage, so we didn’t install another camera from a different angle. That was our mistake.”

“Wait—across from there, isn’t that little girl looking toward this direction every now and then? Did she notice something?” Lin Huang pointed to where the video showed, at an angle to the camera, a bench occupied by a girl about the same age as Lin Xing, wearing double ponytails, drinking from a cup and glancing toward the corner periodically.

Lin Huang let the clip continue. It ran for another ten minutes until the girl finished her drink; she came over with an empty cup and quickly turned away.

“She probably just noticed the trash can and thought she’d throw away her cup after finishing,” Chen Wei said, finding Lin Huang a bit too sharp in his suspicion.

“Take me to where this footage was shot,” Lin Huang said. “And find that girl. I need to ask her some questions. Whether or not she saw anything, I can’t afford to ignore a single clue.”
“Fine. We’ll help you look,” Chen Wei said with a face full of resignation. “At this point, we don’t have any better leads.”

A few minutes later, two guards escorted Lin Huang to the exact place where Lin Xing had last been seen.

This time he did not only enter the Blood Hunt state, driving his sense of smell to its limit; he also activated maximum vision, and his pupils turned a hawk-like amber.
At the bar, the air purification system had greatly thinned Lin Xing’s scent, but here he still caught what remained of it.
At the blind corner below the camera, two waist-high green trash bins were packed to the brim.
Lin Xing’s scent vanished abruptly beside the bins—not the kind of slow fading he had smelled in the bar, where purification had gradually diluted her trace until it became impossible to track, but an immediate disappearance.

He frowned and scanned the area. Even with vision pushed to its limit, he found not a single hint.

Just as he began wondering whether he had missed something, a plump woman came up carrying a garbage bag.
She seemed to be a nearby vendor. Seeing the two overflowing bins, she snapped at the two guards, “You added one bin here today, so why is it two now? The trash is piled over the edge. Do you think the ship’s guests will be comfortable seeing this?”

“We’re security staff, ma’am; there’s not much you can do with us,” one of them said with a rueful face.

“Then tell me who I’m supposed to talk to then?” the woman shot back, fiery-tempered as ever.

Lin Huang turned to her at once. “Ma’am, when did you see three bins here?”

“Around five-forty,” she said. “I had just finished my delivery meal and came to throw out the boxes. It’s only been a little over half an hour, and now it’s gone. Strange… could someone have taken the bins away?”

“Did you see a girl of about thirteen or fourteen passing by?” Lin Huang asked at once.

“I see so many girls every day—I can’t remember every one of them,” the woman replied, rolling her eyes as she tossed in her trash and was about to leave. Then she suddenly turned back. “You said a little girl… Actually, yes—I remember. There was a little one with two ponytails sitting over there, drinking a drink.”

The direction she pointed to was exactly where the bench with the drink-holding girl had appeared in the video.

“Thank you,” Lin Huang said. He knew he wouldn’t get much more out of her, but he still intended to ask the double-ponytailed girl whether she had seen anything.