The second floor of the Red Theater Restaurant was filled with the clamor of pirates and drunks.
"Shit! I knew it would be like this!" Danitz slammed his fork onto the table, splashing a few drops of greasy gravy. "Every time there's some damn thing where clues are fed straight to your mouth, it's never anything good!"
"To be honest, I'd rather not have heard any of this," Lin Huai shrugged in agreement. "I'd prefer it if I had investigated these clues myself with hard work. A pie falling from the sky usually comes with a trap."
Thor stuffed the last piece of grilled octopus leg—about as thick as his forearm—into his mouth and said indistinctly, "Who cares about traps! Let's just go to that whatever coast and smash it to smithereens!"
"And then what? My foolish brother," Loki spoke up from the side, wiping his mouth with a napkin and mocking him. "And then we find out it was just a decoy, and the real ritual is being held on the other side of the city? Do you want to relive your stupidity in Jotunheim?"
Thor's face instantly flushed red, but he swallowed his retort and turned to look at Lin Huai.
Lin Huai gave Thor a deep look, then curled his fingers and tapped the table rhythmically, organizing his chaotic thoughts. The nursery rhyme, the three murders, the victims with black eyes, the "concealed" Sinful Angel, and that ominous coast... Lin Huai stood up, his gaze sweeping over his "teammates" who had various expressions. "Mr. Danitz, you'll have to work hard once more. Take us to the Bayam Police station."
"What? The Police station?" Danitz's wail rang out. "Shit! Why go to a place like that? Those bastards don't do anything except collect protection fees! It'll be my money again."
"Because they have the case files." Lin Huai's tone was firm. "No matter how corrupt an institution is, it still has functions it must perform. We need to see the original case records to see if there are any details you overlooked."
Half an hour later, with the help of a few gold pounds, the doors to the Bayam Police station's archives opened for them.
"I told you, these bastards only care about money!" Danitz complained while feeling the sting in his wallet, flipping through a pile of parchment to find three case records.
Lin Huai took the files and began to read them carefully.
The contents of the records matched Danitz's verbal account, but Lin Huai still found some details between the lines.
The night before the innkeeper died, he had an argument with a priest dressed entirely in black.
As for the two brawling drunks in the Sailor Tavern, the witness testimony from that night said the two drunks were good brothers who claimed while intoxicated that they had stolen a black ring, but no such item was found on them.
And as for the thug from the fishing village outside the city, the "antique" he stole had a sketch attached to the file—it was a statue of a black Angel hanging upside down. Currently, this item was being kept at the Tidal Church on the other side of the city.
"Black..." Lin Huai whispered to himself.
"And then?" Thor was already getting impatient. "Finished reading the files? Can we go smash that coast now?"
"Not yet," Lin Huai said, handing the files back to Danitz. "After reading the documents, we need to visit the scenes."
"Visit the scenes? The people have been buried in the cemetery for days!" Danitz curled his lip.
"What we're looking for is the residual aura," Lin Huai explained, looking at the Demoness Kaelan. Kaelan nodded immediately; as a high-Sequence Demoness, she was most sensitive to the remnants of such evil power.
Lin Huai and his group left the restaurant and headed toward the small inn where Danitz said the first murder occurred. The streets were lined with old-style buildings, and the sea breeze carried a salty, fishy scent.
"Shit! What's that smell!" Danitz's nose twitched, and an expression appeared on his face. "Why is there a smell of burning? Damn it! This scorched smell!"
Danitz's professional sensitivity allowed him to quickly discern that this was not just a simple fire.
The group looked up. Ahead in the block, thick smoke was billowing from the main door and windows of a two-story building, and the air was filled with pungent, irritating soot. It was their first destination, the small inn where the murder had occurred.
"It's on fire?!" Thor looked at the blaze ahead, anger burning in his eyes. He turned and shouted at Loki and Kaelan, "Loki! Kaelan! Let's go put out the fire! We can't let the flames swallow innocent lives!"
Loki rolled his eyes and muttered, "It's not our kingdom, what does it have to do with me?" But he still followed Thor. Worry flashed in Kaelan's eyes; she looked at Lin Huai, and seeing him nod, she followed as well.
"Let's go too!" Lin Huai ordered.
When they arrived at the scene, the surrounding residents had already gathered, whispering among themselves, but no one dared to approach. The fire at the small inn was already intense, tongues of fire licking the window frames with a crackling sound. Thick smoke rose straight into the sky.
"This fire... something's wrong! What a coincidence," Kaelan frowned.
"What should we do, Wise One?" Thor gripped mjolnir tightly, lightning crackling around him, ready to charge into the sea of fire at any moment.
"Put out the fire! Quickly! It will destroy important clues," Lin Huai ordered, then looked at Kaelan and Loki. "Kaelan, use your frost magic to suppress the flames. Loki, I need you to control the surroundings to prevent the fire from spreading!"
With everyone's combined efforts, the original fire was brought under control. The thick smoke gradually subsided, but the inn had been burned to a crisp.
"What a mess," Loki complained, putting away his illusion. He walked to Lin Huai's side and tapped the wall with his scepter. "Now what? It's burned so clean, I don't think we'll find even a shred of a clue."
"Not necessarily." Lin Huai didn't share Loki's pessimism. He activated his Spirit Vision to observe everything that had been destroyed by the fire. Although the main body of the inn was burned, Lin Huai sensed a fluctuation of spirituality beneath the front desk.
He crouched down, cleared away the charred boards and ashes, and a hidden trapdoor in the floor was revealed. Pushing the trapdoor open, the group looked down to see a hidden secret room of about ten square meters.
The space inside the secret room wasn't large, and the walls were covered with strange symbols. In the center of the room, a complex and eerie eight-pointed star pattern was drawn with a dark red pigment. In the center of the pattern, a goat's head was offered as a sacrifice.
"It seems this innkeeper didn't die for nothing..." Lin Huai looked at the altar with a cold sneer on his face. "He was a Criminal himself, and I'm afraid he had innocent lives on his hands. I suspect this guy would occasionally invite a destined traveler here, but this time, he ran into a shark."
"This magic circle? Interesting." Loki was quite interested in this kind of black magic. He leaned in closer, wanting to examine the altar more carefully. Lin Huai smacked Loki on the head. "Stop studying it; you can't handle it. Be careful not to go mad."
Lin Huai glanced at the alert Kaelan and signaled her to inspect the scene.
"It's too clean here to be a [Criminal]'s sacrificial scene. There's no residual aura or spirituality," Kaelan shook her head.