Hunter of Mysterious Creature-Chapter 500 - 97: Zhao Xuan

That smile, how should I put it... It didn't feel like an expression a human could make...

If Sun Hang had to describe it, it was probably like a high-distortion digital photo melded onto a human skin mask. The key was that when his attention was focused on this distorted photo, its contents would gradually seep into his consciousness... He could never see clearly what that face looked like, but the chilling feeling it brought was deeply imprinted in the depths of his mind.

Of course, while it was chilling for others, for Sun Hang, it was a very disgusting feeling... Like a slug crawling into his nostril and wriggling incessantly inside.

Sun Hang really wanted to pull this slug out from his nostril, but it just kept burrowing deeper and deeper...

"Damn it!"

Sun Hang cursed, forcibly halting the memory retrieval.

"What's wrong?" Song Yarong, who had been watching Sun Hang from the side, asked worriedly, "You look... pretty pale."

"If you ate a slug, your face wouldn't look any better." Sun Hang replied offhandedly, taking a couple of deep breaths to cast that nauseating feeling aside as much as possible, and then began the memory retrieval once again.

This little girl definitely had some issues, but how this engineer got infected and became a lurker, there wasn't a single trace of that in the memory fragments...

Could it be that he became a "lurker" even before this memory?

No, that's not right... Intuition told Sun Hang that the problem lay in the events of this night's evening...

Sun Hang repeated the scenes of lighting and blowing out the candles over ten times. What puzzled him was that although the girl's smile was so eerily horrifying, the engineer didn't sense anything amiss and continued smiling at his daughter, his eyes full of a loving father's affection...

Fatherly love doesn't turn someone into a fool unless the father's perception of reality had been distorted.

"Wait a moment."

With a thought, Sun Hang paused the playing footage.

At this moment, the little girl in the frame leaned forward and gently blew out the nine candles stuck in the cake.

Everything in the scene stopped, except for the candles on the cake... The flames at the top were still flickering incessantly.

"The cake! The problem lies in the cake!"

After blowing out the candles, the engineer cut the not-so-large cake into three pieces—one for the daughter, one for himself, and the last piece he placed in front of a young woman's black and white photo on the cabinet. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Previously, when Sun Hang observed this, all his attention was on the engineer and his daughter beside him. But upon revisiting the scene, he noticed the cake on the table behind wasn't a cake at all, but a whole piece of ochre-red rotten meat. Sprouting small tendrils like potato shoots, the meat surface was subtly pulsating.

Once the third piece of the "cake" was placed in front of the deceased wife's photo, the engineer turned away... Previously, the cake would revert to its original form at this moment, but this time, having caught Sun Hang's attention, it remained in its rotten meat form as if finally "revealed".

Oblivious, the engineer picked up the dish holding the rotten meat, under the "hopeful" gaze of his "daughter", forked up a small piece, and put it into his mouth...

"Bring up this engineer's family background information!" Sun Hang suddenly opened his eyes wide and said to Song Yarong.

"This person's name is Zhao Ming, thirty-seven years old, from a single-child family with no siblings. His parents passed away when he was young, and he grew up in a welfare institute in Tianfu City, with no contact with distant relatives. Twelve years ago, he married Yan Lili, a woman he grew up with in the welfare institute, and they had a daughter named Zhao Xuan in the third year of their marriage."

Having apparently already checked Zhao Ming's background, Song Yarong recited fluently, "But shortly after Zhao Xuan was born, Yan Lili was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer and passed away a month later. Zhao Ming never remarried and raised Yan Lili alone..."

"Wait a second," Sun Hang interjected suddenly, "Zhao Ming is an engineer at the Mysterious Creature Research Institute. His job isn't so relaxed that he could work while taking care of a child who can't take care of herself, right? Both he and Yan Lili grew up in a welfare institute, neither had parents, and you also said he never kept in touch with relatives... So what's with this child? Could she have been sent to full-time care?"

Seeing Sun Hang's interest in Zhao Xuan, Song Yarong frowned, "What's going on, are you suspecting something about Zhao Xuan? Although... many of us say Zhao Ming's world only revolves around his daughter... he'd even show us her childhood photos when he's in a good mood..."

"Childhood photos? How young?" Sun Hang asked, "Are the photos still available?"

"Probably during her infancy... As for the photos, Zhao Ming's phone and personal computer might have them, but we'll need the tech team to crack them..."

"Back to the original issue, how did such a busy engineer single-handedly raise a daughter?"

"He mentioned hiring a nanny, but that's about all we know..."

"Did he only show you photos of his daughter as an infant? None of her older?" Sun Hang asked again.

Song Yarong shook her head. For some reason, she suddenly felt a chill creeping up from her heel, all the way to the nape of her neck.