[Cloud City · Emerald Lake Gardens · Property Management Office]
The rain began just as Yin Wuwang walked through the main gates of Emerald Lake Gardens.
Not the kind of rain that came down hard and fast—this was the fine, persistent drizzle unique to late autumn, almost soundless, yet layer by layer it soaked the air through. The paving stones in front of the property management office gleamed wet, reflecting a murky wash of sky. Water droplets slid off the edge of the entrance awning and fell at uneven intervals, like someone plucking absently at piano keys.
Yin Wuwang pushed open the glass door and stepped inside. The heating was turned up high; a thin film of condensation immediately fogged his glasses and collar. The lobby smelled of floor wax and artificial pine, the kind of aggressively clean scent that only high-end residential complexes bothered maintaining. A digital display on the wall cycled through community announcements—yoga classes, parking lot maintenance, a reminder about package pickup hours.
A mortal fortress. The thought came unbidden. Walls, gates, cards, sensors. Three thousand years ago, a barrier this comprehensive would have required at least a fourth-rank formation array.
The property manager's surname was Ma—mid-forties, wire-rimmed gold glasses, and an attitude that shifted from polite to solicitous the moment he saw the badge. He had the front desk brew tea, personally escorted Yin Wuwang into his office, and pulled up the vehicle access system on his computer. The office was cramped but meticulously organized, every surface wiped clean, the pens in the holder arranged by height. Manager Ma struck Yin Wuwang as the kind of man who slept soundly at night because he'd never once filed a form late.
"October seventeenth—" Manager Ma tapped the keyboard a few times and a string of records popped up on screen. "The Mercedes E-Class registered to Ms. Xu Ruolin. License plate: Yun-A K7821."
He scrolled the mouse and filtered for the seventeenth's records specifically.
"The vehicle entered the underground garage at 1:12 PM." Manager Ma pointed at the screen. "After that—no exit record. It didn't leave until 8:45 AM the following morning, the eighteenth."
Yin Wuwang stared at those two timestamps.
October seventeenth, 1:12 PM—entered garage. October eighteenth, 8:45 AM—exited garage.
Nearly twenty hours in between. The car hadn't moved.
"Can you pull up her personal access records?" he asked.
"For individuals, that requires keycard swipes." Manager Ma switched to another system. "The seventeenth... Xu Ruolin's keycard registered at the unit entrance at 1:15 PM. Then—the next swipe wasn't until 8:39 AM on the eighteenth. No keycard activity in between."
"Does the complex have other exits?"
"One main entrance, one underground garage access, and a small gate on the south side that connects to the park trail." Manager Ma thought for a moment. "But the south gate locks after 10 PM—you need to swipe your card to go out, and swipe again to come back in. Let me check—"
A few more keystrokes.
"No keycard activity from Xu Ruolin at the south gate for the entire day of the seventeenth."
Yin Wuwang leaned back in his chair.
Manager Ma was watching him with the eager, slightly nervous expression of a man who desperately wanted to be helpful but wasn't sure if the information he'd provided was good news or bad news. He'd already refilled Yin Wuwang's tea without being asked.
Three access points. Zero records during the window of the crime. Her car hadn't moved, her keycard hadn't been swiped, and by all accounts, from 1:00 PM until 8:30 the next morning, she'd been inside the complex the entire time.
Yin Wuwang mentally reconstructed the timeline. Chen Wan had been killed sometime between 11 PM and midnight on the seventeenth. At that hour, Xu Ruolin's Mercedes was sitting quietly in the underground garage, and her keycard hadn't touched a reader since early afternoon. Even the south gate—the one variable that might have offered an alternative route—showed nothing.
Unless she'd climbed the wall. But Emerald Lake Gardens had infrared sensors and cameras mounted along its perimeter—the security at a high-end residential community like this wouldn't leave that kind of gap. In three thousand years, Yin Wuwang had seen plenty of seemingly impenetrable defenses breached by sufficiently motivated individuals—but those individuals had usually possessed spiritual energy, flight-capable swords, or at bare minimum, a rope. A mortal woman in heels would need more than motivation to scale a sensor-rigged wall undetected.
Yin Wuwang had Manager Ma print out the records and signed the retrieval form.
Walking back out through the management office entrance, the rain was still falling. He stood beneath the awning and glanced toward the parking lot—everything gray and hazy, the rooftops of cars gleaming with water. A woman in a long coat hurried past with an umbrella, heels clicking on the wet stone. Somewhere deeper in the complex, a dog barked twice and went silent.
Xu Ruolin wasn't at the bar the night of the murder.
She was home.
He turned this over carefully. The woman who spent over three hundred thousand yuan a year at Night Wanderer's VIP room, who'd had a screaming fight with Chen Wan a week before he died, who'd vanished from the bar entirely during the week of the murder—that woman had been locked inside this gated fortress the entire night, recorded by three separate systems that didn't know each other existed.
This was an important lead, but it wasn't conclusive on its own. An alibi needed cross-verification—access records could only prove her card hadn't been swiped, not that she absolutely hadn't left the premises. What if someone had swiped for her? What if she'd tailgated another resident through the gate?
Still, combined with the designated driver company's records and the vehicle logs, three independent lines of evidence all pointed to the same conclusion: the overwhelming probability was that she hadn't left Emerald Lake Gardens that night.
A person who wasn't at the scene couldn't have personally strangled Chen Wan to death.
But that didn't mean she had nothing to do with the case. The one who'd manipulated Zhang Yunxiang was a "woman with a beautiful voice," and Xu Ruolin—
Yin Wuwang's phone rang.
He glanced down at the screen. Caller ID: Shen Han.
[End of V2_Chapter 42]
Next: A New Nickname Drops—and So Does a Bombshell About That Tie