Chapter 1656: The Nanshi Disappearance Case
Nanshi is some distance from Jing City, but using items to get there isn't too troublesome.
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Simply put, the situation within the country has changed again. Nearly a year has passed since the initial natural evolution began. The longer the time, the fewer naturally evolving players there are. Coupled with the Special Defense Department and military's control over the situation, and with propaganda efforts in place, many people proactively seek out the Special Defense Department when they show signs of evolution, asking for help to alleviate their cannibalistic urges. As a result, the proportion of newly emerging cannibal players is still declining.
The artificially created evolvers by the Special Defense Department and military are also under control. Therefore, the cannibal players that can gather in groups are mostly those who appeared during the chaos in Zone 014. Of course, cannibal players may still appear later, but they generally struggle to form a significant threat. This is because seamless surveillance in large cities has become widespread. If any problem arises anywhere, the Special Defense Department's investigation speed is very fast, so these players can only retreat to smaller cities and towns.
Although small cities don't have surveillance everywhere, their populations are small, and any incident spreads easily. As mentioned before, the Special Defense Department's propaganda efforts are thorough, and the public is also very concerned about the cannibal player issue. So, if anything unusual happens in someone's home, people will secretly call the police to report it. If it's a misunderstanding, that's even better; if there's a real problem, it's a precautionary measure.
Over the past year, some clustered cannibal players and their organizations have either been wiped out by the Special Defense Department or are under close surveillance. As long as they don't cause trouble in Zone 014, the Special Defense Department is willing to turn a blind eye.
In this overall environment, the situation in Nanshi is somewhat baffling.
Disappearance cases are frequent. Initially, they involved inconspicuous outsiders who had no relatives locally. Sometimes, people moving in and out suddenly leaving seemed normal. However, some particularly alert residents noticed something amiss. For example, over the past two months, many citizens called the police, reporting that people were moving houses in the middle of the night.
Normal people wouldn't choose to move in the dead of night. Unless something urgent happened, they wouldn't drag all their belongings along. Although these reporters said they indeed saw neighbors, residents of the same building, or people from adjacent buildings leaving—some even exchanged greetings with them—they still felt something was off.
At first, even the police didn't take it seriously. The reporters said they saw the people leave with their own eyes—what kind of case was that? Furthermore, some people even investigated the workplaces of these individuals based on neighbor-provided information. The final result was that most of these people had resigned in advance. Even if they couldn't go in person, they contacted via phone. The only slightly strange point was that all these people claimed they were going to work elsewhere, and then their phones became unreachable.
This wasn't considered a major issue. After players appeared, not only was there population mobility, but there were also countless people who mysteriously disappeared without a trace. There was no need to waste effort searching for them.
Next, factories and construction sites that needed large-scale recruitment found it abnormal. Due to player evolution, Nanshi had been compressing consumption for a long time, leaving many people unemployed. As long as people were alive, they had to eat. In the first few months, the situation improved somewhat, but who would have thought that in these two months, things would take a sharp turn for the worse? Many places reported a decrease in job seekers.
What a joke! Even in a small city like Nanshi, the demand for labor is enormous. It's always been a sea of job seekers, never a shortage of workers.
This situation was already very abnormal. So many people had disappeared—where did they go?
At first, the Special Defense Department suspected some unknown random instance or a magnetic field-disordered area. But after players scoured the entire city and even the surrounding hills, they found nothing. They had to redirect their focus back to the earliest reports: migrant workers resigning and leaving, and moving in the middle of the night.
After multiple investigations by the police and Special Defense Department, one abnormal point was summarized: the neighbors described the departing people as lacking "enthusiasm."
That's right, lacking enthusiasm. Many outsiders were seen by their neighbors as very hardworking and sociable, greeting people when coming and going. But when they moved away, they didn't say much. When asked, they simply said they found a new place to live.
Later, the Special Defense Department deployed personnel in areas where outsiders lived densely. They encountered a few people moving overnight, but shortly after leaving, these individuals suddenly died. When they checked their families, they found them all packed in the luggage.
Only then did the Special Defense Department feel a chill. Previously, the reporters only saw one person moving. When asked about family members, the movers either didn't answer or said they had left early. But judging by the current situation, those people were clearly being transported as luggage.
In the same area, it was impossible for so many people to suddenly go insane and kill their entire families. Therefore, the Special Defense Department could only speculate that the person responsible for the final move was controlled by someone else, and the act of leaving Nanshi was just a facade to prevent the Special Defense Department from investigating.
But even more troublesome was that after the Special Defense Department secretly investigated just a few households, the cases of migrant workers mysteriously disappearing suddenly stopped.
In fact, when the people they were tracking died midway, they had already been discovered. They just didn't expect the perpetrators to clean up so decisively, leaving no trace.
Seeing the signs, the Special Defense Department immediately began a city-wide investigation into disappearances and murders over the past three months. They were shocked to find that many people had also disappeared in the gray industries, but those who knew each other simply kept quiet.
Unlike the complicated disappearances of legitimate manual laborers, these cases were straightforward and brutal. Sometimes, people just went out to answer a phone call or provide a service. Even more extreme, someone might be eating with friends and disappear while going to the bathroom.
During the same period, so many people in the city had vanished mysteriously. After ruling out random instances or them suddenly becoming players, the only remaining possibility was that they were being hunted.
In fact, over the past half year, there had been cases in the civilian world where players who couldn't adjust their mentality used murder as an outlet. But those were mostly solo acts. This time, it was clearly more than just two or three players involved. They had a detailed plan, knew how to select their targets, and had clearly formed a sizable organization.
The targets were ordinary people, and the numbers were large. Naturally, the Special Defense Department associated this with cannibal players.
Unfortunately, the physical and mental enhancements brought by evolution not only increased players' chances of survival but also facilitated their crimes.
(Chapter End)