Xuanqing Guard

Chapter 293: Chapter 293: Deduction

"Bang!"

Shen Hao slammed his hand heavily on the table, jolting the teacup so hard it almost fell to the floor, but Wang Jian, quick-eyed and swift-handed, caught it and set it right. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com

"Where are they? Still no clues?"

"Sir, centering on Five Rams City, over the past three days we’ve sent people to check all the official roads, side paths, and even some old abandoned routes, but no one saw Ma San or his group.

The teleportation arrays in every city likewise didn’t find any trace of them.

I even ordered a review of the guest registries in the city’s inns—still no relevant personnel information..."

Shen Hao rubbed his brow. He admitted he’d handled this matter too carelessly, hadn’t thought it through, and somehow let the opposing side slip through his fingers, suddenly turning the situation passive.

His original intention was to lure out the forces behind Ma San, have them display more means, since the more they revealed, the likelier they would slip up—always hiding in the shadows made them impossible to catch.

After forcing the opposition to show their "abundant elixir supply" and "ability to covertly transport bulk goods," Shen Hao hadn’t expected them to pull out more than twenty storage bags, abandoning the regular transport methods and instantly retracting the incriminating evidence Shen Hao was hoping to follow—his plans to trace the clues were dashed in a moment.

Now Ma San and his two accomplices had vanished without a trace, as if they’d disappeared altogether, leaving Shen Hao without any targets, but also convinced they couldn’t possibly be hiding out in the wilderness, since it made no sense. If Ma San merely wanted to rely on hiding to cover his tracks, it wouldn’t work at all. How long could they hide? Sooner or later they’d need to deliver the goods south—what, just hide there forever? Unless every step was planned in advance, Ma San would never have agreed to take the goods in the first place, and he certainly wouldn’t have prepared over twenty storage bags ahead of time.

It was obviously premeditated.

But how did Ma San’s group arrange their transport plans and route? Why were they able to evade the sweeping surveillance of Jingxi like this?

Seeing Shen Hao so perplexed and frustrated, Wang Jian was also inwardly anxious. This time, Ma San had taken sixty-one cartloads of old grain—if that ended up in barbarian territory, it would become enemy supplies. If that happened, it would be a huge stain on Shen Hao’s record—and anyone responsible along this line wouldn’t fare well either.

"Sir, should we try to deduce it again?"

"Huh, all right. You go first."

This was Shen Hao’s habit while investigating cases, and Wang Jian had learned it from him.

"In my opinion, after Ma San and the other two finished the transaction with Zhang Lie, they didn’t head toward the city gate of Five Rams City, so they probably weren’t planning to use the teleportation array immediately, but were going elsewhere first."

Shen Hao nodded, signaling Wang Jian to continue.

"But based on the scouts’ reports from the official roads and side paths around Five Rams City, no trace of Ma San’s group was found. So either they didn’t use those roads, or their tracks were so well hidden that no one detected them.

I lean toward the idea that Ma San and his group concealed their movements..."

Shen Hao shook his head, interrupting: "Hiding their tracks isn’t possible. At every key node, there are scouts holding scouting discs, and those things are specifically designed to target cloaking methods. Unless Ma San’s group dared to separate people from the goods, they couldn’t possibly evade the scouts’ eyes."

This was the crux of the problem.

Because of the scouting discs, anyone with high magical artifact fluctuations would be detected, no matter how well they masked their appearance. And the blind spots in the use of scouting discs definitely wouldn’t apply to cultivators of Ma San’s level.

Round and round, there was still no explanation for the group’s whereabouts.

Shen Hao reviewed everything in his mind once more, but still came up empty-handed.

Wang Jian was nearly scratching his scalp bald, his frustration and anger obvious: "Those three bastards were right under our noses—how did they disappear? They can’t seriously have run south to the Ten Thousand Miles Bamboo Sea on foot, right?"

Running from Five Rams City all the way south to the Ten Thousand Miles Bamboo Sea on foot? That... doesn’t really seem possible... does it?

A flash of inspiration struck Shen Hao. He immediately stood up, walked quickly over to the left wall, and looked at the map hanging there.

The map wasn’t military-level, but the general layout and directions were there.

Shen Hao pressed his finger against Five Rams City’s location, then drew a straight line south to the Ten Thousand Miles Bamboo Sea—this... was just too far. Even for cultivators, walking it would take more than half a year; Ma San couldn’t have chosen that method.

Using all those storage bags was obviously for lighter, faster travel. But the teleportation arrays were watched by scouts... wait a minute!

Just as Shen Hao was about to run in circles back to his earlier dead end, his eyes fell on a patch of blank hub area on the map. Every time he saw one of these stretches drawn as "woodland," he’d mentally fill them in with place names.

"Go, take my waist token to the records room and borrow the military-level maps of the Jingxi region." Shen Hao tossed his waist token to Wang Jian, who didn’t dare ask questions, simply grabbed it and ran out.

Soon, Wang Jian came rushing back with a sealed scroll of maps. He shut the door and spread the map out on Shen Hao’s desk.

"Suppose Ma San separated from Zhang Lie at midnight on November 30th; they didn’t travel long distances on official or side roads, nor did they use the city’s teleportation arrays, nor stupidly try trekking half a year over mountains to reach the Ten Thousand Miles Bamboo Sea. How else could they have gone?"

Before Wang Jian could answer, Shen Hao pointed to a place on the map: Shuangshi Town.

This was a place missing from the map on Shen Hao’s office wall, not very large—about the size of an ordinary village with a hundred households—but it was a key military transit stronghold, a logistical hub linking Jingxi to Jingbei. What was called a Bing Town was just this sort of place; the southern Beach Stone was a reinforced, aggregated version of such a Bing Town.

"Ma San’s group could have gone here! Shuangshi Town has a military-use small teleportation array, from which they could jump straight to Beach Stone—much faster than the teleportation arrays in any city, and they’d reach the southern region directly."

"But sir, that’s impossible. The teleportation array in Shuangshi Town—even for us Xuanqing Guards—requires a permit from the Jingxi Military Governor’s Mansion. And after arriving at Beach Stone, that’s border army territory, even stricter inspections. If they went this way, wouldn’t they be walking straight into a trap?"

Shen Hao shook his head, his voice trembling just a bit: "Do you remember that Zhang Lie said the two people Ma San brought seemed familiar to him? He said they had the same sort of bearing as he once did. What kind of bearing was that?"

Wang Jian’s face changed: "You’re saying..." He didn’t dare go on, his voice trembling much more.

"Also, Zhang Lie noticed that all the storage bags Ma San collected during the transaction were the same size—more than twenty bags, identical in dimensions. Doesn’t that seem like they’re standard-issue?"

As soon as Shen Hao said this, Wang Jian grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself, legs suddenly weak.