Chapter 70: The Madwoman

"Ah—!"

Lin Xun's sharp scream shattered the congealed air inside the room.

Hearing the chaotic footsteps outside the door, Ma Wenwen reacted with extreme speed and shouted, "Let's go out and take a look."

Le Dong and Cai Kun were already like frightened birds at the mere twang of a bowstring. Before Ma Wenwen's voice had even faded, Cai Kun slammed his hand down hard on the door handle—Click! The door opened!

When they reached the corridor, seven or eight police officers were sprinting toward the source of the scream, and the trio of Le Dong were immediately swept along by this human current.

At the end of the corridor, the dilapidated wooden door near the stairwell stood wide open. As Le Dong squeezed his way to the doorway, the sight before him made his scalp tingle with terror!

Lin Xun's face was as pale as paper, her right hand clamped tightly over her upper left arm, her body hunched over as she stumbled backward in a hurried retreat.

Bright red blood was gushing out between her fingers, rapidly staining her light-colored sleeve and dripping steadily onto the greasy floorboards.

Two strong police officers were forcefully pinning a filthy, dirt-caked old woman against the wall.

The old woman's grey, filthy hair was disheveled, and her face was a maze of gullies caked with grime. Though her body was lean and small, her strength was astonishingly great. While frantically twisting and struggling, she screamed with all her might:

"Don't you dare try to harm Xiao Bai! You people don't you dare try to harm Xiao Bai! Get out! Get all of you out!"

Le Dong instinctively took half a step back, his eyes sweeping across a kitchen knife on the floor stained with fresh blood!

"Who's injured? What's going on?!" A police officer in the crowd demanded.

"Hiss... It's nothing, just a flesh wound!" Lin Xun gasped in pain, her forehead covered in cold sweat, but she forced her voice to remain steady.

Gritting her teeth, she swept her gaze over the officers holding the old woman and explained, "I was asking questions... she wasn't cooperative and suddenly went crazy... I just had my hand braced against the door to go inside... and she slashed out with the knife... Good thing I dodged quickly... otherwise..." She didn't finish, but her gesture of sweeping across her own neck made everyone realize that the target of the second strike was her throat!

"This is completely lawless! How dare she attack a police officer? Pin her down and take her away!"

An older police officer barked after hearing the explanation. It took the combined, tremendous effort of two officers to haul and drag the wildly struggling and screaming old woman toward the stairwell, leaving only her harsh scoldings and curses echoing in the narrow hallway until they gradually faded away.

Lin Xun watched the struggling figure disappear around the stair corner before letting out a few heavy gasps, the cold sweat on her forehead growing even denser.

Without caring about her still-seeping arm, she immediately turned to Ma Wenwen, urgency in her eyes: "Mr. Ma, over on your side... did you discover anything?"

Ma Wenwen was silent for a few seconds, then slowly shook his head, his voice low: "...Hard to say. I performed a ritual just now, but... I didn't sense any lingering malevolent spirits."

He paused, seeming to weigh his words or perhaps sensing something formless. "...However, this kind of 'inability to sense anything' is sometimes even more troublesome. It implies either that there truly is nothing, or... that whatever is lurking here is too fierce and violent..." He uttered the last few words extremely slowly and heavily.

Lin Xun's expression sank lower and lower with every word he spoke.

She looked at Ma Wenwen's solemn demeanor, then swept her gaze over the lingering terror and fright still visible on the faces of Le Dong and Cai Kun. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, and when she opened them again, her usual decisiveness had returned.

"All right, I understand. I will report the situation truthfully to Mr. Chen." She turned to the older police officer in charge of the scene. "Captain Gao, Mr. Ma's preliminary investigation work is complete, and staying here won't help much more. I need to get my arm treated and will take them back to the station to rest first."

Her reason was entirely logical and sound. Coupled with the "commotion" Ma Wenwen had stirred up earlier—the deliberate loud noises that many officers had overheard, along with the scattered ashes of talisman paper on the ground—it all served as the best corroboration for how the situation had been handled.

Captain Gao looked at Lin Xun's blood-stained sleeve, then at Ma Wenwen's grim, keep-strangers-at-a-distance expression, and nodded without much hesitation.

"All right, you've all worked hard. Go back and tend to your wounds and rest first. We'll continue sealing off and investigating the area here."

"Also," Lin Xun added before leaving, her tone solemn, "this building... it's best to thoroughly clear and seal it off, leaving only the necessary guards. Do not let unauthorized personnel approach for the time being."

She did not explicitly utter words like "dirty things," but her gaze, her tone, and the tense, surviving-a-catastrophe demeanor of Ma Wenwen and the others silently conveyed a sufficient signal of danger.

Captain Gao and the other officers exchanged glances and silently nodded in agreement.

A few minutes later, Cai Kun drove the car away from that dilapidated urban village.

Inside the car, the four of them harbored their own thoughts in silence all the way until they finally arrived beneath the municipal police headquarters building.

Inside the precinct, Lin Xun rejected the suggestion to go to the hospital for stitches. "It's a superficial wound, the bones and tendons aren't damaged. Let's just treat it simply for now; we'll talk later." Seeing her resolute tone, a female officer had no choice but to simply dress the wound for her.

Lin Xun expressed her gratitude and, without lingering in the lobby, walked straight toward a relatively quiet partition in the corner, obviously to make a phone call and report to this "Mr. Chen."

Ma Wenwen, Le Dong, and Cai Kun were gathered on the chairs in the corner of the lobby.

The moment the three men's bottoms touched the chairs, Cai Kun looked out at his car parked in the distance near the police station entrance.

After hesitating for a few seconds, he finally couldn't help asking, "Master Ma, the weather is quite nice today, isn't it?"

Ma Wenwen was stunned, somewhat at a loss. Cai Kun smiled awkwardly, leaned closer to Ma Wenwen, lowered his voice, and asked in a negotiating tone, "Uhm... those talismans of yours... do you have any spares?"

Seeing that Ma Wenwen didn't react, he quickly added, "I saw how you used that talisman just now... quite... quite deft? Tell me, at my age... can I still learn a bit? Just for peace of mind."

Ma Wenwen turned his head toward the source of Cai Kun's voice, pulled a bitter arc at the corner of his mouth, and smiled: "You think this stuff is easy? It drains the mind and damages the vital breath. You? At your age, your bones are already set; you can't learn it."

Seeing the expectant light on Cai Kun's face dim, Le Dong vaguely guessed his intention.

This fatty... still doesn't trust his car.

Sure enough, Cai Kun sighed with disappointment, but he still hadn't given up—or rather, his anxiety over his car outweighed everything else: "Then... then look, could you... trouble yourself one more time? Slap one onto my car as well? Just... just for good luck!" He was practically pleading.

Ma Wenwen seemed to have guessed his intent as well, and with a bitter smile, he was just about to speak when he was interrupted by a flurry of chaotic high-heel clicks coming from the inner office area of the lobby.

"Bang—!"

The office door was violently shoved open, the tremendous noise tearing apart the tranquility of the lobby.

Immediately afterward, three impeccably dressed, bejeweled women shrouded in expensive perfume rushed out from the office area.

Following closely behind them were several police officers with dark, gloomy faces...