"Uh," Jiang Shu suddenly found that he had scrolled to the end of the electronic archives.
Just... It was quite abrupt.
Several segments of surveillance video showed nothing obvious, with simple text backgrounds. Perhaps due to the scant archives, the person compiling them had even included the life story of the original owner of the music box and basic information about the curator, as well as some resident musicians at the New Moon Hall. Beyond that, there was nothing.
In short, there was no useful information at all, and Jiang Shu even felt he could have conducted the on-site investigation himself.
After all, nothing had been discerned from it.
"Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, go through the surveillance videos again and see if you can find anything," Jiang Shu instructed; he couldn’t make out anything, but maybe the Tablet Spirits could identify some details by analyzing each frame.
He stretched languidly and then sent a message to Wolf: Can’t make heads or tails of it, so it’s not a Deception case, not my business, take care.
Wolf: ...
——
The next morning, Jiang Shu climbed out of bed simply because Wolf had sent him another message.
"Don’t tell me, this case is related to the Deception Group again," he muttered as he opened the message.
Wolf: Kirie investigated the surveillance in the New Moon Hall lobby and discovered that someone had remotely tampered with the data, meaning someone might have entered the night before last.
The lobby surveillance of the New Moon Hall consists of two parts, one is the complete surveillance system that’s online, which, aside from the music box, leaves no blind spots; the other is an old-fashioned camera directed solely at the music box, manually operated and unhackable.
Now it seems there are traces that the surveillance system was hacked, which means someone had entered that night.
Jiang Shu replied: So, isn’t that a clue? Probably a group of people hacked into the surveillance, manually controlled the old camera, and then stole the music box.
With such a clear and straightforward case, why would it need my involvement?
Jiang Shu shrugged and began preparing breakfast for both himself and Su Xiaoou. These days, Su Xiaoou would always come over for breakfast, and Jiang Shu enjoyed it; it was just an extra pair of chopsticks, and he could also keep an eye on her study progress.
Wolf’s message came through again: No, I’ve taken a photo of that old camera for you to see.
Soon, he sent a picture.
In the picture, the old standalone camera was positioned on the ceiling, its lens facing a certain direction, and around the outer ring of the camera, a glass dome was inverted over it.
Wolf: The outer layer is explosion-proof glass, directly linked to an old-fashioned alarm in only one direction, not an electronic setup but mechanical.
Wolf: Moreover, the curator said he hid transparent threads in the glass of the dome. If the glass was tampered with, the threads would be destroyed too. But the glass we removed, except for the part we broke, all the other threads were intact.
Wolf: In other words, that old surveillance camera was never touched, it just didn’t capture anything.
Interesting, how did the music box disappear, then? Could it really be remote retrieval?
Jiang Shu stroked his chin, lost in thought.
The thief entered the exhibition hall, but didn’t get captured by the camera while instantly taking the music box...
After thinking for a while, Jiang Shu still had no idea what to do, and at that moment, Wolf’s message arrived again.
Wolf: So, I went back and asked Kirie in more detail, and she still says a Dimensional Portal is completely impossible.
Jiang Shu: "..."
He had heard Wolf talk about the Dimensional Portal before; at the time, Wolf had harassed Kirie because he suspected that the Huang Kong heist was actually the result of a Dimensional Portal being created, only to get thoroughly lambasted.
And now it was coming up again.
He could already imagine Kirie’s "you must be seriously ill" expression.
But could it be a Superpower?
Based on his own definitions, Jiang Shu began to consider this carefully.
Like remote retrieval, or Invisibility, for instance.
He shook his head, packed up the stir-fried dishes he had just made, and then started frying a few buns he had made the day before.
"Knock knock—" Someone was at the door.
Jiang Shu didn’t turn around. He knew that the only person who would come at this time was Su Xiaoou, so he called out, "Come in by yourself."
He had given Su Xiaoou the password to the door, but she was very considerate and always knocked first.
"What’s for breakfast today?" Su Xiaoou burst in with excitement and glanced at the pot and the plate of dishes beside it, "Fried buns with rice porridge and side dishes? That looks delicious."
"Wash your hands and wait at the table," Jiang Shu glanced at her.
Having someone to share a meal with was always comforting for him; otherwise, in a foreign place of the Otherworld, one might die of loneliness.
Of course, Su Xiaoou couldn’t fill the void left by Sister Ruo; only Sister Ruo could fill her own absence.
While eating, Jiang Shu suddenly remembered the four treasures at home and started looking for them. Soon, he saw the four Tablet Spirits squatting in a corner, doing something unknown.
"Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, come here!" Jiang Shu called out.
Immediately, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta slowly turned their heads to look at him, then step by step, they walked over, with emoticons depicting exhaustion still displayed on their screens.
"What’s this about?"
Alpha: There are eighteen surveillance cameras in the New Moon Hall, and thirty-six nearby.
Beta: There are seventy-two hours of surveillance footage in the files, totaling four thousand three hundred twenty minutes, which is two hundred fifty-nine thousand two hundred seconds.
Gamma: The framerate of the footage is 60 frames per second, making up a total of fifteen million five hundred fifty-two thousand frames.
Delta: Divided between us four, that’s three million eight hundred eighty-eight thousand frames of video each to process.
Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta: One night, do you know what we went through last night???
Jiang Shu: "..."
"Thanks for your hard work." He could empathize with the difficulty the Tablet Spirits faced.
Delta: No need for thanks. After processing one hour of footage, we found the issue, then we spent the night playing mahjong. It got the CPU quite hot; let the old man cool down for a bit.
Jiang Shu was taken aback and looked toward the corner where they had just been squatting. Sure enough, a miniature mahjong set was laid out there. As for where the mahjong set came from, he turned to see a 3D printer still in standby mode.
Heh, if I let myself be moved by them again, I’m a dog.
"So, where’s the problem?" Jiang Shu asked.
Little Alpha pulled up those two frames of footage—both were a blur, indecipherable.
Jiang Shu checked the time; these odd frames first appeared at 1:29 am, and then again at 1:49 am, twenty minutes apart.
"What does this mean?" he wondered.
At a playback speed of sixty frames per second, it was virtually impossible for the average person to notice a single frame of difference, but the Tablet Spirits could.
Alpha: Look, in those twenty minutes, moonlight appeared in front of the window in the surveillance footage!
"Moonlight appeared?" Jiang Shu was puzzled, "What about the moonlight?"
Gamma: Considering yesterday’s lunar phase, the time, the speed of the moon’s movement, and the direction of this window, there shouldn’t have been any moonlight at that spot at that time.
Although Jiang Shu couldn’t do the math, he had enough general knowledge to understand what the Tablet Spirits were implying.
"So, that means..." he muttered, forming a hypothesis in his mind.
Beta: At that time, the moonlight should have shined through another window, one that is at a ninety-degree angle to this one.
"I got it." Jiang Shu nodded; he had figured out how the Deception Group had done it.
That’s right, the Deception Group.
Because it was a sleight of hand from a classic magic trick.