dmims Chapter 46 Investigation Team
Chapter 46 Investigation Team
The dust is advancing from the north, at a slow speed and in a stable direction.
The volume of dust is equivalent to that of two to three vehicles.
Chen Fei mentally compared the location of his landing spot with the direction of the dust cloud.
The enemy's advance route was precisely aimed at the area where the vultures had circled.
Not a coincidence.
"They arrived quite quickly."
Chen Fei mentally evaluated this assessment.
He turned and walked toward his lodgings, stopping briefly as he passed the post of the wanderer A.
The wanderer stood up from the edge of the grass, the old scar on his left shoulder showing a pale white in the slanting light of the evening.
Chen Fei didn't make any move; he simply stood there, glanced at the northeast direction, paused for two seconds, and then looked back at the Wanderer Armor.
The homeless man looked northeast, and after a while, he raised his nose and sniffed.
It smelled fuel.
It had seen this smell before; during its wanderings, human camps and vehicles had given it a long-standing memory of avoidance, and that smell was inextricably linked to danger.
The stray ape lowered its tail and tucked its ears back a little.
Chen Fei saw its reaction and paused slightly in the northwest direction.
This time, Wanderer A reacted even faster than in the morning, moving northwest, with Wanderer B following behind.
The two lions disappeared into the grass.
Chen Fei grinned and started walking back towards where he had landed.
Sel opened his eyes when he returned.
She sniffed, pushed the stingy man to her side, and gently pressed her chin against his back.
The stingy fellow stirred in his sleep but didn't wake up.
Sel closed his eyes again, but his body was not completely relaxed; a muscle in his shoulder blade was taut.
She didn't need Chen Fei to explain.
Having lived in a pride of lions for over six years, she knows when it's necessary to press the cubs closer together.
Chen Fei found a spot on the west side of his landing site and lay down, facing northeast.
The wind came from the north, pushing the scents of the grasslands in layers, including the pungent smell of vulture feathers, fuel, metal, and the twilight commotion of wildebeest herds in the distance—they too had smelled something unusual, but they didn't know what it was.
The dust storm continued to rise above the horizon.
As darkness deepened, the setting sun cast an orange-red hue over the grassland, blurring the distant dust cloud in the light, but it didn't stop.
Chen Fei's ears were pointing north and perked up.
When the dust settled, he heard—
It wasn't the sound of the car turning off; it was too far away to hear.
It was the sound of a flock of vultures taking off from their gathering point, the collective vibration of their wings cutting through the air, low-frequency and broad, traveling across the grassland from three kilometers away.
Something must have disturbed them.
The car has arrived!
...
Before the morning light had fully spread, the beams of flashlights were already shimmering in the grassy area in the northeast corner.
Chen Fei lay on the sandstone platform, his super-long-range vision fully activated.
Three kilometers away, two off-road vehicles were parked at the edge of the low grass. The vehicles were dark green and had characters on the sides that Chen Fei could not recognize.
It wasn't the hunter's car.
The hunter's vehicle didn't have that many devices. It had an antenna and some kind of square instrument that Chen Fei couldn't figure out the purpose of on the roof rack. The door was open, and some people were still inside, while others had already gotten out.
Five people went down.
The flashlight beam swept across the grass like the antennae of an insect, bumping against the walls everywhere.
Five people were present. Two were holding some kind of instrument, one was recording something, and the other two were walking around the perimeter with regular strides, indicating they were conducting a grid search of the area.
"Professional."
Chen Fei mentally defined the team.
These weren't ordinary patrol officers, nor were they tourists passing by. He'd seen this search method in a crime documentary; it was called crime scene investigation, and it had a fixed procedure and division of labor.
His gaze fell on the person who was taking notes.
The person was squatting on the ground, holding something in his hand that was reflective, made of metal, and about thirty centimeters long. Next to him was a small upright sign with a number plaque at the top.
This is a measurement.
Measuring paw prints.
The person taking the measurements lingered next to the paw prints for a long time.
It took longer than Chen Fei had predicted.
He used three different tools to measure the same paw print more than once. Each time he finished measuring, he would review the record in his hand, then turn to another person next to him and say something.
The person next to him walked over, squatted down, measured himself, stood up, and shook his head.
The two talked for a while, then both shook their heads.
The depth values they measured could not be found in any known individuals in their database, and they could not accept the possibility that "the database is wrong," so they tended to believe that "the scene had been manipulated."
It has been manipulated.
This direction will lead them down a different path, a completely wrong one, but one that will be extremely useful to Chen Fei.
Its tail slowly swept across the sandstone platform.
The two people conducting the outer grid search walked back and forth three times in the low grass and gully areas.
They lingered at the entrance of the gully for a long time. One of them squatted down, parted the grass blades to the sides, and looked for something on the ground.
Chen Fei knew what they were looking for.
The sandy ground at the entrance of the gully was soft; he had walked there and left footprints.
However, he was in a belly-down position at the time, his paws were very light, the heat flow was minimized, and the depth of penetration was much shallower than when he was walking normally—about one to one and a half centimeters, which is close to the penetration depth of an average adult female lion, and is perfectly normal in the database.
The two men found his paw prints at the entrance of the gully, and compared them with the three unusually deep paw prints in the sand, which led to a new puzzle.
Two sets of claw prints, from the same species, but with a difference in depth of nearly five times.
This doesn't make sense from a physical standpoint, unless the animal made some kind of acceleration or jumping motion in one of the positions, causing the impact force to be concentrated on one claw, resulting in an abnormal depth of indentation.
Chen Fei estimated that they would most likely arrive at this explanation.
There is a problem with this explanation: the action of jumping or accelerating would leave a continuous gait trajectory before and after the landing point, but the spacing between the three deep claw marks does not conform to the stride pattern of any large feline when running or jumping.
They need to measure it again.
Sure enough, the person with the notebook came over and began measuring the distance between the deep claw marks. After measuring, he squatted there for a long time before standing up again.
He shook his head again.
At this moment, Big Head appeared from the direction of the landing point and walked along the edge of the grass below the sandstone platform.
It still leans a little more on the right side when it walks than on the left, but it takes bigger steps. The fur on the thick scab on its left shoulder has begun to regrow from the edge to the center. The new fur is shorter and lighter in color than the old fur, like a small patch.
It climbed onto the sandstone platform, walked to Chen Fei's side, and sniffed Chen Fei's cheek.
Then it looked northeast, following Chen Fei's gaze.
Three kilometers away, the beam of a flashlight shone through the grass.