Three years ago, my younger sister vanished in an abandoned old house. The surveillance footage showed her “walking straight into a wall.”
Now I run a shabby detective agency, scraping by on finding lost cats and catching cheating spouses, until one rainy night, a notification suddenly popped up on my phone: “Abnormal Case File System: Host’s spiritual vision awakened. E-rank anomaly detected nearby. Complete a scan to claim your starter reward.”
The stench of rotten fish seeped down from the ceiling. The System’s heat map pointed to the bathroom mirror cabinet. I put on rubber gloves and pried open the panel. Inside was a clump of blue fibers, exactly like the material of the sweater my sister had worn the night she disappeared.
“Ding! Scan complete. Reward: +10 spirit energy points. Redeemable for the ‘Brief Rewind’ skill.”
At the same time, Su Wan, a forensic examiner with the Special Affairs Bureau, rang the doorbell. “Detective Chen, something strange happened in the south of the city. A cleaner was found with his throat slit. There was no murder weapon at the scene, only half of a bronze fragment engraved with ancient symbols.”
I touched the notification device in my pocket and suddenly smiled.
Turns out the “missing sister case” I’d been investigating for three years was only the tip of the iceberg.
