PD -Chapter 200 Blood Connection

“Now is not the time.”

Suddenly, within the eerie red glow, Ai Lin’s voice rang out again, as if she were talking to someone—responding in a back-and-forth conversation.

Yet she clearly wasn’t using a phone or any communication device.

I stared blankly at the woman’s figure and suddenly understood.

Her strange behavior earlier wasn’t a summoning ritual for an evil deity at all. She was establishing a connection with it through blood and ritual artifacts—communicating with the evil god itself.

The lotus-shaped bowl filled with her own blood was essentially a “telephone.”

“Right now I can’t make a move. He’s with his friends.”

“Yes. His friend is the inheritor of the Record of Heavenly Secrets.”

“Don’t worry, my master. I will bring every drop of the special blood within their bodies to your presence…”

Ai Lin’s voice carried a chilling tone, laced with cruelty and bloodlust.

She was nothing like the short-tempered girl we had met at the bar.

What shocked me most was that she actually knew my true identity. And from what she had just said, Liu Xiaopeng’s earlier suspicion seemed correct—this woman had been deliberately approaching him all along.

“Master, please rest assured!”

That was Ai Lin’s final sentence. She then set down the lotus bowl, and in an instant, the blood-red glow in the room faded. Even the candle flames returned to their normal color.

Ai Lin took out a handkerchief and wrapped it around the wound on her left hand. Then she turned slightly, preparing to leave.

At that moment, Liu Xiaopeng immediately pulled back, hiding into the darkness nearby.

Fortunately, the abandoned building was large, with many places to hide, making it difficult to be discovered.

The surveillance feed went completely dark, leaving only the sounds of insects in the night and Liu Xiaopeng’s breathing.

“This woman—has she gone insane?!” Officer Yan Shu, watching through my phone, had just witnessed everything Ai Lin did inside the room. Her instincts could only interpret it as the woman putting on a bizarre act.

But another voice in her mind told her otherwise: Ai Lin had come alone and hadn’t detected Liu Xiaopeng’s surveillance… so if she really was acting, who was she performing for?

And if it wasn’t for an audience, then what was the purpose of that entire ritual?

These conflicting thoughts clashed violently in her mind, leaving her deeply confused and unable to decide what to believe.

“Let’s keep observing for now and analyze it later,” I said quietly to Yan Shu, hoping to calm her and prevent the situation from overwhelming her.

Finally, Ai Lin seemed to have walked far enough away. Liu Xiaopeng cautiously stepped out from the darkness.

He pushed open the creaking old wooden door. After searching his body for a moment, he found a lighter, walked inside, and lit the candles that Ai Lin had extinguished earlier.

The room lit up again.

Liu Xiaopeng looked at the altar and picked up the lotus bowl. The blood inside… had completely vanished. Not a single drop remained.

On the altar, besides the bowl, there were a pile of miscellaneous items. After rummaging through them, Liu Xiaopeng pulled out something to examine.

It was a round mirror, with a budding lotus painted in blood on its surface—identical to the pattern we had found on the carpet at the victim’s home.

“Xiaopeng, come back first. We’ll discuss this properly,” I said into the phone.

“She… was communicating with an evil god just now…” Liu Xiaopeng muttered to himself. “It seems like the evil god was giving her orders, and… all of this has something to do with me.”

“The victims’ common point! I remember now!” Tang Shanshan suddenly leaned in and said.

I frowned and asked her what she had realized.

She pulled up the files of a girl who had died a week earlier and a university professor with a similar case on the computer.

“Earlier we were trying to find a common factor in their cause of death, but we overlooked something important—the first digits of their ID numbers are the same!”

“That number represents a region… and that’s my hometown!” Liu Xiaopeng froze on the other end of the call.

Ai Lin, the dead girl, and the professor—all of them were from the same place as Liu Xiaopeng. That could not be a coincidence.

“This situation… may be far more complicated than we imagined,” Liu Xiaopeng said after a long silence over the phone. “Maybe… it’s even connected to my parents’ massacre case from back then. I already had a feeling last time—this matter isn’t that simple.”

“This…”

I suddenly thought of the 507 Institute’s case-distribution “gacha machine.” I had already seen that it was driven by spiritual energy and operated through the principles of Qimen Dunjia, assigning cases based on karmic and fate-linked connections to highly relevant individuals.

But I had assumed these connections were subtle, something that only became visible over time.

I never expected that the case Liu Xiaopeng chose would already be so tightly bound to his own fate.

“I’m going to find Ai Lin right now and interrogate her!” Liu Xiaopeng said, preparing to blow out the candle and leave.

“No!” I immediately stopped him. “Don’t act alone. We’re coming to meet you right now.”

I gestured for Tang Shanshan to follow, and we rushed out to get the car.

Officer Yan Shu stood there blankly, seemingly unable to process everything she had just heard. But she understood the urgency and didn’t question further, simply following us out and driving another vehicle, trailing us out of the police station.

We met up with Liu Xiaopeng on the road and drove to Ai Lin’s residence.

It was a long-term rental apartment building. Liu Xiaopeng pointed to a lit window on the seventh floor.

“She lives there.”

“I’m in uniform—should I go up first and check?” Yan Shu asked after getting out of the car.

I thought for a moment, then shook my head.

“No, you can’t go alone.”

“Here’s the plan: you go up on the pretext that someone reported a peeping incident in Ai Lin’s room, and investigate what she’s doing. If anything feels wrong, come out immediately—we’ll handle it.”

“Wait!”

Before I could finish, Liu Xiaopeng suddenly interrupted.

He pulled us back behind a nearby car and pointed toward the apartment entrance.

“She’s coming out again!”