Chapter 186: Crematorium

Seeing this, Chen Ling walked directly out of the courtyard, and the two of them quickly walked toward the distant street.

Wen Shilin also knew he lived here. If Wen Shilin came over in a while and saw him mixing with this group of thugs who had beaten him up, his persona would probably collapse.

"What did you find?" After walking two streets, Chen Ling asked.

"You said you wanted to investigate organ trafficking. We thought about it carefully and felt that this thing should be related to hospitals, so we let the brothers go to various hospitals in the city to stake out..."

Hearing this, Chen Ling's expression became a bit strange. It seemed not everyone was Wen Shilin, without such a sharp news sense. These thugs had also made the same mistake as him, taking hospitals as the main target.

"And then?"

"We staked out in the hospitals for two days and turned almost every corner, but still had no harvest... However, a strange thing happened tonight." The thug leader looked around, and after confirming that no one was there, he spoke slowly,

"One of our brothers was responsible for keeping watch at the back door. During the night, he saw a few doctors come out surrounding a stretcher, looking very nervous."

"This brother felt something wasn't right, so he snuck along behind them. He saw a car parked outside the hospital, with a few people in black clothes standing by it. They mysteriously opened the trunk, intending to stuff the person on the stretcher inside... but just then, a gust of wind blew, and the white sheet covering the stretcher was blown away."

"Guess what?"

The thug leader lowered his voice, "There was a corpse on that stretcher, and it had been cut open everywhere. The whole person had been hollowed out like mud..."

Chen Ling's pupils contracted sharply.

"Are you sure you didn't see it wrong?" Chen Ling immediately asked back.

"I didn't see it wrong; that brother of mine staked his life on it," the thug leader continued. "According to him, when the doctors saw the person on the stretcher, their faces turned pale on the spot. Those men in black hurriedly wrapped the person up, shoved them in, and then drove off."

"Did that corpse have any distinguishing features?"

"The details aren't clear, after all, it was a bit dark at the time, but it was supposedly a teenager, around sixteen or seventeen years old."

A teenager... Chen Yan's appearance immediately surfaced in Chen Ling's mind.

He knew the person the thug leader was talking about couldn't be Chen Yan, but judging by the description, the conditions and the encounter of these two victims were too similar. If nothing else, it was likely the work of the same group.

However, he didn't understand. Logically, this group shouldn't be brazen enough to take action in a hospital, and judging by the doctors' reactions, it didn't look like they did this often... Could it be that after the fall of the Seven Districts, there was no longer a safe and stable source of organs, so they had to take risks within the city?

The more Chen Ling thought about it, the more he felt it was possible. He immediately asked, "Where did that car go in the end?"

"The brothers are chasing it; I came to find you the moment I knew."

"Let's go, follow them."

Chen Ling set off without hesitation, and two figures moved rapidly in a certain direction under the cover of night.

Fortunately, vehicles in this era were not powered by internal combustion engines but by steam engines. Coupled with their bulky size and the narrow roads, their speed was extremely slow—not much faster than running in the complex core area of Aurora City—so the thugs were barely able to keep up.

Chen Ling and the other man sprinted along the trail they left behind, but they had started too late and still couldn't catch up to the car... After sprinting through several blocks, the thug leader was already covered in sweat, and his speed gradually slowed down.

In contrast, Chen Ling, who was beside him, remained calm and composed, showing no signs of exhaustion. This secretly shocked the thug leader; it seemed his boss was no ordinary person.

"Forget it, you run at your own pace," Chen Ling said, seeing how much he was struggling. "I'll go ahead and chase them myself."

As soon as he finished speaking, before the thug leader could try to act tough, Chen Ling whipped up a howling gust of wind and sped toward the end of the road!

The thug leader was dumbfounded. He never expected that his own all-out effort was merely the other person's casual performance...

Following the marks left by the thugs, Chen Ling's figure was so fast that it left afterimages. He soon caught up to the thugs who had given up halfway due to exhaustion, then continued forward. By the time they left the main urban area, the thug who had been in the lead was also sitting by the side of the road, panting and giving up the chase.

A steam car is still a car; even if it isn't fast, it was impossible for them to catch up on foot. At this point, their tracking marks were completely lost.

Chen Ling looked at the dim wilderness in the distance and asked with a frown:

"What's ahead?"

"It's... the outer ring of the North District," the thug replied, gasping for air. "It's very desolate here... no one lives here... why would that car drive this way?"

Chen Ling looked at the dim area in the distance, where only a few scattered glimmers of light flickered. He raised his finger and pointed there.

"What is that?"

The thug thought for a moment, "Should be the crematorium?"

Hearing the word "crematorium," Chen Ling was stunned. He seemed to understand something, his expression turned ugly, and he immediately approached that direction at full speed!

These guys, are they trying to destroy the evidence?

If everything was as Chen Ling thought, this organ theft at the hospital would definitely put the forces behind it at risk. Aurora City wasn't the Seven Districts where you could just bury a dead person in a mass grave. If that teenager's corpse in the hospital wasn't handled properly, it would likely be discovered by someone with ulterior motives.

Chen Ling had finally found a lead on the organ trade; he couldn't let it be burned to ashes just like that. He swept past like a gale, and no one in the dim wilderness noticed his presence.

As the crematorium drew closer, Chen Ling could already see the car parked in the open space, but there was no one in the car anymore.

At this hour, the crematorium was already closed for business. Except for a few rooms where lights were still on, the rest of the place was empty. Chen Ling nimbly vaulted over the iron gate, landed silently inside the crematorium, and crept toward the lit rooms like a ghost.

Almost simultaneously, on the wall on the other side of the crematorium, a drop of blood silently streaked through the air.

That drop of blood landed precisely in a corner of the crematorium, and the moment it was about to touch the ground, it transformed into a figure in black clothes with bandages wrapped around their face.

"Crematorium..." Jian Changsheng's eyes narrowed beneath his hood.

"Coming here at this hour, what exactly are they trying to do?"