Chapter Ninety-Eight: Are There Really Vampires?

Bane almost laughed again at that.

The girl, in a situation like that, had still been paying attention to whether the man was handsome.

It was only when his partner, Jopri, who knew him too well, shot him a glare that he forced himself to hold it in.

“Cough, Miss Auburn, was it? Besides being good-looking, do you have anything else you can give us? Hair color, eye color, any scars on his body or face, and what he was wearing.”

Bane asked the sort of proper questions a police officer was supposed to ask, his expression solemn.

The girl tilted her head and thought hard for a moment.

“It seemed like brown hair. Or maybe black. I can’t remember the eye color. He was wearing a cloak, something like it was just wrapped in cloth at random.”

Even Jopri looked a little helpless this time.

The girl had used words like “seemed” and “something like” over and over, each one full of uncertainty.

In the end, aside from saying that the unidentified person was handsome, everything she had said was more or less useless. Well, and maybe the hair was brown or black.

“Guys, maybe you should come take a look at this!”

The female coroner, who had been examining the body on the ground, called out to them.

Jopri, Bane, and several nearby officers walked over together, and even the girl followed along out of curiosity.

When they reached the body, they saw that the coroner had already peeled back the lining of the drunkard’s coat.

His skin was exposed.

“How did he...”

One of the officers could not help asking in amazement.

The drunkard’s skin was deathly pale, and his bones stood out sharply, as though he had been severely malnourished for a long time.

The officer had been astonished by the state of the skin, but the coroner, Berry, offered a different view.

“This man may not have been all that fat before, but he was definitely not thin.”

As she spoke, the gloved fingers of her hand moved to the corpse’s lower abdomen and pinched up a fold of wrinkled skin.

“See this? This kind of skin means his subcutaneous fat must have been much thicker than it is now.”

“And you can find a lot of similar folds under the arms and along the sides of the limbs as well.”

Bane interrupted her.

“Wait. Are you trying to tell us this guy just had a full-body liposuction procedure, then went out drinking himself senseless, and then deliberately committed rape?”

Berry stared straight into Bane’s eyes. Only when he looked away did she go on.

“All right, Bane, stop being a clown here. Would you even believe a story like that yourself? Look at this too.”

She turned the dead man’s head to the side, exposing a section of neck near the nape.

There were two tiny holes there. She pointed to them with her finger.

“The spacing is roughly where human canines have atrophied.”

For once, aside from the ever-composed coroner, everyone else seemed a little stunned.

The coffee in Jopri’s hand even fell to the ground, splashing liquid over the cuffs of both his trousers and Bane’s.

“Hey, man, watch it! These are new pants!”

Jopri ignored the wisecracker.

“Berry, don’t tell me this guy ran into a vampire demon!”

The coroner spread her hands.

“Hm. I cut into the radial artery in the dead man’s left wrist, and almost no blood came out. Blood begins to coagulate after death, of course, but for it to hardly flow at all, at least eight to ten hours would have to pass. In other words—”

Berry paused.

“The victim’s blood had already been nearly drained before he died. As for why there is also fat loss and muscle atrophy, we’ll have to take the body back for a detailed examination.”

Bane stared in disbelief at the bite marks on the corpse’s neck, then at the left wrist.

Under his breath he muttered, “Oh, my God.”

But if one had to say who was most agitated here, it would have to be the girl who had called 911.

Her hands were covering her mouth and nose, and her breathing was very rapid.

Looking around suspiciously, she kept glancing left and right, then suddenly up toward the sky.

Noticing her expression, Bane asked her instinctively, “Ma’am, did you say the man at the beginning was hanging upside down like a bat?”

The girl nodded uncertainly.

She remembered that the person’s original target had clearly been her, not the drunk lying on the ground.

“Officer, I want to request that you take me home.”

“Sorry, ma’am. It would be better if you came with us to the station, gave a proper statement, and let me examine you as well.”

The one who answered was Berry, who had risen from the ground.

“Okay. Okay.”

As long as she did not have to be alone, that was enough.

Half an hour later, the body was bagged and loaded onto a vehicle, and the parked patrol cars all returned to the station together.

In the car, Bane teased Jopri, who was driving.

“So it wasn’t Spider-Man or Batman after all. It was a vampire.”

Jopri kept driving, his face blank.

“These crooks keep getting craftier. Draining a man dry like that—just let me catch you!”

Bane rolled his eyes, though clearly he did not really believe it was a vampire either.

A single bloodless corpse was not enough to prove anything.

There were certainly methods that modern science could reach.

...

Wu You sent a distant thought to the vampire named Carl.

“Don’t take it too far.”

...

No one knew who had uploaded the story about someone being drained of blood by a vampire in the alley behind the bar to the internet.

A number of busybodies on Twitter immediately reposted the rumor.

And somehow, perhaps because some miraculous netizen had hacked the police internal network or had another connection, a video was also released. It was exactly the clip of the coroner Berry explaining the drunkard’s cause of death to the gathered police.

As soon as that footage appeared, it was rapidly shared all over Twitter.

What was unexpected, especially to Wu You, was that there was not much panic online over vampires.

Instead, there was a surge of vampire fan groups.

They believed vampires were righteous beings, that one had saved the girl who was about to be raped, that vampires were friends of humanity.

They openly declared their wish to receive the Dark Gift.

And even more surprising to Wu You, a large number of religious groups also emerged.

They loudly proclaimed the power and true existence of the gods they worshiped, and among them, the most numerous were obscure cults.

If even one cult of that kind appeared in China, it would be a major affair and would be met with a full-scale crackdown.

But in the United States, there were plenty of them. That was the developed, advanced America for you.

Wu You set down his notes in a daze.

What the hell was wrong with the reaction in the West? Did I log into the wrong network?

Such explosive news online naturally reached many people at home who used VPNs to get around the firewall.

Some even downloaded the material and posted it on domestic websites.

But the domestic netizens were, on the whole, more rational and calm, offering all sorts of analyses from mythology to science, each one sounding quite convincing.

Most of them simply treated it as tabloid gossip.

The true spirit of the bystander was on full display.

And while the vampire craze online had not yet faded, some vampires had already quietly blended into human life.