Chapter 30 – The Hardware Store
Tsk, she didn’t like the number four either.
Too inauspicious.
After sighing quietly, she still obediently chose to blend into her ten-person squad, listening to the others discuss their strategies.
Where should they search for the alien species? How should they arrange their forces? How could they capture the alien species while minimizing harm to ordinary citizens?
One of the young security officers from the Executive Department, temporarily assigned to their fourth squad, stepped forward and handed them an electronic screen.
The green screen projected into the air, allowing everyone to see it.
Displayed on this screen was a map, presumably of Reigaken State, with over forty locations marked with red circles, making them particularly noticeable.
The officer introduced the situation seriously: “The forty-three marked locations are where the victims’ bodies were found.”
He randomly selected one of the red circles, swiping his hands in the air a few times, causing the circle to gradually enlarge, revealing a street and the buildings on either side. In front of a store that looked like a hardware store from the outside, yellow police tape was strung up, with pedestrians walking by.
Only then did Tu Ran realize they were viewing a surveillance feed.
The camera zoomed in again, entering the interior of the store, presenting a three-dimensional view of the shop.
Tu Ran guessed that the current footage wasn’t from surveillance, as even many blind spots, such as behind doors, were now clearly visible. Perhaps this was the Federal Government’s holographic photography technology, fully recreating the scene in three dimensions.
Tu Ran thought of her holographic recording ring, the effects produced by the research institute after filming likely looked similar to this.
From the current view, it was indeed a hardware store, with shelves cluttered with scattered old appliances.
The only difference from the hardware stores Tu Ran remembered was that on the shelves here, there were mechanical skulls, severed mechanical limbs, prosthetic eyes, and complex tangled wires exposed outside.
These were things Tu Ran had never seen before.
The camera panned around the hardware store, eventually pausing on the floor in a corner.
The camera zoomed in.
There was a highly decomposed corpse.
A shriveled abdomen, bloodless lips, deeply sunken eye sockets, emaciated body with ribs faintly visible under the oversized clothes.
With just a glance, Tu Ran deduced that all the internal organs in this corpse’s abdomen had been hollowed out. Judging from the depth of the eye sockets, the eyeballs were also missing, and she suspected that the brain matter had likely been completely consumed as well.
This was likely the fate of someone possessed by an alien species—becoming a mere shell of bones.
The officer explained, “This is the hardware store owner, discovered dead in his shop by a customer this morning.”
He then manipulated the screen to display a photograph of another corpse with a similar condition to the hardware store owner. “We found this body in a cabinet under the hardware store owner’s checkout counter. Surveillance shows he was the first customer to enter the store yesterday morning.”
Tu Ran began to form a hypothesis: an alien species possessed the customer who walked into the hardware store, then targeted the owner, taking over his body and stashing the customer’s corpse under the checkout counter. Now that the hardware store owner was dead, it indicated that the alien had found yet another host.
