Chapter: 'How Do You Know That Again?

Lü Fusheng — Old Lü to everyone — had been a neighborhood cop for over twenty years. Middle-aged, parents to care for above, kids to raise below: prime material for being squeezed by superiors, or as he'd put it, the perfect age to grind.

But Lü Fusheng wasn't playing that game. He'd found enlightenment and just wanted to coast. His daily highlight was sitting in the office with a cup of tea, a cigarette, and a newspaper from open to close.

Solving cases? Ha. That kind of legwork that wears out your soles — even a dog wouldn't touch it. Especially this theft case, which was a real headache.

Lü Fusheng wanted zero part of it. He just wanted to wait for the city bureau to swoop in. But this new girl had zero self-awareness, piling on extra work out of nowhere.

If they followed her plan, he could kiss getting home on time goodbye. 'You're a rookie who knows nothing. Stop trying to show off!' Displeased, Lü Fusheng slapped a label on her, then turned to flatter Wu Suo: 'In my opinion, Chief Wu's call is right — we should run through the local habitual thieves first.' Jiang Xia's brow twitched.

That was some heavy-duty bootlicking. A real newbie would've been crushed by that kind of dressing-down from a veteran cop.

But Jiang Xia had clocked seven or eight years in the workforce before transmigrating. She wasn't about to be intimidated.

All that noise was just code for 'I don't want to work.' She rolled her eyes internally. Cops were human — wanting an easier load was understandable.

But priorities were priorities. Three lives in the hospital, and he was pushing the case away? That crossed a line. As a new hire, she shouldn't be making enemies with the veterans.

But a deadweight who only knew how to hide behind the chief and throw labels around? Offending him was fine. 'What are you on about?

Just because a case is hard, we don't investigate?' Jiang Xia shot back. 'Besides, the academy literally teaches us to solve cases.

I gave a reasonable deduction based on standard trace analysis, and the chief hasn't objected — so what's your problem?' 'You haven't even started the job yet!' Being talked back to by a rookie stung. Lü Fusheng's face darkened.

'People are in the hospital waiting for money to survive. If we follow your lead and can't catch the thief, who takes the blame?

You? You think you've got what it takes?!' Oh, so now you care about lives. 'Enough!' Before Jiang Xia could fire back, Wu Suo cut Lü Fusheng off: 'We haven't even started investigating and you're in here arguing?

Lü Fusheng, I'm telling you — if we don't catch the criminal, even when the city bureau shows up, you're still on the hook.' Lü Fusheng froze. Wait — didn't Wu Suo dislike this woman who was about to join the force?

How did his attitude do a complete 180 and flip to defending her? Lü Fusheng had no clue what Wu Suo was thinking. As a pragmatist, Wu Suo's issue with Jiang Xia had been simple: she couldn't be worked like a mule.

But if she had real skills — if she could act as a searchlight for case leads — that was just as good as a mule. Lü Fusheng, on the other hand, barely worked.

Worse than a dog. If Wu Suo could've kicked him out, he would've done it ages ago. Now this useless dog was baring its teeth at the searchlight, trying to take a bite?

Of course Wu Suo was going to bark back. 'Report!' Hu Wei came jogging back after questioning the onlookers. He sneaked a glance at Jiang Xia, pretended he hadn't heard the argument, and said: 'I asked around.

Everyone outside is from the enamel factory. They were on shift and only came over after someone borrowed a phone to call the police — they don't know anything.

The neighbors were home the whole time. I asked them too: they said they haven't seen any suspicious people hanging around these past few days.' Given Jiang Xia's earlier deduction, Wu Suo wasn't surprised.

'Then this is going to be tough.' He frowned, brow tightening. 'There are a lot of people in this area. Even if we rule out factory workers and the elderly and sick, we're still looking at over a hundred suspects.

Going through all of them would take two or three days. By then, it'll be way too late.' Wu Suo mulled it over, but with all his experience, he couldn't think of anything faster than canvassing.

'Jiang Xia.' Wu Suo looked up. 'Any other ideas?' Time wasn't on their side. He could only hope the searchlight had more to offer.

'Give me a bit more time.' Jiang Xia took a deep breath. 'I need to look at the scene again. Make sure no one else moves around.' 'Fine.' Simple enough.

Wu Suo agreed on the spot. 'Go ahead — just don't disturb the scene.' With the green light, Jiang Xia grabbed a handful of wheat stalks from the woodpile and walked to the courtyard wall.

Solving cases, at its core, meant using experience and physical evidence to keep narrowing the suspect pool. The smaller the initial pool, the less time and effort needed — and the faster the arrest.

But get it wrong, and all that work was wasted. Jiang Xia had already looked inside the house. Based on the ransacking pattern, she suspected the culprit wasn't just a local — they were very likely someone familiar with Dong Aihua's family.

Compared to Wu Suo's scope, that could shrink the suspect list to single digits. But relying on ransacking patterns alone wasn't solid enough.

She wasn't a hundred percent sure. She was still the new girl. First impressions mattered. Nail the suspect, and the station would look at her differently — future work would be smoother.

Get it wrong, and she'd be branded a show-off, looked down on, and worse, she'd waste the golden window to catch the criminal. She couldn't gamble on gut feeling.

She needed harder evidence. Like a complete suspect footprint. Jiang Xia stared at the chaotic mess of footprints on the ground and studied them carefully.

Hu Wei, also a rookie, watched her every move with open curiosity. 'What's she playing at.' Lü Fusheng muttered under his breath, arms crossed.

He watched Jiang Xia crouch and frown at the ground, sneering inwardly. Theft cases were notoriously hard to crack. What could a fresh grad possibly find?

That lock thing earlier was pure luck — a blind cat stumbling onto a dead mouse. Now that she actually had to deliver, look at her: nothing.

Serves her right for showing off. Dong Aihua still hadn't stopped sobbing. She looked at Wu Suo standing motionless, then at Jiang Xia crouching by the wall, and the tears started falling again.

The old one's useless, and the young one's flailing. How are they ever going to catch the thief? Jiang Xia tuned out the peanut gallery.

Her entire focus was on the footprints. There were a lot — at least four or five distinct types, all jumbled together. Most overlapped three or four deep, and the bottom layers were completely unreadable.

The scene was basically worthless. Even a seasoned forensic detective would be stuck. The suspect's prints were the earliest — buried at the bottom — and had been trampled into oblivion.

Where do you even start? After a thorough look, Jiang Xia abandoned the idea of brute-forcing the footprint ID. Her Level 2 footprint analysis was roughly senior-detective level, not expert.

With this much chaos, she couldn't sort it out quickly. She needed a different angle. Jiang Xia stood up, stepped back two paces, and at some point had pulled a coin from her pocket — it was already spinning between her fingers at speed.

Think. Think. If I were the thief... She stared at the direction the footprints were facing. Then it hit her. Got it. Look at the direction!

The onlookers who came later were there to rubberneck. They'd have stood with their backs to the wall, toes pointing into the yard, heels toward the wall.

Even after they left, their prints would run parallel to the wall. But the thief climbed over the wall to get in — and climbed back over to leave.

When he landed coming in, his toes pointed the same way as the onlookers — indistinguishable. But when he left, he had to stand right against the wall to haul himself up.

His toes would be pointing straight at the wall. That was the tell. Like finally cracking the last monster question on a math final after ten minutes of staring at it, Jiang Xia's heart jumped.

She felt a rush of energy. She scanned the brick wall and quickly picked out a few spots that looked climbable. Working down from there, within a stride's range, she re-examined the footprints on the ground.

With direction as the filter, prints that had been hopelessly overlapping suddenly snapped into focus. She searched fast.

Not this one. Not this one. This one... this one! A suspect footprint — trampled from both sides, only three centimeters of it still readable — finally surfaced.

It was the mid-ball of the foot, with a fragment of sole pattern: roughly a wide W shape. Yes! Jiang Xia's energy spiked.

She stuck a wheat stalk next to the print as a marker and kept searching the yard. With the feature locked in, she calculated the stride length and quickly found a second trampled print.

This one was clearer — only two-thirds covered. She marked it and moved on. She got faster and faster. In two or three minutes, she'd marked a trail from the wall all the way to the door, then turned toward the southern side room.

About two meters in, she stopped dead. A complete, crystal-clear right-foot suspect footprint stared back at her. Jiang Xia snapped her head up and called out to Wu Suo: 'I found it!' Lü Fusheng had been waiting for Jiang Xia to crash and burn.

Hearing that, his face scrunched up like he'd bitten something sour. She actually found something?! 'You found the suspect's footprint?' Wu Suo was instantly alert.

He stepped around the wheat-stalk markers and strode over to Jiang Xia's side, crouching to examine the print. 'This complete?' 'And it's a wide wavy pattern — rubber-soled shoe.

That makes it a lot easier to track down!' Back then, plenty of families still hand-stitched cloth shoes with layered fabric soles. Those soles all looked similar, were hard to tell apart, and everyone wore them — a nightmare to trace.

Rubber-soled shoes were a different story. You needed coupons or cash to buy them, they were less common, and different factories used different sole patterns — much easier to ID.

Track by shoe, and the suspect list might shrink to single digits. Wu Suo reached out excitedly to give her a solid pat, then caught himself when he saw her expression and dialed it back to two light taps on the shoulder.

'Not bad at all for a police academy grad — you've got real skills!' 'We don't have to track just by shoe.' Jiang Xia smiled. She'd put in all that work to find a complete footprint — not just for that one clue.

She said, steady and confident: 'Chief Wu, I can tell you: this thief is between 1.73 and 1.78 meters tall, weighs around 135 jin, and is somewhere between 24 and 28 years old.' 'Huh?' Wu Suo's head filled with one giant question mark. How on earth do you know that?