Su Shan didn’t know what had happened to her. Since yesterday, she had suddenly found herself appearing on the street, and her memories seemed fragmented.

She clearly remembered dying in a game. According to what she had heard from Qin Dingdong, after obtaining an “Echo” and dying, one should open their eyes in the real world. But she discovered that when she woke up, she was standing on the streets of the “Land of the End,” and beside her lay her own corpse.

She could only wander aimlessly nearby, then spent a night in a building by the roadside before getting up and continuing on.

Not long after she started walking, as she passed by a building, she inadvertently turned her head and noticed what seemed to be a familiar figure inside—a person who was robust and strong, wearing a black T-shirt.

Su Shan quickened her pace, walked into the house, and took a closer look. It was indeed an old acquaintance she had met once before.

“Ah!” Su Shan exclaimed with slight delight, then hastily saluted. “You’re Team Leader Li from Inner Mongolia!”

“Ah…?” Officer Li turned around, startled, his expression extremely unnatural. “You, you’re that criminal investigation technician from Hunan… Little Su?”

“Yes!” Su Shan nodded with a smile. “It’s so wonderful to see you! To run into you is really too—”

Before she could finish speaking, Su Shan froze completely.

Because she inadvertently saw that Officer Li’s left hand was gripping something pitch-black and foul-smelling, with a somewhat familiar shape.

His fingers were stained with dried blood, and his pants and arms were also covered with many bloody handprints.

She frowned and looked for a long time before asking tentatively, “Team Leader Li… what is this…?”

Officer Li’s expression looked extremely uneasy. He hurriedly stood up, instinctively wanting to hide his left hand behind his back. But Su Shan was a police officer after all, so even though Officer Li had moved his left hand behind him, she still became suspicious.

“It’s, it’s nothing… Little Su… I…” Officer Li seemed not to have anticipated that an acquaintance would suddenly walk in from outside. He was completely at a loss for words.

A ripple passed through her field of vision, and two characters around Officer Li’s body displayed themselves clearly. What surprised Su Shan was that these two characters shone much more brilliantly than any characters she had ever seen before.

A few seconds later, she asked softly, “Pickpocket…?”

“How… do you know?”

Su Shan withdrew her gaze and asked seriously, “Is this your ‘Echo’… But what exactly is that thing in your hand…”

After hearing this, Officer Li stared at Su Shan in a daze for a while before finally giving a bitter smile. “I… might have become somewhat abnormal because of this place… I’m afraid you’ll be scared if I tell you…”

After hearing this, Su Shan swallowed slightly, then imperceptibly shifted half a step toward the doorway.

She had originally thought that encountering an acquaintance inside a roadside building would be a good thing, but the other person seemed far too abnormal. Officer Li’s physique was too large for her, and being from the same police academy background, he would certainly be familiar with combat techniques. If it really came to a physical confrontation, she wouldn’t gain any advantage.

“Team Leader Li… did you just kill someone…?” Su Shan asked with a calm expression. “Is what you’re holding in your hand a heart?”

“I didn’t kill anyone, but what I’m holding in my hand is indeed a heart.” Officer Li nodded and brought the heart out from behind him, then spread his hand open before Su Shan.

Although she was a technician, this was the first time Su Shan had observed a human heart at such close range, because ordinary cases rarely involved murderers vicious enough to dig out the victim’s heart.

It had to be said that the heart was smaller than she had imagined—only about the size of a fist overall, shaped like a peach. But this peach looked as if it had been crushed by someone, its shape somewhat deformed.

In the eyes of Su Shan, a criminal investigator, this heart was obviously full of suspicious points.

First, all of its cardiac vessels appeared to have been neatly cut by something, completely extracted from a person’s body, and each vessel showed traces of bleeding, indicating that when this heart was removed, it was most likely still beating.

Second, the blood on the heart’s surface had already dried, suggesting it had been separated from the human body for quite some time, while Officer Li’s finger creases, fingernails, and even forearms were all covered with fresh blood.

Combining all these circumstances, it wasn’t difficult to guess that after the other party had dug this heart out of a living person, he had been holding it in his hand and playing with it all along. Looking at the degree of blood desiccation and the blood residue between his fingers, it had basically lasted more than a day.

This bizarre situation made Su Shan’s back turn cold for a moment.

This was something that only an extremely dangerous, psychopathic, antisocial murderer could possibly do—something that Su Shan, as a young police officer, had naturally never encountered before.

Seeing Su Shan take a step back, Officer Li hastily explained, “Little Su, I don’t know if you’ll believe me when I say this… but I really didn’t kill anyone. I took this heart to train my ‘Pickpocket’…”

“Train your ‘Pickpocket’…?” Su Shan was stunned. Her police instincts made her instinctively ask, “The purpose of training ‘Pickpocket’ with a heart is… to kill people?”

“I…” Officer Li was taken aback, then finally shook his head helplessly. “Little Su… what I want to kill isn’t people, but certain more formidable things.”

“What…?” Su Shan raised an eyebrow. “More formidable… ‘things’?”

“I’ve had the fortune of witnessing those things using ‘Pickpocket.'” Officer Li said. “I originally thought this ability could only retrieve some objects… but never imagined it could extract a person’s internal organs. This heart came from one of ‘Cat’s’ brothers. He was killed by that thing not far in front of me… The other party pulled out his heart and crushed it in their hand, and we humans had no way to deal with it.”

What Officer Li was saying contained too much information at once for Su Shan to comprehend.

“I was thinking… if I became familiar with the feeling of pulling a ‘heart’ out of a pocket… could I also do the same thing…? Could I pull out the hearts of those things…?” Officer Li said with a bitter smile. “But I’m really going crazy… Is what I’m doing even right…?”

He slowly placed the fist-sized heart in his hand into his pants pocket, then skillfully pulled it out again.

Su Shan clearly saw that the other party’s pants pocket had already been soaked and hardened by dried blood. With just a light touch, some dried, dark-red blood flakes fell down like snowflakes.

“I’ve repeated this action thousands of times in two days…” Officer Li said with a desperate expression. “I don’t know what I’m doing… I…”

“You’ll succeed.” Su Shan also answered gloomily at this moment. “Team Leader Li… I have experience. Your current state… is right.”

“Right…?”

“Yes.” Su Shan showed a smile tinged with sympathy. “Qi Xia once taught me that in this place, the more desperate a person is, the stronger they become. The ripples of your ‘Pickpocket’ are very clear right now.”