Blood Neon

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

（suns also rise）

When the sun had almost heated the girl’s butt to medium-rare, Lin Ying finally got up.

She pulled out the few pieces of cloth that had always been stuffed under her head as a pillow. Looking with disgust at the drool stains on them, the girl licked her lips, straightened up and sat on the bed in a duck-sit. Yawning, she stretched lazily, then squinted and smoothed the messy tuft of hair sticking up on her head.

She lifted her head, glanced outside the window, then slowly lay back down again. She turned over, resting sideways on her arm.

With her eyes closed, she enjoyed the scorching sensation of sunlight shining through her eyelids, and time passed like that for a while.

There was nothing to be done — a person who neither needed to work nor attend school and was well-fed lived exactly this leisurely.

—— A long time passed before Lin Ying slowly shifted and got up. She slipped her feet into the shoes on the floor and hopped off the bed.

.

Walking to the corner of the room and looking at the pile of clothes there, the girl felt a bit troubled.

These clothes could perhaps actually be sold to a scrap collector, but they probably wouldn’t fetch much money, and she would still have to take unnecessary risks.

Usually, when several adults went missing, if there was no evidence indicating this involved a crime, and if they did not have special situations like special identities, then the police would not pay particular attention. Naturally, they would not conduct further investigation — unless there were signs suggesting this was connected to other incidents, not an isolated case. In that situation, they might pull older files and merge them for combined investigation.

At the family’s request, they might send two officers to ask a few of the last witnesses present and take a brief look at surveillance footage or something.

But that was about it.

So in theory, disposing of stolen goods itself did not carry much risk.

But what if?

This time Lin Ying had eaten three people in one go. If she counted the victims from the past nearly two weeks, the total already added up to a full six — enough to form a ranked team with a coach’s slot.

Although she felt her work had been fairly flawless, what if?

After all, this was three people at once.

Put simply, after doing something big, she was very nervous now.

.

After thinking it over and weighing the pros and cons, Lin Ying still decided to neutralize the clothes.

She first picked out a few pairs of underwear that had been close to the body, preparing to throw them away with yesterday’s snack trash in some trash bin.

When discarding evidence in such a situation, there was always the question of whether to throw it far or near.

But this place was not the primary crime scene. Even if she dumped them nearby, and some trail-hunting secret agent actually found them, they would only assume she had deliberately carried them a distance to dispose of them, right?

This would become an endless loop of you predicting me, me predicting your prediction. And expecting herself to battle wits with an air enemy that might not even exist was not Lin Ying’s style. So after a simple decision, she would take this part of the trash to be discarded in a residential area five hundred meters away.

She could take a path without surveillance to get there — very suitable.

What remained were the outerwear, shirts, T-shirts and such.

To be fair, if she started from a compassionate mindset, Lin Ying actually wanted to return these clothes to their families.

Whether good people or bad people, disappearing into thin air without leaving a single word—

Someone who should have returned home like usual simply never came back after walking out the door that day.

Even their belongings couldn’t be retrieved. All their loved ones could do was post missing person notices all over the streets and alleys, with no real clues to follow. On them were clearly written words like: “Wearing a white jacket and black cropped pants at the time of disappearance… Any information will be heavily rewarded.”

It must be incredibly painful…

Unfortunately, Lin Ying’s position made it impossible for her to return these clothes.

Setting everything else aside, she simply couldn’t bring herself to do something so deranged as personally handing over the belongings of someone she had killed to that person’s family.

》

And what if she approached it from a pragmatic point of view?

As someone who, after defeating a raider, would strip them bare like a frugal scavenger who managed a thrifty household, Lin Ying did quite want to sell the clothes for a bit of petty cash.

But she still felt the resale price of old clothing wasn’t worth the risk.

However, a qualified RPG player would always feel it was a shame to toss away even a pile of trash.

So, after weighing the options for a while, she decided to just stuff the clothes into one of those green charity bins for used clothing.

Most apartment complexes had them downstairs. She could find a few and drop parts of the pile into separate bins.

It was a donation — so it didn’t count as throwing them away.

.

Before leaving the bar yesterday, Lin Ying had already turned off the phones she had taken.

After returning to the room, due to the darkness and her chronic procrastination, she hadn’t taken any further action. It wasn’t until daylight today that she finally pulled a thin needle out of a drawer that couldn’t fully close and started prying out the SIM cards.

Looking at the small SIM cards in her hand, Lin Ying let out a sigh and crushed them with her tentacle.

There was nothing to be done. Considering the risk of use, in this era of real-name registration, these were just useless things.

She tossed the smashed fragments into the trash she planned to throw away, and then stored the most valuable phone inside her shadow. Patting the nonexistent dust off her backside, Lin Ying was ready to begin a new day.

After waving goodbye to the loyal teddy bear who had stayed in the room, the girl slowly carried a plastic bag full of trash downstairs.

There wasn’t much difference in the room compared to yesterday, but under the sunlight streaming in through the windows, although it was still run-down, it at least didn’t look as gloomy as before.

She glanced around the area. After confirming there were no signs of human presence, Lin Ying finally pushed the door open slowly.

This particular act of opening the door had nothing to do with ceremony today.

Her ability to shrink into shadows and slip through gaps didn’t work well in such bright daylight.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it—if she had to describe it, it was kind of like motion sickness? Or like when someone had drunk too much, swaying unsteadily while walking.

At times like this, if Lin Ying forcibly shrank her body into the shadow, she would feel extremely, extremely unwell.

And it wasn’t just natural light either—if a room were filled with various types of spotlights arranged into a shadowless lighting matrix, Lin Ying was also quite certain she wouldn’t be able to use her ability as freely as usual.

Sure, light was what created shadow. Even in the middle of the day, Lin Ying could effortlessly drag a random passerby into the shadow on the roadside and chew them to pieces without being affected. But if the light was too strong, she would still feel inexplicably uncomfortable.

As for the principle behind it? She couldn’t really figure it out either.

Though her real body did reside in the shadow beneath her, Lin Ying wasn’t some kind of shadow-being from a fantasy story, living in the Shadow Realm or whatever.

So when faced with this strange property of her own body, she could only chalk it up to the idea that, compared to darkness, people were simply less afraid of light. All in all, it was just mysteriously mystical.

Quite the enigma.

.

Carrying the garbage bag, just like an ordinary girl getting up in the morning to throw out the trash, Lin Ying hummed a tune and strolled leisurely down the path.

“Country road, take me home～zutto, boku wa～”

With no timekeeping device on hand, she couldn’t know the time precisely.

“Anata no～itakatta?”

But that was fine too. Now that she wasn’t being driven by any job or mission, Lin Ying didn’t really need to care much about the exact time. Occasionally catching a glimpse of a clock at a roadside shop would do.

“Ikenai, country road～”

After tossing the garbage into a rather large dump site in the distance, Lin Ying left the urban village district.

Next, she would donate the clothes—then she could think about how to sell the phones.

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