87: Chapter 87 Ghost Case

Early mornings in Shanghai were always damp and cold.

Especially in the French Concession, where even the air carried a blend of butter and cigars.

Michael Smith, the assistant military attaché at the British Consulate, disliked this smell.

He preferred the fog of London—pure, clean, and filled with a sense of lost direction, much like his current mood.

On the desk before him lay a top-priority telegram sent from London.

The telegram was very short.

"Ascertain the truth of the 'Sihang Warehouse Ghost' incident. At any cost."

Ghost.

Smith gave a bitter smile.

He had been in China for three years and considered himself a staunch materialist.

But in the past twenty-four hours, everything he had heard and seen had caused his once-proud rationality to teeter on the brink of collapse.

He picked up his coat and put on his fedora.

Today, he was going to see a ghost... The ruins of Sihang Warehouse had already been cordoned off by the Japanese Army.

But for a veteran agent like Smith, such a blockade was essentially non-existent.

A few US dollar bills were enough to grant him unimpeded passage.

He wasn't the first one there.

Klaus, a German and a lackey of the Gestapo, was holding a magnifying glass and carefully studying something on a pile of charred concrete.

Not far away, Jack O'Connor, the assistant to the US military attaché and a boisterous former Marine, was puffing on a cigar and acting chummy with several Japanese officers, likely fishing for intelligence.

Colleagues in the same trade are rivals.

But at this moment, their objectives were surprisingly aligned.

Smith ignored them.

He walked straight toward those two pools of iron that had already cooled and solidified.

Yesterday, these had been two of the Empire's Type 94 Tanks.

He crouched down, took a Swiss Army Knife from his pocket, and tried to pry a sample from the edge of the molten iron.

The tip of the blade snapped.

Smith frowned.

The hardness of this substance exceeded his understanding.

Even more eerie was that the surrounding ground showed no signs of an explosion.

It was as if those two tanks had been crushed into molten iron out of thin air by an invisible giant hand.

He stood up and walked toward the west wall of the warehouse.

There was a massive, blasted-open breach.

That was normal.

In war, there are always explosions.

But what was abnormal was that after walking around the breach, he found a pitifully small number of craters.

This looked more like a precise, surgical internal demolition.

Who had the ability to plant so many explosives right under the noses of over four hundred Chinese Soldiers?

And who could control the timing and power of the demolition so perfectly?

He looked up.

At the edge of the warehouse's top floor, a small segment of something that looked like rope swayed gently in the wind.

Smith's pupils constricted.

He immediately ran into the warehouse and, with great effort, climbed onto the precarious rooftop.

He carefully removed that segment of "rope."

It was very light.

Light as a feather.

But when he tried to cut it with his army knife, he found that the blade couldn't even leave a white mark on it.

A layer of cold sweat broke out on Smith's back.

What on earth was this?

...Night.

In the French Concession, at a jazz bar called "Night Shanghai."

Smith, Klaus, and O'Connor sat in an inconspicuous corner.

Three glasses of whiskey, three silent men.

"Found anything, my German friend?"

O'Connor was the first to break the silence, blowing a smoke ring, though his eyes remained sharp.

"Aside from discovering that the Japanese are all useless fools, I've found nothing."

Klaus took a sip of his drink, his tone filled with the arrogance characteristic of Germans.

"And you, American cowboy? What did you squeeze out of your Japanese friends?"

"They said they saw flying insects."

O'Connor shrugged helplessly. "Swarms of them, flying insects that explode."

"Nonsense."

Klaus snorted coldly. "Just ghost stories made up by a bunch of cowards who've had the wits scared out of them."

Smith remained silent.

He just swirled the ice in his glass, but in his mind, he recalled the crazed Japanese artilleryman he had seen at the prisoner-of-war camp that afternoon.

That artilleryman had held his head, repeatedly muttering two words.

"Moth."

"The devil's Moth."

One madman saying it might be a coincidence.

But what if everyone was saying it?

"Mr. Smith."

Klaus turned his gaze toward him. "You, a gentleman of the British Empire, surely must have had quite a harvest today?"

Smith smiled noncommittally.

From his pocket, he pulled out that black "rope fiber," thinner than a strand of hair.

He placed it on the table.

"I think you two might have some interest in this."

Klaus and O'Connor's eyes were instantly drawn to it.

They leaned in almost simultaneously.

"What is this?"

O'Connor reached out to touch it, but Smith blocked him with his glass.

"I don't know."

Smith looked at them and said, word by word:

"I only know that this kind of thing shouldn't exist in this world."

In the bar, the noisy jazz music seemed to fall silent at that moment... Back at the consulate.

Smith wrote his report through the night.

He didn't mention any "ghosts" or "Moth."

He simply objectively sealed his findings and that mysterious fiber inside an encrypted file folder.

At the end of the report, he wrote his conclusion.

"An unknown third-party force, possessing technology far beyond the current era, has intervened in the battle for Shanghai."

"Their purpose: unknown."

"Their methods: incomprehensible."

"Recommendation: Classify this incident as the highest threat level."

Having written the final word, Smith leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.

He looked out the window at the brightly lit Shanghai.

For the first time, he felt that this city was so... unfamiliar.

And dangerous.

Who exactly was that ghost?

And where were they hiding?

Smith didn't know.

He only knew that this war, starting from the night four hundred men collectively vanished...

...had become increasingly interesting.