Ji Ping reacted a fraction too slowly, and the disc was snatched from his hand by Kuang Feifan. He froze for a moment, his face quickly contorting into a mask of fury.

But Kuang Feifan didn't wait for him to explode. He took the disc out, popped open the computer's drive, and inserted it.

It was true that the video files on a single DVD could be overwhelming; he couldn't help but break into a smile, turning to Ji Ping and asking, "Officer Ji, which file is it?"

Since the deed was done, Ji Ping had no choice but to swallow his anger, stabbing a finger irritably at a file on the screen.

Kuang Feifan opened the video file. The footage, shot at night, had a greenish tint to it, making it feel somewhat like a horror movie.

Ji Ping glanced at the timestamp on the screen and said, "Jump forward a bit."

As instructed, Kuang Feifan adjusted the time.

"Stop, right here. Pay close attention," Ji Ping warned.

By then, Feng Tian and Wang Hai had also drawn near out of curiosity.

The intersection in the video was quite clear. Abruptly, a figure darted out from the roadside on the upper side of the frame, seemingly approaching from the direction of the gas station.

Kuang Feifan zoomed in on the figure and immediately recognized it as a woman. Though her expression was indistinct, the hurried nature of her run showed she was panting and scanning her surroundings, as if searching for something.

Needless to say, this woman was Luo Jingjing, and Kuang Feifan could sense her palpable anxiety.

What was strange, however, was that from the beginning until now, only Luo Jingjing had appeared in the footage. Given the circumstances as they were told, the phantom car should have appeared on the road before her, but Kuang Feifan could not spot even a shadow of a vehicle.

In fact, the oddest part of the whole affair for Kuang Feifan wasn't whether the phantom car had appeared, but his deep-seated suspicion that her accident had nothing to do with it. Based on what he learned from Zhao Hongcheng, the eerie car had left the gas station ahead of Luo Jingjing and accelerated quite rapidly. Logically, even if Luo Jingjing ran as fast as she could after leaving the station, she shouldn't have been able to catch up to the car, which was already in front of her. Unless it turned around, there was no way it could have hit and killed her.

Thus, Kuang Feifan had long suspected that a different vehicle had killed Luo Jingjing, possibly one unrelated to any ghost. However, what he saw in the video quickly overturned this notion.

There, Luo Jingjing, who had been standing by the roadside, hesitated for a moment, then stepped onto the crosswalk, seemingly intending to check the other side of the road. Judging by her pace, she might have given up on pursuing the car, perhaps realizing her speed couldn't match that of a vehicle.

Suddenly, just as Luo Jingjing reached the middle of the road, she abruptly stopped, looking around wildly, as if she had spotted something bizarre. In an instant, her entire body stiffened, and panic flared across her features, as if she had seen something terrifying.

Panic easily clouds judgment. She started running toward the center of the intersection involuntarily. Just as she reached the midpoint, without the slightest warning, Luo Jingjing's body suddenly flew upward. Although the recording captured no sound, Kuang Feifan could almost hear her scream of agony.

At that moment, it wasn't just Kuang Feifan; Feng Tian and Wang Hai behind him involuntarily sucked in a sharp breath. A collective "hiss" filled the room, clearly indicating that a single gasp wouldn't be enough to settle their nerves.

Kuang Feifan didn't need to ask; he knew the others, just like him, had only seen Luo Jingjing suddenly lifted off the ground in the footage. Her unnatural posture strongly suggested she had been struck by a speeding vehicle, yet in the recording, they hadn't seen a single car appear during her flight and heavy fall to the side.

In short, Luo Jingjing appeared to have been struck and killed by an invisible car.

Like Kuang Feifan, Feng Tian and Wang Hai stared blankly at Luo Jingjing's motionless form on the ground. For a long while, they remained seated, unmoving.

Only Ji Ping knew the contents of the footage, but he remained silent, sweeping his gaze over the others with an expressionless face.

After a long, heavy silence, Kuang Feifan mechanically raised his hand, rewound the video slightly, and re-watched the segment where Luo Jingjing was thrown into the air. This time, as she fell back to the ground, he rewound again and began scrubbing frame by frame. The moment Luo Jingjing’s body began to ascend, he reluctantly paused the image and magnified it inch by inch.

At that moment, Ji Ping, standing nearby, suddenly spoke up. "No need to pore over it. I had the technical team examine this footage closely. The original tape wasn't tampered with, and unlike older tape formats, there's no factor here related to speed causing data loss."

Kuang Feifan understood his implication. The naked eye only perceives a film at 24 frames per second; one must dissect the content frame by frame to see more. But hearing Ji Ping now, Kuang Feifan knew this particular recording shouldn't present such issues.

Could there truly have been an unseen vehicle at the scene?

Kuang Feifan couldn't help but ask Ji Ping, "When you surveyed the scene, did you notice anything suspicious?"

Ji Ping shook his head. "It looked exactly like a traffic accident scene, but there were no tire marks, no fragments of vehicle debris. You could say that apart from a body that looked like it had been run over, there was zero evidence to suggest a car had ever been present."

Just as he suspected.

Kuang Feifan turned to Feng Tian. "What's your take?"

Before Feng Tian could answer, Ji Ping tapped the table with his finger, reminding him, "What about the video you mentioned? Shouldn't we play it?"

Kuang Feifan quickly brought up the recording he had recently transferred to the computer, sequenced the files to check the camera angles, selected the footage from inside the small store, and began playback.

Ji Ping casually asked, "Didn't the partition fail? Our technicians said it was completely unrecoverable."

Kuang Feifan shrugged. "Maybe your techs haven't played with much surveillance software."

Ji Ping felt stifled but had no choice but to continue watching the screen with a sullen expression.

In truth, Kuang Feifan and his team had only heard Zhao Hongcheng describe the surveillance footage; this was their first time seeing it. Even on fast-forward, watching Zhao Hongcheng sleep and Luo Jingjing’s seemingly strange actions felt somewhat dull compared to the shock of witnessing Luo Jingjing's fatal accident.

However, when they saw the counterfeit currency appear in the cash register, they all gasped in surprise, especially Ji Ping, who let out a sharp intake of air this time.

They quickly finished watching that segment. Just as Ji Ping was about to speak, Kuang Feifan waved him off, pulling up the footage from the gas station lane and signaling him to continue watching.

As the group watched the vehicle headlights illuminate the scene in the recording, a sudden, bright flash erupted from the outer room. The people inside froze almost simultaneously. The flash they just witnessed looked exactly like car headlights streaking across the outer room’s glass onto the interior wall.

A thought surfaced simultaneously in everyone's mind: at such a late hour, a vehicle was driving into the dark, unlit lanes of the gas station.