“Do you think that man in black was telling the truth?” Wang Meili asked, still staring in the direction he had disappeared, a hint of doubt lingering on her face.
“True or not, Barbie City has been acting weird lately,” Ah Zhai replied, adjusting the camera on his shoulder while replaying the footage of pink glows and shifting statues. “If someone’s really behind all this, we have to get to the bottom of it!”
Lin Xiaoqiang nodded, his eyes fixed on the photo of the bespectacled man with a shadowy expression. He searched his memory for any hint of familiarity—but came up empty.
“Looks like our only chance is to ask the animals,” he said, tucking the photo away and preparing to launch his signature “animal detective” operation.
His first stop was the community park, where many of his feline friends hung out. He showed them the photo and asked if they’d seen this man—or sensed anything odd about him.
“This human… smells tricky,” muttered Blackbeard, a sleek black cat who sniffed the photo with a wrinkled nose. “I saw him a few months ago in the corner of the park. He was planting strange devices that gave off a weird low-frequency hum. It was very unpleasant.”
Lin Xiaoqiang’s heart skipped a beat. That strange hum had been mentioned by several residents lately—and the man in black had mentioned something about “resonant frequencies.” Blackbeard’s testimony was no doubt a critical clue.
He then found a few city-roaming dogs and asked them to sniff the man’s scent for anything familiar.
“This smell… it’s foreign, and there’s a nasty chemical edge to it,” said a sharp-nosed German shepherd. “I remember catching a similar whiff near some abandoned factories.”
Abandoned factories? Lin immediately thought of the place where the Dog King had once engineered the “Pink Frenzy Virus.” Could this mysterious man be connected to the Dog King somehow?
To be sure, he took to the skies—figuratively, via his network of aerial allies. He called upon a few birds who often flew over the outskirts of the city, hoping they could offer a broader perspective.
An eagle who patrolled the city edge eyed the photo and gave a sharp cry. “This human… I saw him enter a run-down research facility near the edge of the city. That place radiates a strange energy that makes my feathers itch. Most of us birds avoid it.”
An abandoned research facility—yet another potential hotspot. It was becoming clear that the bespectacled man was exploiting these forgotten corners of Barbie City to conduct some kind of secret experiment involving strange energy.
Piece by piece, through fragmented animal memories and impressions, a picture was forming in Lin Xiaoqiang’s mind. This man—whoever he was—seemed deeply connected to the mysterious “pink anomalies.” His movements and behavior pointed to dangerous energy experiments being carried out in places long abandoned.
The factories and the research facility were very likely bases for his covert operations.
“Looks like we’ve got a new target,” Lin Xiaoqiang told Wang Meili and Ah Zhai, sharing everything he’d learned from the animals. “We need to check out those places ourselves. There’s a chance we’ll uncover the truth about this mystery man—and the conspiracy he’s hiding.”
And so, the Supernatural Research Club trio once again set out in search of the truth. But this time, what awaited them could be their strangest and most dangerous mystery yet.
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