NIGHT Chapter 2
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Case One: The Phantom Sniper
Chapter 2: You can call me Professor Xu
Xu Pei thought he was dead.
The lab had exploded, flames roaring into the sky. He’d stumbled through thick, choking smoke before tumbling down the emergency staircase.
What happened next defied all logic.
He found himself in a crowded square, surrounded by people shouting about something he couldn’t tell. Lightning crackled the sky, wind howled from every direction, and sporadic raindrops stung his face. The sensory overload short-circuited his brain.
The very first thing that sunk in him was, ‘this must be the underworld.’
The woman on the stage, decked in a fuschia pink suit1, was probably some underworld official deciding who got heaven and who got hell.
But that theory evaporated as quickly as it came, because the banners around him weren’t listing the laws of the dead but were campaign slogans for a mayoral election. And the crowd’s arguments weren’t about facing judgment, but about public safety and their city’s crime rates.
Just as Xu Pei’s brain began recalibrating, slowly syncing himself to this bizarre reality, everyone around him suddenly screamed and dropped into a crouch with their hands over their heads. His freshly reconstructed worldview promptly shattered again.
What are they doing?
He needed more intel.
Twisting the ring on his pinky, Xu Pei dialed down his scent neutralizer2. Instantly, a myriad of scent flooded his nose. Rain. Dirt. Grass. The earthy smell of nature. But this relaxing scent wasn’t what he was after.
Switching the neutralizer off entirely, stronger odors overwhelmed his sense of smell. The smell of hot dogs, car exhaust, the sewer lurking beneath manholes… A vivid map of the city guided by its scent unfolded in his mind. Yet the one thing he needed, the one crucial scent others would emit due to their emotions, was missing.
What's going on?
A gust of wind surged past, and it carried an unfamiliar tang that Xu Pei had rarely encountered.
It was gunpowder.
Living in a city with banned firearms, Xu Pei rarely encountered weapons. Which was why it took him a second too long to realize what was happening, and why everyone was running.
He instinctively turned toward the wind’s origin, but all he saw were a dense grove of trees and distant office buildings. Then, in a blink, the wind shifted. A crisp, clean scent of juniper berries cut through the chaos.
He turned his head. Behind him stood a handsome alpha.
Xu Pei pegged him as an alpha immediately was, admittedly, partly due to stereotypes, because betas and omegas rarely hit around 190cm. As for his thought that he was handsome, that wasn't because Xu Pei had taken a good look at his face, but mostly because the guy wore a holster harness over his crisp white shirt3, outlining a frankly unfair set of pecs, something that was a far cry from what Xu Pei would usually see in his everyday life.
Yet something was off.
Xu Pei still couldn’t catch even a whiff of his scent. None of his pheromones, nor emotional undercurrents emitted by his scent. Even with a neutralizing device, it shouldn’t be so effective that Xu Pei wouldn’t be able to tell whether he was an alpha.
Could his glands be defective?
Really, what Xu Pei should’ve been thinking was why this guy was walking toward him while everyone else fled. But his brain, still glitching from sensory whiplash and missing scent variables, hopped from one thought to another like a derailing train.
And so, in the midst of all this turmoil, Xu Pei cluelessly got himself arrested.
Even though he was the one who’d been sexually harassed4.
All translations on ADammen Translations are by Abo Dammen. Please don’t repost, retranslate, or turn them into EPUBs/PDFs, read only on this site.
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Inside the police station’s interrogation room, the blinding interrogation lights made Xu Pei’s eyes throb. But his mental exhaustion was far worse than his physical condition. Hours of nonstop questioning had become his own personal mental torture, and worse still, since he got arrested, a barrage of inexplicable events had his brain refusing to shut down.
No one had heard of Nucheng, one of the most prosperous metropolises in his country, nor had they heard of the National Research Institute, where he worked. Every single item here from cars, brand logos, and even road signs was unfamiliar, their designs subtly different from the ones he knew.
And everyone had no pheromones, nor were they wearing any suppressant devices. Xu Pei, in a moment of desperation, even let his high-grade omega pheromones slip in public, essentially equal to streaking naked by this world’s standards, and yet not a single soul had noticed. And the hardest thing to explain was, one moment he was still in the lab, and the next, he was standing in this strange, unfamiliar city.
A theory, absurd yet disturbingly plausible, began to take shape in Xu Pei’s mind.
The wall clock on the wall read 11 PM. That impotent alpha5–okay, improper label since no one here had pheromones–still showed no sign of letting him go.
Just then, someone pushed open the interrogation room door. "He Sir, there’s no record of him in the system. His fingerprints didn’t have a hit either."
Hearing the result, Xu Pei’s suspicions were sealed. He must’ve crossed into another world.
A world that was eerily similar to his own, but without the existence of glands.
Frankly, compared to the possibility that he had died, this outcome was actually easier to accept.
"What’s your real name?" He Yixun glared at him, radiating that classic ‘We can keep going all night if you don’t talk’ energy.
Xu Pei was already tired of the questioning. It was just the same questions again and again, it’s like a glitched loop. But now that he had some sense of what was going on, he understood this wasn’t something that could be explained with logic. He sighed. "Get me coffee, and I’ll talk."
"You still want coffee?" The person taking down notes looked ready to strangle him. "Just confess already!"
He Yixun, however, caught the shift in Xu Pei’s tone. After a long stare, he spoke facing the one-way mirror, "Bring him a cup."
Xu Pei added, "Not instant, with no sugar. Thanks."
He Yixun’s gaze returned to him, but he didn’t object.
Before long, the warm coffee arrived. Xu Pei took a sip. It was pretty decent, and quite similar to the one he’d usually drink. He was already beginning to consider that if he couldn’t get home, maybe this world wouldn’t be so hard to adjust to.
"Ready to talk?" He Yixun prompted.
Xu Pei sipped leisurely before setting the cup down, deciding to give a little context before dropping the absurd bombshell. "Earlier, I saw your poster downstairs."
He Yixun, the youngest senior superintendent in the history of Bincheng, single handedly slashed crime rates and earned the title the Criminals’ Nemesis.
Xu Pei had to admit, He Yixun looked even better in person than he did in his airbrushed poster6. He had sharper features, and thick brows that framed a deep-set gaze that carried an undeniable intensity.
"You’ve probably handled a lot of cases and had your fair share of encountering bizarre ones." Xu Pei said. "So your tolerance for unhinged truths should be decent."
He Yixun, "And so?"
"Now I get why your cameras saw me materialize out of thin air, and why your systems have no record of me." Xu Pei took a breath. "It’s because I came here from another world."
He Yixun paused for a beat. Then he turned to the mirror and said, "Take his coffee away."
Xu Pei, "..."
"Last chance," He Yixun folded his arms, his patience visibly worn thin. "How did you know the sniper’s position?"
"I told you, I smelled gunpowder." It was the same question for the umpteenth time, but Xu Pei was far calmer now. He thoughtfully put himself in their shoes. If he were a police officer in this world, he wouldn’t easily let someone as suspicious as himself walk away either.
"The building was 854 meters away straight from the Central Square, and you’re saying you caught the smell of gunpowder at that distance?"
"Wind carries scent." Xu Pei shrugged. "Where I’m from, people are very sensitive to scent, and mine’s sharper than most."
It was getting more and more ridiculous by the second.
He Yixun had never met a suspect8 this difficult. He was riddled with inconsistencies, offering nothing useful under interrogation.
Xu Pei, male, 30 years old, the youngest professor at the National Research Institute, specializing in gland repair and modification. He claims his disheveled appearance was caused by a lab explosion and his sudden appearance here was due to some inter-dimensional travel… What the hell kind of nonsense was this?
He looked like a long-term resident of a psychiatric facility, but He Yixun had already had every hospital in Bincheng checked and there was no patient matching his description. Granted, he could have come from out of town, but even that didn’t logically hold up his sudden appearance.
—If he truly had a mental disorder, how could he have been involved in the attack?
So He Yixun still leaned toward the theory that this man had fabricated a wildly implausible identity. As for his motive, and why he’d remained at the crime scene… Well, aside from provoking the police, he couldn’t think of another reason.
"You say your nose is sensitive." He Yixun stood abruptly.
"Yes. But maybe for people like you—"
"Come with me."
He grabbed Xu Pei’s arm and hauled him into the bullpen7, where the cops hustled through post-shooting chaos. Normally, at this time of night, there’d only be a couple officers on duty. But right now, overtime officers were taking witness statements, others interrogating shady characters. The office was a mess, buzzing with noise and tension.
"If your nose is really that sharp, tell me what you’re smelling," He Yixun challenged.
Fine. Xu Pei wasn’t surprised. He didn’t like this chaotic environment, but maybe this was the only way to prove he wasn’t lying. When his scent neutralizer was in its full mode, Xu Pei retained only a basic level of smell which was just enough for him to function in daily life. In his world, he could tell from pheromones basic info like a person’s gender, emotions, and even sexual cues if someone wasn’t wearing a neutralizer at all. Although even his basic level sense of smell surpassed that of most people, it still wasn’t enough to catch extremely subtle scents.
He shut off the neutralizer.
Unlike the open air of the plaza, this time, after turning off his neutralizer, Xu Pei was nearly knocked out by the overwhelming mix of suffocating odors. Grimacing as he covered his nose and enduring the intense discomfort, he looked at a cop on his left and said, "He just had a fried chicken burger."
He Yixun glanced at the trash bin and wasn’t surprised. "Anyone could’ve figured that out."
Xu Pei picked out an officer sitting in a far corner. "He owns at least two large dogs."
He Yixun used his height to glance over and spotted a photo on the man’s desk. "That just proves you have good eyesight," he said, even though he himself couldn’t actually make out what was in the picture.
Xu Pei turned to another officer on the right. "That guy has diabetes."
Someone looked genuinely startled and muttered under their breath, "How’d he know?!"
"He probably saw an insulin pen," He Yixun reasoned. Given that this suspect had remembered even the bulletin board outside the station, it was clear he was a keen observer.
Xu Pei turned his scrutiny on He Yixun himself.
He faced He Yixun, trying to block out the noise and distraction, and took a slow, deep breath. Fortunately, the crisp scent of juniper berries cut through the chaos, sparing him from total discomfort.
"You shower in the mornings," Xu Pei started, "Your body wash is lime-scented. It's faint now, overpowered by your cologne. Your shampoo smells like white tea, but after getting caught in the rain, it’s not so pleasant anymore. You’ve been somewhere with lavender aromatherapy candle, maybe your break room?"
It was the station’s psychological counseling room. He Yixun had, in fact, been there earlier, and there was a relaxing lavender scent candle burning.
Things suddenly got complicated, because most of the details were spot-on. There was only one thing he could argue with.
"I don’t wear cologne," He Yixun said.
"Then maybe you picked it up somewhere else," Xu Pei replied. "You smell like smoke, but you don’t smoke. Your fingers are too clean. You recently had coffee, no milk, no sugar. It has a very high caffeine content so I’d guess a double espresso."
The officers nearby exchanged looks, stunned. He Yixun really didn’t smoke, and he did love his coffee shot double espresso. There was no way this was just a lucky guess. And ever since the suspect was brought in, he’d been locked in the interrogation room so there was no way he could’ve known whether He Yixun had had coffee outside.
All translations on ADammen Translations are by Abo Dammen. Please don’t repost, retranslate, or turn them into EPUBs/PDFs, read only on this site.
"You’re very hygienic. There’s no body odor on you." Xu Pei mercilessly added, "Unlike most of the people in this room, a lot here haven’t showered for days and don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom."
Several officers averted their eyes. Some even gave a few awkward coughs.
"There’s no trace of makeup powder scent on you, no lingering scent of body lotion or hair oil. That suggests…" Xu Pei paused, then said, "Your partner is pretty low-key and is not the type to dress up. Or, you don’t have a partner. You’re single."
The juniper scent clung on He Xiyun was too distinct to be incidental. It wasn’t something you just happened to pick up. Xu Pei had considered whether it might’ve come from a partner who wore that perfume but the scent didn’t add up. Someone who wore perfume wouldn’t neglect to dress themselves up.
"He’s totally single!" One officer had already forgotten the seriousness of the situation and was treating this whole thing like a performance. "I’m starting to think we’ll never get to eat He Sir’s wedding candy!"9
"His only dates are with criminals. He sacrifices his looks for work haha!"
"Remember that sting? Watching He Sir get hit on nearly killed me from laughter."
He Yixun didn’t have the energy to deal with the laughing and joking officers. He still couldn’t figure out how the suspect knew so many intimate details.
There was no way this guy could’ve known about the counseling room’s lavender, his shampoo and body wash scent, unless the suspect had been surveilling him for some time and had an informant inside the station who somehow passed along the fact that he’d had a double espresso right before the interrogation. But when He Yixun arrested the suspect, his confusion during the arrest had seemed genuine.
Even in the wildest scenario, assuming all of this was a meticulous setup… What would the suspect even gain? Make himself out to be some kind of god of smell and wait for disciples to worship him?
That didn’t make sense.
Unless… the suspect really did have an extraordinarily keen sense of smell. Accepting that would actually make the entire incident more logical. But this level of sense of smell was practically a superpower. He Yixun still had his doubts. "You’re telling me you can smell gunpowder from 800 meters away?"
Xu Pei exhaled. Looks like his little "talent show" hadn’t been for nothing after all.
Xu Pei set his neutralizer to a higher mode. "Let me reintroduce myself. I’m Xu Pei. You can call me Professor Xu."
TL Notes:
1 玫红色西装 (méi hóng sè xīzhuāng) – Fuchsia or rose-red suit. You can search this and you will see the color. I quite like it.
2 阻隔器 (zǔgéqì) - some sort of pheromone blocker/dampener so he wouldn't be overwhelmed with the scent. It neutralizes his sense of smell so I'll be using neutralizer instead.
3 I know it said harness but like, imagine if HYX is wearing something like this: (click here)
4 He used 被性骚扰 and well, given his gender and his assumption that HYX is an alpha, it's reasonable why he'd think he was being sexually harassed.
5 阳痿alpha - really calling him impotent lol just because he wasn't releasing pheromones
6 Most images of models used for commercial purposes are “airbrushed” to make the models look slimmer, have better skin etc.. This is to improve the public's perception of the product being sold.
7 A bullpen is a slang term describing the shared, open space among junior staff members. Honestly, the only reason I know of this term is because of that clip from Brookyn 99
8 嫌疑人 (Xiányí rén) - Just know that this is HYX's favorite nickname of XP and you'll be seeing it more often in the future chapters
9 喜糖 (xǐtáng)- Wedding candy is traditionally given at Chinese marriages
Changed Bin City ---> Bincheng & Nucheng
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