(Kuchiba Hiro reached out and gently stroked the smooth feathers of the crow, Fukurai. The realistic texture, combined with the faint sense of emptiness in his stomach from staying up all night and weeping, served as a cold reminder—this nightmare would never end.
He had to endure the heart-wrenching grief and begin to face a world without his father.
His gaze fell on the black briefcase next to the urn, something his father had almost never let out of his hands while he was alive.
He took the briefcase and opened it; inside were some of his father's belongings. He flipped through them almost mechanically, not looking for anything specific, but instinctively longing to touch more evidence of his father's existence—traces that still held the lingering scent of life.
The bag mostly contained cold paper documents and old files. The only thing that could be called a personal item was a worn leather wallet.
He opened the wallet. Inside was some cash and a photo with edges worn white from being rubbed—in the photo, a young Hiro sat on his father's shoulders, both of them smiling brilliantly. That smile seemed heart-breakingly piercing now.
But the most important thing was missing — his father's phone.
Kuchiba Hiro's brow furrowed immediately. In this day and age, a phone carried almost all of a person's life traces. To him right now, that phone was a precious relic connecting him to his father's past, storing his father's voice and face; its importance was irreplaceable.
He immediately picked up his own phone and called the police station that had notified him earlier, asking directly: "Hello, I am a family member of Kuchiba Ta. I'd like to ask, why isn't my father's phone among his belongings?"
The officer on the other end seemed to check the records before explaining: "I'm very sorry, Mr. Kuchiba. The accident occurred in a busy downtown area, and the situation was very chaotic at the time. We cannot rule out the possibility that a passerby... picked up the missing item. We have recorded this and will do our best to search for it. We will contact you as soon as it's found. Please be patient."
The call ended. Kuchiba Hiro's heart sank. He knew that "picked up" was basically equivalent to lost. In the crowds of a bustling city, trying to recover a phone that had been picked up was as hopeless as finding a needle in a haystack.
He took a deep breath, forcing down the surging irritation and sense of powerlessness. He turned his gaze to the laptop on his father's desk. Perhaps he could still find some of his father's digital footprints here for some small comfort.
He opened the computer, launched the browser, and subconsciously clicked on the history tab—he wanted to see what his father usually paid attention to, hoping to gain some insight into his father's thoughts before he died.
However, the history was empty.
A hint of doubt surfaced in his mind. Did his father... have a habit of deleting his browsing history? Did he have some special hobby he didn't want anyone to know about?
Just as this thought arose, he noticed another detail: the top right corner of the browser showed the login status as "Not Logged In." This was a bit strange; his father usually stayed logged in to sync his data.
"Was it a system update or an accidental logout?" he thought, opening the login interface and skillfully entering his father's account and common password.
A pop-up prompted: (Account or password incorrect).
He tried several other possible password combinations and even tried to recover the password, but the result was always the same — the system prompted (This account does not exist).
A chill began to climb up his spine. He immediately opened the social media software his father frequently used.
The situation was exactly the same! It was also in a logged-out state! After entering the account and password, it also displayed (Account does not exist)!
Kuchiba Hiro snatched up his own phone, quickly opening his contacts and social media friend lists—his father's account was gone. It wasn't a grayed-out offline status; it had completely vanished from his contact list! For this to happen, there was usually only one possibility: the account had been voluntarily deactivated, or... it had been completely deleted from the server side.
How could his father have deactivated all his accounts for no reason? He was an online legal consultant; these social accounts and contact methods were his professional lifeblood. He would never have abandoned them lightly!
This series of abnormal details, like cold needles, pierced through his previous grief and numbness. A heart-pounding suspicion uncontrollably surfaced—could his father's death perhaps not have been a simple accident?
But the thought was too dramatic, too unrealistic. His family was just an ordinary one; his father was an upright man who never made enemies. How could he be involved in something that required being "silenced" or even having his "digital existence erased"?
Despite his internal denial, strong doubts had taken root. He no longer sought simple comfort but opened the computer's command-line interface, placing both hands on the keyboard—he had taught himself a fair amount of computer technology, enough to perform some deep data retrieval. Even if files were deleted, as long as they weren't professionally wiped, traces usually remained in the hard drive's low-level data.
However, as the commands ran, the feedback results made his blood nearly freeze.
The low-level hard drive data... was terrifyingly clean. Not just the user data areas he had accessed, but even the system logs and cache areas seemed to have been thoroughly purged, leaving no trace of his father's usage. This couldn't be explained by a system update or a common glitch; this was absolutely a premeditated, professional manual operation!
Kuchiba Hiro's back instantly straightened as he leaned back against the chair, a cold fear seizing him. That most impossible, most terrifying suspicion was being confirmed step by step.
He suddenly turned his head to look at the crow, Fukurai, who was waiting quietly on the desk. His eyes grew sharp, carrying a final, urgent need for verification as he said to the crow, "Fukurai, please, smell this room. Recently... besides me and my father, has any stranger's scent been here?"
A crow's sense of smell is extremely keen, and their intelligence is very high. The crow called "Fukurai" tilted its head to look at him, then spread its wings and circled the study twice at a low altitude, carefully sniffing the air and the surfaces of objects. Finally, it landed back on the edge of the desk, facing Kuchiba Hiro, and let out two short, certain cries: "Caw! Caw!"
It was saying: Yes!
At that moment, the look in Kuchiba Hiro's eyes changed completely. All grief and confusion were instantly suppressed, replaced by a cold, almost terrifying sharpness and calm that slowly emerged.)