Pokémon Detective: Cynthia Forces Me to Adopt a Pokémon

Chapter 161 The Final Answer—71 Coffins

Chapter 171 The Final Answer—Seventy-One Coffins

In the cemetery, as police officers deployed handheld sprites to participate in the excavation, the speed of opening and examining the coffins immediately increased significantly.

One by one, coffins broke through the mounds of earth, like ninjas emerging from their summer hibernation, appearing in droves once more. But when the officers pulled out the nails and pried open the coffin lids, they were all, without exception, empty inside, like the hollow shells of evolved shedding-shell ninjas…

The officers seemed to have already learned something from the detective, so they weren't too surprised by this astonishing reversal and just kept their heads down and did what they were doing.

However, the people involved in the case who were gathered here were different. They could no longer hide their astonishment. Their eyes darted wildly between the seventy-one Pokémon graves, and their faces were full of disbelief.

Ms. Arno, with short hair and glasses, jumped out from the crowd and was the first to confront the bankrupt power plant manager: "William, what's going on? Where are the Pokémon's remains? Have you gone so far as to try to make up for the factory's losses by selling the corpses of dead Pokémon?"

Black market transactions, organ trafficking... all sorts of unsettling speculations surfaced in the woman's mind.

"No, I have absolutely no idea what's happening right now... Why did things turn out this way?"

William slowly shook his head, a clear look of confusion on his face.

"The burial of the elves killed in the factory was entirely handled by the police. Since the explosion, I only saw them once more when the fire department was carrying away the bodies. I never even considered profiting from their corpses. What... exactly happened?"

"Perhaps after the police buried the lightning orbs, someone stole the bodies again?" Douzi muttered to himself irresponsibly, but then immediately dismissed his guess.

"No. Although the management of the cemetery in this area is lax, it's not lax enough to allow grave robbers to openly dig up all seventy-one graves in succession. Moreover, judging from the condition of the iron nails on the coffins, no one should have pried them open before the police."

“Then there’s only one answer.” Azure said to her junior, “Dead Electric-type Pokémon are never placed in their coffins.”

“I understand now what Hugo’s earlier statement meant…” the assistant murmured.

In this case, the rule that "death is irreversible" has failed!

.

"The reason I still have doubts about the final outcome of Electric-type Pokémon, even though this incident seems to have been settled, is because even now that Team Plasma has confessed, there are still many suspicious points in the case that give off an odd feeling."

The detective in the white coat calmly paced through the crowd, explaining his reasoning.

The woman beside him, Officer Jenny, had a solemn expression, like a Bodhidharma statue turned into stone, silently watching her subordinates' work.

Police were opening the last coffin that was supposed to contain the Magneto. With a final, teeth-grinding sound, the wooden coffin lid was pried open with a shovel, revealing its interior—also completely empty.

At this moment, seventy-one coffins were neatly arranged in front of everyone, each one empty, making the cemetery seem like a newly opened open-air coffin shop.

Seeing the coffins arranged so neatly, the detective seemed to have received some confirmation, and his tone of reasoning became increasingly certain—

"First, there is the most direct and obvious contradiction. When the police arrived at the scene of the explosion, they saw Electric-type Pokémon lying scattered on the ground. However, both the on-site evidence and Mr. Telt's statement proved one fact—the Pokémon maintained their usual formation after the explosion."

"This contradiction seems insignificant, but it was enough to pique my curiosity—my initial thought was that since the change in the distribution of the elves did exist, the time when their state changed could only have occurred between the time when Telt left and the time when the police arrived."

"In that case, with a little thought, we can identify the person who had the opportunity to tamper with the scene—at that time, the police and fire department hadn't arrived yet, Plant Manager William was evacuating employees, the Plasma Group executives had no reason to risk returning to their crime scene, and Arno was having a gathering with a publisher of dubious character. The only person who could have altered the scene could be Mr. Telt, the former training consultant for the Rikyu Power Plant!"

As soon as Hugo finished speaking, everyone's eyes were drawn to the bearded breeder.

"Mr. Telt concealed some crucial facts in his testimony to me. When he saw the elves dying en masse in the power plant area, he didn't suppress his nausea and flee the scene in a daze—this thick-skinned shrew is not that sensitive or sentimental!"

"When I came to this conclusion, I didn't actually realize the seriousness of the problem—after all, Telt was the factory's breeding consultant, and it was reasonable for him to try first aid on the spot when he saw the elves he was taking care of lying dead."

"Moreover, rigorous logical reasoning can also prove that this is exactly how reality unfolded—in the forensic reports from the police, there were traces of medicine sprayed on the wounds of some Electric-type Pokémon, but they were covered by later scorch marks, so they were judged to be medical marks before the explosion and did not attract attention. But as long as we understand the situation of the factory before the explosion, we can find out a simple reality: no Electric-type Pokémon were injured on the day of the explosion, and it was impossible for anyone to spray medicine on the Pokémon before they self-destructed."

So it was for emergency rescue... Douzi and Bilan realized at the same time that they had met Telt face to face at the open-air bar. At that time, he deliberately exaggerated his reaction and tried to act like a rude and irritable person in front of the detective, which was probably to cover up this incident.

"But this still leaves something puzzling—what about the new scorch marks on the elf remains? There are no traditional power generation devices in the bio-power generation zone, which is why the fire and secondary explosion did not affect the bio-power generation zone where the elf corpses were displayed after the explosion. So why did the elves' bodies have new scorch marks after Telt used the healing medicine?"

"Through a detail provided by Officer Jenny, I had a near-fantasy hypothesis. This hypothesis helped me clarify everything. Last night at the police station, I met with the forensic officer in charge of handling the bodies of the Electric-type Pokémon. The officer told me that shortly after they completed the identification of the Pokémon's remains and transported them back to the station, a group of power plant employees appeared, demanding that they bury the Pokémon! Since the police had already decided to classify the whole incident as an accident, the bodies should naturally be returned to the Pokémon's trainers according to procedure. William, as the Pokémon owner, was unwilling to respond to the incident at the time, so having the enthusiastic factory employees handle it on his behalf became the most appropriate method."

"It was at this point that you moved those Electric-type Pokémon and buried the Ethereal Coffin—right, Mr. Telt?"

Unbeknownst to him, Hugo had already made his way through the crowd and arrived in front of the breeding consultant.

"The reason you've gone to such lengths is because those seventy-one Pokémon are still alive, right?"