National Forensic Doctor

The sun was high in the sky.

In the Anwan Fingerprint Battle Operations Room (the smoking room), the air conditioning was as slow as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Wei Shikan sat sweating in his chair, staring blankly at the screen. On the paper in front of him were messy scribbles of formulas, with some annotations like HE and WT, but they were all fragmented beyond recognition.

Li Zemin pretended to pass by, glanced at Wei Shikan’s expression, and showed an inexplicable look of comfort on his face.

If watching Jiang Yuan work was like sitting at a volcano’s edge watching lava, then Wei Shikan was like a Muggle-sized ice cube—approaching him to cool down the room was always a comfortable presence.

"Master Uncle, got a question for you," Wei Shikan suddenly lifted his head and called out to Li Zemin.

Li Zemin’s smile flashed and disappeared, replaced by caution: "I’ve got cases piled up over here... What do you want to ask?"

He wasn’t skilled at fingerprinting, but understood Wei Shikan, a second-generation police enthusiast.

These people ask questions not to make trouble, but because they truly have questions, and Li Zemin wasn’t eager to answer any.

Sure enough, Wei Shikan didn’t pause at all and started spitting out math like a spider spirit: "In a model containing multiple convolution layers, each pixel of the hyperspectral image contains multiple band information, so the size of the input layer is H×W×BH... The activation function uses ReLU (rectified linear unit)..."

Snap.

Li Zemin flicked his lighter, lit a cigarette: "This question is indeed worth pondering. You should consider it carefully first, and if you still don’t understand, come find me later, or I can introduce you to a professor..."

With that, Li Zemin calmly left in quick steps.

...

Jiang Yuan woke up and returned to the conference room; it was already afternoon.

On the walls of the conference room, eight teams dispatched to various regions were reaching their destinations and started reporting the newly scanned fingerprints.

Suspects living in big cities were found the quickest with direct flights; next fastest were cities with high-speed rail access. The biggest headache was when someone returned to the countryside, forcing the team of detectives to rent a car and race, worried they wouldn’t reach them before a phone call rang on their phone.

Jiang Yuan wasn’t in a hurry. After each team found their suspect, they’d take them to a nearby police station for "protection," not enter the interrogation room, just sit in a consulting room with tea and water.

Among the eight people, five had prior records, naturally obeying. Others were also sensible, compliant under the persuasion of four visiting detectives and several local officers.

To be honest, among these eight people, at least seven were innocent, their fingerprints just happened to resemble those of a criminal. Therefore, the detectives who traveled a thousand miles were very restrained, engaging in conversation after taking fingerprints.

Jiang Yuan’s temporary +1 skill was still on cooldown, though there was no need to use it.

LV6 fingerprint analysis wasn’t too difficult in one-on-one verification.

The only requirement was having higher standards for fingerprint extraction, but that wasn’t an issue because the fingerprint owners were right there in the consultation rooms of police stations. If Jiang Yuan found the fingerprint unclear, he could easily retake them.

Li Zemin once again set aside his work and stood behind Jiang Yuan, eating melon seeds.

Zhu Huanguang especially disapproved of Li Zemin’s attitude, being a good fingerprint expert and not doing his own work, watching others do fingerprinting instead...

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Nonetheless, Zhu Huanguang ended up involuntarily lifting his head, his gaze passing over his screen and landing on Jiang Yuan’s.

Jiang Yuan had several screens in front of him, without restricting others from watching, filled with dense black-and-white fingerprint lines.

The two largest screens simultaneously displayed high-definition details of a single fingerprint.

The third-level fingerprint characteristics had been applied as early as 20 years ago, with fingerprint experts eagerly anticipating its nationwide rollout.

Yet, popularizing a new technology proved extremely difficult.

Similar to how the fingerprint concept was proposed over 100 years ago, criminals were only truly forced to wear gloves in the last 20 years.

Correspondingly, fingerprint experts were irresistibly drawn to third-level fingerprint characteristics, as they might only need a tiny fragment of a fingerprint to identify a suspect.

The eight feature-point requirement for second-level fingerprint characteristics was challenging; with third-level characteristics, just a few sweat pore formations might confirm a match.

However, promoting this technology was akin to creating a new fingerprint system from scratch, requiring high-definition capture and extraction, needing each forensic investigation team equipped with a high-definition spectral imaging device at the very least...

Of course, the most difficult part always involved people.

Marking the difficulty of second-level fingerprint features was comparable to Level 2; marking third-level features raised the difficulty to Level 4.

New technologies were indeed useful, but the chance of error was very high. In the criminal investigation industry, the cost of mistakes was often enormous, especially in countries like China or Japan, where conviction rates maintained at 90% or higher. While power was immense, the difficulty of avoiding responsibility in unison grew concurrently.

"Number one is not it."

Jiang Yuan habitually assigned numbers to the eight individuals, and once he had a definitive answer, he directly asked Wang Chuanxing to notify the other side by phone.

After all, several detectives chatting away, the psychological pressure was substantial for both suspects and their families.

"Number two is also not it..."

"Number three is not it..."

Jiang Yuan checked quickly, going through three out of the six fingerprints delivered initially.

Upon starting the fourth fingerprint, Li Zemin quietly began cheering from behind.

"Hit! Hit! Hit!"

Li Zemin subtly swung his arms, his eyes bearing the agitation of a stockbroker watching the market.

"Number four is not it."

Jiang Yuan responded promptly.

Li Zemin sighed regretfully.

Jiang Yuan glanced back amusedly, then opened the fifth fingerprint, saying, "There’s no difference whether you cheer or not; the fingerprint has already been determined."

"As long as you haven’t looked, these are Schrödinger’s fingerprints. Even this person himself has never seen his third-level fingerprint characteristics," Li Zemin said, handing a Zhonghua cigarette to Jiang Yuan, while gradually leaning forward.

Jiang Yuan chuckled, zooming in on the fingerprint details, adjusting and observing them.

Third-level fingerprint characteristics posed another problem; they were so high-definition and minute that from a single fingerprint, you couldn’t initially determine which area of the finger it belonged to.

This wasn’t like second-level fingerprint characteristics, with barely over a hundred feature points that could be identified with some comparison.

Of course, this difficulty only bullied the lower-level technicians, akin to certain leaders, it didn’t affect experts like Jiang Yuan at all.

"Number five is also not it."

Jiang Yuan provided another negative answer.

"Only number six is left; numbers seven and eight live more remotely, and neither team has reached them yet," Liu Zhuangshi gripped his palm beside him, almost sweating.

Jiang Yuan nodded.

Next to him, Li Zemin chuckled: "Here’s a politically incorrect remark: living remotely boosts the probability, no worries, number six’s not it, numbers seven and eight have better odds..."

"Hit."

Jiang Yuan cut off Li Zemin, casually sipped his tea, then instructed Wang Chuanxing: "Call group six, be careful, act cautiously, don’t let the suspect hear!"

Li Zemin froze mid-cigarette: "That fast? Aren’t you supposed to take a good look?"

"Once the handcuffs are on, then I’ll look at the real person," Jiang Yuan responded directly.