“Another practitioner found dead?” Inspector Wei furrowed his brow, examining the body in the meditation chamber. The victim lay peacefully, as if merely in deep cultivation, except for the faint smell of antiseptic lingering in the air.

“Yes, Senior Inspector.” Assistant Liu handed him a jade slip containing the preliminary findings. “Third one this month. Same peculiar circumstances - no signs of struggle, no obvious cause of death.”

Wei pulled out a warm antiseptic wipe from his qiankun pouch, carefully cleaning his hands as he contemplated the scene. As both a cultivator and detective in the Imperial City’s Supernatural Crimes Division, he’d seen his share of mysterious deaths. But this case was different.

“Senior Sister Zhang was last seen entering closed-door meditation three days ago,” a young disciple reported, voice trembling. “When she didn’t emerge for morning lessons, Master sent me to check…”

“And the door seals were intact?” Wei asked, noting the undisturbed formation marks.

“Completely, Inspector. Only Senior Sister knew the unlocking sequence.”

Wei nodded slowly. A locked-room mystery involving high-level cultivators - his specialty. He turned to the corpse, channeling spiritual energy to his eyes. Curious patterns of residual qi flickered across the victim’s meridians.

“Assistant Liu, what do you make of these energy traces?”

Liu peered closer. “They’re… oddly familiar. Almost like—”

“Like the previous victims?” Wei smiled grimly. “Precisely. Now why would three unrelated cultivators share such a distinct qi signature in death?”

A knock interrupted their examination. “Inspector Wei?” A court messenger bowed at the doorway. “The Palace requests your presence. Another body has been discovered in the Imperial Library’s restricted section.”

Wei’s eyes narrowed. “Four victims. This is no longer coincidence.” He pulled out another warm antiseptic wipe, more out of habit than necessity. “Liu, gather everything about the victims’ recent activities - who they met, what texts they studied, where they traveled.”

“You suspect a connection, Senior?”

“In my experience, supposedly impossible murders often have elegantly simple solutions.” Wei smiled, channeling energy to his flying sword. “And our cultivator-killer has just made their first mistake.”

The investigation led Wei through ancient archives and secret cultivation grounds, unraveling a web of scholarly rivalry and forbidden techniques. The victims, he discovered, had all accessed the same restricted manuscript on immortality cultivation.

In the end, the culprit was caught attempting to destroy evidence in the Imperial Library - a junior archivist who had used modified healing talismans to remotely “cleanse” cultivators’ meridians while they meditated, turning their own energy against them.

“Brilliant but flawed,” Wei remarked later, sharing tea with Liu. “Using antiseptic spiritual energy as a weapon - who would suspect healing magic of being lethal? But the residual traces were too distinct.”

“Like using warm antiseptic wipes to clean a crime scene,” Liu mused. “The evidence remains, just in an unexpected form.”

Wei nodded approvingly. “Exactly. In both cultivation and detection, the truth often hides in plain sight. We just have to learn to see it differently.”

The case closed, justice served, Wei found himself oddly grateful for its complexity. It had pushed him to grow as both cultivator and detective - a reminder that even immortals had much to learn from the mortal art of deduction.