On his way home, Chen Zheng received a call from Liang Yueze asking whether he was free the day after tomorrow. He was about to ask what was going on when he suddenly remembered that the death anniversary of Liang Xinqing and Liang Yubin was approaching. Every year around this time, Liang Yueze went to pay respects to them. Unless Chen Zheng was so busy he absolutely could not get away, he went with him.
“I’m free,” Chen Zheng said. “I’ll go back to Suiguang.”
Suiguang City lay in central Han Province, directly beside the provincial capital, Luocheng. It was a quiet little city known as Luocheng’s back garden. Although Chen Zheng had spent most of his childhood in Luocheng, his mother’s hometown was Suiguang, and it was there that he had met Liang Yueze.
The clear, crisp autumn weather was ideal for climbing mountains and admiring the season, and Suiguang was indeed famous for its forests and hills. At this time of year, the slopes were covered in red and yellow leaves interspersed with patches of evergreen, beautiful enough to resemble an immortal realm.
Dressed solemnly in black, Chen Zheng parked at the cemetery and took out a bouquet of flowers he had bought after arriving in Suiguang. There were no messages on his phone. Liang Yueze had not asked whether he had arrived. Chen Zheng headed directly toward the Liang family graves and, sure enough, soon spotted a familiar figure.
Liang Yueze sat between two elaborate gravestones, speaking softly. He was too far away for Chen Zheng to make out the words. Chen Zheng did not immediately go over and disturb him. He turned away instead and looked up at the bright sky.
When Liang Yueze finished talking to his younger brother and sister, he turned, saw Chen Zheng, and smiled. “You got here and didn’t even say anything?”
Only then did Chen Zheng approach. “What’s the rush? You barely get time to visit them. I wasn’t going to interrupt your private conversation.” He placed a bouquet before each gravestone and drew a quiet breath. “Xiao Qing, Xiao Bin. I came to see you.”
Chen Zheng had never been the kind of person to chatter in front of graves. After that sentence, he fell silent. Liang Yueze draped an arm over his shoulders, and neither man spoke. After a while, Chen Zheng asked, “What were you talking to them about?”
“The same things as always,” Liang Yueze said. “Reporting what I did this year and what accomplishments I made.”
Chen Zheng said, “Xiao Bin sounds like your boss.”
“Wasn’t that what he wanted to be?” Liang Yueze smiled. “Out of the three of us, plus you, he was the most ambitious. If not for… this position would’ve been his.”
Chen Zheng patted Liang Yueze’s back. Liang Yueze looked at the thin boy in the photograph on the gravestone. “You think I wanted this job? If it weren’t for you, I’d be out there taking the world by storm with your Brother Zheng right now.”
Chen Zheng laughed. “What are you talking about?”
“Am I wrong?” Liang Yueze tipped his face toward the sky, clouds reflected in his eyes. “None of us ended up walking the road we imagined back then.”
Chen Zheng noticed the bottle of liquor on the ground. Liang Yueze could not hold alcohol well, but he always drank a little on a day like this. Of the three siblings, Liang Xinqing had been the bold, free-spirited girl who loved to drink. Liang Yueze always said Liang Yubin had constantly kept her under control while she was alive, and he, the eldest brother, had never helped his little sister out. So now, whenever he could drink a little with her, he did.
“You’ve had too much.” Chen Zheng helped Liang Yueze sit down. “What else did you tell them?”
Liang Yueze thought. “I asked them to protect you. I asked them last year too. Xiao Qing used to like you so much. She said yes, she’d definitely protect you.”
Chen Zheng sighed and played along, pressing his palms together toward Liang Xinqing’s gravestone. “Then thank you, Xiao Qing.”
After a quiet moment, Liang Yueze kept his gaze away from Chen Zheng. “Zhengzheng, none of us can really help you with what happened at work. You have to walk out of it yourself. You weren’t the one who did anything wrong.”
Chen Zheng thought, *Coincidence? Why has everyone been telling me the same thing these past two days?*
Noticing something on his mind, Liang Yueze considered for a moment before asking, “Is there news about that SWAT captain?”
What had happened with Han Qu had never been made public by the police, so ordinary citizens knew nothing about it. But a major businessman like Liang Yueze could notice that the captain of a Special Police Detachment had vanished and that Chen Zheng’s position had suddenly changed, allowing him to vaguely infer that something was wrong.
Chen Zheng shook his head. “Someone just told me recently that a teammate is a teammate and I’m me. My life went too smoothly, so I sit around overthinking everything. If I’d been through real storms, I wouldn’t take something like this so seriously.”
Liang Yueze looked surprised. It took him a moment to digest that. “Your superior?”
“Why a superior?”
“He sounds pretty broad-minded. And blunt. Like someone who’s been through a lot and has some age and perspective behind him.”
Something about “age and perspective” unexpectedly struck Chen Zheng as funny. “He’s only twenty-nine. He’s had less time to accumulate perspective than either of us.”
Liang Yueze laughed too. “Then if he can say something like that to you, he’s a newborn calf that isn’t afraid of tigers.” After a moment, when Chen Zheng remained silent, he continued, “Actually, he isn’t wrong. People like us may simply have had things go too smoothly. So when trouble suddenly arrives, we fall into the pit without warning. And climbing back out isn’t easy.”
Chen Zheng turned toward Liang Yueze. Liang Yueze’s tone was light, as though he were talking about someone else. But could the turmoil Yunquan Group went through back then even be compared with Chen Zheng’s present predicament? *How old had Liang Yueze been then?* Chen Zheng narrowed his eyes, remembering, and said quietly, “You were only twenty back then.”
“Yeah. Fifteen years in the blink of an eye. We’re both thirty-five now.” Liang Yueze’s expression softened as if he were looking at two children. “If Xiao Qing and Xiao Bin had another life, they’d be fifteen now too. Wonder if they’d still be brother and sister. Wonder if Xiao Bin would still be so obsessed with his career.”
Chen Zheng did not believe in reincarnation, nor did he believe the dead could protect the living. Accompanying Liang Yueze to visit these siblings, or sweeping the graves of his own deceased relatives during Spring Festival, was ultimately something the living did for themselves, seeking their own comfort.
Yet at that moment, he joined Liang Yueze in the fantasy. “They’d definitely still be siblings. Without Xiao Bin keeping Xiao Qing under control, wouldn’t she turn the heavens upside down?”
Liang Yueze laughed. When the laughter faded, perhaps because of the alcohol, melancholy entered his voice. “What about me? In my next life, can I still be their big brother?”
“Probably not. By the time you reincarnate, you’ll probably only make it in time to be their grandson.”
“Zhengzheng, you… can’t you say one nice thing?”
After spending around half an hour at the cemetery, the two walked down the mountain together. At the parking lot, Liang Yueze’s secretary opened the car door. Liang Yueze asked, “Come home for dinner?”
Chen Zheng knew he meant the Liang family home and shook his head. “I need to hurry back.”
Liang Yueze did not try to keep him. “Busy again lately? And now you’ve got some young coworker who talks like your boss?”
“The institute’s the same as ever, but something’s going on with Criminal Investigation.”
Hearing this, a trace of relief appeared in Liang Yueze’s eyes.
Chen Zheng said, “Don’t look at me with that old-father expression.”
“Whenever you run into a case, you become a different person.”
“Different how?”
“Like… a branch after winter, I guess. Suddenly full of life.”
The two cars left the cemetery one behind the other, Chen Zheng’s following. Liang Yueze’s car headed toward downtown and gradually disappeared from sight. Chen Zheng turned the wheel toward the highway out of the city, and their paths separated.
Dark clouds blanketed the direction of downtown, while outside the city stretched one of autumn’s rare brilliant blue skies.
“You’ve had it too easy. That’s why you care.”
“We’ve both had it too easy. That’s why we didn’t know how to handle hardship.”
On the way back to Zhuquan City, Chen Zheng remembered what Ming Han and Liang Yueze had said. *Was that really it? Had his life gone too smoothly, leaving him unable to move beyond the damage Han Qu caused? Then what setbacks had Ming Han been through?*
Ming Han was like a mysterious man who had abruptly barged into Chen Zheng’s world, and Chen Zheng knew very little about him. Liang Yueze, meanwhile, was his childhood friend. Chen Zheng knew perfectly well what hardships Liang Yueze had survived.
The Liang family’s Yunquan Group was one of Han Province’s major taxpayers. It had originally manufactured mechanical components, then rode the real-estate boom to explosive growth. Under Liang Yueze’s leadership, it had now completed a transition into the technology sector.
Liang Yueze might be selected every year as an outstanding young entrepreneur, but when he was a child, he had never dreamed of inheriting the family business.
Grandpa Liang had founded Yunquan Group, and the two characters in the name *Yunquan* came from Grandma Liang’s name. Unlike plenty of wealthy businessmen who kept women everywhere outside the home, Grandpa Liang had remained extremely loyal to his marriage. He and his wife had only two sons and one daughter.
Liang Yueze’s father was the eldest son, but despite his position, he had no interest in business. In modern terms, he was a useless young master born into a wealthy family. The second son and youngest daughter were far more ambitious and became the two children Grandpa Liang focused on cultivating.
Liang Yueze was the eldest grandson, but just like his “salted-fish” father, he had no interest in the family business. When Chen Zheng went back to his mother Lu Hejun’s hometown during summer vacation, he met Liang Yueze at a Liang family banquet. At seven or eight years old, Liang Yueze spent every day trying to brainwash Chen Zheng into believing that he was going to become a special forces soldier someday, and since Chen Zheng was his best friend, naturally Chen Zheng had to become one too.
At the time, Chen Zheng had no particularly clear plans for the future. But because his uncle Lu Hejing was a police officer, perhaps family blood meant Chen Zheng ought to become a police officer too. If he absolutely had to choose, though, he would rather have become a dog trainer, because he had once been chased and bitten by a dog.
Liang Yueze called him unambitious. If they joined the special forces, accumulated enough achievements, and rose high enough, why bother training dogs? They could train people!
Chen Zheng thought about it and found a certain logic there. But he also worried Liang Yueze was simply bragging and would never actually be allowed to join the special forces.
“Would Grandpa Liang agree? I don’t think so. Your uncle and aunt aren’t married.”
If they were not married, they had no children. If there were no children, no one would inherit the family business. Chen Zheng had been young, but after years of hearing adults talk, he understood that in a family like the Liangs, someone inevitably had to inherit Grandpa Liang’s mantle.
“My brother!” Liang Yueze’s eyes lit up whenever he mentioned Liang Yubin. “I’ll take you to meet him next time. He’s incredible. He can’t do a single fun thing. All he does is study every day.”
“…” Chen Zheng did not think that sounded like praise.
Liang Yueze had a younger pair of boy-girl twins only two years younger than him. Chen Zheng had heard Lu Hejun talk about them. Lu Hejun had focused mainly on the younger sister, Liang Xinqing. Even as a little girl, she was clearly going to grow into a beauty, and she was exceptionally lively with a mouth sweeter than honey. Lu Hejun’s implication seemed to be that it would be wonderful if their own family could gain a daughter too.
“The best part is, he already promised me he’ll take over when we grow up. Then I can play all I want!” Liang Yueze grew even more triumphant. “When I become a special forces soldier, he’ll sponsor equipment for my unit!”
Chen Zheng found the entire idea deeply unreliable. “Military equipment doesn’t rely on sponsorship, does it? And your brother is only six. What can he possibly promise you?”
Liang Yueze’s expression changed instantly. “My brother is the best! You’re not allowed to say anything bad about him!”
Chen Zheng rolled his eyes and walked away.
Yet as the years passed, Liang Yueze continued fooling around like an idiot. His ambition changed from becoming a special forces soldier to becoming an explorer. Liang Yubin, meanwhile, steadily grew into the most highly regarded member of the Liang family’s youngest generation. His grades were excellent. He went abroad to study at sixteen, and outside his coursework, he followed Grandpa Liang and his uncle into the company’s affairs. His character was upright and disciplined. It was almost impossible to believe he and his father and older brother came from the same family.
By then, Liang Yueze had entered university too, majoring in programming and even putting together his own gaming team. Chen Zheng teased him. “So your dream was actually to become special forces inside a game? In that case, Xiao Bin really can sponsor your equipment.”
Liang Yueze was tremendously smug and praised his little brother to the heavens. “I told you years ago Xiao Bin would inherit the family business, and you didn’t believe me. Anything he promises me, he does.”
“What else has he promised you?”
“To do my homework. You forgot? Otherwise, how would I have had so much time to hang around with you?”
“You actually have the nerve to admit that?”
“Why wouldn’t I admit it to you? Aren’t we brothers?”
Chen Zheng had to admit that, before he entered society, Liang Yueze had been his closest friend. It was not necessarily because the two of them were exceptionally compatible. Friends they had grown up beside gradually drifted away one after another, yet somehow Chen Zheng and Liang Yueze kept bickering and fooling around together. Perhaps that itself was a kind of fate. Chen Zheng attended Public Security University because of his uncle’s influence. And perhaps because Liang Yueze had spent their childhood constantly talking about the special forces, Chen Zheng had been influenced enough to take several courses related to special-police work.
The more Grandpa Liang valued Liang Yubin, the happier Liang Yueze became. He barely bothered with his own studies and spent every day fussing over his team. Chen Zheng was busy at Public Security University and contacted him less often, but whenever they happened to talk by phone, Chen Zheng could never resist nagging him. Liang Yueze grew increasingly like an idle rich playboy. “Zhengzheng, stop worrying about nothing. If the sky falls, Xiao Bin will hold it up!”
No one ever imagined that the child holding up the Liang family’s sky would be the first one to break.
It happened in autumn fifteen years ago. Chen Zheng had just entered his junior year and was overwhelmingly busy. Lu Hejun suddenly called and told him to make time to return to Suiguang City. Something had happened to the Liang family. The twins and the Liang uncle who had already taken over the family business were gone.
The accident occurred in Country M in Southeast Asia. The Liang family had been expanding its business there in recent years and had recently acquired land for a resort. Liang Yubin had already been conducting on-site inspections there for several months. The Liang family’s second son was preparing to go over and make the final decision. Liang Xinqing loved to travel and insisted on coming along so she could have a vacation at the same time.
The three of them, together with two accompanying staff members, were involved in a severe traffic accident. Four died at the scene. Liang Yubin was taken to hospital but could not be saved.
Chen Zheng was already preparing for a career in criminal investigation, and his first reaction was that there had to be more to the crash. Yunquan Group’s current leader and future successor had both died. Surely someone wanted to bring Yunquan down.
But the accident happened abroad. The local police ultimately uncovered nothing and classified it as an ordinary traffic accident.
When Chen Zheng hurried to Suiguang City, he did not see Liang Yueze at all. Liang Yueze had gone to Southeast Asia. His fun-loving parents seemed to age decades overnight, while the already retired Grandpa Liang was forced to come back and take charge.
The Liang family was being battered by a storm, and Chen Zheng could not remain in Suiguang City for long. He called Liang Yueze, but Liang Yueze did not answer. He could only ask Liang Yueze’s aunt, who was also in Southeast Asia handling the aftermath. She said Liang Yueze was physically fine, but had sunk into a severe depression and probably needed time to process everything.
Chen Zheng returned to Public Security University and continued checking on the Liang family from time to time. Because of the enormous upheaval, Yunquan Group was forced to abandon all its overseas operations. Liang Yueze returned to China, dissolved his gaming team, and took up a burden he had never once imagined carrying. His mother suffered a mental breakdown from excessive grief and was hospitalized. His father left home and vanished without a trace. After forcing himself to hold everything together for half a year, his grandfather finally fell ill. Competitors attacked and devoured Yunquan Group from every side. Everything accumulated over the years began collapsing. Middle and senior management were repeatedly poached until the company was almost an empty shell.
All that remained of the Liang family were Liang Yueze and his aunt. But after marrying, his aunt had developed a career of her own and no longer devoted herself entirely to Yunquan Group as she once had. Near death, Grandpa Liang clutched Liang Yueze’s hand and begged him never to let Yunquan collapse. Yet during occasional lucid moments, the old man would look at his haggard grandson and say to forget it. It did not matter if the company fell. The assets the family had left would already allow Liang Yueze to live comfortably for the rest of his life.
After Chen Zheng graduated and returned to Luocheng, Yunquan Group was still struggling through the storm. Liang Yueze seemed to have become a completely different person: quiet, restrained, exhausted, resembling Liang Yubin, the younger brother who had always seemed more like the elder one.
Whenever Chen Zheng had time, he went to keep Liang Yueze company. Yunquan Group’s competitors had almost exhausted every route the company had to survive, and Liang Yueze was trying to transform the business. Restructuring a healthy company was already extraordinarily difficult, let alone one battered nearly to pieces.
Chen Zheng wanted to do something for the friend he had grown up with. But time had changed everything. They were already running on completely different tracks. Chen Zheng had his mission and Liang Yueze had his fate. There was simply nothing Chen Zheng could do for him.
“It’s fine. Just drink with me a little and remember when we were kids.” Liang Yueze had said it with reddened eyes.
Chen Zheng did not know exactly how Yunquan Group eventually returned to stability. He understood nothing about corporate warfare. The years in which Liang Yueze dragged Yunquan Group forward were the same years Chen Zheng gradually established himself within the police system.
Both of them succeeded. But when Chen Zheng considered it carefully, his own success truly had been almost without setbacks. The only ripples had probably been people criticizing him and his being “banished” to train students at the police academy. Liang Yueze, meanwhile, had walked a road paved in blood.
*Was that why Liang Yueze could say something so similar to Ming Han today?*
Chen Zheng returned to himself. Instead of remaining immersed in the tremendous upheaval the Liang family had survived, he found himself more interested in Ming Han. Liang Yueze’s past looked like this. *Then what about Ming Han?* When Ming Han said Chen Zheng’s life had gone too smoothly, he had sounded even more casual than Liang Yueze.
When Ming Han mentioned Han Qu in the car that day, Chen Zheng had not thought much about it. Looking back now, however, the conversation felt increasingly strange. Ming Han knew what had happened in Luocheng and roughly understood what Han Qu had done. As a member of the Mobile Unit, there was nothing odd about Ming Han knowing details. But the problem was that when Han Qu leaked police intelligence to Qiusai, the Mobile Unit seemed to vanish both before and after Qiusai launched its attack.
The situation had been urgent. Police resources throughout Luocheng and Han Province were mobilized, even the Special Action Team led by Shen Xun, yet the Provincial Department’s own Mobile Unit appeared to have some other assignment. The Mobile Unit might be mysterious, but whenever the province encountered a case that local authorities could not resolve, they almost always provided support. The Qiusai attack was the sole exception in which they seemed to do nothing.
Chen Zheng had known very little about the Mobile Unit before. If he had not spent so much time around Ming Han recently, he probably never would have found their absence from the Qiusai incident suspicious.
“The Mobile Unit… Han Qu…” Unable to sort out the threads for now, Chen Zheng idly scrolled through his phone and noticed an entertainment-news alert: Lin Dong would make his stage debut at Yunxiang Theater near the end of the year.
Chen Zheng opened the article. It said Lin Dong had deliberately stepped back to improve himself after becoming enormously popular and had not appeared publicly for some time. His agency, Yunxiang Entertainment, had hinted that it planned to create a stage production specifically for him to fully showcase his acting ability.
The article used a still of Lin Dong from *Feather Affairs*. It was no exaggeration to say he possessed an exceptionally attractive face. Chen Zheng could not help wondering whether Zhu Qianqian had liked Lin Dong himself or Yu Feng, the anti-narcotics officer he played. *If it was the latter, had Zhu Qianqian ever hated the fact that she was a drug trafficker’s daughter?*
A person could not choose how they were born. Zhu Qianqian had grown up inside a criminal organization and might have witnessed brutal violence since childhood. Zhu Lingjuan gave her a mother’s love, but also gave her sin. Perhaps that was why she had been so unmoved when she watched Wu Lianshan accidentally kill Zeng Yan.
Yet Zhu Qianqian had probably longed for an ordinary life too. If she had been allowed to choose, she would never have wanted to be a drug trafficker’s daughter. She had no legal identity, so she used Zeng Yan’s and spent ten years living like an ordinary person. When she talked to others about family life, she could not conceal her longing, yet she did not dare find someone with whom to build a family of her own. She sold cold dishes, cared for small animals, watched television dramas, wanted to save enough money for old age while she was still young, liked the anti-narcotics officer in a drama, and at the final moment of her life, tried to seek help from the police.
But she was a drug trafficker’s daughter.
Her mother killed someone and was then killed herself. In the end, Zhu Qianqian still walked the same road as Zhu Lingjuan. Her lamentable life came to a close.
Chen Zheng remained dazed for a moment before Lu Hejun called.
“You went with Yueze to see the twins?” Lu Hejun’s tone carried a tentative note.
“Mm. He told you?”
Lu Hejun sounded relieved. “I feel better when you spend more time with friends. Son, I want to discuss something with you.”
“Mm?”
“It’s your uncle. Why don’t you make time to go see him?”
Chen Zheng frowned. “What happened to him?”
“N-nothing!” Lu Hejun sighed. “Isn’t it about your transfer to Zhuquan? I was unreasonable at the time and yelled at him, blaming him for not looking after you. He got angry with me and stopped talking to me.”
Chen Zheng: “…”
Lu Hejing had always been the troublesome member of the Lu family. While Chen Zheng still lived in Luocheng, Madam Lu frequently made him pass messages to Lu Hejing. But over the past year or so, Chen Zheng had barely contacted him either. All he knew was that Lu Hejing, once known as the “No. 1 SWAT officer,” seemed to have stepped back from frontline work at the Provincial Department.
“I’ll call him when I have time,” Chen Zheng said.
Lu Hejun relaxed and chatted with Chen Zheng a while longer. At the end, she said, “If you don’t want to be a police officer anymore, just come home. So what if your uncle won’t protect you? You still have your mother.”
Chen Zheng smiled. “Mom, how old am I? You think I still need you supporting me? Don’t worry. I’m really fine.”
The weather was good. Chen Zheng took the clothes, sheets, and duvet covers that had accumulated unwashed recently and fed them into the washing machine load by load while cleaning the apartment. Before long, the balcony was full of laundry. As he hung up the final piece of clothing, something looked wrong. He examined it more closely and discovered there had been an “accident.”
The light-gray tracksuit was not his. Ming Han had lent it to him after Chen Zheng took a tumble in the mountains. When doing laundry just now, Chen Zheng had carelessly thrown in a red blanket as well. The blanket bled a little. Most clothes would have been fine, but Ming Han’s tracksuit was pale gray and made from material that absorbed dye easily. He had ruined it.
Chen Zheng: “…”
*Forget it. I’ll buy him another one.*
After resting for several days, Chen Zheng originally intended to go to the institute, but the case had not been entirely wrapped up, so he drove to Beiye Sub-bureau instead.
At present, Wu Lianshan and Wu Ye had admitted killing the woman formerly known as “Zeng Yan,” now identified by her real name, Zhu Qianqian, as well as Wu Junqian and Zhao Shuihe. Wei Youtai had confessed to killing Feng Feng. Physical evidence corresponding to the confessions was gradually being completed. But the bodies of the real Zeng Yan and Hao Le, who had died ten years earlier, remained missing. If only Zhu Qianqian and Feng Feng had known where they were buried, there was now no living witness left to ask.
Chen Zheng and Ming Han both doubted whether Hao Le was truly dead, while Yin Jingliu, who disappeared during the same period, was wrapped in even more mysteries. Yet because of objective limitations, the police had no way to formally launch investigations into either of them.
Three other cases were also tugging at Beiye Sub-bureau’s nerves. They were the disappearances of women working in food service who had been selected earlier using Zhu Qianqian and Wu Junqian as models. The missing women were Wang Chenchen, who sold malatang; Liu Jianglu, who made viral dumplings online; and Zhao Yu, who ran a milk-tea shop. Wu Ye denied having “incidentally” killed any of them, and the current evidence was insufficient to connect either him or Wu Lianshan to their disappearances.
Most likely, these were three independent missing-person cases.
Originally, each should have been investigated by its respective police station. But since the cases had already landed with the sub-bureau, Kong Bing did not send them back. Without other cases distracting them, Chen Zheng quickly noticed suspicious points in the Wang Chenchen and Liu Jianglu cases. Beiye Sub-bureau immediately began investigating, and within three days, the killers in Wang Chenchen’s case were exposed: her older brother and sister-in-law.
Wang Chenchen came from the countryside. Her chance to study had been given to her older brother, and she left school before finishing junior high to work in the city, eventually building a decent life for herself. Her educated brother, meanwhile, failed to establish himself in the city and returned home in defeat. Poverty bred malice. The couple coveted Wang Chenchen’s family shop and resented that she lived better than they did. During Spring Festival, they asked Wang Chenchen to help arrange school admission for their child, but she refused. The more they thought about it, the less they could swallow their resentment. Taking advantage of her husband being away on a business trip, they murdered her.
A week later, Liu Jianglu’s body was found as well. Her death had an almost absurdly dramatic quality to it. She was a middle-aged internet personality who frequently went out taking photographs with elderly men. Though she looked endlessly energetic and never appeared tired on camera, years of hard work had already hollowed out her health. When she collapsed, it happened in an instant.
On the day it happened, she and three older men went to an abandoned factory to imitate young people and take trendy photographs. Partway through, Liu Jianglu felt unwell and said she needed to rest, but her companions insisted on continuing. She forced herself onward for a while, then suddenly collapsed and struck the ground. Her heart stopped immediately. One of her companions had worked at a clinic when he was young. After feeling for her pulse, he shouted, “Dead. She’s dead!”
All three men panicked. They remembered news stories they had often seen: several people gathered together, one person drank and died, and everyone else was held responsible.
None of them wanted to bear responsibility. They blamed one another, each accusing the others of ignoring Liu Jianglu’s health. Finally, someone suggested they simply hide the body. As long as the police could not find the body, they could never make any of them responsible!
After interrogation, all three had explained what happened and revealed where they hid the body. The case was closed.
As for Zhao Yu, owner of Dream Island Milk Tea, investigators still had no breakthrough. Chen Zheng had a feeling that her case was different from the other two and might involve a much more complicated network.
Only after this period of work ended did Chen Zheng realize he had not seen Ming Han for several days. Beiye Sub-bureau no longer had much need for Ming Han’s help. *So that brat is comfortably lounging around the police dog center now?*
Chen Zheng might complain internally, but he was hardly going to go around asking about Ming Han’s whereabouts. When work ended, he looked at his phone for a while, then quickly put it away. But the moment he walked downstairs, he saw someone grinning and waving at him. Who else could it be but Ming Han?
School entrances were lively at dusk. The weather was steadily growing colder, yet the celebratory feeling of the year’s end was building. It was only late October and still far from Christmas, which students adored, but those who enjoyed making occasions out of nothing had already begun exchanging gifts.
On Shuiban Street near No. 10 Middle School, both gift shops and street vendors’ carts were packed with students. Everyone wanted to pick out something they liked, whether for their girlfriends, close friends, or someone they had a crush on.
Inside a milk-tea shop, Liu Wenran took a box wrapped in shimmering purple paper from a paper bag and opened it in front of her classmates. Everyone else was even more excited than she was and crowded closer to see. Zhou Xi asked, “What is it? What is it?”
Liu Wenran grasped the upper half of the object inside the box and carefully lifted it out. Confusion appeared on her face.
“Huh… why does it feel so weird?”
“Wenran, who gave you this?”
The object was a red clay doll. It was not ugly and could even be called fairly well made, but its eyes were extremely strange. Their outlines were realistic, and upon closer inspection, another eye seemed layered inside each one. Strange designs covered its forehead and cheeks. When you looked at it, those eyes, resembling parasitic insect eggs, seemed to stare back. The longer you looked, the more inexplicably chilling it became.
Uncomfortable, Liu Wenran stuffed the doll back into the box. Her heart was beating quickly. All the happiness of receiving a gift vanished, replaced by fear and even a trace of nausea.
Her classmates kept asking who had sent it. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? Didn’t they write your name on it?”
“Fuck, could it be some kind of prank? Halloween’s coming up.”
The more her classmates talked, the more irritated Liu Wenran became. She drank her milk tea in silence. Not long afterward, they left the shop, and Liu Wenran threw the box, paper bag and all, into a roadside trash can.
Zhou Xi stared. “You’re just throwing it away?”
“The more I look at that doll, the weirder it gets. It looks like some cursed doll. Better not to keep it.”
The sun had already set. Outside a newly opened congee hotpot restaurant, customers waiting for tables sat on plastic stools cracking sunflower seeds. Chen Zheng was not eating any. Instead, he accepted an extraordinarily crude, ugly clay figure from Ming Han and felt his eyelid twitch.
“You… made this to curse me?”