Elio’s Notes: 鱼肚白, literally “fish-belly white,” is a traditional Chinese description of the pale whitish light that appears across the sky just before sunrise.
Ling He was even more agitated than the literal “Old Wang next door.” Gripping Wang Chongliang by the shoulders, he demanded, “What did you see that night? Tell us!”
Even after so many years, certain sudden events terrifying enough to split the liver and gall had burned irregular marks into memory, eventually becoming scars and festering wounds inside the mind that occasionally peeled open and bled again. Wang Chongliang looked frightened and dazed as he gestured with both hands. “There was a fire. I saw someone set it!”
“It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t an accidental fire. Thieves broke into the inn that night and started fighting inside… There were several of them. They fought, they were hacking at people with knives… I was terrified. I didn’t dare keep watching, so I slipped away. Then I saw Shuping come back. The shop caught fire. They set the fire, ahhh!”
“My wife burned to death! She was burned into charcoal and fell from upstairs. She died horribly!”
“She was pregnant. She was carrying my son! Ahhh!”
He was a middle-aged man approaching forty, yet once his thoughts were suddenly torn open and forced back toward this buried past, his shoulders shook and he burst into uncontrollable sobs, choking beneath grief he could no longer contain.
A man’s crying after years of suppressed bitterness could be even harder to hear than a woman’s. Years of collapse and despair had finally found an opening through which to pour. Tears and mucus smeared messily across his chest while his heart-rending sobs circled the ruined roof and broken walls, then echoed along the street that had already become rubble.
Yan Xiaodao, who arrived a step later, now stood at the entrance to Wang Chongliang’s house, which looked ready to collapse at any moment.
A solitary streetlamp cast its last glow across Yan Xiaodao’s upright figure, almost like a guiding light lit for him inside the darkness. Faced with yet another human tragedy he had witnessed with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, his heart had become clear as a mirror.
To conceal one murder, more murders had been committed to bury the truth, widening the pool of blood until it spread out of control through cracks and underground channels in every direction. Now countless shattered clues were resurfacing from those buried waterways, slowly moving toward one another and fitting together until they finally formed an evidence chain supported by fact.
Yan Xiaodao’s expression was grave as he looked at the man weeping over the ruins of a destroyed family. Something called human feeling inside him seemed to be pressed slowly across a board covered in needles.
A cold-hearted, selfish person might have decided none of these old events had anything to do with him. Yan Xiaodao, however, felt almost like an accomplice.
……
That night, Captain Xue’s patient persuasion combined with Mr. Ling’s relentless mixture of pressure and intimidation finally forced Wang Chongliang, the last demolition holdout on the street, to recount what had really happened years ago in broken fragments. His memory was surprisingly good, and he remembered many details. Perhaps that was because he had spent so many years alone, living a poor and simple life, with the few warm memories remaining in his mind consisting almost entirely of those brief moments he had once shared with his lover, Li Shuping.
More than a decade earlier, when Wang Chongliang first drifted into the Three Rivers region looking for work, he really had been a handsome, hardworking young man. He survived on the little money he earned carrying bricks at construction sites and also took odd jobs along this street building houses and painting walls. During one such job, he met Li Shuping, who lived across the street and ran a family inn.
Li Shuping’s husband had earned some money from the inn and acquired a little wealth. Men, regardless of class, whether princes and nobles or ordinary commoners, seemed destined to develop wandering thoughts the moment life grew comfortable and there was spare money in their pockets. Li Lianfu was said to have kept a mistress in town, often staying away and refusing to return home, leaving almost every trivial detail of the inn’s business to Li Shuping.
A lonely young proprietress guarding an empty room, an unfaithful husband notorious for fooling around outside, and, by sheer coincidence, a handsome, strong, unmarried young man living directly across the street…
Once, Wang Chongliang had gone to Li Shuping’s inn to paint the window frames. He was crouching on the floor working when footsteps sounded behind him. Turning abruptly, he looked upward and saw Li Shuping standing before him barefoot, her hair wet and dripping, wearing a thin nightgown with nothing underneath and the curves of her body faintly visible through the fabric. Wang Chongliang had never touched a woman in his life. How could such an inexperienced young man withstand that kind of temptation? In that instant, desire caught fire and swept out of control, carrying both of them with it.
What began as an affair partly driven by revenge against an unfaithful husband gradually became genuine affection after years of stolen intimacy on the kitchen floor and the guest-room sofa. Li Shuping even became pregnant. Wang Chongliang had originally planned to wait until all his wages for the year had been paid, then take her away, elope somewhere no one knew them, and live a quiet life together.
Heaven proved pitiless. The imagined life of a loving family of three never began. Every hope and dream held by small people stooping beneath the weight of poverty and struggling at society’s bottom was destroyed on that dim rainy night.
Li Shuping had accompanied her legal husband back to his hometown to handle some business, so the inn had been closed for several days and secured with a large lock on the front door. But a lock like that stopped gentlemen, not criminals. It could never have kept out villains determined to slip into an empty inn and use it as a place to spend the night. And what happened there that evening was accidentally witnessed by Wang Chongliang, the lover who knew the premises well enough to sneak around the back courtyard and peer through the windows…
Once the scattered hidden threads were assembled, Captain Xue’s sharp mind had already reconstructed the broad course of events, laying out a recognizable and increasingly clear sequence.
Pale purple appeared along the horizon. Auspicious violet dawn gradually faded into the fish-belly white of morning as Captain Xue, who had not slept all night, organized a mountain of clues and mapped out the next stage of the investigation. He finally lifted his head from the keyboard of his laptop, a voice recorder clipped to his collar and his phone wedged between the left side of his face and shoulder as he rapidly issued instructions without wasting a single moment.
Captain Xue had a fiery, impatient temper, but he was unquestionably efficient. Even outsiders watching him work could not help admiring him.
This living Yasha seemed to possess three heads capable of following three lines of reasoning at once, eyes watching six directions, and eight hands reaching out to work simultaneously.
Excitement shone from Xue Qian’s eyes like headlights cutting through a night road as he analyzed the case for the others. “What we know now is that Chen Jiu, who fled with crates of stolen money that day, probably hijacked a small box truck bearing the logo of Ling Huang’s Hanchao Group and traveled along the suburban highway through this area in the rain. He apparently didn’t kill the driver. Maybe he expected a long journey and needed somebody to drive for him. Unfortunately, surveillance infrastructure in the outskirts was extremely primitive back then, and after all these years there’s no footage left. Chen Jiu was the principal offender in the bank robbery, so naturally he wouldn’t dare openly check into an inn or ask anyone for lodging. He entered the village just when the Li couple happened to be away and broke into their empty inn, occupying it as though it belonged to him.”
“If we build a psychological profile of Chen Jiu, the man was violent by nature and had extreme aggressive tendencies, but he simply wasn’t intelligent or meticulous enough to accomplish anything truly sophisticated. He badly needed someone smarter beside him. He was arrogant and never planned for consequences, so ultimately he was nothing more than a brute relying on physical strength and acting alone. With an enormous amount of money on him, he probably became complacent. Maybe he even planned to cook something in the inn and sleep comfortably before continuing. What he didn’t realize was that while the mantis stalked the cicada, the oriole was already behind it. According to my analysis, there was probably more than one group of enemies following him… And that so-called driver absolutely wasn’t innocent either. He secretly tipped off whoever was behind him, allowing the main culprits to intercept Chen Jiu at the inn and kill him.”
Yan Xiaodao listened silently as Captain Xue analyzed the case point by point. Everything fit beautifully. Yan already understood most of the truth now, so listening to Xue Qian felt almost like hearing a painstaking closing argument that could jump directly into the final case report.
Or perhaps half the facts known to him and Ling He, when joined to the other half of the clues uncovered by Xue Qian, would already create the complete story. The only questions were whether Yan Xiaodao was willing to confess what he knew and whether Ling He intended to cooperate directly with Captain Xue.
Xue Qian continued. “According to Wang Chongliang’s testimony, the killers who arrived afterward followed Chen Jiu into the inn. They encountered one another in the dark, windy night, fought, and eventually stepped onto a road of crime they could never return from. There were at least four people working together when Chen Jiu was hacked to death and the stolen money was taken. Wang Chongliang witnessed a small portion of the fight, but he was too terrified to look closely and ran. If he hadn’t escaped, he probably would’ve been hacked to death and dismembered on the spot too. And right then, the innkeepers returned one after another and walked straight into a death trap…”
“Wang Chongliang didn’t actually see Li Shuping enter through the front door, but judging from what happened, she probably walked in first and was immediately subdued. Li Lianfu entered shortly afterward, and both husband and wife encountered the killers. We don’t yet know the details of that confrontation. What followed was the bizarre fire witnessed by Wang Chongliang and many neighbors along this street.”
“Li Shuping and her husband were completely innocent victims. Without any warning, they stepped into a place of death and suffered a disaster that had nothing to do with them. Because they had become witnesses who could not be allowed to live, they were destined to burn together with the crime scene into black charcoal. Li Shuping was pregnant and fell from the second floor of the inn. It’s very possible she was brutally thrown down and died there with her unborn child… Li Lianfu burned to death inside.”
“This wasn’t an ordinary fire. A gas cylinder exploded. The blast destroyed practically every trace and bloodstain inside the inn, eliminating the evidence and the bodies. Only Chen Jiu’s dismembered remains were taken away. These people were extremely clever about destroying the original crime scene. Judging by the timeline, they then manufactured the explosion at the chemical factory and used that as the perfect place to dispose of the body, conveniently framing Boss Ling in the process. It was only recently that the remains resurfaced from the acid-and-alkali ruins of the abandoned factory and were discovered by police.”
Captain Xue had concluded that the inn was the original crime scene even before forensic examination because he had shown photographs to Wang Chongliang, the only surviving witness.
After so many years, Wang Chongliang had been so terrified at the time that he never clearly saw a single killer. But he had seen the victim’s face. From seven or eight photographs, he immediately picked out Chen Jiu. “That’s him. He fell on the first-floor floorboards. His face and body were covered in blood. I was hiding outside the window, and I was scared stupid. For years afterward, whenever I had nightmares, I saw this face. I could never mistake him, Officer Xue. It was him…”
A police car and several plainclothes officers took Wang Chongliang away so he could be properly housed and protected.
Wang Chongliang was deeply wary of everyone around him and trusted only Captain Xue. “Officer Xue, if I go into the station, they won’t beat me again, will they? I’m afraid they’ll accuse me of being a suspect again.”
Xue Qian told him, “Relax. This time, we won’t wrong an innocent person, and we won’t let the real culprit escape.”
Wang Chongliang had reported the incident years ago, but an uneducated villager like him knew nothing about investigative procedure and nearly got himself trapped inside his own statement. The officers handling the case at the time had treated it with the careless incompetence of a muddled miscarriage of justice and interrogated Wang Chongliang coercively, even suspecting that he had filed a false report to mislead authorities. Wang Chongliang was forced to change his statement and never spoke about the truth again. The fire was consequently classified as an accident in a confused mess, until the special task force reopened the old case.
The famously stubborn demolition holdout no longer needed to confront the demolition crew with bottles of kerosene. Yasha Xue took charge on Wang Chongliang’s behalf, viciously scolding several suspicious figures still circling outside the ruined Wang house. “Nobody demolishes this building! No one touches a single brick or tile! This house is evidence in a criminal investigation now. Who knows what Li Shuping may have left here back then? I’m making the call. If you don’t like it, tell your company executives and village officials to come talk to me!”
Xue Qian gave Yan Xiaodao a meaningful look.
As the group walked back toward the inn, Xue Qian casually reached out to steady Mr. Yan. Yan Xiaodao naturally hooked an arm around Xue Qian’s shoulder and gave him several firm pats. His emotions were enormously complicated, but he also had his own jianghu principles, sense of righteousness, and reason. Sincerely, he said, “Captain Xue, you’ve worked hard. I hope you solve the case soon and bring the truth into the light.”
“We’re getting damn close!” Xue Qian suddenly leaned toward Yan’s ear and lowered his voice. “Knife-mark expert, there’s something else I want your opinion on.”
The two found a quiet corner on the first floor of the inn.
Ling He seemed to shoot Yan a murderous glance. He was probably thinking that Yan Xiaodao and Yasha Xue had gone from enemies to friends far too quickly and were already close enough to throw their arms around each other’s shoulders. Yan Xiaodao knew perfectly well that hot-blooded young Mr. Ling was a walking jar of vinegar, so he sent him a look: Behave. We’re discussing something serious.
Standing beside a window where the first thin rays of morning spilled across them, Xue Qian got straight to the point. “Mr. Yan, remember when you helped the Bureau Chief reconstruct the likely profiles of those killers from the wounds?”
Xue Qian already knew that history. Yan Xiaodao nodded. At this point there was no reason to continue hiding the fact that he had once served as an unofficial cross-boundary informant.
“One of the killers, just as you predicted, had some unusual behavioral compulsion, perhaps even a pathological sexual fixation. Around the victim’s pelvis and genital region, this person repeatedly drove the tip of a knife straight down, leaving a cluster of sharp puncture marks.” Xue Qian pulled up photographs from the encrypted image database on his laptop and quietly showed them to Yan Xiaodao. “Take another close look. Don’t these two images look very similar?”
Yan Xiaodao leaned toward the screen and studied them carefully. The first photograph showed Chen Jiu’s remains, which he had already examined. The second had clearly been taken at Linwan Pier on that rainy night. He instantly recognized the deck pieced together from railway sleepers. Across the wood was another dense cluster of small holes made by the point of a knife.
Knife marks covered the weathered grain, enough to make anyone with trypophobia uncomfortable. But to Yan Xiaodao’s precise, practiced eye, that piece of wood was decisive physical evidence declaring that heaven’s net was vast and nothing ultimately escaped it.
His gaze seemed glued to the cold glow of the computer screen. Every person used a knife with a distinctive strength and angle, characteristics that could neither be imitated nor duplicated. To someone like Yan Xiaodao, reading knife marks was almost like a police forensic expert reading fingerprints.
“Who was this? Who used the knife?” The answer flashed through Yan Xiaodao’s mind almost as soon as the words left him. “You… You Jinglian?!”
“That’s him.” Xue Qian gave the smallest possible nod. “I collected this evidence at the scene that night. I thought the marks looked alike too.”
Yan Xiaodao found it almost impossible to believe. You Jinglian had eventually risen to the rank of a powerful regional official. Had the man really once been a bandit fifteen years ago? He had always been temperamental and outwardly respectable, but to think he had participated in a blood-soaked crime of this magnitude was almost unimaginable. Truly, knowing someone’s face did not mean knowing his heart.
Xue Qian leaned close and said, “And before You Jinglian was transferred to our area, he spent his entire career in the south. I checked. He isn’t originally from our region at all. He was born here in the Three Rivers area, and both his registered native place and birthplace are in Luojiang City, only a little over twenty kilometers from here.”
That fit.
If You Jinglian’s original place of advancement had been here, then following the trail back to its beginning brought them directly to the earliest footprints.
Once one member of the group was identified, how difficult could it be to locate the others? Break apart every social relationship Secretary You had possessed during those years, examine each piece, and the answer would emerge.
Returning the favor, Yan Xiaodao offered Xue Qian another clue. “Captain Xue, last night I took a fall while chasing Wang Chongliang and rolled down this staircase. Turns out the fall wasn’t completely useless.”
Yan Xiaodao crouched at the bottom step and pointed. “Look. This inn was rebuilt, but because the ground behind it rises into a slope, we can reasonably imagine that Li Shuping and her husband’s old building used a similar layout. This staircase makes three turns. That was probably dictated by the original building being constructed against the hillside. These oddly shaped stairs didn’t just trip me. Fifteen years ago, they may have given Chen Jiu the fatal fall that doomed him too.”
Xue Qian immediately understood. Yan Xiaodao continued, “There are signs of fractures in Chen Jiu’s leg bones. We suspected he was ambushed, chased, and surrounded. He may have rolled down these stairs and broken his leg, making it impossible to escape. In the end, he died exactly where his actions had led him.”
“That gives the scene one hell of a clear picture. Thanks, Mr. Yan!” Captain Xue clapped his hands, eyes gleaming, then leaned toward him again. “Keep these investigative deductions confidential for now. We don’t want to alert the snake.”
“Don’t worry, Captain Xue.” Yan Xiaodao was both comforted and grateful that Xue Qian trusted him this much, even though, given what Yan actually knew, he felt he did not deserve that trust.
He would not betray his godfather, but neither would he betray Xue Qian. Walking along the border between light and darkness, seeking survival inside a narrow crack, treading alone along a tightrope stretched between justice and old debts of affection, he had carried this road with enormous difficulty, yet he would not turn back.
Yan Xiaodao sat on the bottom step and looked toward a wisteria outside, growing stubbornly among the broken tiles and ruined walls. An important foundation inside his heart had shattered and collapsed, fragments of rubble piercing him painfully. Yet at the same time, new vegetation seemed to cover the ruins, sending delicate green branches winding upward from dried ravines inside his chest. This was perhaps a necessary road through his turbulent life, a pass he had always been destined to cross, a rebirth after pain, reflection, and transformation.
Ling He wrapped his arms around Yan’s waist from behind. “They shouldn’t need the two of us here anymore. I’ll take you home.”
Yes. Once You Jinglian’s identity had been exposed, everything else could be solved by following the vine to its roots. It was now only a matter of time and efficiency. The investigation could safely be left to Captain Xue. There was no longer any need for the two of them to continue acting as self-funded auxiliary plainclothes officers.
Yan Xiaodao gripped Ling He’s wrist tightly, like a drowning soul finally confirming that the life raft swimming beside him had never abandoned him. Calmly, he nodded. “Let’s go home.”
Ling He seemed to kiss his hair from behind.
Yan Xiaodao was not certain. But beneath the hair at the crown of his head, his scalp felt a breath of scorching warmth. Ling He suddenly moved closer as though unable to resist, no longer caring about the idle stares of unrelated people around them, and openly lifted Yan Xiaodao into his arms before carrying him away.