The scene that followed was chaotic, but that had little to do with Ji Xun.
The moment he saw the blade embedded in Luo Sui’s neck, he felt a strong wave of dizziness surge up into his mind. After struggling through the blackness that kept creeping in, Ji Xun realized he was already in the criminal investigation team’s office. The long stretch of movement in between didn’t exist at all in his memory, as if it had been cut out.
“…I passed out and you just brought me straight to the police bureau?” Ji Xun said in disbelief. “How much time has gone by?”
“Seventeen minutes and twenty-eight seconds,” Huo Ranyin answered.
“Ever since I’ve been with you, my sense of caution has gotten weaker and weaker,” Ji Xun said with lingering fear. “At this rate, I’ll be sold off and not even know it.”
“Then change it,” Huo Ranyin said.
“I’ll try, I’ll try,” Ji Xun replied perfunctorily. He looked around. Besides him, there were only two detectives buried in piles of evidence. The already five-centimeter-thick stack of materials had grown by another three centimeters, and Ji Xun noticed a laptop that hadn’t been there before — it must have been confiscated from Li Ke’s home as new evidence.
“What’s the situation now? Was Luo Sui saved?”
“Emergency treatment.”
“What about Li Ke?”
“He’s not in great shape either,” Huo Ranyin said. “He was badly shaken. He opened the door himself, and he nearly killed someone. He’s breaking down now, so we’ve urgently found a psychologist to help him with debriefing… Why?”
Ji Xun took a while before he realized Huo Ranyin had also asked him a “why.”
He looked up and met Huo Ranyin’s lowered gaze.
A quiet, deep gaze.
“Why did you hand the key to Zhao Wu?” Ji Xun asked slowly. “No reason. This is Qin City, someone else’s turf. If I’m not going to hand the key to Zhao Wu, the person in charge here, am I supposed to hand it to you? That would be overstepping, Team Leader.”
“Whoever opens that door will end up killing someone,” Huo Ranyin said. “Ji Xun, when you were opening the door, did you notice anything?”
“You’re thinking far too highly of me,” Ji Xun said, shaking his head. “If I had really noticed something, if I had guessed anything, I would have had them tear the door off instead. Then nobody would have been harmed. Look, I also wish I had a pair of eyes in the front and back of my head, able to see the future and remember the past, but I don’t.”
“Huo Ranyin, are you feeling guilty because you didn’t step forward? But everyone has their own fate to bear. You have yours, I have mine, Zhao Wu has Zhao Wu’s, and even Luo Sui — she has hers.”
Huo Ranyin’s lips didn’t move, but Ji Xun still heard a faint, almost imperceptible sigh. That earlier “why” had not been a question. Definitely not.
It had only been the heartfelt guilt of someone who wanted to shoulder everything.
“So this really was an accident,” Ji Xun said. “A fortunate accident, from the bottom of my heart.”
Death had quietly come near, chuckling softly, and spread its cloak beside them.
And because of Ji Xun’s small shift, the scythe-like cloak brushed past Huo Ranyin.
Ji Xun looked at Huo Ranyin and slowly said, “I’m really glad I didn’t hand that key to you.”
After the lingering fear came a shameful kind of relief.
“…Are you all right?” Huo Ranyin, still looking at Ji Xun, suddenly lowered his eyes and changed the subject stiffly. “I’ll go buy you a cup of hot cocoa.”
“Thanks,” Ji Xun said. “Make it double.”
Huo Ranyin turned away. When he reached the door, he deliberately glanced back and saw Ji Xun collapsed weakly in his seat, his side pressed against the desk, hair falling over his eyes, looking like a helpless, pitiful kitten.
His steps toward the hot drink stall quickened by three parts.
However, when he came back with the cocoa and hadn’t even entered the office yet, he heard an energetic voice from inside — Ji Xun’s voice.
“I got it!” Ji Xun was thrilled, pacing back and forth. Suddenly he stopped, as if he had eyes on the back of his head, and accurately sensed Huo Ranyin’s arrival. He turned back and waved him over like a cat. “Huo Ranyin, come quickly, I’ve found the truth of the case!”
During the time Huo Ranyin had been away, they had discovered a brand-new clue in the evidence pile:
Deleting files by dragging them to the recycle bin and emptying it — that doesn’t actually count as complete deletion.
The real way to erase traces is to fill the entire hard drive with meaningless large files so that every KB on the disk surface gets overwritten.
That was how the folder the tech team recovered from the “deleted” files was found.
It was a folder named Bright Green. Most of its contents were traces Luo Sui had left on the internet, and the four images that had alarmed everyone in Li Ke’s phone were in it too. The screenshots appeared to show that the posts were made seven hours earlier and the comments three hours earlier, but the original file creation date of the screenshots was—
August 13, 2012, 10:17 p.m.
In other words, the darknet kidnapping case targeting Luo Sui had happened four years ago.
“On June 17, this folder was created. The earliest saved images were of Melancholy Blue-Court’s Weibo account. Then there were Tieba, Tianya, Renren, courier tracking numbers, real names, addresses, and so on.”
“The folder was created on this computer yesterday night. Inside was a txt file listing the owner’s Weibo account names and passwords. The email and passwords were all gibberish — there were fourteen accounts total, but not the ‘Diligently Working Hard’ one. I’m afraid Li Ke wasn’t the owner of this folder. He just saw Luo Sui using his computer to browse these things last night and wanted to peek into her secrets, so he photographed the screen with his phone. As for whether the phone was logged in by him secretly or whether Luo Sui used his phone herself, we can’t tell yet. We can ask him later.”
After that long string of analysis, Ji Xun paused for a breath.
At just the right moment, Huo Ranyin handed him the hot cocoa he had bought. Ji Xun smiled at him, took the drink, and had a big sip. After enjoying the chocolate’s effect on his mind, he continued:
“So here’s the question. If the owner of this folder wasn’t Li Ke, then who was it? Who was that perverse enough to spy on a girl’s online activity and keep everything? And how did Luo Sui end up with it?”
Ji Xun pointed the laser pointer at the computer screen projected onto the wall.
“Please look at this Weibo post.”
July 15, 2012.
[Received the first paycheck from my new job…]
“I went back and checked the records you all brought from Luo Sui’s company, and found that she started work on June 15. Her first sales commission came from Qin City First People’s Hospital.”
“At the same time, Hu Kun’s medical insurance record shows that on June 16, 2012, he caught a cold and went to Qin City First People’s Hospital for registration. Although his medical insurance card eventually concealed his cause of death, that registration record strongly proves that he may have encountered Luo Sui at some point that day.”
“Let me make an irresponsible speculative deduction. Suppose in the crowded elevator, Hu Kun looked down and saw the account page of Melancholy Blue-Court on the phone screen Luo Sui was using. Curiosity was sparked. Even if he didn’t know the girl’s name, it didn’t matter — the internet made her impossible to hide…”
“Wait,” Zhao Wu couldn’t help raising his hand to interrupt. He found it hard to understand. “Are you saying an eighty-year-old man was skilled at internet doxxing? And used smartphones better than I do?”
“In 2012, he was seventy-six.”
“What’s the difference between seventy-six and eighty?!”
“Don’t define a person using a conventional mindset. When Huo Ranyin and I ran into Old Hu at the entrance of Daye Temple, he used his phone to send messages very smoothly. This old man dressed fashionably, had a fashionable mindset, and maybe his knowledge was even more fashionable.”
“Then what about the K mentioned by Hu Zheng’s wife…” Zhao Wu hurriedly flipped through the confession file in front of him.
Ji Xun’s memory was excellent. He recited it first: “‘After we found K, we hinted to the old man about it. Every time we just started, the old man would look impatient and tell us to get lost.’ From the wife’s perspective, it might seem like the old man had gone senile and didn’t care even when evidence of a young lover’s affair was put in front of him. But if Hu Kun was K, of course he wouldn’t want to hear the daughter-in-law’s nagging. And precisely because K was dead, Luo Sui opened those files on the night she was fleeing and read them, reminiscing over them.”
Zhao Wu looked one part incredulous, one part speechless. “Hu Kun — a seventy-six-year-old man — first doxxed a young girl, then used the darknet to trick a fool who wanted to kidnap Luo Sui for organ trafficking.”
“He may have used that setup to go meet Luo Sui,” Ji Xun said. “According to the broken-bridge effect, people often mistake accelerated heartbeats caused by nervousness for love. Hu Kun’s move may have been the beginning of that unusual age-gap romance. Hu Yan told me she knew about Luo Sui only two or three years ago, and if you subtract the time lag, the timeline fits.”
Deputy Captain Mai looked utterly numb as he sighed. “That relationship was seriously twisted. He was seventy or eighty, lusting after beauty, having an affair and an age-gap romance, then bringing the girl home to irritate his wife and children and stir up a family war. And when he died, nobody even called the police for him. Really, what was the point? And now Luo Sui has all these files, which means she already realized how twisted Hu Kun was. Add money as temptation, and no wonder she developed murderous intent.”
“Was it really an affair?” Ji Xun said abruptly.
“Luo Sui committed a crime, wanted to use our hands to kill herself, and her last wish before dying was to risk arrest so that Li Ke could retrieve the marriage-carving dolls Hu had made himself.”
“A while ago Team Leader Huo handled a case in Ning City. There was a male writer who visited a doctor’s house every day. At first everyone thought he was cheating with the doctor’s wife. In the end, he was gay, and the real affair partner was the doctor.”
“After Hu Kun divorced Hu Zheng’s mother, he never remarried. Hu Zheng kept saying his father had cheated, which is why his parents divorced. But in fact, the year Hu Zheng’s parents divorced, Hu Yan was one year old. Hu Kun brought her over from her biological parents and raised her, but he refused to explain the whole story to Hu Zheng’s mother. He became increasingly annoyed by her later investigation into Hu Yan, and eventually proposed divorce. I just called Hu Yan and had that confirmed — so Hu Zheng’s mother held a grudge, believing Hu Yan was Hu Kun’s illegitimate daughter and that she had misled her own child. It’s true many families break apart because the husband cheats, but certainly not all family breakups are due to infidelity.”
“Granny Mei, the woman the world saw as Hu Kun’s second wife, was actually just the caregiver hired to look after Hu Kun.”
“Maybe that was just a smokescreen to avoid unnecessary gossip, or maybe it was unintentional, but Luo Sui and Hu Kun both tacitly avoided exposing their grandfather-granddaughter romance in front of the neighbors. That made all the neighbors unconsciously treat Granny Mei as the legal wife. After all, when people see an old couple and a young woman walking together, they naturally assume the girl is a junior family member.”
“And Hu Zheng always thought his father’s grandfather-granddaughter romance was shameful and refused to acknowledge Luo Sui’s status, always calling her the mistress. In his eyes, his father dating an old caregiver was more respectable than being with Luo Sui.”
“Hu Yan was a foster granddaughter. She didn’t care about the inheritance and didn’t want to get involved in family conflict, so she always chose to avoid it. She didn’t correct anyone when she saw Luo Sui, so of course she wouldn’t gossip.”
“As for why Luo Sui herself accepted the mistress label after Hu Kun died: in traditional thinking, the dead deserve reverence. Luo Sui loved Old Hu. They hadn’t defied social pressure to register their relationship while he was alive, and after his death she didn’t want him to become the subject of other people’s gossip, so she willingly gave up the inheritance and her status, just to fulfill Old Hu’s wish of sending the sapphire.”
“Your view is a bit shocking…” Zhao Wu rubbed his head. “These are all just deductions. The evidence still isn’t strong enough, right? And even the reason doesn’t really convince me. If Luo Sui was willing to be with the old man, why not make it public at this point?”
“Mm, I think what Lao Zhao said makes sense,” the deputy captain said firmly, standing with his captain.
“Deputy Captain Mai, what do you think about grandfather-granddaughter romances?” Ji Xun ignored Zhao Wu and asked the deputy captain instead.
“No opinion,” the deputy captain said blankly.
“Then Deputy Captain Mai, if your daughter or some young girl you know fell in love with an eighty-year-old man…”
“Are you kidding me!” the deputy captain jumped up. “If my daughter ever did that, I’d break her… I’d break that shameless old man’s legs first!”
Everyone looked at him speechlessly.
Zhao Wu rubbed his head again, then said, “That’s true. Public opinion can be crushing. Sometimes the hardest thing to overcome is other people’s eyes. Thinking about it that way, it’s still better to have a son — less worrying.”
The deputy captain got angry. They both had children — the deputy captain had a daughter, Zhao Wu had a son.
The deputy captain sneered. “Having a son is better? What if your son grows up and turns out to be gay like Team Leader Huo—”
Everyone’s gaze turned to the deputy captain’s face.
Huo Ranyin’s eyes drifted lightly over him, followed by Ji Xun’s gaze. Compared with Huo Ranyin’s, Ji Xun’s looked like a knife honed for ten years, sharp enough to strike his head off.
The deputy captain was stunned too. After recovering, he quickly apologized, “Sorry, sorry. I spoke too fast and left out a bunch of words. What I meant was, like the criminal suspects in Team Leader Huo’s cases… being gay…”
The frozen atmosphere thawed.
Zhao Wu said, “A son doesn’t always obey his father. Homosexuality is innate — determined by genes. If he really is gay, then so be it. I don’t have any other choice. If one is driven away, the next one will still be a man. It’s not like with daughters and weird old men — if you drive one away, the next one might be a young guy.”
The deputy captain was very upset and felt personally implicated.
“Captain Zhao is quite open-minded,” Huo Ranyin said in surprise.
“That’s right,” Zhao Wu accepted the praise, then continued, “But for the sake of my lifespan, and so I can keep serving the people for a long, long time… if my damn son really is gay…”
Zhao Wu unconsciously pulled out his gun and set it on the table, slowly saying:
“Then please let him leave home early and make his own way, work hard, and struggle on his own.”
The office burst into laughter.
“We continue analyzing,” Ji Xun said after the interruption passed. “When Old Hu sent messages on the mountain, I asked who he was messaging. He said he was sending them to his wife. I thought about it — Granny Mei uses an old phone and probably isn’t very good with electronic devices.”
“…”
“Also, don’t forget, Old Hu and Granny Mei never registered their marriage. Legally, they really weren’t a couple. Old Hu and Luo Sui never registered either. Looking at it through the lens of love, you could imagine that the old man was too old and didn’t want to burden the young girl, so even if he died, Luo Sui wouldn’t need to have ‘second marriage’ written in her household registry. But what about Granny Mei? They didn’t register, there was no property protection, and Old Hu brought a young girl into the house. Even though his children were all grown, why would she still stay in his home? Did she do it for his age? For his mistress? To spite herself? For the feeling of taking care of someone? Or was she, like a girl in her sixties, deeply bewitched by Old Hu and determined to stay there even at her own expense? I think the truth is simple — the home belonged to Old Hu and Luo Sui. It had nothing to do with her. She was just a caregiver.”
A suffocating silence fell.
The deputy captain was the first to recover. “Then what about Granny Mei and Hu Zheng…”
“Hu Zheng wanted to fight for the inheritance, so he first had to undermine the legitimacy of Luo Sui’s claim. Between the two evils, of course he joined forces with Granny Mei,” Ji Xun said succinctly. “As for Granny Mei, maybe she wanted money, or maybe she was jealous of Luo Sui.”
“Jealous of… Luo Sui?” Zhao Wu said in disbelief.
“Luo Sui was probably jealous of Granny Mei too,” Ji Xun threw out another bomb.
“Old Hu was a quite handsome elderly man,” Ji Xun said. “If Hu Zheng had shown any signs of wanting to matchmake her with Old Hu, Granny Mei might have been tempted. But Old Hu never gave her the time of day and only treated her as a caregiver. That would’ve been one thing, but in front of outsiders, he also used her name to cover for Luo Sui. She had the status of a wife in name only, of course she would resent that.”
“As for Luo Sui, she and Old Hu were in a legitimate emotional relationship, but in front of outsiders she could only be the granddaughter. Whether at work or in the neighbors’ eyes, their relationship only stopped at ‘family affection.’ I’m afraid sometimes she also envied Granny Mei, who could openly be Old Hu’s ‘wife.’”
“This kind of twisted jealousy caused by twisted relationships will inevitably lead to an even more twisted outcome.”
The outcome needs no more saying; everyone already knew it.
That was also why they were all gathered here now.
“When Huo Ranyin and I first went to Old Hu’s villa, we saw Luo Sui nearly get hit by a flowerpot falling from the second floor. The reason the flowerpot fell was because someone had set up a mechanism inside the villa. Compared with people like Hu Zheng, who had poor relationships with Old Hu and thus basically never came to the villa, Granny Mei, who lived there all the time, was obviously much more familiar with the layout and had a greater chance of having created that mechanism…
“Also, Hu Zheng’s ability to lie in wait at that secret base was probably something Granny Mei told him. Because of the police report Huo Ranyin and I made, she knew the base existed. Being a woman herself, she understood that the heartbroken Luo Sui would probably go there to remember Hu Kun, so she hinted to Hu Zheng.
“I think all of these are concrete expressions of Granny Mei’s malice toward Luo Sui.”
Another silence.
But this time, everyone was thoughtful.
They had been convinced by Ji Xun.
At last, Zhao Wu asked, “Was the person really killed by Luo Sui?”
That’s right. If Ji Xun’s reasoning was followed through, and if Luo Sui and Old Hu were true love, then how could Luo Sui have killed Old Hu? And why would she kill him?
And most importantly —
If Luo Sui didn’t kill anyone, why would she use the police’s hand to kill herself?
“As for that question,” Ji Xun said, “the answer is in the Weibo screenshots Old Hu collected.”
