Using the excuse, “Boss, I might have something going on at the company, I can’t keep my phone away for too long in case someone needs me,” Xie Lin requested to step out briefly to retrieve his phone.
The owner led them out through the fire exit. As they walked through the narrow, aged passage, he asked offhandedly, “Were you scared back there? You didn’t seem to have much of a reaction, though.”
Xie Lin: “He was so scared he went blank; he hasn’t recovered yet.”
The owner: “Is that so?”
Xie Lin turned to the person beside him: “Is that so?”
“…” Chi Qing, who had seen plenty of corpses since joining the Bureau, replied expressionlessly: “Yes.”
Xie Lin, a man who had seen enough corpses in his life to build a mountain, added: “Me too. This is my first time seeing such a realistic prop. I rarely even see the corpse of a mosquito, let alone this.”
Chi Qing: “…”
Is he overdoing it? Only days ago, this man was poking at human facial skin and severed limbs while discussing case details.
Xie Lin continued to play his “businessman” persona, asking with professional curiosity: “Where did you buy the specimen? It’s so lifelike, it must have been expensive. I’m a businessman myself—is running an escape room profitable these days? What are the operating costs and the break-even period?”
The owner didn’t seem interested in chatting: “It’s alright.”
Xie Lin: “Your store has great sales online. Did you have prior business experience?”
The middle-aged man was wearing navy linen trousers; the loose legs hid his slight limp, making it hard for anyone to notice his injury at a glance. He held a ring of keys. As he inserted a key into the lock, Chi Qing noticed that beyond his limp, the man’s knuckles were abnormally large, his skin extremely rough, and his hands covered in calluses—the hands of someone who had labored for years.
He answered: “Yes.”
After leading them out, the owner returned to the surveillance room. He pushed open the dark, black-painted door with a slow, heavy gait. Before entering, he said: “Hurry up. Five minutes.”
The surveillance room was pitch black. Eerie sound effects bled out from the escape rooms, an undercurrent of silent screams. The owner sat on a wooden chair that creaked under his weight. Throughout the previous conversation, Xie Lin hadn’t shown a single flaw. The owner’s posture relaxed; he even began tapping his fingers on the desk in rhythm with the horror sound effects. That was until, on the blurry surveillance screen, he saw the “businessman” player tap his phone screen three times to make a call.
…What kind of phone number has only three digits?
The owner’s tapping fingers froze.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the call, Ji Mingrui didn’t realize how “unexpected” this surprise really was. He and Su Xiaolan sped toward the location.
Ji Mingrui: “Unexpected? How unexpected?”
Xie Lin: “We wanted to play an escape room…”
“…” Well, that certainly is unexpected.
Ji Mingrui switched his phone to the speaker, stepped on the gas, and asked: “Are you alone?”
“No,” Xie Lin said. “Two of us. You know the other one.”
Ji Mingrui: “Two people, taking a walk, and you run into a homicide case. Fine, don’t say anything else, I know who it is.”
As soon as Ji Mingrui finished speaking, he heard the familiar, impatient voice of his “good brother” Chi Qing: “Are you done yet?”
Just a few days into the holidays… Ji Mingrui was defeated by the “plague-god” aura these two possessed.
“You two,” Ji Mingrui sighed wearily, “How is it that wherever you go, a case follows? Sometimes I wonder if the net of justice is too loose, letting you two out into the wild.”
Xie Lin didn’t reply, but Chi Qing heard him think: [Do you think I wanted this? Who wants to touch a dead body on a date? We could have been doing something else in the dark.]
Intuition told Chi Qing that whatever Xie Lin meant by “something else,” it definitely wasn’t anything wholesome.
Chi Qing: “Let go.”
Xie Lin’s brow arched—he knew Chi Qing had heard him—but he didn’t shy away: “I won’t.”
The internal monologue was cut short as Xie Lin grabbed Chi Qing’s wrist and yanked him behind his back. The crisis arrived in a heartbeat—the wall where Chi Qing had just been standing was smashed in, leaving a deep crater. The owner stood against the light, clutching an axe, his expression unreadable.
“Let’s talk this through,” Xie Lin smiled, his mind racing to figure out where he had slipped up. “No need for violence. The service industry is hard enough as it is. Think about the wall repair costs at the end of the month—it’s not worth it.”
His peripheral vision flickered upward, locking onto a security camera he had previously overlooked.
This is going to be troublesome. He had wanted to go somewhere else for the rest of their date.
Xie Lin loosened his collar, his expression darkening with genuine annoyance. It was rare to see him truly angry at being interrupted. Though he was still smiling, his voice was cold: “I wanted to resolve this peacefully, but if you insist on throwing yourself at us, don’t blame me, Boss.”
Theoretically, two men against one limping man shouldn’t be an issue, but the axe changed the math. Furthermore, they couldn’t fully count as two—the mysophobic Chi Qing only counted as half a fighter. Even so, Xie Lin gradually gained the upper hand.
When the owner realized he couldn’t win, he turned and retreated into the fire exit. Xie Lin and Chi Qing couldn’t let him escape. In the chaos of the unfamiliar layout, the owner dragged his lame leg into another corridor. Just as the door was about to slam shut, Xie Lin slammed his foot into it.
“Don’t move! Police—!”
By the time Ji Mingrui arrived, the scene was already under control. The suspect was bound at the entrance.
After investigating, the motive, the identity of the victims, and the facts were all laid bare. Ji Mingrui felt his heroic enthusiasm slowly cooling. They were basically just “case-closing tools” for these two.
Before heading back to the station, Xie Lin studied the other room themes on the wall: “Check the other themes, too. Since he hid his own story in this one, he might have done the same elsewhere. There might be more than one body here.”
Checks revealed three bodies total—one per theme. Each had different ages, genders, and characteristics. The corpse in the “Anatomy Room” was a man with a beer belly, eyes wide open, staring fixedly at the ceiling, looking exceptionally eerie. His character name in the theme was “Boss Wang.”
The theme contained a diary entry: “I think I’ve gone mad. I often can’t distinguish dream from reality. I want to fix the choices I made… In my dreams, I wasn’t swindled by Boss Wang… I would have married her, opened a small grocery store… two children, a boy and a girl.”
The police soon matched the identity of the victims. But the third body, a woman around thirty, remained a mystery until the owner suddenly spoke: “She was my wife. I had to marry her because of… certain things. She was a lunatic with mental health issues.”
He looked at the officers calmly: “No point in hiding it now. You won’t find her in missing persons reports; she had no family. After marrying me, I was the closest person she had. No one noticed she was gone, and no one filed a report.”
Even Ji Mingrui, who had handled major cases, felt a chill. An escape room owner, three themes, three bodies. The shop had massive online bookings, with over a hundred sales a month. People had been interacting with these corpses, laughing and chatting with a triple murderer, never suspecting a thing.
Ji Mingrui felt goosebumps rise on his arms: “Why did you do this? Just to hide the bodies?”
The owner lifted his weathered face: “These three themes… they were my life.”
“No ‘why.’ If you have to say, maybe it’s because after a certain age, looking back at half a lifetime, you realize it was all just a mess.”
Behind the interrogation room glass, Xie Lin was unusually quiet. After checking if Chi Qing was injured, he fell into a deep silence. He carried a heavy, inscrutable aura—the same one Chi Qing had been unable to read in the past.
Chi Qing was not good with words. He wanted to ask “What’s wrong?” but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Finally, he tentatively placed his hand over Xie Lin’s.
He rarely tried to read people—it felt invasive and he lacked interest. But touching Xie Lin was different; he only heard what Xie Lin wanted him to hear. And for the first time, he felt a spark of curiosity. Or perhaps, he realized, it wasn’t just curiosity—it was a desire to understand someone’s heart.
As Chi Qing’s hand covered his, Xie Lin looked down at him.
“A lot of emotions are very foreign to me,” Chi Qing said. “When others are unhappy, I rarely know why, nor do I care. I didn’t mind that before, but now… it feels different.”
Before Chi Qing could add, Of course, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, the silence in Xie Lin’s heart crumbled.
[I’m not unhappy.]
[I’m just afraid I won’t be able to control myself.]
Since Xie Lin opened his mental “permissions,” Chi Qing had only heard mundane daily thoughts. This was the first time he had heard Xie Lin think about “crime.”
[I know why he killed them. The things he wanted to do, he couldn’t. The woman he wanted to marry wed another. He regretted so much… following the swindler (Boss Wang), marrying the crazy woman… and his younger brother, whom he believed ruined his life step by step.]
[I can even feel his state of mind as he stripped away their flesh and turned them into specimens.]
Chi Qing realized that the deeper Xie Lin analyzed a crime, the more his own intrusive thoughts pulled him into the abyss. Xie Lin had known from a young age that “crime” held a certain attraction for him. A part of him was like an abyss, waiting to consume him.
Chi Qing seemed to understand why he couldn’t read Xie Lin before: Xie Lin was constantly suppressing himself, suppressing his “thirst” for crime.
Chi Qing looked at their joined hands: “I think I answered this for you before. He was the one who killed. Not you. You will never become him.”
Xie Lin froze. It was the first time he truly understood what Chi Qing’s ability meant. Through the touch of their hands, Chi Qing could easily pull him back from the edge.
However, the touching moment didn’t last long.
“If thoughts were a crime,” he heard Chi Qing continue, “I would have committed quite a few. For a long time after meeting you, I often thought about how to make you disappear from this world without a trace—to the point that I even prepared several perfect crime schemes.”
Xie Lin fell silent again: “…”
If he didn’t know Chi Qing well, he would have struggled to realize that this was his boyfriend’s way of “comforting” him.
Chi Qing had spent more time and energy on someone else’s emotions than ever before. After delivering what he considered a very reassuring statement, he waited for feedback, asking coldly: “Do you feel better now?”
Xie Lin didn’t know what expression to make. Finally, giving his partner some face, he said: “Hearing you say that, I do indeed… feel much better.”
