The story of the former First year, Class 1 seemed quite utterly unremarkable. Aside from a student who committed suicide due to family reasons, a clique of underachievers, and a teacher who detested her students, there was no other information.
Closing the notebook in her hands, Su Xiaolan stood up and said, “Thank you for your cooperation. If any leads come up later, please remember to contact us as soon as possible.”
When the group walked out of the director’s office, the First year teaching building happened to be right across from them. Crossing the corridor connecting the two buildings and walking down one floor brought them to what used to be the classroom of First year, Class 1.
A sign with the words “First year, Class 1” hung over the door.
Only now, it was filled with a new batch of students. These new freshmen huddled together, chasing and playing with each other during the recess. In their mid-teens, each of them bore a face still flushing with childish innocence.
Chi Qing hadn’t entered the office in the first place and took a step ahead to head back. However, just as he turned around, he bumped into someone.
The boy who was bumped into seemed to have been stealthily eavesdropping here for a while. Chi Qing hadn’t noticed when he arrived, but he did notice the familiar spectacle frames on the bridge of his nose. This was the very student he and Xie Lin had spoken with in the pavilion that day.
Chi Qing asked, “What are you doing here?”
The boy didn’t answer.
Meeting Chi Qing’s gaze, he fled in panic as if he had been caught red-handed. He ran all the way into the stairwell next to him, dashed down the stairs, and vanished in a flash.
When Xie Lin walked out, he only saw the fleeting silhouette of a school uniform from behind. “Did someone just come by?”
Chi Qing gave an “mm” and said, “The one you looked for before—the most silent student in the class.”
Regarding this, Ji Mingrui scratched the back of his head and remarked, “This former First year, Class 1 is really strange enough.”
The director escorted them partway and was just about to return to his office when Xie Lin suddenly called out to him, “Their class previously had two students with rather unsatisfactory grades—one named Bai Zhixing and the other named Yu Yang. Could you take us to see them? No need to call them out, just a glance through the window will do.”
“Oh, those two. No problem. That kid Yu Yang is in Class 5 now,” the director said. “Bai Zhixing… I can’t quite remember. Let me check. I think he was assigned to Class 7, or maybe Class 6. I’ll have to look through the class assignment records.”
No one else caught anything from these words, but Xie Lin, standing at the corner of the stairs, smiled slightly and asked, “Is that Yu Yang usually quite popular?”
Startled, the director said, “Ah?”
Seeing his reaction, Xie Lin knew he had guessed right. “With so many people in the former Grade 1, and since you don’t manage Grade 2 now, yet you clearly remember which class he is in, his interpersonal relationships must be quite good.”
The classroom of Second year, Class 5 was exceptionally boisterous during recess. Someone in the class was sighing, “I wonder if we can actually have PE class later. We haven’t had PE for two consecutive weeks.”
Yu Yang was tall and sat in the back row. Wearing the black and red uniform of Honghai No. 6 High School, he raised his voice and said, “As the sports representative, the next time I see the teacher, I’ll remember to tell him to show some backbone. If a man can’t even protect a single PE class, what else can he do?”
With that, the class burst into laughter.
After speaking, Yu Yang got up and walked out of the back door with his arms around his friends’ shoulders, planning to buy something to eat. The boy looked very bright and sunny, a textbook central figure.
Bai Zhixing was in the neighboring class, but when the grade director led them over, they couldn’t find him in the classroom.
The grade director said somewhat apologetically, “The students aren’t all here during recess… and I don’t know…”
Before the grade director could finish his sentence, the gloved man who had barely spoken the entire time uttered the words: “The restroom.”
“?”
“There’s a cigarette pack in his desk drawer,” Chi Qing said using sentences as concise as possible. “He probably went to the restroom to smoke.”
The grade director thought to himself that these two probably didn’t need him to lead the way at all. Given them three minutes, they would be able to figure out exactly where a person was, their personality, and their family background.
Bai Zhixing was indeed smoking in the restroom. The boy had very short cropped hair, single eyelids, and a fierce look. When he came out of the restroom, he carried a heavy scent of smoke, calling out “Hello, Director” in a completely unabashed and utterly perfunctory manner.
Looking at him, Bai Zhixing seemed to be exactly the same kind of person as Wang Yuan and his crowd.
However, he was reluctant to say much about the events back in First year.
“We haven’t been in the same class for a long time,” Bai Zhixing stood with his hands in his pockets. Carrying a bit of a rogue aura, he said quite indifferently, “After the classes were shuffled, I didn’t have much interaction with them. We weren’t particularly close to begin with; it was just that our seats happened to be next to each other. Since none of us listened to the lectures, we just played games together during class. I couldn’t be bothered to get involved in their other activities, like fighting off-campus. I found it boring.”
“Did they have any other classmates they were close with?”
Bai Zhixing wore an expression of “too lazy to think.” After a long while, he said, “Yu Yang, I guess. But we didn’t hang out together later either. Yu Yang is actually a pretty good guy, and he couldn’t really vibe with them anyway. Later on, he went off to concentrate single-mindedly on his studies.”
Inside a restaurant near Honghai No. 6 High School.
The investigation team had found a private room inside to have lunch together.
Jiang Yu said, “According to Bai Zhixing’s account, those few people did indeed hang out together before, but later on, that student Yu Yang, whose grades improved, turned over a new leaf and broke away from their small clique.”
“That’s quite normal,” Ji Mingrui said. “It fits the logic of high school boys’ social circles perfectly.”
“So, do you have any thoughts?” Ji Mingrui asked again.
Jiang Yu shook his head.
All the fragmented pieces of information lay scattered before them, but between them and the three male high school student corpses who died in different manners, the most critical piece of the puzzle was always missing.
If the real killer existed among the people they were currently investigating, would it be Jiang Yiyun? Or Bai Zhixing, who was casually smoking in the restroom? Or perhaps Yu Yang, who looked bright and likable?
…
While the others were chatting about the case, Chi Qing was the only one seriously scalding his bowls and chopsticks with boiling water.
He was exceptionally meticulous when eating out, wishing he could keep his eyes on the kitchen to see if the sanitation standards were up to par. He absolutely had to use serving chopsticks to pick up food, and he wouldn’t eat much.
The dishes at this restaurant were ordinary, with only a few being truly delicious. As soon as they were served, they were wiped clean by Ji Mingrui and the others like a swarm scavenging for food. Chi Qing’s movements were slow, and before he could even reach out, a bowl of braised pork was already divided up.
The next second, a piece of meat appeared in his freshly cleaned dining bowl.
After placing the piece of braised pork into Chi Qing’s bowl, Xie Lin put down his chopsticks and said, “At your speed, when will you ever get to eat?”
No one had ever dared to put food into Chi Qing’s bowl before.
Xie Lin had also remembered his fastidious habits only after putting it in. He pushed his own dining bowl slightly toward Chi Qing. “If you can’t eat it, just…” Just put it back.
However, keeping his eyes lowered, Chi Qing tacitly accepted this piece of braised pork that had been placed in his bowl.
Ji Mingrui and the others were too deeply invested in discussing the case to notice the opposite side of the round table.
Much less did they hear Chi Qing murmur under his breath, “Anyway, we’ve already done things far more excessive than this.”
Xie Lin brought his hand to his mouth and cleared his throat lightly.
Amidst the conversation, the three-person team over there reached a conclusion. “The nature of this case is clearly a revenge killing. I think it’s necessary to assign extra personnel to keep an eye on Yu Yang and Bai Zhixing. If the killer is truly targeting the former First year, Class 1, then the two of them, having been part of Wang Yuan’s small clique, still have a considerable probability of becoming the next victims. Not to mention, they themselves harbor a certain degree of suspicion. In short, we should still have people keep tabs on them.”
The discussion regarding the case concluded here.
Toward the end of the meal, Chi Qing heard them start to chat about a movie that had recently been re-released.
Su Xiaolan, in particular, said with a hint of yearning, “I heard it’s being re-released. I’ve been waiting for years…”
“That movie is a classic. I used to love it. It’s incredibly romantic, even though the ending is a tragedy. Plus, it’s known as the movie ‘you absolutely must take the person you love to see once in this lifetime.'”
Although Chi Qing was once half an insider in the industry, he didn’t know much about the classic films within the trade. Hearing the word “romantic,” he could roughly guess the nature of this film.
After finishing his meal, Chi Qing wiped his hands with a wet wipe beside him. As he set the wet wipe down, his peripheral vision caught Xie Lin’s hand moving under the table—his five fingers spread open, palm facing up toward him.
With a lazy, tired expression, Xie Lin stared at him and said, “Let’s secretly hold hands for a bit.”
When doing something sneaky, the surrounding sounds would habitually be amplified. Chi Qing clearly heard Su Xiaolan continuing to talk about that topic he had zero interest in, and he even memorized that the release date of that boring movie was exactly three days away.
“Although I really want to go… how can there be any time,” Su Xiaolan finally sighed, comforting herself. “Cracking the case is more important. Besides, I don’t have a partner either. As a single dog, going there would just be seeking torture. It’s better to work.”
Chi Qing’s fingers touched Xie Lin’s.
At first, the voices of the people next to him could be heard clearly, but after a few seconds, they faded away.
All his senses converged in the palm of his hand.
Three days passed quickly. Amidst the continuous investigation and the increasingly rampant neighborhood rumors, the incomprehensible aspects of this case grew more and more numerous.
Nothing much was happening on Bai Zhixing and Yu Yang’s side; they attended and left school normally. Bai Zhixing skipped classes from time to time, completely unbothered by the rumors surrounding poor students. However, because the rumor that the killer exclusively targeted underachievers had spread too widely, there was basically no one in the internet cafes, ushering in the flattest off-season in recent years.
After going a few times, Bai Zhixing found the internet cafe during this bleak period very boring, so he didn’t go back afterward.
The Five-Year College Entrance Examination, Three-Year Simulation review books remained out of stock.
All the underachievers in the entire city were practically studying for their lives. Su Xiaobo stayed up late so much that he looked like he was about to fade away. When the two of them occasionally helped Su Xiaolan pick him up from Guangyuan, they found that the kid was getting thinner by the day.
“Sigh,” Su Xiaobo slumped in the back seat and sighed. “I was dreaming about doing exam papers last night. And do you know what the most suffocating part is? It’s that everyone is studying hard. The people whose ranks were ahead of me last time are also working hard. I still can’t beat them. In this way, my score has risen, but my ranking hasn’t budged at all.”
“…”
“I really envy the top student in our grade. People who do well in school are so safe.”
“Don’t we underachievers have human rights! Why do we underachievers have to hover on the edge of life and death!”
On the day the movie was released, Xie Lin and Chi Qing were given the morning off and didn’t need to rush to the General Bureau.
In the morning, as Xie Lin was eating breakfast, he remembered that movie. “Want to go see it?”
Chi Qing finished his simple meal, set down his chopsticks, and said, “A romance film. Not interested.”
Xie Lin gave an “oh”: “I get it. Officer Su said you must take the person you like to go see it, so I am not the person you like.”
“…”
How is he still bringing up such groundless trouble?
Unmoved, Chi Qing explained, “That’s just a marketing gimmick.”
Xie Lin: “You don’t need to say anything more. I understand everything.”
“…………”
In the end, Chi Qing checked the tickets and found that they had sold out long ago, which finally brought some begrudging comfort to Xie Lin.
Who could have known that this movie seemed to haunt them like a ghost. By the afternoon, when Chi Qing casually scrolled through his moments, he saw a post from Ji Mingrui: Didn’t expect to pass by here on a dispatch [Image].
The attached photo was a picture of a movie theater.
Further down was a comment Ji Mingrui posted himself: Replying to all: A fire broke out in a building near the movie theater. It is currently unknown if there are any casualties.
Chi Qing casually commented two words: A fire?
Inside a certain building on Nanyang Street, billowing thick black smoke constantly surged out from the blackened windows.
The fire took a full ten-odd minutes to be completely contained.
Other office personnel inside the building were urgently evacuated downstairs. A crowd of people stood at the bottom of the building chatting and taking photos.
“What happened…”
“How did it just catch fire out of nowhere.”
“Thank goodness I was on the 3rd floor…”
The usage of this building was complex. Some people rented a few rooms to open workshops, there were Taobao shops, and there were also the offline board game cafes most popular among young people nowadays.
Ji Mingrui stood outside the crowd maintaining order. Once he received the fire department’s notification over the walkie-talkie that the fire inside had been completely extinguished, he ran all the way up through the emergency exit.
“The body is completely charred,” Su Xiaolan, who was inspecting the scene with rubber gloves on, felt a bit uncomfortable from the sight inside. The thick smoke that had not yet dissipated made people cough continuously. It was very difficult for her to look directly at that blackened, charred corpse lying horizontally at the doorway, which could no longer even be called human. “Judging from the bone size, it’s a girl. The specific identity requires a forensic DNA test. It’s been burned so badly that nothing can be distinguished…”
Not long after Chi Qing commented, he received a crime scene photo sent by Ji Mingrui.
In the photo, the body was burned like a piece of charred coal, except this piece of coal possessed limbs shaped like a human’s.
The entire room was burned beyond recognition.
The position where the corpse was found was very close to the door. One hand was stretched straight forward; she must have desperately beaten against the door before her death.
There were no dropped items at the scene. Inside a bag that was burned down to just a sheet of charred leather, the contents were blackened and indistinguishable. Only upon closer inspection did one find a girl’s lipstick, a makeup mirror, and a phone that could no longer be turned on.
Ji Mingrui sent a few more messages over.
–Arson.
–Before we came in, the door was locked.
–It’s murder.
