After Xie Lin swiftly completed his task, he thoroughly dedicated his mind to chatting with Chi Qing, acting exactly like an internet stranger who had just met him.
L: Got a partner yet, handsome?
Chi Qing: Yes.
L: Is he handsome?
Chi Qing: ……
L: Would you consider having one more boyfriend? What do you think of me?
What kind of split-personality drama was he trying to pull here?
Chi Qing typed out a sentence: I’m currently considering replacing my boyfriend.
L: ……
While the two were chatting on their end, the “Wang Yuan” account Ji Mingrui was responsible for gave him a massive shock: “I previously said that the social relations of these high school students were too simple. I overstepped my bounds—the online world of this bunch of high school students is colorful and vibrant!”
“What ‘broadening the list,’ ‘CPDD’… I had to search for ages just to find out what they meant. His friends list has reached the maximum limit.”
Looking at the friends list that seemed to have no bottom, he said: “Even people doing WeChat business are only at this level.”
“Moreover, he has quite a lot of girlfriends. Today this little sister calls him ‘Wild King Brother,’ tomorrow that little sister asks him to get on the game to protect her,” Ji Mingrui was filled with wonder. “We didn’t have any of this back in our day. Those small phones gifted when buying phone credit weren’t even slider phones—opening a web page to read a novel was a struggle.”
Searching like this was not a sustainable way forward.
Furthermore, Chi Qing’s task progress was very slow. But if one path was blocked, he would just take another.
He wasn’t like Su Xiaobo, who insisted on stubbornly fighting to the death despite only being able to score dead last. If it were him, he would simply skip the exam altogether.
As long as his own name didn’t appear on the final report card, what did it have to do with him who the “Poor Student Serial Killer” murdered?
Of course, he hadn’t spoken these words to Su Xiaobo.
Chi Qing thought about that “missing video.” Since the video could be deleted by someone, it was highly probable that the friends lists of these people had also been cleaned up. The killer must have gotten to know and contacted these victims through the internet, and after doing all this, he would definitely delete his own social accounts.
Chi Qing simply gave up on those netizens with whom it was impossible to communicate, and searched for keywords within the roaming chat history instead.
“Like,” “she,” “girlfriend”……
The account he was responsible for belonged to Ma Hui. Within the chat history of the gaming friends Ma Hui frequently contacted, he actually managed to find a few records regarding “she.”
—— She’s sick in the head today. I clearly wasn’t late but she insisted I was late, fuck.
Connecting the records before and after, this line was referring to Jiang Yiyun.
—— She said so?
—— Why does she have so many issues.
……
Filtering out these obviously irrelevant instances of “she,” the remaining two pieces of content were quite intriguing.
—— She said she likes me.
The chat history before and after this segment went like this:
Ma Hui: Ahhhhhhh
Friend: What’s wrong with you? What kind of trouble did your teacher stir up again?
Ma Hui: No, I’m very excited right now, let me organize my words.
Friend: ???
Ma Hui: She said she likes me!
Ma Hui: I’m not dreaming, am I? I’m about to have a girlfriend?!
Unlike the “Wild King Brother” Wang Yuan, Ma Hui was short and small. Usually, no girls were willing to talk to him much. On the internet, he didn’t really know how to chat with those soft girls either—mainly because his gaming skills were mediocre. Although he had gifted quite a few skins, he hadn’t managed to date a single girlfriend.
The timestamp of the chat log was one month before the incident.
Friend: The one you got to know in the game before?
Friend: You play games so terribly yet you can still encounter a girl. When on earth will my spring arrive?
Ma Hui: If I agree directly, wouldn’t it make me look too cheap? Should I give her the cold shoulder for a bit?
Friend: Don’t leave her hanging so long that she runs away.
Ma Hui: She won’t. She likes me so much. She said she just likes the way I give it my all in games, which gives her a particular sense of security. She also said I’m completely different from the other people she knows.
……
Halfway through Chi Qing’s reading, a message from L arrived again.
L: You haven’t paid attention to me for ten minutes.
The next sentence:
L: Are you really considering replacing me?
Chi Qing took a screenshot of the chat and sent it over.
Chi Qing: Look at this.
The opposite L fell silent for a long time. The sound of the man tapping on the keyboard became serious. A few minutes later, he also sent over a similar segment of chat history.
Jin Hongbo: I made her angry.
Friend: Just give her the cold shoulder, who does she think she is.
Jin Hongbo: Scram, what cold shoulder? I definitely have to go and coax her.
Jin Hongbo: Seriously, there has never been a girl like her whose anger I actually find cute.
The timestamp for this segment of dialogue was also a month ago.
Within the past month, a “she” had appeared when both of these individuals chatted with their close friends.
L: Her emotional intelligence is quite high.
L: She’s a master at fishing.
After changing the screening strategy, progress on Ji Mingrui’s end remained exceptionally sluggish: “There are too many people. This Wang Yuan is a pickup artist; every single one of his ‘she’ references points to a different girl.”
Chi Qing: ……
Xie Lin: ……
In the end, Chi Qing reminded him: “Look for the one from the past month.”
Ji Mingrui: “Tangtang? Mianmian? Xiaorou?”
Xie Lin narrowed down the scope: “Which one was the most special to him? Since the other party approached with a purpose, she would definitely make him feel like he was the special one. Look for someone who is no longer in the friends list but was frequently mentioned within the span of a month.”
In this way, the target was narrowed down significantly.
Ji Mingrui locked onto the name that was mentioned the most: Tangtang.
Moreover, the most important thing was that he couldn’t find anyone with the note “Tangtang” in the list. Scanning around, judging from the chat logs, the other “little sisters” all had their own respective names.
This discovery was very important.
The case investigation had a new direction.
“During the same period of time, all three of them encountered a girl who appeared online and held a very favorable opinion of them. If it’s a coincidence, the timing of her appearance is a bit too coincidental.”
On the whiteboard, another arrow was dragged out from the bottom right corner of the photos of several victims.
Xie Lin held a black marker between his fingers and wrote the word “Netizen” in the blank space.
The weather today wasn’t good; it was an overcast day. The orientation of their meeting room didn’t even face south. The gray light filtered through the window and hit Xie Lin: “Furthermore, without exception, these few girls have all vanished from the social lists of the deceased.”
One or two could still be explained away as a coincidence. For three victims to all be like this, it defied explanation.
They couldn’t find the accounts, nor could they find the person behind the accounts.
He closed his eyes, almost able to picture a month ago—or perhaps a bit earlier—three high school students playing games in class as usual, or hiding their phones in their desk drawers to watch movies, and talking nonsense with friends on social software.
Jiang Yiyun was conducting her lesson in the classroom. She was completely helpless against those few problem boys in the back row, so she averted her eyes, pretending not to see.
A “beep” sounded.
At a certain moment, an unfamiliar social account requested to add them as a friend.
[You are now friends, start chatting now.]
Inside the classroom, the sunlight beamed in. A stranger on the other end of the network always made people feel an extra sense of mystery.
They casually sent over a sentence:
—— Hello.
At that time, they still didn’t know what this online encounter would entail.
The meeting room once fell into a blanket of silence.
Chi Qing’s eyes had been lowered all along. Suddenly, he asked a question: “Then what about Yu Lan?”
“Yeah, these people are all male students,” Ji Mingrui said. “What about Yu Lan’s side? How did the killer approach her? We looked through her chat logs for so long just now, but she didn’t mention getting to know any new netizens at all. No little girls added her—let alone girls, there were no strangers.”
Su Xiaolan: “Yes, it’s impossible for the killer to have deleted everything so cleanly. The roaming records for all the friends in the list are still there. Why did Yu Lan never mention it to her friends?”
Yu Lan always remained completely incompatible with the victimization logic of the other three.
On the character relationship map, the area pointed to by the arrow dragged out from the bottom right corner of Yu Lan’s photo was a blank space.
Although Yu Lan liked to surf the internet, it was purely because typing was convenient given her circumstances. Her online world was just as simple as her real world. Her recent chat history with friends was entirely about the cat she had recently adopted; she had given that cat a beautiful name called Little Star. Aside from that, there was no other content.
Chi Qing remembered that the cat’s eyes did indeed shine as brightly as flickering stars.
“Little Star……”
Yu Yang pushed open the door to his home after school. He carried his backpack over one shoulder, threw the backpack near the entryway after entering, and said to the cat crouching at the door, “Time to eat.”
Yu Yang’s mood was not good. He still went to class every day, but he just sat listlessly in the classroom, utterly oblivious to what the teacher was lecturing or where the lesson had reached. He was originally supposed to organize physical education class activities, but after a moment of silence, he said: “Teacher, please switch to someone else. I can’t continue serving as a class committee member.”
Yu Yang only had Yu Lan left as his relative.
The people close to him had left him one by one. He forced himself to return home and poured cat food into the cat’s food bowl.
As if the cat knew what had happened, it followed Yu Yang wherever he walked. Even though it was still hungry right now, it didn’t go to eat the cat food in the bowl. It rubbed its head against the leg of Yu Yang’s trousers: “Meow……”
Yu Yang completely broke down in this empty room.
He slowly squatted down, his tears crashing straight down onto the floor as he murmured in a low voice: “Is this a dream?”
“Meow……”
“Do you know who she was going to meet?” Yu Yang felt that he might be going crazy, otherwise how could he think of asking a cat that couldn’t speak? “It’s my fault. When she told me she had an appointment to go out with a friend tomorrow, I should have asked clearly—asked exactly who it was.”
“She only has those few friends, and it wasn’t any of them. Who was she going to meet? Do you know? Can you tell me?”
Yu Yang and the cat stared at each other quietly for a long time.
Finally, he lowered his head: “Forget it.”
Yu Yang’s neck remained drooped. He truly couldn’t figure out why it was Yu Lan, why it had to be… why…
Just as he thought of this, the cat suddenly let out another “meow.”
Only, this “meow” sounded a bit muffled compared to just now, as if it were biting something in its mouth.
Yu Yang slowly raised his head and discovered that the cat was laboriously rummaging through the storage box beneath Yu Lan’s desk, its mouth holding tightly onto a transparent box, refusing to let go. The box was tied with a ribbon, which quickly came undone, and finally, the items inside the transparent box scattered all over the floor.
Scattered all over the floor were colorful paper stars.
They were the kind of small trinkets that girls habitually loved to fold.
Yu Yang took a look. At that moment, for some unknown reason, his heart skipped a beat. Then, as if possessed, he picked up a paper star closest to him, slowly unfolding it along the creases of the origami.
A line of familiar handwriting was written on it.
Yu Lan’s elegant handwriting had written a sentence on it: He hasn’t replied to my messages for the past two days. I’m very worried about him.
