Once those footsteps passed, the entrance door slammed shut with a deafening boom. From that moment until the day Chi Qing left that place, that door never opened again.
Xie Lin: “After I got in, I was locked in a room where there was only one other child. The moment he mentioned which school he was from, I knew his name; there were records about him in the case files. I asked him a lot of things, but he was already mentally unstable.”
The previous roommate had been dragged out and had stopped breathing after a bout of agonizing screams—anyone would break down under those circumstances.
Xie Lin already had his ears pierced back then. Although he didn’t wear earrings often, he wore a black stud in his right ear on the day he entered that place—only he and Xie Feng knew that the stud was actually a tracker.
In truth, it was rather uncommon for a teenage student to wear an earring.
That person had also grown suspicious: “What’s that thing on your ear?”
It was all thanks to Xie Lin’s face.
Xie Lin raised his hand to touch his ear: “A gift from a girl.”
Xie Lin offhandedly delivered a classic “playboy” speech: “A guy like me gets chased by a lot of girls at school, and I’ve dated quite a few. I quite like the one I’m with this time, so I’ve been carrying the gift she gave me on my person… though I can’t be sure how long I’ll keep liking her. Do I need to take it off? It’s a bit of a pity, but it’s no big deal. There’s always the next girl anyway.”
“……”
The black stud didn’t look out of place on Xie Lin at all. Even though the youth was wearing a clean school uniform, as he stood by the iron door with one hand stuffed into his uniform pocket and his back leaning against the door—his expression lazy and his slightly upturned bedroom eyes filled with frivolous charm—he really looked the part.
This was also the reason Xie Lin had been willing to go in.
The tracker was highly unlikely to work here, as the police couldn’t find a single lead, meaning there was probably some kind of signal jamming device in place. But if he could find a way to get this tracker to the outside…
Xie Lin knew this plan would be incredibly difficult to pull off.
Therefore, he needed an “ally.”
He couldn’t do this alone.
The first person he approached was the child sharing his room, but he couldn’t even finish his sentence: “I have a plan, you…”
Xie Lin’s words were cut off by the child in his room, who was curled up in the corner. A peculiar odor had already begun to form in the space.
His eyes were like a pair of black spotlights. Staring unblinkingly at the wall behind Xie Lin, he said, “You are a ghost.”
Xie Lin: “What ghost?”
“……”
“Who are you talking to?”
“Shh,” the child’s pupils darted left and right as he whispered, “He’s back.”
The child experienced intermittent episodes. Unconsciously, his fingers clawed at the grey paint on the wall beside him. His fingernails were already tearing away from the flesh, leaving blood-red streaks across the grey surface as plaster cascaded down. Scraping away, he muttered, “I saw him again. He’s back. Is he trying to take me away too?”
The child’s fingers suddenly dug in hard, his nails scraping against the wall with a piercing, screeching sound.
His expression turned distorted: “No—I’m going to survive. I will definitely survive. I don’t want to die.”
He’s a complete lunatic.
Mentally unstable.
Xie Lin frowned as he looked at him. Behind him was the door secured with iron chains, the entire room was dilapidated, and there was a madman inside. He sighed, thinking to himself that executing this plan would probably be far more difficult than he had imagined.
Over the next few days, he attempted to establish contact with the people in the adjacent rooms by tapping on the walls, but without exception, every attempt sank like a stone into the ocean.
No one had the mental bandwidth to pay attention to the sound of tapping on a wall.
Fortunately, the rooms were merged and shuffled every week according to a cruel set of rules.
So, with each passing week, Xie Lin would try again.
“They claimed they only captured kids with high IQs, but I barely ran into any smart ones,” Xie Lin said. “Just when I was about to give up, I encountered a kid.”
He was tapping Morse code on the wall, and almost no one had ever responded to him.
Just as Xie Lin was about to give up on relying on others and resolve to help himself, late at night in the room of the new week, he heard the sound of someone tapping on the wall.
Xie Lin didn’t expose his purpose right away. He tapped out a greeting: Hello.
The other side replied: Not good.
Xie Lin: Why not good?
The other side: Because you are too loud.
On that first night, the communication between the two consisted of only those four phrases, totaling no more than fifteen characters.
Hearing up to this point, Chi Qing’s expression gradually became subtle.
Xie Lin noticed that Chi Qing actually seemed to mind the term “kid”: “Who are you calling a kid?”
“?”
Xie Lin muller it over, suspecting that Chi Qing was being jealous. He stopped to coax him: “It was a poor choice of words on my part. In this world, you’re the only ‘kid’ I know; I don’t remember any other kids. Don’t be angry, I’ll change the word for him. Is ‘little brat’ alright?”
Yet the words “little brat” somehow triggered an even bigger reaction than “kid” just now. Chi Qing said, “You weren’t very old yourself back then. Did he count as small? Why call him a little brat?”
“……?”
Now Xie Lin was truly at a loss as to why Chi Qing’s reaction was so intense.
Another minute passed before a realization dawned in his mind: “You…”
He and Chi Qing were both among those who had been captured.
If among all those children, there was anyone who could calmly tap out a response like “you are too loud” under such circumstances…
…Aside from his dear boyfriend, it seemed difficult to find a second person.
With a blank expression, Chi Qing took over Xie Lin’s words: “So you were that incredibly annoying person from back then.”
Time was pulled back to that night.
Although Chi Qing had found the voice from the other side annoying, neither of them fell asleep after the tapping stopped.
In such an environment and under such “game rules,” no one dared to sleep. Everyone’s nerves were tightly strung. Chi Qing stared at the child sharing his room—whom he had bound to the corner with iron chains—yet his mood had miraculously eased for a brief moment because of that meaningless exchange just now.
After a long interval, the other side tapped out another sentence: Can I find you again tomorrow then?
Chi Qing stared at the ash-white wall. After a long pause, he curved his finger and tapped on the wall once as a response.
Xie Lin was rarely caught this off guard: “……That person was really you?”
Chi Qing was also quite speechless: “……It was me.”
“……”
The two held each other in the darkness, falling silent for a long time.
The hand Xie Lin had originally placed on top of Chi Qing’s head slid down slightly, his thumb lightly and playfully brushing against the side of Chi Qing’s neck: “So we’ve been speaking to each other since back then.”
No one could have imagined that ten years ago, they had once been so close.
The next day.
Ji Mingrui was driving, skillfully turning the steering wheel to pull into a parking spot near the church.
After getting out of the vehicle, he shut the car door, walked through the green belt, and glanced at the bench by the street.
The bench outside the church was completely empty.
The ruins were still the same ruins, no different from yesterday daytime.
However, the church door—which had originally been tightly shut—had been opened slightly at some point, leaving a crack that was virtually imperceptible unless one looked closely. It wasn’t until early the next morning, when Ji Mingrui got up before dawn to review the scene and see if anything had been overlooked, that he noticed something was off. After putting on his gloves to avoid contaminating the scene, his hand rested on the brass-colored handle of the church door. Before he could even push it open, a sense of unease struck him.
“What’s going on?” Ji Mingrui looked down at the door handle. “I clearly shut the door when I left yesterday.”
Could another police officer have come to check the scene even earlier than him?
Su Xiaolan had mentioned in passing yesterday that she might come over this morning.
Thus, Ji Mingrui still pushed the door open. The word “Officer” had just formed in his mouth after “Officer Su” when the rest of his words automatically died out. His eyes widened as he blurted: “……What on earth is going on.”
“Don’t go over there, someone died in the church ahead…”
“What awful luck. It just got burned down, and now a life has been lost. Is this church cursed or something?”
Early in the morning, a large crowd had gathered once again outside the church, which had briefly returned to being deserted.
They huddled together, whispering among themselves.
Some believers clutched the crucifix necklaces on their chests, praying in low voices: “Lord…”
“Make way, everyone make way.”
The crowd was dispersed by the criminal police, dividing the pedestrians into two rows on the left and right. A group of people who had rushed over from the General Headquarters walked into the church through the space cleared in the middle.
Xie Lin and Chi Qing were at the tail end of the line.
No one expected that after just one night, a corpse would be hanging from the very wall in the church where the names of several killers were written.
The perpetrator had used two wooden pillars that had fallen from the church ceiling to serve as a crucifix, binding and securing them with wire. After the wire secured the pillars, it was wound around the ceiling above. The pillars were burned to a charred black, resembling two dark iron frames.
A person was bound right at the center of the cross.
The person’s neck was not secured, hanging down at a bizarre, fractured angle, their chin almost buried in their chest. One shoe had fallen off their foot, and their two legs hung perfectly straight in mid-air.
This person possessed no particular distinguishing features, wearing an ordinary denim jacket and sweatpants, looking as though they had gone out for a night run.
Even though the victim’s identity appeared ordinary, the scene before them—which was an exact replica of the “Crucifixion Painting” that had originally hung on the wall—still caused everyone’s breath to hitch.
After a long time, someone asked with a tingling scalp, “What exactly does he want to do?”
What a twisted instigator was thinking was a question no normal person could answer.
But everyone knew that there was perhaps one person who could answer this question.
Everyone present silently turned their gazes toward one of the two men who had walked in last.
Facing the two pillars before him, Xie Lin offered a near-playful hypothesis: “Perhaps he felt the previous way of saying hello lacked a sense of ritual.”
“……?”
A sense of ritual.
Was this a joke?
Xie Lin continued, “Of course, merely for a sense of ritual wouldn’t warrant him taking such a risk to kill another person. Therefore, there must be a message he wants to convey here, and this message is highly important.”
After Xie Lin finished speaking, he turned to Chi Qing, who was standing beside him: “Did you bring gloves?”
Chi Qing wasn’t wearing any on his hands, but he had a pair prepared in his coat pocket.
Xie Lin: “Borrowing them from my partner for a moment.”
Ji Mingrui watched as Xie Lin quite naturally reached his hand directly into Chi Qing’s pocket, pulled out a pair of black gloves, and put them on unhurriedly. Afterward, he placed his left hand over his right wrist, pinching the edge of the glove to adjust its fit. While adjusting, he signaled to the criminal police nearby to lower the corpse from the wooden pillars.
Xie Lin’s gloved hands hadn’t searched the corpse for long before he felt something inside the pocket of the victim’s upper denim jacket. It was hard, rectangular, and possessed some thickness.
Xie Lin reached inside to explore, caught the edge of the object, and pulled it out to find that it was an audio cassette tape.
There was no equipment inside the church capable of playing a cassette tape.
The cassette tape was brought back to the General Headquarters as evidence. After undergoing a round of fingerprint testing, it was finally delivered to the meeting room.
A player had already been prepared on the meeting room table.
A detective inserted the cassette tape. Once the play button was pressed, the tape began to spin slowly. After a faint burst of static noise passed, a nursery rhyme slowly began to drift out, filling the entire meeting room with the innocent and pure singing of children:
“Look, look, look for a friend, find a good friend, look, look, look for a friend, who is my good friend?”
