As the only available channel to communicate with “z,” Xie Lin’s account was placed under heavy surveillance by the police task force.
Looking at the text displayed on the monitoring screens, the other detectives asked in bewilderment, “A familiar game? What game?”
It was difficult for Xie Lin and Chi Qing to answer that question.
That game—it was a bloody, brutal game of survival.
Back then, the culprit had kidnapped teenagers who were generally in middle school. They already possessed a preliminary understanding of the world and their own ways of thinking. Yet, even those middle schoolers had ended up like that in the “game.” What would happen to this group of much younger elementary school children? How terrified would they be?
Did they truly understand what murder meant? Did they know what it meant to pick up a knife?
…After a few seconds of silence, Xie Lin dropped the casual, rakish demeanor from his face for the first time, becoming remarkably solemn. “The situation these children are in is likely far more dangerous than any of you previously anticipated.”
Sure enough, as if validating Xie Lin’s words, the police station received an anonymous video the following day.
The video footage was pitch black. The location appeared extremely dark, as if completely devoid of any light source. When the camera lens swept across objects, it could only capture vague silhouettes. It was difficult for the naked eye to discern what was being filmed in such a pitch-black environment.
Only the audio was crystal clear. They could distinctly hear a sequence of footsteps, followed by the creak of a door being pushed open. It was only after this door opened that other sounds came filtering through.
Before anyone else in the conference room could react, Chi Qing—who was exceptionally sensitive to sound—said in a cold voice, “It’s crying.” The children were crying.
Aside from the sharp or suppressed whimpering, a shrill, agonizing shriek suddenly erupted. Accompanying it was a muffled, blunt thudding sound. The sound felt like a blunt knife hacking down, striking a chord of dread in everyone.
“Is someone smashing objects?” a detective asked blankly.
Who was smashing? Why were they smashing? And… what were they smashing?
Everyone was curious about the rhythmic blunt thudding, listening in utter bewilderment. However, at that moment, Chi Qing—who had remained expressionless through several cases regardless of how brutal the modus operandi was or how shocking the crime scenes appeared—turned somewhat pale.
Granted, his complexion was already pale enough to begin with, habitually lacking color. Even though he wasn’t touching any physical object and his hands were safely tucked inside his sleeves, he felt an unprovoked sense of filth. A feeling akin to a severe germaphobic trigger surged from the depths of his heart.
He knew exactly what was being smashed. It was a person.
“I’m going to the restroom.”
_
Inside the restroom, the sound of rushing water filled the space. Chi Qing washed his hands aimlessly, over and over again.
Eventually, a pair of hands reached over from the side and turned off the faucet. The sound of water ceased. Xie Lin said nothing. As one of the two survivors from back then, he fully understood why Chi Qing had reacted this way.
He silently used a paper towel to wipe the moisture from Chi Qing’s hands before speaking, “The Bureau Chief wants the two of us to head over to his office. There will be a few other detectives inside. This case bears too much resemblance to the one from ten years ago; it’s currently suspected to be a copycat crime. They need us to cooperate and recount our experiences regarding the details of the case back then… Can you handle it?”
Xie Lin wanted to tell him not to go if he couldn’t handle it, but Chi Qing replied, “…I can.”
Xie Lin and Chi Qing had conducted countless interrogations before. This time, just like in the past, they sat on the opposite side of the table. The detectives opposite them held pens and paper, and the atmosphere inside the room felt constricted.
Both Xie Lin and Chi Qing appeared somewhat ill at ease. Chi Qing twitched his fingers slightly. Xie Lin raised his hand to undo the top button of his dress shirt.
Noticing the other detectives looking over at him, Chi Qing remarked, “I’m a bit unaccustomed to this.”
Following up on his words, Xie Lin explained further, “We’re usually interrogated as suspects. We can’t quite adapt to the identity of victims all of a sudden.”
“Format…” The detectives were speechless. How does someone get so used to being a suspect?
Only a handful of detectives participated in this inquiry. They deeply understood the significance of this conversation and knew that the confidentiality level of the case ten years ago had always been kept at the highest tier. Most of them had even personally participated in the investigation back then.
To this day, they could clearly recall the city-wide sensation from ten years ago. It had caused them sleepless nights, and their dreams were often haunted by the desperate cries of parents—cries identical to the ones echoing at the entrance of the Tianxin Residential Quarter right now.
—”Save my child—!”
—”When will my child come back? When can I see him?”
—”Has the killer not been caught yet… Is my child still alive…”
“Back then,” the interrogating detective began, never expecting that a question they refrained from asking the survivors all those years ago would be posed in this manner today, “how did you two survive?”
“And what exactly was that game?”
Even though they all had their own conjectures regarding the answer—which was precisely why they had been so wary of Xie Lin for so many years, deeming him too dangerous to remain at the Main Bureau.
After a long pause, Xie Lin said, “You survive by killing.”
“Similarly, as long as you ensure you aren’t killed by someone else, you can also survive.”
Xie Lin hadn’t even killed the serial kidnapping culprit back then, so it was even less possible for him to lay a hand on the people sharing his room. However, nearly every single roommate had made a move against him.
“I’ve been choked by the throat in the middle of the night. Someone tried to gouge my eyes out with chopsticks while eating, and someone else stabbed me with a secretly hidden fish bone. Even under those conditions, the methods of killing remained numerous. They would lie, beg for mercy, and cry about how desperately they wanted to live.”
“The first person who died in front of me didn’t make it past the first week of the game. Before the final day arrived, he couldn’t take it anymore and committed suicide,” Xie Lin recalled that dark, confined room. “From the moment I entered, his mental state was highly unstable. Only later did I find out he had witnessed the culprit kill a defiant child—that child had been his very first roommate.”
“After I moved in, he would frequently talk to the wall by himself, as if there were a third person in the room.”
“Right before the first round of the game ended, that night was the only moment his mental state appeared entirely normal. He looked at me very seriously and asked, ‘Let me kill you, so I can stay alive, alright?’“
At the time, Xie Lin had thought to himself: I’m not the one who went crazy. Why would I let you kill me? I’ll just adapt to whatever happens on the final day, but it’s impossible for me to actually kill someone.
Xie Lin didn’t answer. His roommate remained silent for a long time. Finally, the boy looked up, staring at the boarded-up window for a very long duration before uttering a single sentence: “It’s been so long since I last saw the sun.”
“Those were the last words he ever spoke. When I woke up the next morning and opened my eyes, I saw a pair of feet dangling in the air.”
Xie Lin followed those suspended feet upward and discovered that the boy had stripped off his clothes, torn them into strips, and tied the pieces of fabric together to fashion a “rope,” hanging himself from a protruding beam in the room. The beam was old and the wood was cracked, unable to bear the weight stably. As a result, the corpse hung unsteadily, its rigid legs dangling with the toes pointing toward the ground. The entire body was already completely cold.
On the day before the first round of the game ended, unable to withstand the immense psychological pressure, he chose suicide.
…When Chi Qing had initially learned that Xie Lin was wanted, he had also wondered internally how Xie Lin managed to survive. Today, that question finally found its answer. Xie Lin was just like him—they were forced into confinement within the darkness, holding tools that could be used to commit violence, yet neither of them had ever raised a hand against another.
_
“The truth behind the case ten years ago… turned out to be like this.”
The detective in charge of the recording shut the thick, yellowed case file. Back then, this file had left several blank pages precisely due to the lack of interrogation statements from the survivors. The pure white blank pages had now become thin and brittle, their edges slightly curled. The newly added black ink markings gave it an even greater sense of antiquity.
One detective remarked, “But this case is so troublesome. Back then, so many lives were sacrificed and so much effort was spent just to crack it. This time…”
This time, they were dealing with another once-in-a-decade twisted killer. The difficulty of the case was by no means lower than the one from ten years ago.
“No,” Xie Lin spoke up suddenly from across the table. He had just unscrewed a bottle of mineral water and handed it to Chi Qing. “This case won’t be more difficult than the one ten years ago.”
Everyone failed to grasp his meaning immediately. “Why do you say that?”
Xie Lin stated, “Because I won’t let the events of ten years ago happen a second time.”
Following that, Xie Lin and Chi Qing spoke in turn, finishing each other’s thoughts:
“If the rules of the game still involve changing rooms every seven days, we still have five days left to solve the case.”
“In fact, the case itself has already provided quite a few clues. Since he chose a ‘copycat crime,’ there must be commonalities between the two cases. This is the clue ‘he’ left behind for us—for instance, the matching locations for the crime must possess highly distinct features. It must be a remote, enclosed, and tightly bounded area with different rooms, or space that can be partitioned into multiple units.”
“The signal in that place will almost certainly be jammed, because some of the children are wearing electronic watches with GPS tracking capabilities.”
“And there is one final, most crucial clue—one that can directly lead us to him…”
At this point, both Xie Lin and Chi Qing fell silent for two seconds simultaneously before speaking in unison: “The clue is the case from ten years ago.”
The detectives understood instantly. The killer knew the case from ten years ago far too well.
Why was he so intimately acquainted with the undisclosed details of that case? What connection did he share with the culprit from back then?
…And what was the true meaning behind the final words spoken by that culprit during his trial ten years ago?
In that split second, everyone recalled that low, eerie sentence spoken during the trial that had shocked the entire gallery. The man had seemed to be smiling as he spoke:
—”You can neither kill nor capture me.”
The specific investigation and screening work did not fall under the purview of Xie Lin and Chi Qing. By the time the meeting concluded, it was already evening. Fearing they might cause a commotion, the two still wore face masks when they went out. Bidding farewell to the days of hiding and returning to the residential quarter where they had previously resided brought a strange sense of transience.
Xie Lin parked the car in the garage. As he stepped out, he noticed Chi Qing staring intently at the elevator doors. “What’s wrong?”
Chi Qing replied, “Nothing. It just suddenly feels like a long time has passed.”
He recalled the day he was looking for an apartment—the very first day he stepped into this residential quarter. A certain Landlord Xie, who was running a deficit business, had kept trying to persuade him by his ear, and by a strange twist of fate, the two ended up living directly across from each other.
Back then, it was just the beginning of a bitter winter. A biting, frequently rainy winter.
“At the time, I was worried you wouldn’t be willing to rent it,” Xie Lin remarked. “It took quite a bit of coaxing on my part.”
Chi Qing asked casually, following the topic, “Why were you so insistent on having me rent it back then?”
Xie Lin grinned. “I wanted to be closer to you, of course.”
That was blatant nonsense. Back then, there was absolutely no affection to speak of between the two, only the camaraderie built from getting into a mutual fistfight and ending up at the police station together.
Chi Qing muttered, “Speak human language.”
Xie Lin spoke the truth: “I wanted to investigate you. I felt like you were a bit suspicious.”
Recalling the impression Xie Lin had given him at the time, Chi Qing countered, “Your level of suspicion wasn’t low either.”
It was rare for Chi Qing to indulge in such slightly sentimental reflections. However, this rare sentimentality vanished into thin air the moment the elevator reached their floor, the doors slid open, and he caught sight of two full rows of white chrysanthemums lining the doorway—flowers that no one had managed to clear away yet.
Chi Qing: “…”
Xie Lin stepped forward to check the card on the flowers. “…………Sent by Ren Qin.”
“The cat is currently being raised at her place too. Even if you miss it, there’s nothing we can do right now. If you go knock on Ren Qin’s door, she might faint on the spot.”
Only after moving the piles of white chrysanthemums aside did Chi Qing manage to locate the door lock. Upon opening the door, they discovered that all the furniture inside the apartment had been covered with white sheets.
Every single detail silently declared one fact: The master of this house is deceased.
