“Morning,” at eight o’clock, at the headquarters. Ji Mingrui climbed the stairs with materials in hand, pushed open the door to a small conference room, and greeted the people inside with infectious enthusiasm. “I’ve brought all the archived records of the former Class 1, Grade 10. Didn’t expect us to be assigned to the same team! Has everyone eaten breakfast? How about we start work after we finish eating?”
As he spoke, Ji Mingrui placed the bags of breakfast he was carrying onto the large round table in the conference room.
Inside the bags were soy milk, steamed buns, fried dough sticks, sandwiches… a fusion of Chinese and Western, everything one could want.
The investigation into the campus murder case had been divided into several directions.
Because the crime occurred within their precinct, it was convenient for them to gather data and conduct interviews. Combined with the fact that the group of “new recruits” already had experience participating in major cases, the three of them had been assigned to this task once again.
Headquarters had allocated a few rooms to them, with each room handling different tasks; they were primarily responsible for clerical work, sitting together to review the files of the former Class 1.
The various groups worked independently.
But there was one exception—consultants were free to enter and exit all groups as they pleased.
At this moment, the two consultants from headquarters were both sitting in the conference room’s sofa chairs, dozing off.
As the weather warmed, Chi Qing was wearing a black hoodie. Perhaps to avoid noise while sleeping, he had the hood pulled up; the wide brim slumped down to his nose bridge, his red lips pursed. The weather forecast predicted rain today, so he had a transparent long-handled umbrella resting by his side, its silver handle looking cold and sharp. The man, curled up there, was the living embodiment of four words in a loop: “Don’t come near me.”
Xie Lin, who wasn’t afraid of death and sat right next to him, wasn’t sleeping. He was squinting, looking a bit drowsy, flipping through a book titled Learning to Observe: Identifying a Person’s Identity in Three Minutes. It was hard to tell if he was actually reading it seriously.
Hearing Ji Mingrui enter the room, he raised his brows slightly, habitually hooked the corner of his mouth, and pulled out a harmless, charming smile: “Good morning, Officer Ji.”
Ji Mingrui: “What’s wrong with you two? What did you do last night? Didn’t you sleep all night?”
Xie Lin closed the book and replied politely: “…There was a power outage last night, so we didn’t sleep well.”
Ji Mingrui “Oh”-ed upon hearing this.
A power outage sounded like a small mishap at first glance.
“Your apartment complex had a blackout last night? Ours is the same, always cutting power or water…”
It was only after he finished speaking and stuffed a bun into his mouth that it dawned on him: What did a power outage have to do with sleeping poorly? One doesn’t need to keep lights on to sleep. Was there any inevitable connection between an evening power outage and sleep quality?
There was, of course, no inevitable connection.
After Chi Qing grabbed his wrist last night and said “Let’s try again,” Xie Lin had lain back down.
But after another hour or so passed, Chi Qing still couldn’t sleep. Holding onto the hope that Chi Qing would take the initiative to kick him off the bed, Xie Lin had pushed his luck, slipping his hand into the gap between the hem of Chi Qing’s pajamas.
“…Didn’t you say let’s try?” Xie Lin had said. “Let’s try something else. I didn’t have experience last time, let’s see if there’s any improvement this time.”
In the silence, Chi Qing reached up and placed his hand over Xie Lin’s roaming fingers.
His finger joints were very stiff.
After dozens of seconds passed, that stiff hand didn’t exert even a bit of force to push him away. Even if it wasn’t a comfortable habit, he had acquiesced to Xie Lin’s actions.
Xie Lin: “…”
In the dark, Xie Lin eventually admitted defeat and sighed.
“Does it make you uncomfortable when I do this?”
“It’s just not very easy to adapt to,” Chi Qing said.
“Then why don’t you resist?”
“Didn’t I say we were trying?”
…
He really was a man of his word.
Xie Lin finally stopped at the appropriate time and pulled his hand back. The two of them had toughed it out for a few more hours, finally getting some sleep just before dawn.
Even though the experience of their first night sleeping together wasn’t ideal, given Chi Qing’s level of mysophobia, allowing him onto the bed, enduring the whole night, and finally successfully sleeping for over three hours was quite an achievement.
Ji Mingrui didn’t know the inside story, and he didn’t have the time to think about it. After devouring his breakfast in a few bites, he started burying his head in the files: “I’ve made copies, one for everyone… That person over there sleeping, wake up.”
Xie Lin took the materials Ji Mingrui handed over, while simultaneously holding up a finger to his lips, gesturing for silence.
“Just give them to me, let him sleep a little longer.”
Ji Mingrui: “?”
He really wanted to say: Is headquarters a place to nap? Even if you two are consultants, you can’t be this arrogant, can you?
Chi Qing was a light sleeper. He had been somewhat aware since the moment Ji Mingrui entered, drifting in and out of consciousness. When he finally opened his eyes, Xie Lin had just flipped through a few pages of the materials in his hand: “Awake?”
Chi Qing looked at the thick stack of data sheets—over thirty students in one class, all their exam grades and test papers bundled together: “Any clues?”
Xie Lin: “None for now. There are too many people in one class; it will take some time to finish reading. There are 35 students in total.”
Chi Qing noticed Xie Lin was flipping the materials from back to front: “You’re starting from the back?”
Xie Lin’s fingers rested on the page. The page he had opened to was the first exam of the tenth grade. On the candidate grade sheet, this student’s ranking was fourth from the bottom, with a small note in the upper right corner: 31/35.
Name of the student: Yu Yang.
“If Wang Yuan’s little group had more than three members, the others who hung out with them should also be in this score range.”
“You think there were more than three of them?”
“Most of the mobile games on the market have teams of four to five people. I am indeed more inclined to believe there were more than three of them; it’s just that when they were streamed into different classes in the eleventh grade, the rest might not have been assigned to the same class.”
As Xie Lin spoke, he turned the page of the exam data again, and the ranking rose by one position with the movement.
The page read: 30/35. Name: Bo Zhixing.
Throughout the entire tenth grade, there were countless exams, large and small.
Chi Qing didn’t intend to go back to sleep. He pulled the hood off his forehead, took a stack of materials from the side, and began to flip through them. After a long silence, he said: “These two people had scores neck-and-neck with Wang Yuan and the others in the first few exams, but by the time tenth grade was ending, the student named Yu Yang’s grades kept improving.”
Xie Lin had noticed it too: “The teachers’ evaluations of him were also very positive, praising him for finally putting his heart into his studies. He was promising material.”
In the final exam, Yu Yang climbed over a dozen places, his grades jumping from the bottom tier to the middle.
15/34.
As for the student named Bo Zhixing, his grades remained very stable, neck-and-neck with the three deceased victims. In this exam, if it wasn’t one of them taking the last place, it was the other; the four of them took turns.
From this point of view, it was highly probable that Bo Zhixing was a member of their little group.
But what was going on with this “34”?
Both of them simultaneously noticed the change in the class size—from 35 to 34. One student had suddenly disappeared.
“Transferred?” Ji Mingrui guessed from the side.
Su Xiaolan said calmly: “Very possible. Mid-term transfers aren’t rare; staff changes are normal. Let me flip forward to see who the missing student is.”
After comparing the two grade sheets, Su Xiaolan found the student who was no longer on the candidate list after a certain exam among the thirty-some names.
Class 1, Grade 10: Xu Xingzhou.
His exam rankings were usually stable in the top five.
“Xu Xingzhou, he was a very good child.”
The group set off again for Honghai No. 6 Middle School. It was just lunch hour, and there was basically no one in the teaching building. The grade head who had managed the tenth grade last year had been waiting for them in the office since receiving their phone notification half an hour ago.
The grade head didn’t have the look of someone overly severe. He had been working at the school for over a decade. In his youth, he loved to discipline students, but over the years, his temper had softened, and he often chatted with the kids instead of restraining them with rigid rules.
The director poured them a pot of tea. His features were kind, and he wore a string of Buddhist beads on his wrist. After pouring the tea, he put down the teapot and let out a long sigh: “It’s a tragedy.”
“He transferred?” Ji Mingrui wanted to verify his guess.
The director shook his head extremely slowly: “No, he… met with an accident. He secretly kept the pesticide used by the janitor to spray the greenery, and drank it in the dormitory building. He wasn’t found until the next day, and by the time they found him, it was too late to save him.”
Suicide.
Su Xiaolan asked a sharp question: “We haven’t heard about this incident before. We’ve been investigating for so long, and you didn’t proactively disclose it.”
The director said: “I know you want to ask if there was some other hidden secret, but there truly wasn’t. It’s just that the school is a bit sensitive about this matter. When something like this happens—whether a student takes poison or jumps off a building—we certainly don’t want it spread around. Spreading it would have a huge impact on the school… You officers all know our school; our college entrance rate was never great, we aren’t one of the prestigious schools in the city.”
“And the police came at the time, and it was investigated very clearly—it was suicide.”
“Your precinct should have the files; you can go back and check. I also gave a statement at the time.”
They hadn’t looked in the direction of an “accident” before, but if it was truly the situation the grade head described, pulling the files would make it clear.
There should be no doubt about the authenticity.
Mentioning Xu Xingzhou, the director felt deeply saddened: “Such a good child, why would he give up on life? All of our teachers liked him. Well-behaved, obedient, and he had a good personality. He was neat and clean, and he always wore a white shirt. He said he wanted to become a doctor in the future… Why would he give up on life?”
Chi Qing didn’t walk inside. He leaned against the doorframe, imagining the appearance of a tenth-grade boy.
He didn’t know what Xu Xingzhou actually looked like, so when he pictured him, a gray mist covered his vision.
Xie Lin, sitting in the sofa chair, suddenly spoke up: “Why did he commit suicide?”
“The real reason, I’m afraid, only he himself knew,” said the director. “But based on what we knew about him, he was from a reconstituted family. His parents divorced, and he followed his father away from the environment he was familiar with, coming to Huannan City. That is very unfavorable for a child’s growth. Broken family, unfamiliar environment.”
The director took off the glasses on his nose bridge and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, saying only after a long while: “It was our negligence too, failing to notice his psychological problems… He might have been enduring a lot of unknown pressure and pain all along.”
