No one finished their lunch. Ji Mingrui was the first to snap out of it. In a single second, he savagely shoveled a massive mouthful of rice into his mouth, grabbed his phone and keychain from the edge of the table, and bolted out of the cafeteria: “!@#￥%……！￥!”
His mouth was stuffed so full that no one could make out a single word he was saying.
Jiang Yu and Su Xiaolan followed closely on his heels: “Can you swallow your food before you try to speak?!”
“*……%@!”
Xie Lin brought up the rear of the group at an unhurried pace, asking Chi Qing, “What is he saying?”
Chi Qing replied with a look of difficulty, “Even if I had mind-reading abilities, it would be hard to translate non-human languages.”
Ji Mingrui ran for over two hundred meters before his words finally became somewhat intelligible. Translating it into human speech, he said: “I said I just remembered—Yu Yang’s file shows he has an older sister!”
“…His sister shares his surname, and she’s a mute!”
Inside the discussion room, a large whiteboard stood against the wall, pinned with the headshots of everyone involved in the case.
At the very top were copies of the student IDs of the three deceased.
Starting from the three victims, a tree diagram branched downward to categorize the people connected to them, and Yu Yang was among them.
On Yu Yang’s student ID photo, the boy looked proper, clean-cut, and refreshing. When he smiled, there was a faint hint of dimples.
To be honest, Yu Yang did not stand out in this entire case.
He and the three victims had ceased to have any intersection since the second semester of their tenth-grade year.
He had good grades and a good personality.
Every student from his former class mentioned that he was highly popular, and even the teachers spoke of him with nothing but praise.
If this were a revenge killing, he completely failed to match the profile of a target.
Before long, a criminal investigator pushed the door open, rushing in with a stack of documents: “The test results are out. The deceased is indeed the person you suspected.”
“Yu Lan. It’s her. The DNA test results match.”
No one had expected that an seemingly isolated arson case, which had been transferred to another district for investigation, would connect with the Honghai case currently on their hands in such a manner.
“It seems the fire is connected to this case,” Xie Lin said, taking the stack of documents. On the very first page, a pair of familiar, clear, and large eyes stared back at him from the photograph. “…Except, why is it that the one who met with an accident wasn’t Yu Yang, but her?”
On the chart of connected personnel, a branch split off from the intricate tree diagram; a line next to Yu Yang connected to Yu Lan’s photograph.
The word “Arson” was written next to it.
Yu Lan’s photograph was beautifully taken, looking barely any different from her real self. The girl in the photo carried a gentle smile.
Chi Qing matched the face in the photo with the girl who had opened the door that day, gently reaching out to stroke the cat at the entrance. The two faces overlapped across time and space, yet it was difficult for him to connect this face with the charred, blackened visage in the accident photographs.
He clearly remembered that when he stroked the cat that day, Yu Lan had smiled at him, her eyes curving warmly.
Come to think of it, Yu Lan and Yu Yang actually looked quite similar. Yu Yang also possessed a pair of large eyes, but the impression the two gave off was entirely different—Yu Lan was gentle, while Yu Yang was bright and sunny.
Chi Qing’s thoughts also gravitated toward this exact question: “Why her?”
Ji Mingrui said with a dark expression, “We might have to ask Yu Yang about this question.”
Yu Yang hadn’t seen Yu Lan upon returning home. He was just about to try calling her a few more times when his phone lit up with an incoming call. Without even bothering to ask his teacher for a leave of absence, he hailed a cab and rushed straight toward the police bureau.
The entire way, his mind was flooded with thoughts of “It’s impossible,” and “It can’t be.”
My sister is at work. She should be at work today.
It must be a misunderstanding.
It’s definitely a misunderstanding. They got the wrong person. My sister probably just can’t be reached because her phone died. She must have gone to a friend’s house.
When Yu Yang got out of the cab, he tried to open the car door twice, only succeeding on the third attempt as his hand trembled violently.
He pushed open the door to the morgue in a daze, faintly hearing a chaotic flurry of noises. Someone by his ear told him, “Prepare yourself mentally…”
The white sheet was pulled back.
Though he didn’t want to admit it, and though the corpse was so badly burnt that nothing could be discerned, blood relations could be a strangely profound thing at times. The exact moment the white sheet was pulled back, he felt his heart give a violent shudder, and his chest grew so tight that it became suffocating.
On the freezing iron tray beside the body lay a pile of personal effects sealed in plastic wrap—a piece of scorched clothing fabric, a phone case burnt down to only half its size, a ruined phone, a bag, and a lipstick…
Yu Yang froze entirely in place.
Suddenly, someone tapped him from behind. The man’s eyes turned upward at the corners, and he wasn’t wearing a police uniform: “Can you recognize these items?”
It turned out that when a person reached this point, they would instead calm down to an unexpected degree. “This is my sister’s favorite dress. She saved up her salary for over two months to buy it.”
Even as Yu Yang spoke, his hand continued to tremble uncontrollably.
“The phone case is hers too. She made it herself. I even helped her take this bear out of the oven…”
…
Only upon speaking to this point did Yu Yang finally face this cruel reality, left with no way to evade it.
He choked back a sob and asked, “Was she… burned to death by the fire?”
No one could bring themselves to relay the specific details of the fire to him at a time like this. The morgue fell into a prolonged silence until Chi Qing finally spoke up, completely devoid of emotion: “An electrical fault caused the fire. When it was discovered, the door was locked from the inside. The fire was massive, and by the time the firefighters arrived, it was already too late. The specific details are still under investigation.”
Yu Yang felt as if the tiled floor beneath his feet were spinning.
At this time, he should have been sitting in his classroom attending lessons like usual.
His sister should have been working in the store as she always did, sending him messages to ask how his day was going and telling him to listen carefully in class.
The scene before him felt like a nightmare, plunging him into an abyss of ice.
What snapped him out of the icy abyss was a pair of black gloves entering his line of sight. The owner of the gloves was holding a pack of tissues, looking like someone who habitually carried them around: “Here.”
Only then did Yu Yang realize that he was actually crying.
The vision before his eyes had long since blurred into a hazy mess.
Chi Qing originally would never have performed such an action, which he himself would usually deem entirely redundant.
Whether someone else cried or not would not cause the slightest ripple in his emotions.
Yet now, he was handing over the incredibly “precious” tissues from his pocket to the other person.
Perhaps it was because the cat’s fur had been excessively soft that day.
Perhaps it was because Yu Lan’s gaze that day had been too gentle.
…
Chi Qing didn’t overthink it. He voiced a question he had wanted to ask for a long time: “Your sister should have a boyfriend, right?”
Yu Yang wiped away a tear: “What?”
“No,” Yu Yang shook his head, not understanding why Chi Qing would ask such a thing. “Because my sister couldn’t speak, she always felt a bit timid about interacting with people. She didn’t even finish her junior college before entering the workforce. Our parents passed away early, so it was always my sister who raised me… She felt her condition wasn’t suitable for romance, so she never had a partner.”
Chi Qing’s slender brows knit together millimeter by millimeter.
“Not even someone she liked?”
“No, I’ve never heard my sister mention anyone.”
Yu Lan was a very simple girl who had always faced difficulties communicating with the outside world, making her subconsciously self-conscious, even timid. No matter how gentle a front she put up, it couldn’t change her destiny of being an outsider wherever she went.
She was actually only a few years older than Yu Yang, turning just 23 this year, yet she had already been working for several years.
The Yu family was not wealthy. After the accidental passing of the father, the household was left with only a single apartment and a small amount of savings, prompting Yu Lan to enter the workforce early.
Yu Lan was beautiful, and her large eyes easily evoked a sense of goodwill in others. It wasn’t that no one had ever pursued her, but the moment she smiled shyly and used sign language, those people would hesitate. The hands that had originally intended to add her WeChat would shrink back, and they would ultimately just say: “…Just give me the bill.”
Yu Lan didn’t mind. She had told Yu Yang that she didn’t want to date for the time being; she only hoped he would do well and eventually get into his dream university.
Yu Yang said, “If my sister had a boyfriend, there’s no way I wouldn’t know… Why would you ask that?”
“Because she specifically wore her favorite dress, and no traces of an outerwear or coat were found on the corpse, indicating she went out wearing nothing but a single dress.”
Chi Qing calmly swept his gaze over the attire of the several people present: “With the current weather, it hasn’t warmed up to the point of wearing just a dress.”
“Furthermore, the building where the incident occurred is very close to the movie theater.”
Among the people at the scene.
Some were afraid of the cold and wore thick overcoats; Su Xiaolan was even still wearing fleece-lined trousers. Jiang Yu hitched up his uniform jacket, revealing the bright red thermal underwear beneath his clothes.
Ji Mingrui: “The color of your thermal underwear is certainly… uninhibited.”
Jiang Yu explained, “This year is my zodiac birth year (Benmingnian).”
“…”
In short, regardless of gender, they were all dressed quite heavily.
Although the temperature was warming up, winter hadn’t truly transitioned into spring yet. Going out wearing only a single dress would undoubtedly mean freezing to death.
Chi Qing and Xie Lin were the two people present who feared the cold the least. Even so, the couple—currently in the honeymoon phase of their relationship—would still pick out their clothes before heading out every day, even subtly scouting out what color the other would wear.
Today, the two of them were dressed like a pair of black-and-white specters. Chi Qing had rarely worn a white sweater, but it failed to make him look any warmer; instead, he looked as cold as a handful of snow.
This piece of clothing was actually a recent purchase.
All because Xie Lin had casually mentioned one night: “Is your wardrobe entirely black? Do you not have any other styles?”
That very evening, as if possessed, Chi Qing had opened an online shopping app and spent ages browsing sweaters and coats of other colors.
Aside from lamenting Jiang Yu’s uninhibited underwear, Ji Mingrui also marveled at Chi Qing’s sharp observation skills: “I’ve known you for so long… and for once, you’ve actually looked through the evidence to observe the underlying essence.”
Chi Qing was the type of person who could pinpoint the connection between all available clues, yet remain entirely oblivious to the relationship dynamics between two people.
If this had happened in the past, Chi Qing would at most have noticed the detail of “wearing so little on such a cold day,” but he absolutely wouldn’t have added the second half. Even if he did, it would likely have been a sentence like: Oh, maybe she just isn’t afraid of the cold.
Meanwhile, Yu Yang stood frozen to the side, taking a long time to digest Chi Qing’s words.
Finally, he spoke: “My sister really didn’t have a boyfriend. There were practically no guys around her at all, but… she really had been looking forward to the movie that premiered that day for a very long time.”
