In this confession incident, Yu Yang had not intentionally shared Xu Xingzhou’s business with anyone else.
It was the first time he had ever been confessed to by a boy.
Furthermore, this boy was his own classmate. Usually, Yu Yang would tease him and crack the kind of jokes only shared between good buddies. After Xu Xingzhou confessed, Yu Yang constantly reflected on whether he had done something wrong, giving the other boy some kind of false impression.
Maybe I caused him to misunderstand?
How should I respond to him?
How do I handle this?
Yu Yang spent several days agonizing over these questions, frequently spacing out even when hanging around with Wang Yuan and his crowd.
Wang Yuan had teased him, “What’s up with you? This game definitely wasn’t up to your usual standard, and you’ve been acting weird in class lately. What is it, are you in love?”
Yu Yang hedged evasively, “No…”
“That doesn’t sound like a ‘no’ to me,” Wang Yuan said. “Who is it?”
At the time, Yu Yang genuinely regarded them as friends. Combined with the fact that he was young and didn’t know how to handle the situation, he left out Xu Xingzhou’s name and briefly explained the situation.
Wang Yuan and the others were utterly shocked at first. “A guy likes you? And he even confessed? Man, your charm is insane. So many girls in class like you, and now even guys are coming after you. You’re a real crowd-pleaser across the board.”
Once they processed the information, the focus of their curiosity shifted: “Who is it?”
“Do we know them?”
Yu Yang had no intention of exposing Xu Xingzhou, so he hurriedly tried to clear any connections. “Know them my ass. He’s from outside school, you guys don’t know him.”
Yet, subtle clues could be seen in everything.
The atmosphere between him and Xu Xingzhou had become exceptionally awkward ever since the confession.
In the past, the class loved to tease the two of them. One day during self-study, the academic representative was handing out the graded papers from the previous exam. When she reached Yu Yang and his group, she said, “Your Xu Xingzhou got first place again. You’re eighth from the bottom, Yu Yang. Can’t you try to match up to your Xu Xingzhou?”
Ordinarily, Yu Yang was completely used to this and would even join in with a few laughs and jokes. This time, however, his entire body went rigid. He sternly warned the representative, “Watch your mouth. Since when did he become my Xu Xingzhou?”
His tone was so serious that it left the representative stunned.
Yu Yang continued to emphasize, “Don’t make these kinds of jokes in the future.”
Wang Yuan, who had been sitting on the side playing games and appearing completely nonchalant, put down his phone after the topic ended. He surreptitiously sized up Yu Yang.
He shifted his sinister gaze away from Yu Yang, his eyes flickering toward Xu Xingzhou’s empty seat.
After class, Wang Yuan called the others out. The three of them squatted at the end of the corridor, smoking and chatting. Wang Yuan said, “Didn’t Yu Yang say a while ago that some guy confessed to him? I think I know who it is.”
The other two asked, “Who?”
Wang Yuan replied, “Xu Xingzhou.”
“No way… the two of them?” Someone thought Wang Yuan was overthinking it. “Sure, Xu Xingzhou looks a bit sissy, but it wouldn’t go that far, right? He likes Yu Yang?”
Wang Yuan crushed the cigarette butt in his hand. “There’s no way I’m seeing it wrong. Just you wait and see.”
Thus, that very night, Xu Xingzhou wrote this entry in his diary:
— Wang Yuan asked me: Do you like guys?
I told him I didn’t know what he meant.
He said: Stop faking it, Yu Yang already told me. Didn’t you confess to him? You didn’t honestly think that just because Yu Yang protected you a few times he actually fancies you, did you? He’s not a pervert who likes men.
Yu Yang remained completely oblivious to what was happening between them.
After the confession incident, he intentionally avoided Xu Xingzhou. He only noticed that Xu Xingzhou seemed to grow more silent by the day. Originally he had just been introverted, but later he became increasingly reclusive.
“If a small clique like Wang Yuan’s could do those things after catching Jiang Yiyun’s mistake, they would only be crueler to my brother,” Shen Xinghe said. “They would call my brother out to the small woods, lock him in the men’s restroom, and even in a park with barely any cover…”
Shen Xinghe did not go on.
He had no desire to recount what his brother had endured.
However, everyone immediately realized: those three locations happened to be the exact murder scenes of the deceased victims.
As it turned out, none of these designated locations were random.
Over a year ago, Xu Xingzhou was constantly being pointed at: You are a pervert.
Inside the restroom.
The stall door was tightly shut.
Jeering voices echoed from inside: “Xu Xingzhou, are you actually a guy? The more I look at you, the more you look like a girl.”
“Why don’t you pull down your pants so we can check?”
The three of them spoke amidst laughter, “Are you going to take them off yourself, or should we help you?”
There was barely anyone left in the restroom after school. No one would ever know what transpired inside that stall.
Wang Yuan and his group disliked Xu Xingzhou to begin with, because his grades were good and because he didn’t fit in.
They didn’t tell Yu Yang, knowing full well that Yu Yang would definitely not support them doing these things.
In the second half of the diary, Jiang Yiyun’s name appeared.
Shen Xinghe said, “There was a period when Xingzhou’s grades plummeted severely. Jiang Yiyun’s attitude toward him changed because of it. He originally wanted to talk to Jiang Yiyun about what he had been going through recently.”
At that time, Jiang Yiyun herself was completely overwhelmed with a heavy workload. With the class grades falling short of expectations, she was under immense pressure.
She looked at Xu Xingzhou as he pushed the door open and walked in. “Perfect timing. I wanted to talk to you too.”
Xu Xingzhou called her “Teacher Jiang,” and then stood obediently across from the office desk.
Jiang Yiyun pulled out Xu Xingzhou’s exam papers. “Your performance these past few exams has gotten worse each time. I don’t know what kind of situation you’ve run into…”
Xu Xingzhou opened his mouth. “Teacher Jiang, actually…”
But he couldn’t finish his words.
Jiang Yiyun immediately cut him off, “—And I don’t want to know either. You should regulate your own emotions and focus on your studies. Nothing else matters to you right now.”
“…”
Only after finishing her lecture did Jiang Yiyun lift her head and ask, “What did you want to say just now?”
Xu Xingzhou lowered his head, picked up the exam papers from the desk, and said, “Nothing.”
Meanwhile, Jiang Yu was still gathering evidence at the auto repair shop.
Nothing of suspicious evidentiary value had been found at the school dorms or Shen Xinghe’s home; the communal bunk dorm at the auto shop was their final hope.
Shen Xinghe had arrived in a hurry and hadn’t brought much luggage. There was only a single quilt on his bunk, alongside some miscellaneous sundries and daily necessities. When Jiang Yu lifted the bedding to inspect it, his hand brushed against something resembling hard cardboard. “Rip open the mattress and take a look.”
Inside the mattress lay a stack of paper that looked like thick posters.
When the stack was unfolded, it was densely covered in writing.
Wang Yuan, Yu Yang, Jiang Yiyun…
Five names were listed at the very top.
This was a revenge hit list.
The objective of this mere eighteen-year-old high school student had been explicitly clear from the absolute beginning.
It was “revenge.”
The contents of the entire sheet were quite similar to the whiteboard in their headquarters’ meeting room, but it was far more comprehensive than what the police had compiled. These people’s preferences, personality traits, games they usually liked to play, social media account names across various platforms, class schedules, family backgrounds… It even noted that Jiang Yiyun drove to a student’s house every weekend morning at 10:00 AM to give private tutoring. Of course, accepting money for private tutoring was forbidden by the school, so Jiang Yiyun always drove over stealthily.
Among all of them, the information on Yu Yang was written the least.
Furthermore, it bore no resemblance to the actual Yu Yang.
Jiang Yu couldn’t tell if it was just his imagination, but he felt that while Shen Xinghe wrote about the others without a shred of emotion, it was entirely different when it came to Yu Yang.
Shen Xinghe wrote on the paper: He is very shy. He likes cats. He likes sunny days. There is a cherry blossom tree below his apartment. He is easily scared; he wants to watch horror movies but doesn’t dare to.
Compared to the long, cold list of traits above it—
One could seemingly feel a trace of warmth between the lines.
Jiang Yu relayed this major piece of information back up: “We found it. He has a sheet of paper covered in—”
The call was answered by Xie Lin. Everyone else was busy taking notes; only he and Chi Qing, the two external consultants, had nothing to do besides listen.
Xie Lin said, “Bring the things and withdraw. He confessed.”
Immediately after, Shen Xinghe detailed the operations he had deployed over the past year in meticulous fashion: “I didn’t attend the same school as them, so it was very difficult to get close to them in real life, and our circles of close friends didn’t overlap at all. However, obtaining their social media accounts wasn’t difficult.”
In the internet era, mobile games, online forums, Weibo accounts, and short video platforms cropped up endlessly.
As long as one asked a few classmates who knew people at Honghai High School, getting the social media accounts of Wang Yuan and his group wasn’t hard at all.
In fact, there wasn’t even a need to go through anyone. By creating a burner account and asking a couple of questions on the Honghai forum, plenty of enthusiastic locals would scramble to dox the social media handles of the people they knew.
—Didn’t you all think my brother was a pervert?
As Shen Xinghe changed the gender of the social media accounts to “female,” he thought dark thoughts to himself facing the phone screen: How would you feel if you knew the person you were chatting with was also a guy?
A few boys right in the middle of puberty took the bait entirely on their own after barely a few lines of chatting.
Shen Xinghe expressionlessly typed out the words “Big Brother” to coax them, flattery hitting them so hard they couldn’t tell left from right.
Shen Xinghe didn’t remember exactly what he had chatted about with them anymore.
It was all thoughtless nonsense, entirely formulaic; for him, it didn’t even require using his brain.
Shen Xinghe said coldly, “I didn’t care about them. Even when I killed them, I didn’t feel a thing.”
He was like a naturally cold-blooded criminal.
Xie Lin could even detect a faint, familiar aura radiating from him.
But to Shen Xinghe, there was one person who was an exception: that “Yu Yang” who didn’t resemble Yu Yang at all.
Looking back now, the signs had been there all along.
The two of them—one pretending to be a boy and the other pretending to be a girl—had resulted in Shen Xinghe exposing himself right off the bat.
But in truth, Yu Lan hadn’t played the boy very well either. Shen Xinghe had once seriously doubted his brother’s taste: How could he fall for such a soft, frail boy?
Shen Xinghe had suspected her.
Yu Lan had also secretly asked her few male friends: How do guys usually talk? Should I use more curse words to make myself sound like a guy?
Thus, Yu Lan used her limited vocabulary of swear words to chat with Shen Xinghe: You last night…
She moved the cursor behind “You” and added a naive curse word: You fucking didn’t sleep again last night?
Shen Xinghe suffered from insomnia.
Yu Lan was always preoccupied with whether he slept well.
Shen Xinghe: ?
Yu Lan: I saw your WeChat Moments. You were still posting updates at three in the morning.
Shen Xinghe: …
Yu Lan typed out a crude word awkwardly, speaking with visible discomfort: Fuck, can you sleep a bit earlier next time?
