The bar was gradually filling up with people, but Chi Qing couldn’t hear a single sound. After their slightly cold fingers touched, they took on each other’s warmth, their fingertips heating up little by little.
In the bustling bar, some people were gently swaying their bodies to the music, some were leaning close together talking, and others had started to gather for games…
They still didn’t know what was about to happen here, until a sudden “crash!” rang out from a corner.
A glass was swept to the floor.
At first, the sound of shattering didn’t attract anyone’s attention, until a few seconds later—
A sleek, black square table was overturned. Shards of glass scattered across the floor. A small candle had been sitting on the black table in a transparent brown container—one on every table to set the mood. The unextinguished flame ignited the liquor that had just spilled onto the floor.
Flames suddenly flared up from the ground!
Only then did people turn their eyes toward the commotion: “What’s going on?”
“What happened…”
“Are those two fighting?”
As soon as the words were spoken, more than just one table was kicked over. The tables and chairs in that corner toppled over in a messy heap.
In the darkness, a man could be vaguely seen pinned against the corner wall by another man wearing a hat that obscured his face. The two silhouettes overlapped. If it hadn’t been for the commotion just now, no one would have immediately realized they were fighting.
The man in the hat wore a thin ring on his finger. He first pressed down on the other’s shoulder, only to be dodged as his opponent turned sideways. After creating a brief distance, the opponent raised his leg and kicked at him. The atmosphere was incredibly tense, making it hard to tell who had the upper hand.
Then, something flashing with the same silver light as the ring suddenly appeared in the hand of the man with the hat.
“Ah!!!”
“That guy has a knife!”
On his way to the bar, Ji Mingrui received a call from Su Xiaolan: “Someone just called the police, saying there’s a fight at the bar and one of them is holding a knife… From the description… it sounds like we might know these two.”
Ji Mingrui: “…?!”
The next second, he slammed on the gas pedal and sped up.
By the time he arrived, the inside and outside of the bar were in complete chaos. A crowd of people who had fled the bar was gathered outside, along with onlookers who had rushed over from other shops to watch the spectacle. They kept a safe distance from the bar’s entrance, peering inside with panic and curiosity.
“…”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, I heard someone got slashed.”
“…” Ji Mingrui pushed his way through the crowd, shouting, “I’m the police,” as he drew his sidearm and charged in. “Make way, everyone make way.”
The inside of the bar was a complete mess, tables and chairs scattered everywhere.
Ji Mingrui shouted sternly: “Where are they!”
A waiter stuttered, barely able to speak clearly: “T-t-t-they went toward the back door—”
The back door connected to a liquor storage warehouse and a bottomless river. This river was Huanan City’s famous waterway, winding its way across half the city with branches spreading everywhere. There happened to be one right outside the back door. The sky outside was already pitch black, rendering the river a dark, inky color, making it look even more profound and treacherous.
Two black silhouettes stood by the river. After Ji Mingrui yelled, “Is there a light? Turn on the light!” the large floodlight above the back door flicked on with a “snap,” illuminating the scene by the river—and he watched helplessly as Xie Lin, holding a sharp folding knife, violently plunged it into the other person’s body.
He was incredibly familiar with the other person. He didn’t even need to see the face; just the pale skin caused by a perennial lack of sunlight was enough to tell him who it was.
And the spot where the knife went in—appeared to be the heart.
After being stabbed, Chi Qing lost his balance from the preceding struggle. The man was thin, his skin frighteningly pale. His eyes were hidden by his overly long hair, making his expression unreadable. Like a black bird yanked from the night sky, he fell backward, plunging into the rushing river.
He was immediately swallowed by the rapids, not even a corner of his clothes remaining visible.
Someone behind him screamed shrilly: “Murder—!”
Ji Mingrui couldn’t be in two places at once. Human life was the priority; he had no time to chase Xie Lin. After urgently radioing Su Xiaolan with Xie Lin’s escape route, he stripped off his jacket and dove straight into the freezing river.
Cold…
A bone-piercing cold…
Ji Mingrui held his breath and continuously searched through the river, but every time he reached out, he grasped nothing but water.
After failing to grab anything countless times, he gradually lost consciousness.
When Ji Mingrui opened his eyes again, twenty-four hours had passed.
“Officer Ji, you’re awake?” A nurse in a white uniform leaned over him, asking softly. “How do you feel? Is there any discomfort? If there is, remember to tell me. You suffered from exhaustion when you went into the river to rescue him. Thankfully, the rescue team arrived in time…”
Ji Mingrui couldn’t care less about how he was saved. He suddenly sat up from the hospital bed, grabbed the nurse’s hand, and demanded: “Did you fish him out? Where is he now?”
The nurse didn’t know his relationship with the other victim and was startled by his sudden movement. She said blankly: “He was pulled out…”
“Where is he?!”
“He is…” The nurse seemed to feel the next words were inappropriate, lowering her voice. “In the morgue.”
Ji Mingrui was struck as if by lightning.
The… morgue?
“You mean…”
How many times in a person’s life do they have to experience the pain of parting through death?
Ji Mingrui was slammed by the heavy reality. His brain turned sluggishly, entirely incapable of processing or thinking. After a long while, he finally managed to say: “Are you saying he… he’s dead?”
“Yes,” the nurse relayed what she knew. “The folding knife pierced exactly through his heart. The river is deep, the terrain is treacherous with hidden rocks, and the water currents diverge in multiple directions. This river leads to several different places. It took the rescue team over ten hours to pull him out. Moreover, the body had multiple signs of impact from submerged reefs, especially the face. It was battered beyond recognition by the time he was recovered.”
The nurse added: “You’re actually quite lucky you didn’t swim into the deeper waters, otherwise even the rescue team wouldn’t have been able to save you.”
Hearing this, Ji Mingrui ignored the unfinished IV drip next to him, got out of bed barefoot, and dashed straight out!
He didn’t know where he was going. His mind was filled with one thought: he had to find someone to ask, he must find someone to ask. Who could come and tell him that the rescue team made a mistake, that this wasn’t the truth at all…
He stumbled forward and crashed into someone.
The person was the Chief of Police.
The Chief pressed down on his shoulders, forcing him to stand still, then sighed and said to him, word by word: “He’s gone. I heard the kid didn’t have any family, and you were the closest person to him.”
“Go to the morgue to see him one last time, and then prepare to arrange his funeral.”
One week later, the memorial hall.
The room was filled with white mourning wreaths. A dirge played on a loop in the hall.
A sorrowful piano melody flowed slowly through the air.
Right in the center of the hall sat a brown coffin, the body inside covered from head to toe with a white cloth.
The entire hall was filled with black and white; it was hard to find a third color. Black and white intertwined to form the color of death.
It was clearly a funeral.
Suspended above the coffin was a black-and-white photograph. The subject of the photo had extremely beautiful features, but the face was entirely expressionless, as if he had made up his mind from the very beginning to use this photo as his portrait for the dead.
“Whoosh—”
It was raining outside.
The gloomy weather added an unspeakable and eerie sense of solemn tragedy to the funeral.
Not many people came to mourn the deceased, just twos and threes. They arrived holding umbrellas, closed them at the entrance, and cold rainwater dripped down from the tips of the umbrellas.
“The dead are gone, my condolences.”
“The contributions Mr. Chi made to our police force when he was alive are obvious to everyone. If it weren’t for Mr. Chi, several previous cases wouldn’t have been solved so smoothly.”
Besides the few representatives sent by the police force to offer their condolences, there was also He Sen, who used to be Chi Qing’s agent.
He brought a bouquet of white chrysanthemums and gently placed them in front of Chi Qing’s coffin: “Although… we knew each other for so many years and you didn’t have any achievements in the acting world, our paths did cross. The villains you played in so many dramas, practically playing yourself, still left a profound trau… impression on everyone.”
Ji Mingrui stood amidst the coming and going crowd, wearing a white flower on his chest, exceptionally quiet.
When a person is hit with extreme shock, it can actually calm their state of mind. He methodically managed Chi Qing’s funeral arrangements.
Across the street from the memorial hall entrance, after sending off a married couple of detectives who came to mourn, Ji Mingrui stood at the door. From the corner of his eye, he seemed to glimpse a man holding a black umbrella across the street. The man was dressed all in black, standing near a streetlamp like a phantom. Ji Mingrui blinked. A car drove past right at that moment, and when he looked in that direction again, there was no one under the streetlamp. It was like a dream.
“Sir, where to?”
In a taxi, the driver looked through the rearview mirror at the man who had just closed his black umbrella. The man looked as if he was freezing to death, otherwise, his face wouldn’t be so terribly pale.
Not only was the man’s skin extremely pale, but even his lips were entirely devoid of color.
At the same time, the phone in the man’s jacket pocket rang.
The voice on the other end didn’t sound very happy, but even so, his tone was still gentle: “Why are you running around?”
“Don’t you know you’re injured?”
“Rumble—”
Raindrops smashed against the car window, lightning split the dark night, and a ghastly light illuminated the interior of the car.
If the taxi driver had been a little more attentive when he pulled over just now, carefully observing his surroundings, he would have discovered that the passenger he picked up looked exactly like the portrait displayed in the memorial hall he had just driven past.
This person, it seemed, had come to attend his own funeral.
That night, one week ago.
Chi Qing did not act according to Xie Lin’s plan. After wresting away Xie Lin’s knife, he didn’t let go. Instead, he pinned Xie Lin’s wrist down and plunged the knife into his own body. He looked into Xie Lin’s eyes and said, “No need for all this trouble. Just kill me directly.”
