[The live stream has ended.]
Cumulative views: 2.3 million people.
On the completely black screen, only the real-time comments sent by the audience remained.
—What happened???
—That looked like a real kidnapping scene!!! I couldn’t hear the voices at the end very clearly, only caught a few words, but they seemed to be saying ‘you shouldn’t have started a live stream and exposed the location’ or something.
—I literally just said that finding an address based on this stream was impossible for a human to do… and yet someone actually found it?
—Finding a location just based on a live stream, what kind of people are they?
Su Xiaolan had been following the live-stream room’s dynamics the entire time. Her heart, which had been in her throat throughout the whole process, had never once been able to settle down. Only after seeing Xie Lin and Chi Qing appear did she let out a brief sigh of relief. She thought to herself that a normal person indeed couldn’t do it; the only ones capable of such a feat were those two consultants from municipal headquarters who never played by the rules.
At the same time, municipal headquarters received the information and successfully obtained the location where “Z” was hiding the children: “Based on the light inside the room, they found the signal light located opposite the amusement park. There is a bridge there; the river beneath the bridge used to be a shipping route, and the signal light was built back then. After the shipping route ceased operations, the signal light was preserved as a historical remnant.”
The municipal police dispatched with extreme speed.
Since they had already deployed personnel to search the vicinity of the orphanage after obtaining that lead earlier, and the orphanage was only five or six kilometers away from the amusement park, a group of officers sat in their police cars, fully armed and ready to go.
As they drove close to the amusement park, the colors of the police sirens blended with the signal lights, illuminating this area where no one had set foot for years.
The tactical group leader gave orders before getting out of the vehicle: “Everyone, get ready!”
“Our most important task for this operation is to rescue the children. Confirm the location of the children immediately upon entry.”
“Snipers, remain outside to cover and await orders.”
“Understood!”
No one knew what the current situation was inside, but considering that Xie Lin and Chi Qing were, after all, two people dealing with ‘Z’ alone… they should be able to hold out until they arrived.
However, the actual situation was not a two-on-one at all. After ‘Z’ was slammed into the sink by Xie Lin, his hands fumbled twice in the abandoned sink, grasping the knife that had fallen just moments ago. Then, utilizing the force Xie Lin applied to his head, he tilted his head to increase his field of vision, and suddenly swung the knife backward with all his might.
Xie Lin had no choice but to let go and dodge. He quickly realized that ‘Z’s’ target was not him—but Chi Qing, who was untying the ropes for the child behind him.
While untying the ropes, Chi Qing attempted to comfort the child in front of him. He wanted to say “don’t cry,” but what came out was: “Can you please be quiet.”
The child was clearly startled by the people who had suddenly burst in.
He felt that these two people seemed to be here to rescue him, but the man in front of him did not look like a good person either, and his words were actually identical to those of the kidnapper.
“Waaah—” The child thrashed even harder.
Chi Qing’s tone grew colder: “Don’t move.”
“Waaah, waaah—”
Chi Qing: “……”
Under the onslaught of the child’s noise, Chi Qing untied the rope. It was difficult to pay attention to his rear, and by the time he heard Xie Lin’s shout of “Watch out!”, it was already too late. ‘Z’s’ objective was highly targeted; he still remembered the scene of Chi Qing falling into the river back then, and he also knew where Chi Qing’s injury was located.
Chi Qing raised his arm to parry, the blade slicing through his glove. In the next second, ‘Z’ raised his knee and kicked brutally toward him—
Even though the stab wound on his body had already scabbed over and no longer required gauze or medication, he had, after all, taken a knife. Chi Qing’s vibrant red lips turned pale in an instant. He clearly felt the half-healed wound tear open once again under the attack, and blood slowly seeped out.
“Get behind me,” Xie Lin said.
Unable to find a handy tool, Xie Lin grabbed the chair the child had been sitting on just now and hurled it in ‘Z’s’ direction to widen the distance between them and restrict his movements. Then, almost the instant the chair hit the ground, he closed in on ‘Z’ at maximum speed, his leg sweeping violently across ‘Z’s’ calf.
‘Z’ let out a muffled grunt. During the struggle, the hat ‘Z’ was wearing slowly slid off, revealing a pale, gaunt face.
The man’s appearance had changed slightly compared to when he was a child; his face was longer and thinner, and his sharp eyes drooped, giving off a highly uncomfortable feeling. The distance between the two of them was extremely close. He stared directly into Xie Lin’s eyes and spoke his first words: “You guessed right. Ten years ago, I got lost here. I waited the entire day, and no one came to look for me.”
Ten years ago.
This place was not yet overgrown with wild grass. As a newly built amusement park, it was bustling with people, and the Ferris wheel stood in the center of the park, spinning round and round.
“Hey,” before they dispersed, a teacher from the orphanage called out to him. To this day, he still remembered the bright red nail polish on that woman’s nails. Her tone was highly impatient; a monthly salary of just over two thousand yuan was not enough to make her patiently deal with a ‘problem orphan.’ “Gather here at four o’clock sharp, got it?”
The woman might have misspoke, or she might have done it on purpose.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, by the time he walked back here alone along the path, the orphanage’s bus had long since vanished.
The sun was about to set, and the people in the amusement park gradually dwindled.
He walked to the slide in the adjacent play area, curling his entire body inside the dark slide entrance to look out. He wanted to see if anyone would come to look for him.
When they returned and noticed one person missing, even if it was a slip of the tongue, they should come looking for him, right?
He could clearly have gone back on his own.
The amusement park had a dedicated service department; he could have borrowed a passerby’s phone to dial 110…
He had countless ways to get back, but he chose none of them.
At 9:30 PM, staff members patrolling before the park’s closure carried flashlights to complete their final rounds. The flashlight beams swept past the play area, but no one discovered that a child was still hidden there.
Thus, he watched helplessly as the sky darkened bit by bit. He clutched his knees until the very last streetlamp on the roadside flickered out. He curled up inside the slide, letting the darkness swallow him completely. At that moment, he thought: So, it wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
He waited until late into the night. Exhausted from waiting, just a moment before he was about to crawl out of the slide, he faintly heard a very faint footstep. The sound was so light it felt like an illusion. Then, a face suddenly appeared before the circular opening of the slide!
The person was grinning and smiling at him!
“It’s so late… why are you here all alone?”
That was the first sentence he heard that night.
The footsteps in Z’s memory and the footsteps in reality gradually overlapped.
Boom—!
Locked rooms were forcibly shot open one by one by the criminal police. Bullets struck the iron chains, producing loud crashes followed by the sound of chains snapping. The unified footsteps outside drew closer and closer.
Without the obstruction of the doors, the children’s crying became increasingly clear.
“Waaah, waaah, waaah—”
Vaguely, someone was comforting these children: “Don’t cry, it’s alright. You are safe now.”
Xie Lin stared deeply into Z’s eyes: “What on earth do you want? By making such a massive scene, you never thought of escaping unscathed. It’s impossible for you not to know the consequences of starting a live stream. In fact, if you had been more cautious, you could have completely chosen a room where the signal light couldn’t reach.” Once Xie Lin calmed down, he realized this live stream was riddled with loopholes. He pressed, “You did it on purpose. What exactly are you trying to do?”
Z did not answer. He violently struck back with his elbow. Having briefly regained his freedom of movement, he reached out again to grab the child’s collar, dragging the child—who had been about to rush out of the room—back and pinning him in front of his chest.
The knife had been knocked away by Xie Lin during the fight, but that did not stop him from laying hands on the child.
Z’s blood-stained hand squeezed the child’s neck as he asked, “You can come over and kill me, I won’t fight back. But he will die. Do you dare?”
Although Chi Qing showed no expression on his face, he was pale from pain.
And precisely because of the knife wound on his body, he suddenly grasped a common thread:
First it was Guo Xingchang, then it was him, and now it was this child.
It seemed he highly desired to see Xie Lin kill someone.
Chi Qing also associated this with the first clue the police had received. That audio tape was the first message Z wanted to convey to them. The eerie nursery rhyme sang: Look, look, look for a friend, find a good friend~
Just as a stalemate ensued inside the room, the rescue team had already saved the other imprisoned children and traced the hallway and the sound of crying to Xie Lin’s position.
The area where Z hid the children was a leased section of the amusement park. This area had been rented by an art training class years ago to use as an art classroom. The small area was partitioned into tiny classrooms with a hallway running through the middle.
Someone shouted outside the door: “Are you inside? How is the situation?”
“Don’t come in,” Xie Lin said. “He has a hostage.”
“……”
The footsteps outside the door stopped.
The situation at the amusement park was quickly transmitted back to municipal headquarters. Wu Zhibin forwarded it to the three-person group that had been incessantly asking questions.
Su Xiaolan replied: I thought about this issue before. With so many children, the rescue difficulty is immense. It’s too easy for him to continue holding them hostage.
Jiang Yu: Then what do we do? Can we arrange for a sniper to aim and shoot him from outside?
Ji Mingrui, who had been silent for a while, suddenly popped up in the group chat.
Ji Mingrui: I’ll be there immediately.
Su Xiaolan simply couldn’t comprehend those words: ?
Su Xiaolan: Where did you go?
Su Xiaolan: Besides, we aren’t in charge of this case, what do you mean you’ll be there immediately?
At this time, there were barely any pedestrians left in Tianxin Neighborhood. Ji Mingrui restarted his car. As he started the engine, he looked at the woman in the back seat through the rearview mirror.
The woman was still wearing that visibly outdated piece of clothing, her half-gray, half-black hair tied messily behind her head. The lines on her face were deep, and her eyes—
Ji Mingrui took a deep breath. Instead of typing, he simply pressed the voice recording button. Having rarely encountered a highlight moment in his life, his heart was actually very excited, but he forced that excitement down, speaking as calmly as possible: “I also have a hostage in my hands. I’m heading over right now.”
Su Xiaolan was baffled once again: Hostage?
Before Su Xiaolan and the others could react, Ji Mingrui added: “His mother is in my hands.”
This statement was even more baffling.
…Mother?
What mother?
Su Xiaolan: What is going on? Explain clearly, who is his mother? You stayed in Tianxin Neighborhood for so long and no one could contact you, what on earth did you do?
“You’ve all seen his mother, Yang Yan,” Ji Mingrui took a deep breath and said. “I ran into her in the neighborhood during the day today and felt something was off. After walking her home, I discovered something in her house.”
Time slowly wound back from the dark night to the daytime, back to when Ji Mingrui collided with Yang Yan.
Disregarding Yang Yan’s refusal, he escorted her all the way to her doorstep on the pretext of having too many items to carry.
“Sister Yang, we’ve been walking for so long, I’m a bit thirsty,” Ji Mingrui stood at the door, peering into her house through the crack. “Can I come in and have a cup of water?”
Yang Yan found it hard to refuse. After some thought, she stepped aside to clear a path: “…Come in.”
Ji Mingrui walked in and took a turn around Yang Yan’s house. The woman didn’t go out much, so the house was kept exceptionally tidy. Holding the bag containing the men’s woolen sweater and the razor, he asked casually, “Where should I put these things for you?”
Yang Yan’s mental issues were somewhat different from those of ordinary psychiatric patients. If one overlooked some strange, minor details, she was almost no different from a normal person: “Put them in my son’s room.”
“……”
Your son passed away.
“Which room is your son’s?”
“The second one on the left.”
With a bizarre feeling in his heart, Ji Mingrui pushed open the room door. A bed, a desk, a row of wardrobes—the room was packed full of items. On the desk sat a pen holder, a calendar, a computer, a game console, and at the very edge, there was even a meticulously arranged plate of fruit. However, no one had eaten it, and the apples on the plate had long since oxidized beyond recognition.
The bedding had been freshly sunned, a gray three-piece set, laid out neatly.
Everything looked as though someone truly lived in this room…
Initially, Ji Mingrui thought he was overthinking. Yang Yan had probably just been living in a fantasy world for these ten years, fantasizing that her “son” still lived with her, which was why she bought these suspicious items. The woolen sweater and the razor were both bought for that non-existent “son” of her fantasy.
Until he set down the items and prepared to leave, when he accidentally caught sight of the books on the bookshelf. They didn’t seem to be new.
The state of new books on a bookshelf is different from those that have been flipped through. There are tiny gaps between the pages—these were books Yang Yan bought for that non-existent “son,” and she most likely wouldn’t flip through them herself.
Ji Mingrui thought to himself that after staying with Chi Qing and a certain someone who ran off with his good brother for so long, his reasoning abilities had soared.
He took down the one with the most obvious signs of flipping and discovered it was a high school competition training book. What made his spine go cold was that every question inside had traces of being solved by someone!
Who wrote this?!
“Those are practice questions my son wrote in high school,” a bizarre answer suddenly echoed from behind. Ji Mingrui turned around in panic, only to see Yang Yan holding a glass of water in one hand, her other hand hidden behind her back, speaking to him with a strange smile on her face, “My son’s grades have always been very good. He is very smart. Are you looking for him?”
Not far behind Yang Yan was the entryway, where a full-length mirror stood. The mirror clearly reflected the hand Yang Yan held behind her back—she was tightly clutching a sharp knife.
In that instant, Ji Mingrui felt his hair stand on end.
Ji Mingrui’s thoughts snapped back from his memory. He grimaced, casually using the silk scarf Su Xiaolan had left in his car during a previous mission to bandage the knife wound on his arm. At the same time, he glanced back at the woman, confirming that Yang Yan, sitting in the back seat, had her hands and feet bound tightly by him with no possibility of breaking free.
“She asked me if I was looking for her son, and even tried to slash me with a knife. While disarming her, I accidentally touched her, she feigned injury, and then knocked me unconscious. When I woke up, I was tied up by her in the utility room, and it was already dark.”
“To be honest, I still haven’t figured out what’s going on,” having no time to say too much in the group chat, Ji Mingrui replied with one last sentence after finishing his bandaging, “But the two of them indeed seem to have some connection. Z is her son. As for why Z is her son… I still haven’t found the answer to that.”
