Because of the weather, the sky at nine that night was much darker than usual. The night was as thick as ink, and the stretch from the shopping street to the residential area was silent.
Besides Ren Qin, there were three other people in her home. Ji Mingrui had rushed over from the police station to provide support and prepare for tonight’s operation. After sneaking upstairs, he said, “The operation on that side isn’t going very smoothly. We still haven’t found the person.”
One reason the police were having trouble was that, at this point, everything was still just speculation. They hadn’t found any solid evidence. Another reason was that they were worried about alerting the suspect. If they rushed in too noisily and tipped the man off, it would only increase the cost of tracking him down later.
Xie Lin said, “That’s normal. If he really planned to kill today, he certainly wouldn’t reveal his whereabouts. He didn’t leave any flaws in the previous cases either, which shows he’s very good at hiding his tracks. He probably started preparing for today several days in advance.”
Then Xie Lin turned to Chi Qing. “You drank several cups of coffee during the day. Why are you still sleepy?”
Chi Qing stood off to the side, looking unmotivated and as if he didn’t really want to be involved.
At a time like this—when anyone would be scared out of their wits—he said indifferently, “I’m not sleepy. I’m just a little bored.”
“…”
While they were talking, Ren Qin was eating takeout with tears in her eyes. “Can I just eat a few bites? I really don’t have an appetite.”
The reason she had ordered takeout was because Xie Lin had said, “The other side is very meticulous. You always order takeout in daily life; if you don’t order it today, it’ll seem suspicious.”
Ren Qin painfully finished the takeout. Xie Lin asked again, “What time do you usually go to sleep?”
Ren Qin thought about it. “If I have to work the next day, around ten-thirty. On weekends I sleep later.”
“Do you usually turn off the lights when you sleep?”
“Yes,” Ren Qin said. “If the light is on, I can’t sleep.”
“If the killer does show up, he’s probably already watching somewhere to see when you turn the lights off and go to sleep. Then he’ll come upstairs around the time you’ve probably already fallen deeply asleep. All you need to do is act as you normally would—turn off the lights and sleep on time.”
So just after ten, Ren Qin changed into her pajamas as they had told her to. Gogo the cat was perched on the windowsill watching them. Ren Qin soothed it, saying, “It’s okay. Be good. No matter what happens later, don’t cry out. I’ll be fine.”
After that, she turned off the lights and got into bed as usual, while the others hid in different places.
Chi Qing usually didn’t turn on the lights at home anyway, so whether Ren Qin slept with the lights off or not made no difference to him. But before he could even choose a hiding place he was satisfied with, Xie Lin had already pulled him into a standing wardrobe.
Xie Lin said, “Stop looking. There isn’t any place that can hide you and still keep zero contact with you. This is the only spot that can fit one more person, so your only option is to squeeze with me.”
“…”
Even a large bedroom wardrobe wasn’t exactly spacious enough for two adult men. The two of them were almost pressed tightly together. After Xie Lin shut the wardrobe door, the last bit of light disappeared too, leaving the inside pitch-black.
Chi Qing bent his legs and tried hard to shrink himself down. He was thin, but his legs were long, so it was still difficult.
And because every movement would brush against the person beside him, each shift meant more contact. He didn’t even know what part of the other man he had touched. Based on instinct and sensation, Chi Qing belatedly realized that it was probably Xie Lin’s waist.
“Don’t you think this is too cramped?” Chi Qing endured it for a moment and spoke while moving a hand aside.
“What?”
Xie Lin had been trying to see outside through the crack in the wardrobe, so his attention was all on the gap. He really hadn’t heard clearly.
Chi Qing repeated, “I said…”
The moment Xie Lin heard the first sound of his voice, he instinctively leaned forward in the direction of the sound. “Mm?” It was the kind of movement people make when they’re listening intently to someone, but in the dark, narrow wardrobe, it took on another meaning.
As he leaned in a little, a lock of hair brushed against Chi Qing’s neck.
Xie Lin said, “Go on.”
Chi Qing suddenly forgot what he had been about to say. The words at his lips turned into, “Don’t lean over here.”
Xie Lin said, “There’s only this much room. You might as well just tell me to get out.”
Chi Qing said, “That works too.”
“…”
“This plan probably won’t work,” a voice interrupted from outside the wardrobe. Ji Mingrui, who still hadn’t found anywhere to hide, lowered his voice and said, “She’s been trembling the whole time.”
After Ren Qin turned off the lights and got into bed, she simply couldn’t fall asleep like she normally would—something any person would fail to do in such a situation.
The room was dark. With her eyes closed, the fear of not knowing what might happen the next second instantly wrapped around her. Before Ji Mingrui even spoke, she hadn’t realized she was shaking.
“Sorry,” Ren Qin said, sitting up under the covers. “Unless you knock me out, I really can’t do it.”
Ji Mingrui said, “Don’t look at me. I can’t do it, and intentionally hurting someone is against the law.”
In the end, Xie Lin opened the wardrobe door. He turned on his phone screen and used its faint light to illuminate the room, then sighed.
“Switch people.”
If they were switching, that raised another problem: who would replace her?
Su Xiaolan couldn’t get here in time. Ji Mingrui was tall and broad-shouldered, with a buzz cut; if he lay on the bed, he would look like an unmistakably burly guy. Xie Lin was also tall, with a model-like build—slim in clothes, probably with eight abs if he showed his body.
In the end, everyone’s gaze turned to Chi Qing.
Chi Qing said, “…Why are you all looking at me?”
“If we’re talking about who here looks vaguely the most like a woman,” Ji Mingrui said fearlessly, “bro, it’d probably be you.”
The faint light from Xie Lin’s phone happened to fall on Chi Qing. He was still bent-legged inside the wardrobe. Since the air-conditioning was on in Ren Qin’s home, he had taken off his coat after coming in and was only wearing a sweater. Because he was so thin, the sweater looked loose on him.
He had long hair, slender fingers, and long legs.
If you ignored the sense of weariness about him, his features were actually a little androgynous and quite beautiful.
From those beautiful lips came the coldest words: “The moment you said that, you lost your brother.”
Ji Mingrui said, “Come on, help out.”
Ren Qin was more empathetic. She knew what it felt like to lie on a bed. “How about I try a little harder? Don’t make things difficult for Mr. Chi. In this situation, anyone lying down would be scared…”
Chi Qing hadn’t said anything yet, but Xie Lin seemed to have read his mind. “He probably dislikes the bed because you lay on it, and he doesn’t really want to wear your pajamas either. As for being scared, I don’t think that’s it.” He glanced at Chi Qing and fully agreed with what Chi Qing had told him earlier by message: “…Even if the killer were standing at the head of the bed right now, he’d still be able to sleep.”
Chi Qing really wasn’t afraid. He simply didn’t know what fear felt like.
“Although I don’t really want to help with this,” Chi Qing had to admit Xie Lin knew him very well, “if we can change the bedsheet and get a clean set of pajamas, then it’s still negotiable.”
Ren Qin: “…”
Ji Mingrui: “…”
His brother, a man who valued his cleanliness over caring whether the killer was right in front of him.
After changing the bedsheet, Ren Qin found a set of clothes that had never been worn before. She herself wasn’t short, but there was no way she could compare with Chi Qing’s height. After trying to make it fit, she gave up, thinking that once the blanket was on and the lights were off, no one would be able to see much anyway. Whether it was sleepwear or not didn’t really matter.
After Chi Qing lay down on the bed, he pulled the blanket over his face. His hair was long over his forehead, and at first glance he really did look the part.
No matter how alert the killer was, it would be hard to notice at a glance that the person on the bed had already been replaced.
The swapped-out Ren Qin and Ji Mingrui hid in the wardrobe. Ji Mingrui had taken someone else’s spot and asked, “Consultant Xie, where are you hiding then? Or should I come out instead?” He had already wandered around the room for a long while and hadn’t found anywhere to hide except the wardrobe.
Xie Lin pointed very naturally toward the bed. “It’s fine. I just checked. The clearance under the bed is just right. I’ll hide there.”
Ji Mingrui: “…?”
It wasn’t his fault for overthinking. It was dark and eerie now, and “someone under the bed” was a classic trope from countless horror movies and novels.
Did they really have to hide in such a ghost-story kind of place?
Ren Qin, wearing a coat over her shoulders, thought to herself that she had been scared at first too, but now, with “someone in the wardrobe,” “someone under the bed,” and “the person in the bed isn’t the original person,” she couldn’t even tell who was scaring whom.
From the wardrobe, she watched the man crawl under the bed and disappear, then looked again at the person on the bed who was so calm it was almost absurd, as if he were truly asleep. She quietly said to Ji Mingrui, “With Mr. Xie and Mr. Chi here, it’s actually quite reassuring.”
Ji Mingrui quite agreed, sighing along with her. “Yeah. Sometimes the two of them are scarier than the criminal.”
Half past eleven, approaching midnight, the rain gradually stopped.
There was no one left in the neighborhood.
As long as someone stood near the apartment building, it was easy to see which household had laundry hanging out on the balcony, and also easy to tell whether the lights in the house were on or off. More than an hour after Ren Qin’s home went dark, a half-burned cigarette butt appeared beside a garbage bin near one of the building entrances.
The red glow on the cigarette butt quickly went out when it touched the damp ground.
The upper section of the wardrobe where Ren Qin and Ji Mingrui were hiding had a shutter-door design. By gently lifting a layer of wooden slats, they could open a narrow gap and barely see the scene in the bedroom.
The more Ren Qin waited, the more uneasy she became. She was afraid that he would come, and even more afraid that he wouldn’t. If he didn’t come tonight, wouldn’t it be even more dangerous afterward? At the same time, she also hoped this was all a misunderstanding, hoped that no one had ever entered her room in the middle of the night at all.
But just as the clock hand was about to point to twelve, inside the quiet, sealed wardrobe, she clearly heard a faint, familiar sound from the living room.
It was the sound of a key being inserted into the door lock.
Someone was really opening the door!
Hearing that sound, even Ji Mingrui couldn’t help swearing inwardly.
The orange cat’s whole body jerked. Its eyes turned toward the bedroom door, but this time, perhaps because Ren Qin had been soothing it, it didn’t cry out much. It was, however, visibly tense.
Ren Qin, hidden in the wardrobe, instantly went rigid. She clamped a hand over her mouth and held her breath, terrified that the other person would hear her breathing.
Then the key slowly turned. The lock gave a soft click.
The door opened.
They couldn’t see the living room from the bedroom, so they could only listen, using the sounds to tell that the person who had come in stopped in the living room for a while.
He seemed to be changing shoes, opening the shoe cabinet.
Then, with a bang, he shut the shoe cabinet again.
After that came the sound of footsteps. It sounded like the person was very familiar with this place. When the footsteps paused, Ren Qin heard the sound of water being poured and realized he had even gone to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water.
What did he use to drink it? Was it her cup?
Very soon, there was the rushing sound of water from the kitchen. He cleaned the cup carefully and thoroughly before coming out. The sound of his slippers on the floor grew closer and closer to the bedroom.
—The bedroom door was opened.
Ren Qin, hidden in the wardrobe, had inadvertently experienced, from a third-person perspective and at close range, how the other person had entered her home every night for the past month after she fell asleep, and what he did after entering.
Reality was far more chilling than imagination. Listening to the sounds alone made her scalp crawl.
Ren Qin dared not look, but Ji Mingrui had to keep watch through the wardrobe crack at all times. He narrowed his eyes and tried to adapt to the darkness. He could vaguely see a black figure appear at the bedroom door.
After entering the bedroom, the man walked to the side of Ren Qin’s bed.
He stood there silently for a long time, looking at “her.”
From under the bed, the scene was even more direct.
Xie Lin was hiding under the bed. The man’s feet were only half a step away from him, and he remained there for a very long time.
Inside the wardrobe, Ji Mingrui rested his fingers on the wooden slats, pressing two of the shutter boards downward. He widened his eyes, trying to see more clearly through the gap. He saw the man holding something reflective in his hand—that was a knife!
In the middle of the night. A strange man with a knife enters your room and stands at the head of the bed looking at you.
Ji Mingrui’s heart skipped a beat.
And the “Ren Qin” on the bed was completely buried under the blanket. Not only was she not trembling, her breathing didn’t even change. If Ji Mingrui hadn’t known in advance that the person lying there was Chi Qing, he would have really thought the person was asleep.
Ji Mingrui thought to himself: his brother’s mental fortitude is really something else.
And the one under the bed too… also incredibly strong.
“Qin Qin.” The man suddenly spoke.
His voice was a little hoarse, low and slow.
Perhaps because, in tonight’s plan, “she” wouldn’t survive until the next day anyway, it no longer mattered whether he was discovered or not. The man didn’t deliberately soften his movements, nor did he use any sedatives to make her completely unconscious. He wasn’t even afraid that his voice would wake “her.”
The black shadow beside Xie Lin moved forward a few steps, then the shadow shifted, and he climbed onto the bed.
Chi Qing was lying on the right side, with a large empty space on the left. His whole face was buried in the blanket. Although lying there had been boring, and if he’d been given a little more time he might actually have fallen asleep, at this moment he was still awake.
His eyes were open. He very clearly felt the mattress sink down on the right side and struggled hard to resist the urge to kick the person off the bed.
The voice beside him was very close: “Qin Qin, I didn’t come to see you yesterday. I missed you a lot.”
“Do you miss me?”
“How could you miss me? You might not even know me, but I’ve been coming to see you at night many times. I know everything about you.”
The man’s hoarse voice came in broken fragments. In the end, he said, “Even though you may never know me, you will always belong to me. This is the last time I’ll come see you, Qin Qin.”
As he spoke, the man gently placed a hand over the face of the person beside him through the blanket. “I found another girl. She’s as pretty as you and lives in your neighborhood too—right in the building ahead of you. Maybe you’ve even seen each other before.”
After saying that, he slowly pulled the blanket down from “Ren Qin’s” face.
The next second, he realized the person under the blanket wasn’t Ren Qin at all… no, that wasn’t Ren Qin!
Without any warning, he met a pair of unfamiliar eyes—eyes deeper than the night itself—staring straight at him.
“I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” Chi Qing said, looking at him. “You sure do talk a lot.”
Then Chi Qing paused slightly and called out his name:
“…Zhou Zhiyi.”
