The sun finally sank, the horizon drawing in its last bit of light, and the long-awaiting darkness scrambled to cover everything.
In a street-side parking space outside the hotel, a silver-white van had been parked for a long time.
The van’s windows were opaque black glass, making it completely impossible to see the situation inside from the outside.
As for the mysterious interior—there were two people inside: a bald man wearing a hat, and a young man using a computer.
“What time is it already?” the bald man said, somewhat impatiently. “Why hasn’t the mark returned yet?”
The mark they were talking about was, without a doubt, Huo Ranyin.
Staking out someone with no fixed routine in an unfamiliar city always meant facing endless trouble. They could only start their investigation from the hotel, but something had gone wrong at this very first step.
They waited all the way until 4:00 AM, but still didn’t see him return.
Although it was possible for tourists to stay out all night partying at KTVs or bars, this was Huo Ranyin, after all—an extremely cunning opponent. Could Huo Ranyin have already realized someone was tailing him?
The two men in the car analyzed the situation for a moment and decided to re-watch the footage from the camera they had kept pointed at the hotel entrance all this time.
The surveillance footage, playing at 8x speed, showed everything was normal—except for a man who left carrying two large suitcases and returned empty-handed fifteen minutes later, which was a bit strange.
The young man zoomed in on a screenshot, pulled out the group photo from the Mingxing Publishing House’s annual meeting, and confirmed that this man was an editor named Ai Yin.
Interesting.
But this couldn’t stump him.
The young man slowly reached out. The fingers on both his hands were very long, long to a somewhat grotesque degree, like ten thin white chopsticks striking the keyboard.
Besides the surveillance, they had made other preparations. That afternoon, they had slipped into the hotel lobby and set up a disguised Wi-Fi network with the exact same name as the hotel’s. They then changed the password for the hotel’s actual Wi-Fi to lock it out. Overnight, more than half of the foolish people there had connected to their Wi-Fi without any defenses.
That idiot Ai Yin was no exception.
And a phone connected to a public Wi-Fi was like a house with its front doors wide open, inviting people to come inside and take a look.
The young man easily hacked into Ai Yin’s phone through the Wi-Fi and saw his WeChat chat history.
>>>
Ai Yin: Teacher Ji, how was your trip today? The Daye Temple I recommended was pretty good, right?
Ji Xun: It wasn’t bad, just that climbing the mountain was very tiring.
Ai Yin: Whoa, can’t you drive up to Daye Temple?
Ji Xun: …I climbed up to other Buddhist temples too.
Ai Yin: But I remember there’s a cable car?
Ji Xun: No, I changed to another mountain to visit Buddhist temples.
Ai Yin: Whoa, Teacher Ji, you like worshipping Buddha that much?! You even switched mountains to climb. Have you climbed enough? Do you need me to recommend other temples?
Ji Xun: …No need, I’ve already looked them up myself.
Ai Yin: Whoa, Teacher Ji, you’ve already looked them up?!
Ji Xun: Stop with the “whoa”s. Do me a favor, take out my luggage and mail it to me…
Ai Yin: ?!
After that was an address and an audio message.
He couldn’t hear the audio message, but getting to this point was already enough.
In the conversation, frequently visiting Buddhist temples was an important piece of information that could serve as a starting point.
Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack—
The peeping eyes darted nimbly in the dark of night.
Early the next morning, Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin had already freshened up again, left their room, and prepared to continue their mountain-climbing visits along the itinerary they set yesterday.
They ate a simple breakfast at the hotel. As they stepped out the door, Ji Xun looked up at the weather.
“Hmm, dismal dark clouds, no sun in sight, plus the fact that I accidentally left my phone behind when we left the hotel room and had to go back for it… Everything is going wrong. It’s an ominous omen.”
“Following your superstitious thinking, are you also moonlighting as a fortune teller now?” Huo Ranyin asked.
“This is a prophet’s inspiration,” Ji Xun said.
“What inspiration?” Huo Ranyin rubbed his head with a headache. “Obviously, based on logical analysis, anyone could deduce that the longer we stay in Qin City, the higher the probability of those people coming after us.”
“But a prophet is more fashionable than a detective, and I want to look a little more fashionable in front of you.”
“…” Huo Ranyin.
The image of that lively big cat rolled across Huo Ranyin’s mind again.
You look at this cat every day, and its arrogant, head-bobbing swagger makes you want to smack it no matter how you look at it. But when you actually touch its body, the hand that was supposed to teach it a lesson only ends up gently stroking its warm body, observing whether its fur is as bright and shiny as before.
In the future…
A half-sunny, half-cloudy shadow swept across Huo Ranyin’s heart.
Am I going to be completely at Ji Xun’s mercy?
As they talked, they had already walked to the side of the road in front of the hotel. Ji Xun saw a taxi and reached out to hail it.
The green taxi flicked its turn signal and slowly pulled up in front of them. But just before Ji Xun could open the door of the stopped car, a young man suddenly dashed out from an angle, beat them to it, and got into the car.
The car door slammed shut with a “bang,” squeezing out the young man’s pitch-shifted yelling:
“I was here first! This is my car, don’t you guys try to squeeze in!”
Ji Xun hadn’t actually planned on squeezing in.
But it was too late to say anything now; the taxi had already driven off. Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin had no choice but to continue waiting by the road. Fortunately, another empty green taxi was already driving down this road.
Ji Xun hurriedly hailed it.
The taxi stopped.
This time, Ji Xun first looked left and right alertly. Only after seeing no one coming to snatch the car did he pull open the door, smoothly get into the backseat, and say to the taxi driver in the front:
“To the foot of Zouma Mountain.”
“Alrighty, hold on tight—” The driver of this taxi had a fair, soft, and friendly big round face like a full moon, but his voice was gruff and hearty. With a step on the gas pedal, the car sped off.
Zouma Mountain was their first stop today. It was also a very large mountain range within Qin City. The mountain had numerous peaks and, naturally, numerous temples. From the top of the mountain to the bottom, there was also a dedicated mountain-circling ginkgo road. Winding and twisting, it looked like a golden chain wrapping around the whole mountain when viewed from the sky. Naturally, in this current season, there was no such scenery to be found.
Bored in the car, Ji Xun played on his phone for a bit, then naturally started chatting with Huo Ranyin.
Since both of them were sitting in the backseat, communicating was extremely convenient. Ji Xun said, “Actually, from last night until now, I’ve been wondering why the short guy swapped the nameplates at the end of the story…”
He elaborated:
“Assuming it really happened, and Lao Hu indeed witnessed a murder, then there are these few possibilities.
One: Just like he said, he is an innocent bystander.
If that short guy really swapped the plates, what was his motive?
Taking the most common nameplate-swapping trope in detective novels as an example: the victim is killed in Room A, but the door plate is swapped to B, and finally swapped back to A. This is to cover up the primary crime scene.
Now, regardless of which Buddha statue the victim is sealed in, he is dead, and the exterior looks pretty much the same, except that the final placement location is different—could there be a clue about this location that we don’t know yet? Something that prompted the short guy to make such a move.
He wasn’t accomplices with the guy in the gray clothes, but he definitely knew about the guy in gray committing murder—he’s using this incident to achieve some goal.
Two: Lao Hu is half a participant.
When there are lies in a story, it can be disassembled and reassembled into many stories with the same elements but completely different meanings. Delete ‘accidentally wandering into the back mountain,’ and the story becomes that Lao Hu knew all along that someone was going to dump a body and crouched there waiting for it all to happen. Swap out the short guy, and the story becomes that Lao Hu knew someone was going to dump a body, so he swapped the plates and waited for it all to happen. This requires us to figure out a way to properly interrogate that old man again.
Three: Lao Hu is the killer.
This hypothesis is very novel-like. The culprit feels that all the evidence has been destroyed and is certain we can’t track it down, so out of a desire to show off, he wants to toy with us.
Assuming everything is fake, Lao Hu adding this ending can be understood as an attempt to expand our search radius. Both nameplates had the names of the most common Buddhas found in temples. Adding a possibility means multiplying the cost of our fieldwork. So, he is either joking with us, or he wants to stall us in Qin City.
Combining the fact that he knows you and the special location of the abandoned pier, maybe there’s some unfathomable conspiracy behind this.
Could it be that he is the legendary Big Boss of the Men in Black Organization—?”
“There’s another possibility…”
Huo Ranyin had patiently listened to this long string of words before speaking coldly.
“He has Alzheimer’s.”
“…Hmm.” Ji Xun felt utterly deflated, his tone listless. “What a boring conclusion.”
“Stop treating life like a novel,” Huo Ranyin said.
“Tsk, tsk.” Ji Xun sighed, picked up his phone, tapped on it a couple of times casually, and suddenly said to the driver up front, “Left turn at the intersection!”
His voice was urgent and fast, full of cold command.
The driver, who had been eavesdropping on their conversation, had a momentary blank in his brain and subconsciously turned the wheel following Ji Xun’s command. Only after making the turn and driving for a dozen meters did he let out an Aiya: “We’ve deviated from the route…”
“There’s a car behind us that’s been tailing us the whole way,” Ji Xun said seriously. “Shake them off.”
“Eh…?”
However, before the driver could digest this sentence, a series of commands came from the back.
“Turn left.”
“Turn right.”
“Turn left, take the side street.”
“Right turn on the side street.”
“No good, there’s still a car, a black sedan—”
“How could there be no cars on the road!” After the continuous string of commands, the driver up front was starting to lose Ji Xun’s rhythm. Once he couldn’t keep up, his road rage began to flare. The big bro driver’s voice was no longer as hearty as before, and his expression shifted from cloudless to a thunderstorm. “That black sedan you pointed out only appeared after we turned. That license plate ending in 444—I’ve never seen such a ‘rushing-to-reincarnate’ tail number before. Brother, do you have persecution paranoia?!”
“Better safe than sorry,” Ji Xun said cautiously. “I was just discussing the topic of being persecuted. Isn’t it perfectly normal to have a fear of being persecuted?”
“Safe my ass—” the driver cursed out loud.
After all the lefts and rights, not to mention Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin, even the driver momentarily couldn’t figure out their current location. However, they were generally heading toward Zouma Mountain. Having driven this far, they were already far from the urban area, arriving on a suburban road with dense vegetation, sparse buildings, and hardly any traffic.
There weren’t many vehicles on the road. The driver’s attention had shifted from the road conditions ahead to Ji Xun, his hands merely gripping the steering wheel out of instinct. Just as the car rounded another curve, a massive shadow appeared, accompanied by an ear-piercing horn.
The three people in the car looked forward.
A large red truck, like an unavoidable, grotesque behemoth, was aggressively barreling straight toward them!
The Grim Reaper spread his cloak, his scythe slicing across the sheet metal—
The two vehicles collided!
