The sudden turn of events hit everyone’s minds on the scene like a bolt of invisible, chained lightning.
The first to react was Meng Fushan. He stepped toward the collapsed Boss Jiang, intending to check on his condition. But before he could reach him, a hand firmly clamped around his arm.
He turned his head to see the Silver Mask.
“Get the hell away.” Huo Ranyin didn’t bother hiding his hostility toward Meng Fushan, using force to pull him back behind himself. Right after, he immediately squatted down to inspect Boss Jiang’s condition.
Boss Jiang was in bad shape.
He was sitting on the floor as if drunk; the people beside him had tried several times to pull him up, but none succeeded.
Suddenly, he twisted around, collapsed onto his hands and knees on the floor, and began to vomit.
At first, he could still prop himself up with his elbows, but power rapidly drained from his body. He collapsed flat into his own vomit, half of his face submerged in that pool of yellowish-green, sticky, gooey mess. The thick, pasty substance clung to his face like silk.
“Gag…”
By now, the foul stench had spread throughout the restaurant. Those in the restaurant who witnessed this scene turned pale, their throats itching with an urge to vomit as well.
Without needing Huo Ranyin to say another word, they consciously backed away from the spot where Boss Jiang had fallen.
Anxiety had already begun to circulate like cold air.
Boss Radish sat fidgeting uncomfortably: “What happened to Boss Jiang? Looking at this state, could he have been poisoned?”
Boss Ponytail offered dry comforting words that no one believed: “Maybe he just upset his stomach? Instant noodles are too harsh on an elderly person’s digestive system…”
As the leader among the bosses, Short Boss seemed as if he wanted to step forward, but looking at the watery, rancid stomach contents, filled with both terror and disgust, his face turned pale: “Mr. Liu, won’t you take a look?”
Mr. Liu didn’t move. He looked on from a distance, coldly watching everything happening before him: “Xu Ke, go up and take a look.”
Xu Ke was the physiotherapist’s name. Holding his breath, he stepped forward: “Boss Jiang, are you alright? How are you feeling right now…”
He wanted to help Boss Jiang up, but failed to do so.
“I, I…” Boss Jiang was trying hard too.
He struggled to push himself up from the vomit, opening his eyes wide to look at his surroundings.
However, dizziness enveloped him, making the world spin round and round…
“Uncomfortable…” He tried hard to utter a sound, his hand reaching out like a taloned claw to grab the two people right beside him. “I can’t… breathe! My… head hurts!”
Huo Ranyin looked toward Xu Ke.
Xu Ke was the only doctor here, yet he looked even more panicked than Boss Jiang, who was struggling painfully on the floor. His eyes darted about frantically, rolling left and right, refusing to settle on Boss Jiang.
The surroundings had quieted down at some unknown moment.
Those bosses, crew members, and bodyguards all watched Boss Jiang struggle on the floor in absolute silence—a silence that exerted a pressure as icy and severe as frozen frost.
“Snap out of it!” Huo Ranyin grabbed Xu Ke’s collar, shaking him fiercely. Then, he forced Xu Ke to look at Boss Jiang, whose blue veins bulged and eyes bulged wide: “What poison was he given?”
“I don’t know, I can’t diagnose it! Without equipment, it’s impossible to judge at all!” Xu Ke shouted aloud.
“He has a headache, vomiting, a rapid pulse, difficulty breathing, and a flushed face,” Huo Ranyin said rapidly.
“So what? Too many symptoms overlap with this! Plenty of illnesses and poisons can cause these exact results! Do you have any idea how many types of poisons exist in the world? Do you know that even in large, fully equipped hospitals, people aren’t immediately diagnosed upon arrival? They need examinations, blood tests, emergency resuscitation—”
“Give him emergency resuscitation,” Huo Ranyin said word by word.
Xu Ke seemed to finally find a floating reef in his panicked, helpless world. He abruptly snatched off his glasses, rubbed his face hard, and tried his best to calm down: “Right, right, emergency resuscitation! Difficulty breathing… give him oxygen first! Rapid pulse… what medication should be used?”
Huo Ranyin paid no attention to what Xu Ke was muttering. He looked down again at the struggling Boss Jiang and suddenly held the man down.
The foul stench had long since filled the entire space.
The smell of vomit and the smell of instant noodles—every single odor aggressively stimulated Huo Ranyin’s nose.
Yet Huo Ranyin still lowered his head, bringing his face close until he was face-to-face with Boss Jiang.
His smooth chin almost touched the filth on the floor, while his high, prominent nose seemed about to reach into Boss Jiang’s open mouth.
He took a gentle, long sniff for quite a while.
During this time, everyone involuntarily held their breath at Huo Ranyin’s strange behavior.
About ten-odd seconds later, Huo Ranyin straightened his body and said decisively:
“There is a scent of bitter almonds in his mouth. It’s likely cyanide poisoning.”
“Cyanide!” Xu Ke blurted out. “Amyl nitrite!”
He immediately stood up and sprinted outward, while Mr. Liu gestured for the surrounding bodyguards to hurry up and follow.
However, not long after the closed heavy doors of the restaurant swung open, Boss Jiang—lying on the floor, gripping Huo Ranyin’s arm tightly—uttered a long, agonizing gasp, and suddenly stopped moving.
No one uttered a sound, nor did anyone move a muscle.
Just then, messy footsteps came from outside. Xu Ke rushed back in carrying a heap of medical supplies and equipment, shouting loudly: “The stuff is here, the stuff is here! Two people help lift him onto the table so I can give him an injection—”
Not a single voice around him responded.
Xu Ke finally noticed something was wrong. His footsteps unconsciously slowed down, yet he kept walking forward, until he saw Boss Jiang lying motionless on the floor—the burning flame inside his body instantly went pfft and died out.
“He, why isn’t he moving?” Xu Ke asked.
Still, no one answered him. The icy coldness froze into solid ice, adhering to everyone’s hearts.
However, more gazes—almost all gazes—concentrated on Xu Ke, the only doctor at the scene.
Xu Ke squatted down, his movements jerky and stiff like a rusted robot. But he finally touched Boss Jiang, checking his pulse and measuring his breathing… In the end, the doctor raised his head and announced in a somewhat ethereal voice:
“He’s dead.”
Once those words were understood by everyone, a sudden whimpering broke out on the scene.
Someone was crying.
It was the boss wearing the silver mask—normal height, medium build, clad in a low-profile black suit, with hair groomed so neatly that he was the type of person who would vanish into a crowd. His sole distinguishing feature was a dove brooch pinned to his chest.
Clutching his head, that man wept loudly, crying like a completely broken child: “Dead again, dead again, dead again! No matter where we hide, people keep dying! No matter what plan we make, people keep dying! Everyone is going to die—the killer wants to murder all of us, everyone is going to die!”
The fractured voice pierced into everyone’s hearts like broken, sharp blades.
Huo Ranyin looked around his surroundings.
The incandescent lights shone brightly, illuminating faces that were as deathly pale as corpses.
The face of the actual corpse, ironically, looked better than theirs.
They stared with wretched, terrified eyes at the horrific corpse on the floor, and then looked at the other people beside them.
The weeping White Dove Boss had voiced the fear inside every single person’s heart here.
What place was safe? What food was safe? What person was safe?
No place was safe, no food was safe, and no person… was safe!
“Now that the lethal substance has been identified, what we should consider next is where the poison was placed.”
Huo Ranyin spoke up, breaking the eerie atmosphere in the room.
Everyone looked at him.
At this moment, fear had turned them into mindless puppets, foolishly listening to someone pull their strings—the occasional few who managed to retain their sanity amidst the fear, such as Mr. Liu, were in no rush to speak either, merely watching him.
And… who else has been poisoned, Huo Ranyin thought. But he pressed this sentence under his tongue, leaving it unspoken. At present, everyone was already on the verge of collapse from witnessing Boss Jiang being tortured to death by cyanide. If they realized they might also be poisoned, the scene would likely spiral out of control in an instant.
He was here alone without weapons, nor could he reveal his identity as a police officer. Once the scene spiraled out of control, it would be utterly impossible to regain command over the chaotic situation.
He could only investigate the poison first.
Identifying the existence of the poison would also identify the people who might have been poisoned.
“Uncertain whether poisoned” and “confirmed poisoned” were two completely different concepts. The unknown incited panic, whereas a definitive result had to be faced. Once they knew for certain that they were poisoned, they would no longer riot or panic; instead, they would actively seek treatment—though cyanide was extremely toxic, if a lethal dose wasn’t ingested, there was still hope for survival and recovery.
“Correct.” Mr. Liu nodded. “How do we test for the poison?”
“There’s a very simple method.” The one speaking was not Huo Ranyin, but Meng Fushan.
Huo Ranyin noticed that Meng Fushan’s gaze swept over his face as if inadvertently, carrying a faint, needle-like hostility.
Hostility is mutual, he sneered in his heart.
“Take an item with rust—copper rust will do—and place it into items suspected of containing cyanide, such as instant noodle bowls or mineral water bottles. Once a chemical reaction occurs, it proves there’s poison inside,” Meng Fushan said.
It was indeed a very simple method of judgment.
Mr. Liu had the bodyguards gather rusted items and tested everything at the scene that could potentially hold cyanide—every bowl of eaten instant noodles and every bottle of water.
Soon, the results came out.
On the scene, except for Boss Jiang’s and Boss Wu’s instant noodle bowls which contained cyanide, everyone else’s instant noodle bowls were normal, displaying no abnormalities.
When the test results came out, Boss Wu’s face turned deathly pale, his body swaying so much that even his chair turned into a rocking chair. But before he tumbled to the floor, his survival instinct conquered his fear, and his hand reached out like an eagle’s claw to grab Xu Ke! Just as Boss Jiang had grabbed Huo Ranyin moments ago.
He rasped: “I’m poisoned! The medicine—the medicine you mentioned just now, give it to me! Treat me quickly! Is cyanide fatal upon contact? Is there still hope for me? Is there still hope for me?!”
Xu Ke was pulled so hard he stumbled a couple of steps, almost dropping the life-saving medicine in his hand. His face was equally deathly pale: “Hope—there’s hope! Cyanide isn’t fatal upon contact; it’s only fatal in sufficient doses! Placed in instant noodles, it was already diluted quite a bit by the noodle soup. Boss Jiang ate up all the soup and noodles, and it still took nearly half an hour before it took effect, showing that the amount of cyanide added wasn’t fully sufficient. You only ate a couple of bites—you can still… still be saved—”
Human joys and sorrows do not align.
Once the others realized they had escaped another brush with death, their fear shifted completely onto Boss Wu. Freed from the jaws of terror, they caught their breath and were able to speak again:
“Was… was the one who placed the poison the Ghost?” Short Boss asked in a trembling voice, not daring to look at the deceased Boss Jiang.
“How would the Ghost place the poison?” Huo Ranyin asked back calmly. “The bottled water and instant noodle bowls were all sealed. Before being opened, out of fear of being poisoned, they were inspected repeatedly—there were no pinholes or any suspicious marks. How could the Ghost exist inside a sealed room, inject poison into sealed food, and remain completely undetected by any of us?”
Indeed, it made no sense.
‘Ghost’ was merely a codename; he was a human, and a human could not kill people in violation of scientific logic.
Which meant…
“The killer is among us,” Huo Ranyin said. “Poison couldn’t be placed in sealed food, so it could only be added after the food was opened, taking advantage of the owner’s lapse in attention. I reckon that after poisoning the food, the killer…”
A faint fizzing sound rang out in the restaurant.
Huo Ranyin presented the trash can for everyone to see.
The trash inside the can had been cleared, but food liquid lingered at the bottom. Right now, the rusted item was reacting in that lingering liquid. Yet both Boss Jiang’s and Boss Wu’s instant noodle bowls were still sitting on the table, and they had only thrown the outer plastic wrap and seasoning packets into the trash can—this proved that the cyanide in the trash can didn’t come from the two bosses’ bowls; it came from the killer.
“…discarded the cyanide packaging inside the trash can.”
