“Over there… what’s wrong?”

The director leading the way ahead sensed something amiss and also turned his white-haired head to look toward the empty stairway entrance. 

I quickly said “It’s nothing” and gave Yu Baijin a look. 

He immediately understood, and the two of us pretended nothing had happened and continued lifting our feet to climb the steps.

“Must have seen wrong.”

I had to say, if I absolutely had to pick one thing where he and I were compatible, it was our ability to demonstrate astonishing tacit understanding at critical moments.

“Probably the police comrades. The entire building is being watched now, everyone’s quite tense…”

The old director adjusted his reading glasses and also turned his head back, muttering about the sudden changes in recent days at this place that had always been peaceful and healing. 

“Our sanatorium has decades of history. The surveillance equipment is a bit outdated, but mainly, as you know, some patients and family members have rather special identities and value confidentiality. They don’t want to be monitored wherever they go…

“Besides, most of our residents here are retired cadres, recovering from injuries, relaxing their minds—old arms and old legs. They don’t have the ability to make a twenty-something young lady vanish into thin air.”

As he said, in such a sanatorium independent from the downtown bustle, a place of peaceful times, any noise would immediately be noticed by neighbors, let alone a commotion on the level of kidnapping a living person. 

If Rong Wanqing had shouted, the entire building would have heard.

Unless—she hadn’t resisted.

“It’s someone she knows.”

Yu Baijin leaned close to my ear and whispered, his breath slightly warm. 

One hand dishonestly landed on my waist, using this motion to glance behind us again, then he chuckled softly.

“It’s a little girl.”

“If there’s no malicious intent, let’s not startle her yet.”

People in mine and Yu Baijin’s line of work, after enough time, could easily detect “malicious intent” from others. 

Killing intent that was sufficiently strong could be perceived—it was just that people like us who licked blood off knife edges and frequently dealt with life and death had trained more acute senses and were simply more sensitive than ordinary people.

“We’re here.”

The old director coughed. 

I calmly peeled Yu Baijin’s clingy hand off my body and said: “Thank you. Please go about your business, we won’t trouble you further.”

“If you need any help, come find me in the lobby.”

After the old man’s hunched figure left, we were blocked instead by two uniformed young men and a man of unknown origin wearing a pure black suit with a Bluetooth earpiece—an informant sent by either Rong Zheng or Duan Wenshu. 

He sized us up from head to toe and asked expressionlessly: “Mr. Jian, Mr. Yu? Please enter, but don’t touch anything in the room. You can’t bear the responsibility.”

His pretentious manner made Yu Baijin laugh inappropriately, his shoulders shaking as he suppressed it: “…Okay.”

I was too lazy to deal with him anymore.

The two of us stepped one after another into the room where Rong Wanqing had lived for two months. 

The room faced the sun with excellent lighting. 

A gentle breeze came through. 

Outside the open window, half a plane tree crown protruded, and as if disturbed by us, the treetop swayed, shaking loose fine rustling sounds.

This place completely maintained its appearance from before she disappeared.

The entire room was about thirty square meters. 

The layout was obvious at a glance: bed, nightstand, desk, chair, and a two-seater sofa with a triangular cushion on the backrest, its surface embroidered with beautiful patterns.

“I sat here waiting for her.” 

Yu Baijin pointed out his position at the time—left side leading to the door, right side next to the bed. “I remember very clearly, the lamp was on. I just assumed she had gone to the dining room or restroom and would be back soon.”

“How did you get in?” I asked him.

He whistled.

“Can’t you enter like a normal person through the door…”

The lamp sat on the nightstand. 

A quite common wooden corner table with curved edges, two tiers—the lower tier stacked with several books borrowed from the library, the spines uniformly affixed with labels bearing numerical codes at the bottom; the upper tier, besides the lamp, also held a hardcover notebook that appeared to be a diary or reading notes.

Rong Wanqing had the habit of taking notes. 

She would record books and movies she watched, sometimes telling me about them, asking for my thoughts, regardless of whether I was interested, as long as she was willing.

I turned my back to the doorway, twisted my head to glance outside, and seeing no one watching, suddenly reached out to flip the notebook open, trying not to make any page-turning sounds, holding my breath and concentrating as I quickly skimmed through it front to back.

It truly was reading notes.

The notebook recorded over fifty pages, more than thirty books, each page with clear handwriting. 

Stories she particularly liked were marked with colored highlighters, and the excerpted sentences and reading reflections were interspersed with casual doodles of emoticons—girlish self-entertainment. 

I randomly spot-checked several of the more prominently colored underlined passages, using the most superficial decryption method to piece together scattered words and phrases, but didn’t get any distress code. 

I had been overthinking it.

Inevitably somewhat disappointed.

But I didn’t give up. 

Just as I was about to close the notebook and seek another method, Yu Baijin suddenly reached out, his knuckles wedged between the soft leather cover and the flyleaf.

Only then did I notice this detail.

The flyleaf that was glued together with the inner lining of the cover had two pieces of tape on it, positioned diagonally, but the center was empty with nothing written. I compared the size with my palm—about six inches.

Something had originally been attached here and had been taken away by someone.

***

“What are you doing?”

The two men guarding the door sensed something wrong and raised their voices to shout at us: “We told you not to touch anything. Don’t you understand human speech?” 

Their tone was hostile—whether from watching the scene impatiently or having been rebuked by their superiors, they carried an obvious tone of displaced anger.

Hearing this, Yu Baijin turned his head and withdrew his hand. 

The notebook snapped shut with a “pa” sound. I quickly pressed against his back and spoke before he could: “Got it, we’ll be done looking soon.

“Bear with it.” I mouthed the words to Yu Baijin, and the two of us split up to examine other furniture and personal items in the room. 

Time passed minute by minute, but we gained almost nothing.

Aside from the intimate clothing in the wardrobe and the girls’ perfumes and accessories that we had no right to disturb, this was just an ordinary room.

No bloodstains, no traces of conflict, not even a suspicious footprint, yet its owner had vanished like a wisp of fragrance dispersing in the wind, evaporated from the human world.

The only suspicious point was the missing blank space on the flyleaf of the reading notes.

From the specifications, it looked like a photograph. 

Following ordinary people’s logic, the person photographed must be related to the culprit—that’s why they would choose to risk destroying evidence.

However, before I could find ways to further delay and seize the opportunity to gather more clues, the two police personnel at the door had already run out of patience and issued us an eviction order: “Do not obstruct the execution of official duties.”

It wasn’t a suitable occasion for dispute. 

I could only give up and drag Yu Baijin outside. 

Expecting resistance, he was surprisingly compliant, lazily following behind me. 

It was just that when passing those three people, his gaze was fixed and direct, like a pen, like a knife, tracing back and forth along their necks.

I knew he was calculating how many seconds it would take to twist off all three heads. 

My feet could only quicken their pace, taking the true death god away from their vicinity.

***

“Baby, slow down.”

On the way down from the third floor to the second floor, Yu Baijin, who had only been peaceful for a short while, suddenly pulled me back with a smile, yanking backward with his hand. 

The two shadows cast by us on the stairwell wall immediately collided into one mass, stopping at the corner. 

My mind was only occupied with thinking about the next countermeasure, with no spare attention to fool around with him. 

I had just turned my head to get angry when he pinched my chin and turned it forward, his whole person lying on my back, as if playing hide-and-seek with someone.

“Shh.”

I instinctively held my breath. 

Looking down, I saw that on the other side of the corner, a slender figure lay across in front of my toes, tentatively trying to emerge. 

After hesitating for a long time, she finally took a step forward. 

Yu Baijin raised one of my hands and, like a stupid large puppet, scared the other person:

“Boo.”

My face came face-to-face with another face wearing heavy makeup.

It was the girl who had been following us all along.

“Ah!”

She took two steps back and let out a delighted scream. 

Though it was somewhat difficult to judge under the cover of makeup, those eyes truly belonged to a seventeen or eighteen-year-old girl. 

She had a petite figure, slender wrists adorned with colorful accessories, holding an equally colorful flip phone. 

Her hands were clasped in front of her body, her expression carrying a theatrical shyness: “You caught me.”

I couldn’t help but blurt out: “Crazy…?” Yu Baijin covered my mouth with his hand, bent down slightly to match her height, and conversed with her convincingly: “That’s right, we won. Is there a reward?”

“Hmm—”

The girl’s pair of black eyes sparkled brightly. 

Sometimes she wore a thoughtful expression, sometimes she bit her lip and giggled—no one knew what she was laughing about. 

She stared at mine and Yu Baijin’s faces, scrutinizing them carefully for a long time, making me feel uncomfortable all over. 

She finally nodded, satisfied: “It’s you two!”

After saying this, she looked left and right as if afraid of being caught, shook a piece of paper out from her sleeve, and stuffed it into my hand.

“She told me to give this to you two!”

***

It was a stiff piece of cardstock. 

To be precise, it was a fragment torn from some complete piece of paper. 

Two adjacent edges were jagged and frayed. The front was black, the image blurry and unclear, difficult to discern in full. 

The back was white with two lines of small characters.

“Don’t worry about me anymore, leave the city immediately.”

It was Rong Wanqing’s handwriting.