Late at night, Wen Yuxian changed clothes. A large hood from his black hoodie and a black mask covered his face, leaving only a pair of eyes packed with killing intent.

He moved fast through the shadows and reached the address the suspicious intelligence broker had given him—an abandoned factory.

The factory gate was locked from the inside. From within came a terrified scream and cries for help.

The tall, thin man sat on a broken sofa playing games. Beside him, a bloodied man fled in panic. A creature that nobody could name—something between beasts and nightmare—chased him like a cat chasing a mouse, raking him now and then, tearing off chunks of flesh, driving him into agony and endless howling.

For that man, it was a nightmare with no exit. Why had he fallen into this? Why torture him like this? Better to give him a clean end. He longed to die on the spot, yet the instinct to live forced him into desperate struggle.

Wen Yuxian watched the scene through a window crack. A sharp knife slid from his sleeve into his palm. The flash of steel looked warm beside the frost in his eyes.

…

The next day, even with a mission and no need to attend school, people still had to get up early.

Jing Pei kept her mind awake with gossip.

The crowd of onlookers never expected the Ouyang incident in Hujing Prefecture to flip.

Last night, an Ouyang household maid posted a video that kept people scrolling deep into the night.

The maid looked pale and fragile. Facing the camera, she said, “I know that once I speak, ten thousand people will curse me, but I have to speak, because this concerns justice. I suspect Mr. Ouyang was killed by Madam Ouyang, and I have strong reasons.

“I only learned this after Mr. Ouyang acted. He told me he could no longer bear Madam Ouyang’s mental control and suppression, so he decided to kill her. He pretended to be the psychopathic killer and wrote Madam Ouyang a death notice, planning to murder her.

“After I learned it, I tried my best to stop him, and he promised to abandon the plan. Yet that same night, he died. Madam Ouyang said the psychopathic killer did it, but how could that be?

“So I suspect Madam Ouyang discovered Mr. Ouyang’s affair and my pregnancy, and when she saw he planned to leave her, she struck first and pinned the blame on that psychopathic killer.”

The video exploded on release. Comments and shares surged past a million in no time. Many people at Twelve Zodiac Academy watched the drama too.

At first, the maid did not dare speak. Then she realized that if she stayed silent, Madam Ouyang would inherit everything, and the maid would get nothing. So she stepped forward despite the storm of curses, aiming to gain status through the child and claim the share she believed she deserved once the baby was born.

After the video spread, the maid took a flood of abuse. The ship fans broke down. There was no perfect man—only cheating that stayed hidden. A man with such a great wife still cheated with a maid who had nothing, and that made him rotten to the bone.

Some men still sided with Mr. Ouyang, saying Madam Ouyang was too forceful, so his affair with a gentle woman made sense, and so on.

Hujing police turned pale. They already burned with frustration after the killer slipped from their net. Then the Ouyang household tossed out this fresh scandal, and the whole case went feral.

Still, the maid posted the video, and Mr. Ouyang’s mother called the police at once. The police had to act. They soon recovered emails from Mr. Ouyang’s phone data: he had bought intelligence from the Puzzle Intelligence Agency, and he truly had planned to murder Madam Ouyang.

That raised the possibility that Madam Ouyang killed her husband. The real killer never sent her a death notice, yet Mr. Ouyang died. She became the top suspect.

A whole bucket of melodrama. A shocking reversal. Rich circles really are a mess—an attempted wife-killer who died first. The public cheered.

But the law does not cheer. Killing is killing. If Madam Ouyang truly poisoned first in self-defense, she still had to face legal judgment.

Early in the morning, police “invited” Madam Ouyang to the station. Their tone stayed polite. They held no hard evidence, and if they never found it, Madam Ouyang would become the richest woman in Hujing—someone who could shake the whole prefecture with one stomp.

“I have no idea,” Madam Ouyang said, eyes red, voice steady. “If I knew, why would I buy the killer’s location for you? If you catch him, would he not tell you he never sent me a death notice? Why would I create trouble for myself?”

Anyone could see she clenched back tears. Betrayal tore at her from within.

Her reasoning also left the officers watching the monitors with no good counter. If she bought that intelligence before Mr. Ouyang died, it would be different. Yet she bought it after his death. If the killer had not slipped away, they would have caught him. Even without the maid’s video, they could have learned from the killer that he never sent the notice, and that would have raised suspicion toward her.

“Still… she may have predicted the maid would speak, so she played it on purpose.”

“And that intelligence broker… what is that? Two-sided profit from the incident, and he acts like he sits in the front row for the show. How does he know all this? How does he know it so cleanly?”

“…Drop it. Mention him and my head hurts.”

“Just start by tracing where the poison in Mr. Ouyang’s cup came from.”

By the time they reached their regroup point, Jing Pei had finished savoring that whole piece of gossip.

According to yesterday’s plan, Feng Yilian was going to have people check the riverbed for more bones, and Tao Ying was going to take people to that tree to dig. But before they could act, Captain Huang called with a sudden development none of them expected.

They rushed to the Jiangnan District police station.

Captain Huang told them, “Last night, someone called emergency services. The ambulance reached an abandoned factory in the outskirts and saved a man who had lost a lot of blood and fallen unconscious. At the same scene, they found a male corpse and the corpse of a Mutant.”

“The wounds on the male corpse match the wounds on the body we found outside the residential complex yesterday. Same killer. Our coroner also found that the Mutant’s teeth match the bite marks on the half-eaten body from that family of three. We also recovered the Mutant’s DNA from the remains. At the same time, we found that some bite marks on the scattered bones match this Mutant as well.”

Captain Huang handed them the coroner’s comparison photos and the lab report.

“The man we rescued woke up not long ago. He got emotional and said a man saved him. That savior wore a mask and a hat, so he could not see the face. The savior used a blade. Very skilled. He fought one-versus-two and took them down, but he got badly hurt. The survivor worries the savior might die, so he begged us to find him.”

“But the savior used the survivor’s phone to place the emergency call. He wiped his fingerprints and cleaned the blood at the scene. That makes him hard to track.”

Feng Yilian and the others stood stunned. From Captain Huang’s report, one conclusion rose to the surface:

The culprit behind the human-bone case seemed found—namely, the Mutant that already lay dead.

The body outside the Jiangnan West District complex belonged to the Mutant’s group, together with the second man at the factory. The family of three inside the complex also died to them.

So they spent the whole day chasing shadows. This “high-danger” case did not even need them to act before it cracked.

“No, it cannot be that simple,” Chen Mo said. “Before the human-bone case, someone already scattered bones in many places, trying to hide something. If those two men and that Mutant killed everyone, why scatter bones on purpose and draw attention? The Mutant could have eaten the bones too. Something deeper sits behind this. And who was the man who killed them? Some vigilante?”

Teacher Cao said, “But the Tribunal Division assigned you the human-bone case. Since it is solved, the rest does not fall to you.”

“No. I hate this halfway state. I want the answer,” Chen Mo said, close to losing it. “This feels like watching part one of a video and the uploader never posts part two. I want to smash them. Not because the video is amazing—because once I watch part one, I must watch part two. If I watch half an hour of a show, I will finish the whole thing, even if it bores me to death. A murder case like this—if I solve half the riddle and you tell me to stop, I will lose my mind!”

He looked to Feng Yilian for help. Feng Yilian had already taken out his Rubik’s Cube again, back to that lazy posture, like nothing mattered.

Tao Ying was worse. If nobody pushed her, she would not move at all. She looked like someone who wanted to root in place. Tang Qiaoqiao had her mind on Wen Yuxian and wanted to leave at once. Whatever Long Ling showed her last night had her excited even now.

So Chen Mo turned to Jing Pei, pleading. “You hate ending it like this too, right?”

Jing Pei smiled. “Sorry. I follow the school’s arrangement.”

Chen Mo had no allies left. Tears nearly came. These people did not understand the pain of compulsive curiosity. Not one ounce of classmate love. Cruel.

So the group had no choice but to follow Teacher Cao back to school.

Tang Qiaoqiao called Wen Yuxian at once, delighted to share the good news. She tried to learn where he lived so she could visit, but he refused.

…

Wen Yuxian ended the call, let out a deep breath, and sat in a chair. Gauze wrapped his waist and abdomen, already stained red with blood.

In the earlier one-versus-three, he killed one of them but took wounds himself. This time, one-versus-two left him worse off, enough to slow his reactions. Still, he killed them in time. His students had returned to school. If they stayed out longer, he could not guarantee they would not trace him.

He had just started to relax when a tight ache struck his chest—pure instinct, a warning that danger was closing in.

He rose at once, went to the window, and lifted a corner of the tightly drawn curtain. The villa district looked quiet. Few residents lived here. Even in daylight it carried the mood of a horror-film neighborhood.

A thought hit him.

He handled the student side for now. But what about the other side? Would those three notice something? Would the forces behind them notice something and find this place soon?

Blood roared in his ears. The gauze darkened further.

The one he hid began to panic, clawing at the locked door from within, trying to come out.

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Don’t worry.” He pressed his forehead to the door, his blood-stained hands flat against it, like his soul pressed to hers through the wood, and spoke in a low voice.

When the one inside the door finally calmed down, he took out his phone and placed a call.

…

Just as Jing Pei and her classmates reached the gate of Twelve Zodiac Academy, she told Teacher Cao a word, then peeled away from the group with an easy, natural motion and walked off to the side.

“Finish the call and get back in,” Teacher Cao said.

“Got it.”

Teacher Cao then herded the others into the school like he was driving ducks.

Jing Pei answered the call and heard Wen Yuxian say, “I want a safe place I can hide.”

Jing Pei had expected this question, so she gave him an address. Before Wen Yuxian could hang up, she asked, “Do you believe in fate?”

“What?” Wen Yuxian froze.

“Maybe each person’s life has already been written by an invisible hand. No matter how hard you struggle to change it, the ending may stay the same.”

Wen Yuxian’s brow sank. “Is that why you’re helping me? What, you saw my fate?”

“Yes. So I want to see whether people like you, with a fate already fixed, can change it. And for my own reasons, I will do my best to help you change it.”

Unlike Zhang Weiqiang, who in the original text was little more than a throwaway background line, Wen Yuxian’s thread tied into the main plot, one Jing Pei had written with real weight. By logic, the “fate-binding” placed on him should be far stronger than anything that had held Zhang Weiqiang in place. Jing Pei needed results from this experiment to decide whether her plan to alter the future of this world required adjustment.

Because the future in her outline was terrifying.

“Then what did you see?” Wen Yuxian asked.

“If the ending changes, I’ll tell you.”

In the original story, Feng Yilian’s group was sent to investigate the human-bone case and found several suspicious points. Wen Yuxian failed to kill the man and the Mutant yesterday. By the time he tracked them down and killed them, Feng Yilian and the others had already found more clues, even sensing that the case might connect to a teacher at Twelve Zodiac Academy. So even after learning the human-bone culprit might be someone else, they kept digging.

Wen Yuxian tried to relocate his “treasure,” only to get tailed by Tang Qiaoqiao and Long Ling. His injuries kept him from noticing in time, and they discovered his secret. He had no choice but to kill Tang Qiaoqiao, and not long after, he met his own death.

Now the situation had shifted. Wen Yuxian killed the human-bone culprit before Feng Yilian and the others found more clues. That removed the need for them to chase the thread further. And now he would move her to a safer place at once.

So Jing Pei would watch and see where the road led next.

Jing Pei ended the call. When she turned, she met the one-eyed boy’s gaze.

She paused, then gave a polite smile and a small nod, and turned back toward the school.

The boy stared at Jing Pei’s back. He reached up and touched his ear without thinking, confusion flickering in his eyes.

…

Night fell.

Riding the cover of darkness, Wen Yuxian loaded his “girlfriend” into the car. Both windshield and windows had been covered with a custom film. Any camera or naked eye would see a different man driving and a plain woman’s silhouette in the back seat.

He drove toward the address Jing Pei gave him.

Elsewhere, Chen Mo reached his limit. That half-finished feeling clawed at his heart and lungs until even food lost its taste.

So he left home again.

At least finish yesterday’s plan!! he roared in his head.

He used his atavist-family connections to borrow three underwater salvage drones from the Jiangnan District police and took them to the over-the-river bridge.

“The report says you searched before and found no other bones. Could the bones have changed, or gained a coating that kept the drones from identifying them?” Chen Mo guessed. He widened the drones’ search parameters: not just human bone, but anything bone, or bone-shaped.

Splash! Splash! Splash!

Three drones entered the water. The drifter under the bridge looked up in curiosity.

Chen Mo wondered whether the drifter knew something, so he jumped down.

The drifter turned out to be the same stuttering man Feng Yilian questioned—the one who claimed he had seen a car toss bone bags more than once.

That meant no new answers.

Chen Mo was thinking when the drifter suddenly craned his neck and stared up at the bridge. From his angle he could only catch a flash of headlights.

“Th-that—th-that c-car!” the drifter said, thrilled.

Chen Mo snapped his head around. He sprang from one pier to the next, then to the last pier near the bridge end. He climbed in a few swift moves, braced on the guardrail, and vaulted up—only in time to catch the retreating tail lights.

“Damn it.” He dropped his gaze to his watch at once and locked in the time the car passed.

He returned to the pier where the drifter stayed and pressed him. “That’s the same car you saw tossing bones before, right?”

The drifter nodded. That car sounded no different from the rest on the road, but after hearing it enough times, he could pick it out by engine note alone. He lived under this bridge day after day. With nothing to do, he listened to the traffic above. Hearing that car felt like a kid at home who knows whether Dad has returned just from the sound outside.

Good. This trip paid off. He caught a huge lead in one stroke.