40 Trial

The two of them lingered for a while before officially setting off.

Driver Xiao Zhou checked the navigation and the weather forecast, then detoured to take Fang Qingzhou to a shopping mall to buy two jackets. Considering that dinner might be difficult to arrange later, he also bought some bread.

They arrived at the village by dusk.

Police had cordoned off Xu Yuan’s old residence with several lines of caution tape, using the angles to block the view of outsiders trying to peek inside.

Even so, a large crowd had gathered. Villagers with nothing better to do wandered back and forth in the middle of the road, excitedly repeating the exact same story to anyone who made eye contact with them, while occasionally locking stares with the on-duty police officers. Even while eating, they couldn't put their minds at ease; they strolled around nearby carrying rice bowls, patiently waiting for developments.

Everyone upheld a consistent belief—though they had no idea what exciting spectacle there might be to see, they must on no account miss the possibility of witnessing one.

Halfway to their destination, Fang Qingzhou and her companion were recognized as outsiders by some villagers, who actively swarmed forward to inquire.

"Are the two of you cops too? What's the situation now? Have they caught the killer?"

"Why come to investigate a case at this hour? That house hasn't been lived in for decades. What are you looking for?"

"They're digging things up in there; they must be digging up a corpse! Who died? Old Xu, or little Yuan?"

"Did both of them die? And did you police officers kill them? Are there two factions of you competing to solve the case right now, seeing who can figure it out first to crush the other side?"

Since many of them were elderly, several people spoke as they walked, pushed and shoved close by those behind them, and nearly collided with the visitors. Others, unable to wait for an answer, took the initiative to reach out and pull at their clothes.

Zhou Suirong grabbed Fang Qingzhou's arm, pulling her back a step to shield her in front, and replied with a cheerful smile, "How could we be police officers? We don't know anything either, just caught wind of it and came to take a look. Who is this Old Xu you keep talking about?"

Seeing that they were out of the loop, a few people stood back with their hands behind their backs, while a handful stayed behind to explain.

Only, the plot grew increasingly bizarre with each retelling, having already evolved into some unknown version. Zhou Suirong listened for a long time; instead of gathering any information, he ended up completely bewildered. Realizing that mingling with the masses this time was yielding no results, he seized an opportunity to say, "We'll go find the police for an interview."

The enthusiastic villagers followed right along with them, wanting to observe the interview process.

The duty officer pulled back the caution tape, waved a hand, and let the two of them through.

Realizing they had been tricked, the villagers let out a string of exclamations in various tones, shouting at their retreating backs from outside.

Fang Qingzhou entered through the front gate to find Ji He standing in the living room. As the two stepped inside, Ji He half-closed the door and greeted them: "Ah, the two esteemed lazy donkeys."

Fang Qingzhou turned a deaf ear and asked instead, "Were the door locks smashed by someone?"

"The morning after the incident, people from the same village came over in a group to check on things. After shouting for a long time with no answer and fearing something had happened, they banded together and smashed the door open."

Holding a flashlight, Ji He shone it toward several dark marks on the wall and said, "The blood on the floor was cleaned up by someone; the mop is right over there in the bathroom. The villagers claim they didn't do it. The blood on the wall was hard to clean, so it was left behind. The blood splatter range wasn't large, just a few scattered spots, so it wasn't very noticeable. The villagers didn't realize at the time that this could result in someone dying. After searching around and finding no one, they assumed the father and son had run away in the middle of the night, and they all dispersed. It wasn't until later, when no news of Xu Yuan and the other was ever heard again, that various rumors started spreading."

In the living room sat a few chairs with broken legs, along with a pile of swept-up bowl and chopstick fragments in the corner. These were all remnants of the violence from back then.

On the left was a room, and a small window had been cut into the right-hand wall for lighting. Lacking overhead illumination, the interior at dusk was pitch black, relying entirely on Ji He's flashlight.

Standing by the wall, Ji He swept the flashlight beam quickly around the four sides of the room, stopping at the ceiling.

"At the time, Xu Yuan was severely beaten and heavily injured, with no strength left to clean the scene or dispose of the body. Assuming the testimony he provided is completely true and credible, whoever took his father down from the chandelier must have been an adult male with sufficient physical strength. This person's cleanup method was quite crude, abandoning it halfway in a rush, which shows they were panic-stricken at the time. Doing something like that stemmed more from a psychological state of guilt and compensation rather than an attempt to destroy evidence. Of course, we can't rule out the possibility that the other party lacked common sense and acted on pure instinct, only to realize midway that the evidence was too difficult to cover up, and fled in a panic."

Fang Qingzhou looked toward Ji He in the shadows and asked, "Who do you lean toward this person being?"

Ji He’s physical exhaustion made her voice sound lazy, dragging out the syllables slightly longer than usual: "A school teacher, or perhaps a local police officer who came along with the teacher at the time, or maybe a villager who came to check out of worry. Trying to guess their exact identity doesn't matter for now."

With a flick of her wrist, Ji He shone the light toward the dim hallway leading from the living room to the kitchen, taking the lead.

"Before dawn, this person had to clean the scene and hide the body, all within limited time. We questioned nearby residents; since such a major event happened in the village, quite a few people suffered from insomnia that night. Some woke up early, some went to bed late. Analyzing the various testimonies combined, this person didn't use a vehicle to move the body, which means it can only have been buried nearby, close to the old house."

Ji He walked out through the back door. To the left was an abandoned vegetable patch overgrown with weeds, now dug up into a bumpy mess.

"We dug through the vegetable patch and found that only a thickness of about forty centimeters consisted of loose soil, which had been hauled over from other plots. Any further down, there were numerous gravel fragments and the soil layer was hard, making it inconvenient to dig. It's unlikely the body was hidden here. If it had rained even a little harder, the body might have been washed out or emitted a strong corpse stench, giving it away."

Dust billowed in the small vegetable patch, and under the pale beam of the light, figures were enveloped in a swirling haze of dust.

Shadows were distorted, the houses blurred, and the edges of the white light were tinged with the blood-red of the sunset.

Ji He nodded her chin forward: "The only choice left is over there."

Most of the stone-piled fence had collapsed over the long years. The police were moving away some of the rubble, burying their heads in digging a pit on a patch of land outside the vegetable patch close to the woods.

Ji He turned off the flashlight, placed it on the ground, found a spot to brace herself with her hands, and said, "There's a problem, though. Regarding the situation that night, Xu Youxiang described hearing Xu Yuan's piercing cries all night long, which is unlikely. Setting aside the fact that the rain would have muffled the sound, this old house is some distance away from the neighbors on either side. We went to test it, and you basically can't hear much sound at all. The elderly in the village also said Xu Yuan was a child who rarely cried. Even when his father beat him, he usually gritted his teeth and endured it. Xu Youxiang's testimony is abnormal; could he also have been influenced by cognitive interference?"

Fang Qingzhou said, "Not necessarily. Every time a person recalls something, they are influenced by subjectivity, overriding and adjusting their memory, which causes discrepancies between memory and reality. A child getting beaten and crying is a matter of course in his cognition; him having such a thought doesn't mean he's lying or that his memory was altered. Including the scene where he saw the police officers coming out of Xu Yuan's house in the middle of the night, we can't rule out the possibility that he was influenced by village rumors, confusing reality with fantasy. After all, he was only in his early teens back then."

She thought for a moment and added a conclusion: "Judging from the feeling I got when interacting with him, he hasn't been affected by the project."

Just as Ji He was about to say something, a young man's suppressed cry came from not far away: "We dug it up! Is this it?"

The crowd immediately swarmed over, sources of light from all directions converging to illuminate the bottom of the pit. Someone in the middle knelt on the ground, brushing away the layer of floating sand and soil on top.

Ji He instantly straightened up, looking toward the direction of the whispering voices. Seeing them speed up their digging rhythm, her muscles relaxed again quickly. Her black-and-white defined eyes darted between the two of them, and she said with profound implication, "Fang Qingzhou, I have something I want to talk to you about."

Sensing that he was considered in the way, Zhou Suirong shrugged, draped the jacket hanging from his arm over Fang Qingzhou's shoulders, and consciously turned to walk into the house.

Ji He walked over to a corner, reaching a spot where she confirmed Zhou Suirong couldn't hear, before speaking: "In Xu Yuan's heart, he believes he drove his father to his death, that he is no different from the murderer, which is why he has held onto this guilt for so many years."

Not understanding the intent behind her words, Fang Qingzhou said, "Possibly."

Ji He scratched her cheek, looking inexplicably restless: "I can't sort it out. Xu Yuan—Yan Jianyuan—went to such great lengths to guide us into finding his father's corpse. What is his purpose?"

Fang Qingzhou felt that this wasn't really what she wanted to talk about.

"There are many things you don't know. Why did he choose to leave his hometown? Where did he go between the ages of 11 and 14? How did he make a living? Why did he smuggle himself into Country Y at 14? And why did he suddenly begin self-destructing after his life finally started to smooth out?" Fang Qingzhou followed up on her topic. "When someone suddenly goes mad, there is always a trigger."

"Isn't Liang Yizheng's marriage the trigger?" Ji He said. "Liang Yizheng has a successful career and a happy marriage, yet he is the fuse of Yan Jianyuan's tragedy."

"Liang Yizheng? He doesn't even qualify." Fang Qingzhou said without hesitation. "Have you looked at Yan Jianyuan's resume? He was smuggled into Country Y at age 14, and in less than half a year, relying on his looks and unique vision, he made a huge splash on the overseas web. By the year Liang Yizheng graduated from college, Yan Jianyuan's company had already reaped a massive fortune for him. Although his path to wealth wasn't entirely orthodox and he borrowed creative ideas from domestic projects, he didn't miss a single wave of opportunity. When Liang Yizheng's MCN company was just beginning to make a small name for itself domestically, Yan Jianyuan's enterprise had already recruited a batch of top-tier talent and successfully achieved transformation. He wouldn't care at all about Liang Yizheng's petty gains."

"If he decided to seek revenge simply because Liang Yizheng was living well, he could have ruined Liang Yizheng's life through internet trolls back when Liang Yizheng rose to fame on the internet with his anti-bullying persona—after all, Liang Yizheng's story wasn't flawless."

"If he wanted to achieve self-redemption through mental torture of Liang Yizheng, he wouldn't even need to do anything; he would only need to stand before Liang Yizheng, make the other party submit to his wealth, and plunge him into deep jealousy, hatred, and restlessness with no way out. Liang Yizheng would definitely be suffering far more than he is now."

Not minding the dirt, Ji He picked a rock and sat right down, her back curved, hands resting on her knees, looking up at her. Her lips opened and closed silently a few times as if weighing her words without success. With a soft click of her tongue, she rubbed her forehead and said, "Forget it, I'll just say it straight. You should be able to accept it."

"Speak."

Ji He said, "I had people check in City C, and Zhou Suirong's father is missing."

Thinking she meant Zhou Suirong's stepfather, Fang Qingzhou retorted, "That isn't his father."

"He is. I'm referring to his biological father," Ji He said. "Based on Zhou Suirong's information, I asked the police in City C to help investigate the recent status of all his relatives. When tracking down his biological father's whereabouts, neighboring residents said they hadn't seen him return home for over two months, which happens to coincide with the time of Zhou Suirong's suicide."

Fang Qingzhou wanted to say this didn't prove anything, but she bit her lip and ultimately didn't voice such sophistical nonsense. Her teeth chattered slightly, tightening the muscles from her temples down to her jawline into a rigid line.

The tip of Ji He's shoe ground back and forth over a small stone as she said, "No one called the police. His relatives had a distant relationship with him and didn't care whether he lived or died. He didn't buy any insurance, nor did he have large assets. If the police hadn't gone door-to-door to inquire, he probably never would have been registered as a missing person."

In the distance, the forest darkened in massive patches after the sunset, sinking into the night as if transcending time itself. Only the central point of the focused light remained, with pedestrians bustling back and forth behind the light source, eager to drive the story forward to its next act.

After a long while, Fang Qingzhou put on her jacket with slow, deliberate movements, only then feeling her vocal cords capable of normal vibration. She asked, "What kind of person was his biological father?"

"I won't tell you any more case-related content." Ji He's response regained an official, cold stiffness. "Next, we will make every effort to search for his father's body, as well as the likely primary crime scene. If Zhou Suirong really killed someone, judging by his choice to atone through suicide afterward, the scene should still retain most of the evidence. I hope you prepare yourselves mentally."

Fang Qingzhou let out an "Mn," pulling the zipper of her clothes up to the top as she felt an all-encompassing chill in the surroundings. That chill felt like threads of rain, drilling through her skin and carving away her body's perception of temperature like a bone-scraping knife.

She said, "I understand."

One high and one low, standing and sitting, the silence flowing between them felt like a crime scene.

A few meters away, there truly lay a skeleton waiting to be unearthed.

Ji He picked up the stone from the bottom of her shoe, rubbed it in her palm, and steered the topic back: "Yan Jianyuan pays extraordinary attention to you. Based on your intuition, what do you think he wants to do?"

Fang Qingzhou fell silent for a long time before her frozen brain produced the cracking sound of movement, echoing in her ears with the parting words Yan Jianyuan had left her when they last met—*I look forward to the judgment you will pass on me.*

These words leaped out from an unattended corner, seizing her mind in an instant.

Fang Qingzhou's eyelids twitched as she softly spat out two words: "Judgment."

Ji He: "Judgment? Judgment on whom?"

Fang Qingzhou: "…Himself, perhaps."

Hearing an unexpected answer, the cold sneer lingering at the corners of Ji He's mouth receded as she asked, "Judgment for what?"

It took Fang Qingzhou longer than before. She curled her fingers into fists and tightened them, answering, "Abnormality."

Before Ji He could process this, Fang Qingzhou posed another question: "What is an abnormality?"