Xie Qingcheng and He Yu were the last to leave the auditorium.
By the time they got outside, the crowd of students was being herded toward the dormitories by the teachers and police. An announcement was blaring from the school's public address system. "Students, please remain calm and do not wander off on your own. If you are in a remote area, contact your teachers, roommates, and classmates immediately. Please return to your dorms in an orderly fashion…"
But the volume of the announcement couldn't drown out the racket that the students were making.
Everyone outside had their eyes glued to either their own cell phones or the school's landmark—the Huzhou University School of Communication's Radio and Television Tower. This tall building had been constructed by the school specifically for its broadcasting students. Faithfully modeled after a real television station, it was surrounded by lights that could illuminate the entire tower.
However, at that very moment the control system had been taken over by hackers who had turned the tower's exterior a glaring red. It looked like a sword covered in blood that had been violently thrust into the ground. The boldface text projected onto it could probably be seen clearly from several kilometers away:
W,
Z,
L,
The "Drop the Hanky" Game of Death begins now.
In addition to the broadcast tower, the hackers' software had intercepted the signals of all the smartphones at Huzhou University. Everyone could still use their phones, but the little pop-up screen that had appeared couldn't be closed. In the darkness of night, thousands of these little windows transformed the Huzhou University campus into a fluorescent river of stars. It was just a shame that each of these stars was twinkling with a horrifyingly bizarre image.
Xie Qingcheng looked down at his phone again to find that the words in that video were the same as the ones on the tower.
They both read: W, Z, L, the "Drop the Hanky" Game of Death begins now.
In the video, though, below each letter was a group of extremely peculiar-looking electronic dolls. The little dolls sat in a circle, and there was a grinning, swaying girl doll standing outside the circle with a scarlet handkerchief in her hand, just like the "Drop the Hanky" game that children played. Below the W, the doll had already dropped the handkerchief behind one of the boy dolls in the circle. The little boy doll ran as the girl doll chased him with a smile plastered on her face.
All of a sudden, the girl doll caught up to the boy doll, cheerfully grabbed his head—and with a bright smile, twisted it off!
A few seconds later, all the phones began to play a compressed sound file of a children's song in unison. "Drop, drop, drop the hanky, set it lightly behind your friend's back, no one let him know…"
The speakers of countless phones turned this nursery rhyme into a hair-raising chorus that echoed throughout the entire campus.
The students became even more horrified and alarmed as they huddled together. Some even refused to return to their dorms, thinking that it was safer for everyone to stay together outside. Some of the more fainthearted students had already started sobbing. Phones rang incessantly all over the place, overlapping with the song—these calls were all from the students' parents. In the age of digital communication, news of what had happened at the School of Communications had quickly made it onto various social media platforms and attracted a great deal of attention, causing a huge ruckus.
"Hello, Mom? I'm fine…but I'm so scared…"
"Wahhhh, Daddy! I'm with my classmates! Mm! I won't run off anywhere. Waahhhhh…"
Amid this chaos, Xie Qingcheng, too, immediately called Xie Xue. Upon learning that she was at home making wontons with Auntie Li, he let out a sigh of relief. He explained the situation to her in simple terms, told her to mind her safety and stay at home, and made her promise to check in with him once an hour. Then, he hung up without wasting more words with her.
After he ended the call, Xie Qingcheng noticed He Yu watching him calmly. When their eyes met, He Yu shifted his gaze away. Only then did Xie Qingcheng realize that no one had expressed any concern for He Yu.
Practically everyone had received messages from their family or friends, but He Yu's phone had remained silent the whole time, like a pool of stagnant water, as still as the young man's expression itself.
Xie Qingcheng was just about to say something when the "drop the hanky" song ended and a huge photograph suddenly flashed across everyone's phones. The moment this picture appeared, Xie Qingcheng and He Yu heard a police officer next to them curse under his breath.
Immediately thereafter, the furious voice of that police officer's captain rang out from his walkie-talkie. "It's the fucking photo that the police just took as evidence at the crime scene! How the hell did they get their hands on it?!"
That caught everyone's attention.
The photograph in question was completely uncensored, and its contents were bizarre and extremely shocking. It showed the body of a man who had been strangled to death on a large, messy bed. The corpse's tongue hung out of his mouth, and he was completely naked save for a pair of red heels strapped to his feet. This room, with its king-sized bed, was a familiar sight for the students—wasn't this the hotel operated by the School of Communications?
At the start of each school year, many parents who were accompanying their kids back to campus for registration chose to stay at this hotel. The environment was quite good, and anyone with a School of Communications student ID could get a discount. After welcoming the surge of parents at the beginning of the year, the establishment was sustained by the modest but steady patronage of students and their lovers.
This time, most of the surprised gasps of "damn" that rose and fell throughout the crowd came from the male students. This was because the female students were a bit timider, and many of them were already tearfully covering their faces and looking away from this morbid picture. The boys tended to be more tolerant of these sorts of upsetting images, so many of them also recognized that this was the place where they'd often roll around in the sheets with their girlfriends. Fucking hell, that den of pleasure had now become the scene of a murder! How would they ever rent a room there again—just seeing a similar bed would cause them to wilt.
Young Master He had never been to a plebeian hotel like this one, nor did he have a girlfriend with whom to rent a room for the night. Thus, he knitted his brows, oblivious as to why there would be sexual frustration mixed in with the alarm in those cries of "damn" from the young men around him. However, he had noticed another detail in the image. Disregarding the most recent quarrel he'd had with Xie Qingcheng, he turned around to look directly into Xie Qingcheng's eyes—and saw the same suspicion mirrored in them that he felt himself.
Cheng Kang Psychiatric Hospital.
The modus operandi of this case was subtly reminiscent of the previous murder at that hospital.
First, there was the clothing—although both victims were undoubtedly male, they had been dressed in feminine attire post-mortem. Liang Jicheng had been fully dressed in women's clothes, while this corpse was wearing red heels.
Second, there was the music. Neither He Yu nor Xie Qingcheng could forget the song that Jiang Lanpei had quietly hummed in the office while she was dismembering the body. At the time, when they thought Xie Xue had been murdered, they had overheard the soft, eerily distant singing of that disturbed woman from the next room. "Drop, drop, drop the hanky, set it lightly behind your friend's back, no one let him know…"
Third, the letters "WZL" perfectly matched the ones in the mysterious message they had seen in the cave on Neverland Island.
Fearful whispers swept through the crowd as more and more students realized the similarities between this homicide case and the way Jiang Lanpei had murdered her victim.
"…Jiang Lanpei…"
"Yeah, she was singing that 'drop the hanky' song when she killed him. I read it in the papers…"
"Aren't those red heels similar to the shoes Jiang Lanpei was wearing in that photograph published in the newspapers?"
"My god… I've heard that shoes represent evil energy. They can also symbolize sending someone off to their death…"
One student, who had likely become so scared that they lost control of their faculties, shrieked, "It's really Jiang Lanpei! Jiang Lanpei's vengeful ghost is out for blood!"
Their shout sent the crowd erupting into a frenzy.
He Yu had mentioned it to Xie Qingcheng before: because of what Jiang Lanpei had experienced and the way she met her end, rumors had begun to circulate amongst the students at some point after her tragic death. Some claimed that if you wrote down the name of the scumbag who was troubling you along with a cause of death and signed it "Jiang Lanpei," the woman's vengeful ghost would come and claim his life.
This photo now undoubtedly corroborated this campus ghost story. Combined with the fact that the photo was now appearing on a countless number of phones, the students couldn't help feeling extremely disturbed.
The police and teachers in charge of looking after the evacuated students watched as the scene before them became increasingly disorderly. They raised their loudspeakers and put their backs into yelling, "Quiet down! All students! Stop crowding here and follow your teachers back to your dorms! We will make sure that you are all safe!"
The students were driven forward like a flock of ducks, but their eyes remained fixed on the photograph of the murder victim.
Because they were very sheltered in their everyday lives, the students had a very low tolerance for grisly images like this. Still, they found themselves incapable of tearing their eyes away. They were horrified and scared, but the more scared they were, the more they wanted to look—and the more they looked, the more worked up they became.
Safely evacuating people during an emergency was a difficult task to begin with, but to make it even more challenging, the image on everyone's phones changed once more.
The image of the murder victim disappeared, and the screen reverted to the "WZL the 'Drop the Hanky' Game of Death has begun" message.
But there was a small difference now.
Behind the "W," the name of the victim, Wang Jiankang, had been typed out. The little electronic dolls playing drop the hanky next to his name had gone dark. All the smiling children playing the game had frozen in place. And the video had stopped on the frame in which the little boy's head was twisted off.
And under "W, Wang Jiankang," the electronic children beneath the letter Z who had previously been still and unmoving now began to spin rapidly. The little electronic girl grinned as she ran around the circle holding a red handkerchief. She lingered behind her "friends," preparing to drop the hanky at any moment…
The second round of the murder game had begun.
Xie Qingcheng and He Yu met each other's eyes. The same memory crossed both their minds: that sentence, "WZL will be murdered soon," that they saw in the guestbook on Neverland Island. They had both assumed that WZL were the initials of a single person's name. They never suspected that it was actually the first letter of the names of three different people…
W, Wang Jiankang, was dead.
Who could Z be, then?
Just then, He Yu's phone rang.
He froze in surprise. After seeing the name of the caller, he paused for a second before answering somewhat awkwardly. "…Dad."
He Jiwei had just left the airport when he saw the news about the homicide case at the School of Communications and the strange video, sent to him by his secretary. "What's going on at your school? What's campus security doing? How could they allow this kind of thing to happen?"
He Yu didn't respond.
"Where are you right now?" He Jiwei asked.
"Near the entrance of the school auditorium."
"I'll have Chief Li send someone over to pick you up."
"There's no need." He Yu glanced around. People were packed together like sardines in a can. And besides, Xie Qingcheng was standing right there beside him. If a police car were to come and take him away right now, even if he didn't say anything about it, Xie Qingcheng would probably look at He Yu with even more disdain in the future. "Don't worry about it. A police car wouldn't be able to drive in here anyway. I'll head back to my dorm in a little while."
"But what if something happens—" At this point, He Jiwei overheard the chaotic sounds in the background on He Yu's end. He stopped and sighed. "Do you have any close acquaintances with you right now?"
He Yu glanced at Xie Qingcheng. He didn't know if the man could be counted as a close acquaintance of his, or if things between the two of them were still what they'd agreed upon before—the simple, straightforward doctor-patient relationship that they'd once had.
"Hello? He Yu, are you there?"
He Yu was just about to say something when he heard the voice of a boy on the other end. "Daddy, slow down! I left something on the plane. I have to go and tell the flight crew."
Upon hearing this, He Yu's expression cooled significantly. "It's fine, Dad. There's someone I know here," he said, glancing at Xie Qingcheng. "I'm with Doctor Xie."
"Xie Qingcheng?"
"Mm…"
"What are you doing with him? Is he treating you?"
To tell the truth, He Yu wasn't sure either.
Ever since that time at the hotel, Xie Qingcheng had kept on nitpicking him without ever seeming to make a serious effort to address He Yu's mental state. But somehow, He Yu's condition seemed to have improved a great deal, as his attention was no longer completely focused on what had happened with Xie Xue.
He hadn't realized it until now because he didn't have much faith in Xie Qingcheng these days. He always felt that the man was giving him a hard time on purpose so he could indulge in schadenfreude. But at this moment, it dawned on him that perhaps this was part of the treatment that Xie Qingcheng had been providing him with.
Aside from physiological symptoms, Psychological Ebola also had a significant impact on the patient's mental state. Xie Qingcheng did not ascribe to the school of thought that relied purely on medication for treatment. Rather, he placed more emphasis on guiding and establishing stability in a patient's inner world. It wouldn't be wrong to say that he tended toward idealism.
This was also why Xie Qingcheng wasn't suited for short-term consultations and was better at being a long-term caregiver. A therapist like him usually wouldn't repeatedly emphasize, "You're ill, so let's have a chat. You can talk to me if there's anything on your mind." When conducting a psychological intervention, he preferred to use methods that were the truest to life and thus the least likely to be discovered. He always wanted the patient to feel that they were a normal person.
Sometimes, when it came to psychotherapy, it didn't matter how specialized or superficially charming the doctor's words were when they interacted with patients.
Rather, what really mattered was the degree of comfort the patient obtained, and how their psychological condition changed for the better.
His recent squabbling with Xie Qingcheng had He Yu racking his brain to come up with solutions to the stumbling blocks the man had placed in his way—and in doing so, he had managed to move quite a ways out from under the shadow cast by his failed first crush.
Grappling with this realization, he grew slightly distracted as he raised his eyes to look at Xie Qingcheng.
"Why have you gone quiet again?" asked He Jiwei. "What's wrong now?"
"Nothing." He Yu cleared his throat softly and shifted his line of sight away from Xie Qingcheng. "Yes, he's treating me."
"That Xie Qingcheng… In the past, we wanted to keep him, but he didn't want to stay and he refused our invitation. Now, he insists on volunteering."
He Yu could hardly tell his father that he was the one who had gnawed on Doctor Xie back at the hotel in the midst of a flare-up, provoking the good doctor to the point that he couldn't bear to stand by and watch anymore, and that was why he was looking after He Yu in passing. "He…he's just treating me every once in a while," said He Yu awkwardly. "They're not regular appointments."
He Jiwei paused for a moment. "Very well. In that case, you should stay with him. Don't go back to your dorm; there's nothing safe about a bunch of little kids crowded together. Follow your Doctor Xie and return with him to his dorm."
"…Dad, that's kind of inappropriate."
"How is it inappropriate? He's been taking care of you since you were little. He wouldn't mind helping out with such a small thing."
"He's not my doctor anymore."
"Don't get things mixed up—people's goodwill exists apart from employment, does it not? Why else would he continue to treat you from time to time? Plus, his time with our family was perfectly pleasant, so why treat things as so cut and dried? If you're too embarrassed to ask, then pass him the phone, I'll talk to him."
He Yu's younger brother's voice came from the other end of the call once more. "Dad, why are you walking so fast? Who is it? He Yu?"
"…I understand." As soon as He Yu heard that voice, he didn't want to listen anymore. "I'm hanging up now." After ending the call, He Yu looked over at Xie Qingcheng again and coughed softly. "Uh—"
Xie Qingcheng said, "Your dad wants you to go back with me."
"…So you heard."
Xie Qingcheng made a sound of assent. He and He Yu walked ahead with the crowd. The School of Communications campus had been sealed off by now, so Xie Qingcheng had no way of returning to Huzhou Medical School, but he could go back to Xie Xue's dorm. He had just spoken to Xie Xue about it, and he knew the code for her electronic door lock.
With considerable difficulty, the two of them followed the jampacked tide of people back to the dorm.
Xie Qingcheng opened the door. "Come in."
With the living room light turned on, the domestic atmosphere of the apartment washed away the ominous pressure that was everywhere outside. Even though the terror attack was still ongoing, an environment like this made it feel more like they were witnessing a fire from across the river or watching a movie about cops fighting criminals—it wasn't quite so suffocating anymore.
And because this was Xie Xue's house, the first thing that greeted them when they walked inside was a tea table covered in junk food and teddy bears. There were even two empty containers of cup noodles that had yet to be tossed.
He Yu and Xie Qingcheng regarded the mess in silence.
It really was very difficult to feel scared.
Xie Qingcheng shut the door and loosened the first button of his shirt. Then, with a gloomy expression, he began to clean up after Xie Xue.
He Yu looked at the living room, where there was barely any space for him to stand. He had been to Xie Xue's place before, but she'd always tidied up before inviting him over. He never could have imagined that the room might have looked like this before it had been cleaned up—it was practically comparable to a recycling center. For a moment, he actually found this revelation even more shocking than the photo of Wang Jiankang's murder scene; it was too hard to reconcile this squalid room with Xie Xue's usual fresh, clean appearance.
He leaned against the doorway for a long while with his hands folded behind his back before cautiously venturing a question. "…Is she usually like this?"
"She's always been like this." Xie Qingcheng was well used to acting like her dad. With an unfazed expression, he picked up a teddy bear that Xie Xue had tossed onto the ground, patted it clean, and placed it back on top of the cabinet.
He Yu was speechless.
"Go boil some water and make two cups of tea," Xie Qingcheng told him.
"…Okay."
As He Yu made the tea, he noticed that Xie Xue had left two sets of tea ware in the sink. The leaves still in the filter were black tea, which Xie Xue wasn't very fond of. Something flashed faintly through his mind, but before he could give it much thought, he heard Xie Qingcheng call out from the living room, "Get the Tibetan tea on the third shelf of the tea cabinet—I'll have that."
He Yu assented, and instead of pondering what he'd found in the sink, he focused his attention on looking for the Tibetan tea that Executive Xie wanted in Xie Xue's cabinet, which was stuffed full of snacks and beverages.
The room was tidied up very quickly. Xie Qingcheng knew what he was doing; his stern, distinguished, aloof appearance, which made it seem as if he were entirely disconnected from the mundanities of the human world, was just one aspect of his persona. It was only natural for a man who had raised his little sister, eight years his junior, through thick and thin since he himself was still a teenager.
By the time He Yu finished steeping the tea and walked out holding the tray, Xie Qingcheng was bending down to pick up the last pile of books that his sister had tossed on the carpet.
His figure was bewitching when he leaned over, with his long, straight legs and narrow waist. His clothes stretched taut when he reached down, and the lines of his slender-but-strong waist could be easily seen through his shirt.
Seeing that He Yu had returned, Xie Qingcheng straightened up and put the books back onto the shelf before turning to look at him. He raised his chin slightly, indicating that little Secretary He ought to put his Tibetan tea onto the now-sparkling-clean tea table.
"I brewed the 'cold fragrance of snowy fields' for you," Secretary He said. "That's the one you wanted, right?"
"Mm."
Once Executive Xie had finished putting everything away and washed his hands, he sat down on the sofa and loosened his collar.
Despite the walls that separated them from the commotion, they could still hear the raucous crowd outside, and the blare of sirens. In fact, if Xie Qingcheng were to turn his face slightly to the side, he would even be able to see that bloodred tower, glowing like a sword of judgment through the living room window.
Meanwhile, on his phone, the little girl dropping the hanky was still running in circles behind the letter Z.
"Hackers?" Xie Qingcheng asked.
He Yu nodded. "Definitely. They've targeted all the mobile electronic devices in this area in addition to the radio and television tower."
Perhaps because he felt annoyed that both their phones were simultaneously playing this video, and perhaps because he had a competitive streak as a hacker himself, he opened his phone and started to type in some command codes.
"…Interesting," he said softly after a few moments. "They're using the latest equipment from the United States; I've encountered it once before. This equipment has a wide transmission range, but there's a bug: it's actually pretty easy to break through its control."
He stared unwaveringly at the cipher-breaking code on the screen, trying to penetrate his opponent's defense systems.
Sure enough, He Yu's phone fell silent a few minutes later.
Now that his phone was no longer subject to the opponent's signal transmission, he carelessly tossed it aside.
"It's that simple?"
"I must admit that my skill isn't at the bottom of the barrel," He Yu, who ranked among the top five hackers on the dark web, said modestly. "They shouldn't have messed with me."
"Then can you block their transmission to this entire area?"
He Yu smiled slightly. "Not without the proper equipment. Besides, this case is under police jurisdiction. I could easily end up being the target of their investigation if I get involved. And I won't be protecting your phone either. Let's keep it to watch the video."
He had a point, so Xie Qingcheng acquiesced.
He Yu sat down facing Xie Qingcheng and asked, "Speaking of, do you know Wang Jiankang?"
Xie Qingcheng was a professor at Huzhou Medical School, and He Yu assumed that Wang Jiankang was probably a staff member at Huzhou University. He was only asking casually, so it came as a surprise to him when Xie Qingcheng took a sip of his tea, closed his eyes, leaned back against the sofa, and said, "I do."