Half an hour later, Yin Wuwang walked into the forensic examiner's office.
Xie Qingyan was seated at his desk, the fiber comparison report and evidence photographs of the tie spread before him. He looked up at Yin Wuwang, and his gaze landed on his hair.
"Raining?"
"Mm. Light drizzle." Yin Wuwang pulled over a chair and sat down, absently brushing the droplets from his hair.
He noticed that the tips of Xie Qingyan's ears carried a faint wash of color. Nothing obvious, but a shade deeper than usual. It wasn't the kind of red that came from cold or from heat—it was the trace of some emotion that had surfaced from within and hadn't quite finished fading.
The phone call. The "Ye-ge" and the "drive safe"—the warmth of those words probably still lingered somewhere beneath that composed exterior. Three thousand years of battlefield discipline could control a face, but ears had always been traitors.
Yin Wuwang filed this detail away quietly and didn't ask.
He placed the Emerald Lake Gardens access records on the desk, side by side with Xie Qingyan's fiber report. Two sets of findings: one pointing to Xu Ruolin's absence from the scene, the other pointing to a killer who'd acted on impulse.
"The entire structure of the case just shifted." Yin Wuwang drew an invisible line between the two reports with his finger. "Before, we assumed the killer was fully premeditated—manipulated Zhang Yunxiang, prepared a weapon, waited for the right moment, carried out the kill. Four steps, each one linked to the next."
He broke that line in the middle.
"Now it looks like only the first two were planned. She manipulated Zhang Yunxiang. She was waiting for an opportunity. But she didn't bring a weapon. Once she was at the scene—once she saw that Zhang Yunxiang had knocked Chen Wan out and bolted, that a tie had fallen on the ground—she made the decision in that moment."
Xie Qingyan pushed the fiber report to the space between them.
"And the tie belongs to Zhang Yunxiang. He had no idea he'd dropped it." Xie Qingyan's tone carried the precision of someone fitting the last piece of a puzzle into place. "If we can locate the brand and purchase record, we can definitively confirm it's his. But more importantly—"
He looked at Yin Wuwang.
"The killer picked up a stranger's tie from the ground, knelt behind an unconscious man, looped it around his neck, and pulled with everything she had."
Xie Qingyan's voice was perfectly level.
"That's not something a stranger does."
Yin Wuwang understood his meaning.
A spontaneous act didn't mean there was no motive. Quite the opposite—the ability to see an unconscious person and instantly decide kill him meant the thought hadn't been born in that moment. It had lived inside her for a long time. It simply hadn't found its chance.
Zhang Yunxiang knocking Chen Wan unconscious wasn't part of her plan. But she'd used it.
A person who harbored no deep hatred for Chen Wan couldn't have made that choice in the span of a few seconds.
"So there's a connection between her and Chen Wan that we haven't uncovered yet," Yin Wuwang said.
"Yes." Xie Qingyan closed the report. "Xu Ruolin had a romantic entanglement, but she wasn't at the scene. He Jinsong had a financial grudge, but he's been eliminated. The remaining one—the woman who spent six months manipulating Zhang Yunxiang, who hid in the shadows on the night of the murder, who picked up that tie and strangled Chen Wan with her own hands—"
He drew an empty circle on the whiteboard, right at the intersection of every known lead.
Nothing inside it. No name, no face, no identity.
"She's right here." The tip of Xie Qingyan's marker rested on the center of that blank circle. "We know what she did. We don't know who she is."
Yin Wuwang stared at the hollow circle on the board.
The investigation had reached this point: they'd eliminated one suspect, uncovered a wealth of information about another, and even reconstructed the killer's movements at the scene down to individual gestures. But the real killer—the woman who'd laid her groundwork for six months in the dark, who'd picked up that tie at the critical moment—remained a shadow with no leads pointing toward her.
And now, the tie had told them something new about that shadow—she wasn't a cold-blooded professional killer. She was someone driven by an emotion so powerful that in the moment she saw Chen Wan lying on the ground, she didn't choose to walk away.
She chose to kneel down.
Hatred. Yin Wuwang turned the word over in his mind. In three thousand years of navigating the abyss of the Nine Hells, he'd seen every shade of malice the world could produce—grudges nursed across centuries, vendettas passed down through bloodlines, betrayals so layered they'd become indistinguishable from love. But the mortal kind of hatred was different. It burned faster, brighter, messier. It didn't wait for an elegant opening. It seized whatever was at hand—a fallen tie, a few seconds of darkness—and it acted.
That, in its own way, was more frightening than anything he'd encountered in the demon realm. Because it meant the killer hadn't walked into that alley with a plan to kill. She'd walked in with a wound so raw that the sight of Chen Wan unconscious on the ground had been enough to tip her over the edge.
Footsteps sounded outside the door. Little Lu knocked twice and poked his head in.
"Jiang-ge, the cell tower positioning for Xu Ruolin came back. Her phone signal stayed within the Emerald Lake Gardens tower range the entire night of the murder. No drift."
Yin Wuwang and Xie Qingyan exchanged a glance.
Xu Ruolin's alibi was now airtight.
Access records, vehicle logs, cell tower data—three independent evidentiary chains, all pointing to the same conclusion.
She wasn't the killer.
But she was still the person in this case with the deepest known connection to Chen Wan while he was alive. She knew things that Xiao Zhou had chosen not to say.
"It's time to talk to her directly," Yin Wuwang said.
Xie Qingyan nodded.
On the whiteboard, a new line appeared beside Xu Ruolin's name: Eliminated: direct perpetrator. Retained: key witness.
And at the intersection of all known leads, that blank circle still hung quietly in place.
No name. No face.
But she knew Chen Wan. And she hated him—hated him enough to spend six months laying her trap, hated him enough that in that back alley, she picked up a stranger's fallen tie.
[End of V2_Chapter 44]
Next: A Half-Finished Man Gets His Ending—and This Sovereign Feels Something He Can't Name