After a while, Xiaotao arrived with a group of police officers. They blocked the crime scene, and were prepared to move the body. I shouted, “Wait a minute!”

This was the scene of the crime. I knew I could glean the most information if I did an autopsy here. I called Dali to get here, and when he saw what was happening outside, he screamed in shock.

“Zhang Yan is… dead?! Who killed her?”

I almost snorted. How could he not hear the chaos that just swept over the whole auditorium?

“Where’s Professor Li?” I asked him.

“She just left a few minutes ago.”

That was suspicious indeed. Still, the most urgent thing that I needed to do now was to examine Zhang Yan’s body. I asked Dali to go back to our room and get my equipment here.

Xiaotao asked me who Professor Li was, and I briefly explained to her what just happened before I gave Ye Shiwen the knife.

“She was trying to hypnotize you! That’s very suspicious!” she exclaimed.

She then sent a few police officers to Professor Li’s house to question her.

Not long after, Dali returned with my equipment. I began to conduct Organ Echolocation. Zhang Yan’s inner organs were severely damaged, but there was no doubt that the cause of her death was her pierced heart.

I used Autopsy Umbrella to check for Yang Energy Prints and found a lot of messy fingerprints on her body. That was to be expected, since many people had touched her costume before the performance today.

I inserted a stick soaked in alkaline water into her throat to check for signs of poisoning, but found none.

Her eyes were wide open. It was obvious that she was in extreme shock just before her death. I pushed her eyelids down with my hand and heaved a sigh. I still couldn’t believe that she was really gone.

I reported my findings to Xiaotao. Her death was pretty straightforward. She was stabbed through her heart with a sharp instrument. There wasn’t much else that I could find out from her body. Also, because everything transpired right in front of hundreds of people’s eyes, it was possible to accurately determine the time of her death.

Meanwhile, the police kept questioning Ye Shiwen, yet he couldn’t give them any valuable information. All he did was shake his head and say he didn’t know how it all happened then broke down and cried again.

“What do you think the motive behind this murder was?” Xiaotao asked me.

“Motive? I can’t think of any! They were both very much in love! The only reason he would ever kill her in front of everyone was if he’d lost his mind…”

I paused. Then I asked Xiaotao if it was possible that someone could kill when they were under hypnosis.

“You’re suspecting that professor, aren’t you? Well, in general, hypnosis can’t be used to make someone commit a murder. If the person under hypnosis was asked to do something that is too far beyond their normal behavior, such as taking off their clothes in front of a crowd of people, they would automatically ‘wake up’ as if the spell was broken.”

“You said ‘in general.’ Does that mean that there are exceptions?” I asked.

“Wait, let me ask Ye Shiwen a few questions!”

She walked towards him and said, “Calm down and stop crying. Answer me, who did you talk to before the murder happened?”

“I talked to a few people, including Song Yang, but we didn’t talk about anything in particular at all.”

“Where did that knife come from?” asked Xiaotao again.

“Song Yang handed it to me,” he answered, then he began to sob again.

Several policemen turned their gaze to me simultaneously.

“It was a prop knife that Professor Li asked me to give to Ye Shiwen,” I explained. “Both Xiaotao and I have seen this knife before, and it was not supposed to have a sharp blade.”

Xiaozhou picked up the bloody knife and asked, “You mean this one? But it’s extremely sharp!”

“It must’ve been sharpened recently, then,” I countered.

“Didn’t you check it before you gave it to Ye Shiwen?” Xiaotao asked.

“It was an emergency! I didn’t have time to check!”

Xiaotao nodded and continued to ask Ye Shiwen, “When you stabbed the victim, what exactly was in your mind?”

Ye Shiwen replied that he didn’t know. Xiaotao urged him to relax and think carefully. She assured him that the police were here to help him discover the truth. She then asked everyone to leave, then gave Ye Shiwen a bottle of mineral water.

After drinking that water, Ye Shiwen began to calm down. He tried to recollect what happened, then when realization hit him, he started to shiver in panic.

“I… I was cutting a watermelon!” he blurted out.

“What?” Xiaotao and I responded.

“I… I remember feeling thirsty, and then I saw a huge watermelon in front of me, so I wanted to cut it open. But it suddenly moved and tentacles crawled out of it. I was so terrified that I stuck the knife into it… that was when I woke up again and saw…”

He broke down into tears again. He held his head in his hand and muttered, “I did it! I really did kill her!”

Xiaotao pulled me aside and whispered, “I think I’ve figured it out.”

“What did you figure out?” I asked.

“I talked to a psychologist before,” she explained. “And he told me that hypnosis can never be used to make someone commit murder. However, if I wanted to influence the behavior of a person to make them kill someone, what should I do?”

I thought about it and replied, “Make the person believe that the victim was not a human being!”

“Exactly!”

“How did you know all this?” I asked her.

“Because I used to…”

At that moment, Xiaozhou suddenly called out Xiaotao’s name and asked her to join him and the other two police officers standing beside him. The officers had been to Professor Li’s house and questioned her. They talked for several minutes, during which I could hear Xiaotao saying, “Are you sure you’re not mistaken?” and “That’s impossible!” Their eyes would turn to me every once in a while. Needless to say, their behavior was giving me an ominous feeling.

I was about to go ask them what was going on, but Xiaotao suddenly pointed at me and shouted, “Arrest him!”

I was stunned. I thought she was talking about someone else, but the two officers rushed towards me, held my shoulders down and handcuffed me.

“What’s going on here?” I asked desperately.

“Song Yang, I’ve been wrong about you the whole time!” Xiaotao yelled at me.

Xiaozhou explained to me that there were only two sets of fingerprints on the murder weapon—mine and Ye Shiwen’s. The surveillance video also clearly showed that I had given the knife to Ye Shiwen. According to Professor Li, she had been chatting with Dali backstage the whole time, and she’d also never touched the knife before!

Blood rushed to my head. Professor Li clearly gave me the knife. She must’ve have covered her fingers with glue beforehand. She also must’ve known that there would be no surveillance camera in the corridor, but there would be one right behind the stage.

“Listen to me! It’s a trap!” I cried. “Dali, she left you for a while, didn’t she? You must’ve noticed that!”

Dali bit his lips and replied, “I’m sorry, dude. I know we’re friends, but I can’t lie in this circumstance. Professor Li was with me the whole time.”

My eyes widened. It felt as if the whole place was spinning. I felt betrayed, but I suddenly realized something.

“Dali, she hypnotized you!”

“That’s only your theory, Song Yang,” said Xiaozhou. “You have no proof of it. Right now, all evidence is pointing at you!”

Xiaotao waved her hand and barked, “Take him back to the station now!”

I didn’t expect Xiaotao to distrust me so much. I was even more surprised at how quickly she turned hostile towards me.

“Xiaotao-jiejie, do you need to be so harsh? You’re very close to Song Yang after all…”

“Nonsense!” she snapped. “There is no relationship of any kind between him and me!”

I clenched my first. Xiaotao’s words pierced through my heart like a sharp knife.

“You’re making a mistake, Xiaotao!” I yelled. “Do you really think that I would make such an obvious mistake if I decided to kill someone?”

“Take him away!” ordered Xiaotao impatiently.

The two officers tried to drag me away, but I forcibly broke away from them and rushed over to Xiaotao to persuade her. Suddenly, someone attacked me from the side and threw me to the ground. It was Wang Yuanchao. I was in so much pain that I was sure my ribs must’ve been broken.

“Yuanchao,” I pleaded with a weakened voice. “Listen to me. They’ve got it all wrong!”

He ignored me and lifted me up as if I was a little sheep.

I realized the hard way how cold-blooded police officers could be. The friendship I thought I had with them was all based on a lie. Grandpa was right in warning me against joining the police force! He once told me that the police never cared about us—they only cared about the knowledge that the Song family possessed! Once we turned out to be useless to them, they’d discard us as if we meant nothing to them at all.

Wang Yuanchao shoved me into a police car, where I felt as if I was thrown into a pit of despair and regret.

I was taken to the police station. Wang Yuanchao escorted me there himself. Xiaotao and the other officers remained expressionless the whole time. Officers inside the police station whispered things like “Isn’t that him?” as we walked past.

My phone was confiscated and I was locked in a cell. Before she left me, I shouted to Xiaotao, “Let me call Sun Tiger!”

“You’re not allowed to contact anyone except your lawyer at the moment,” she coldly replied. “Do you have a lawyer?”

I couldn’t hold my emotions any longer. “I don’t care that the others believe I did it, but how could you believe it too, Xiaotao? Haven’t we been through enough together?”

She threw me an icy look and left the room. Her answer was clear. She had never regarded me as her friend. Everything was a lie!