After Li Wenjia’s arrest, the police held a state funeral for the fallen police officers. It was raining that day, and the neatly-dressed police officers in full uniforms stood in rows in the drizzling rain. There was a row of urns with portraits in front of them, and in the middle was Officer Ma.

Officer Ma had dedicated his whole life to the duties of a police officer, and in the end, he sacrificed his life for it.

Sun Tiger picked up the microphone and solemnly uttered, “First bow!”

Everyone bowed respectfully to the dead officers.

“Second bow!”

“Third bow!”

And then, the sound of gunfire shook the sky.

All the police officers saluted to the urns covered with party flags.

Xiaotao was right next to me, and I saw tears welling up in her eyes, but she gritted her teeth and refrained from letting it flow. The death of Officer Ma was a huge blow to her. It would take a long time for her to recover from this grief.

Wang Yuanchao, Dali, Shiwen, Lao Yao, Xiaotao’s father, and all other victims of Li Wenjia were all sent to a psychiatric clinic for rehabilitation. I visited them occasionally, and they seemed to be recovering fairly well, although the doctor warned me that the complexity of the human brain was incomparable even to the most sophisticated computer. Once it was implanted with a certain message, it might never be cured unless the hypnotist herself cancelled it.

Fortunately, Li Wenjia had been arrested, so no one else would be able to trigger their minds into that hypnotized state again. That way, it was possible for them to live the rest of their lives as normal people.

“But what if someone imitates Li Wenjia’s voice?” I asked.

“Unless that person can say the correct command words accurately,” the doctor explained, “you can rest assured that nothing will happen.”

I contemplated the possibility of an imitator and concluded that the chances of it happening was perhaps not so great. All of Li Wenjia’s family and relatives were dead by then, and the details of this case were kept under lock and key by the police, so it was impossible for any outsiders to stumble upon them.

Unbeknownst to me, I would one day come across another fox eye. In fact, this one would be even stronger and much more formidable!

Once everything settled down and I went back to the old mundane life on campus, I was visited by someone I’d never expected to see again. It was the professor who lived next door to Li Wenjia. He’d been upset and worried about Li Wenjia ever since the police raided her apartment that night. After asking around, he learned that I was a student at the college, so he came to me to find out what actually happened.

He begged me to take him to Li Wenjia. I told him that would be difficult. He replied that he’d been pursuing Li Wenjia for three years, and they would sometimes go out on dates together. Li Wenjia seemed to show some interest in him, but remained distant and aloof. She was like a puzzling mystery that enchanted him.

I thought to myself, how would he feel if he found out that his lover was actually a demon?

The professor’s earnest nature made it hard for me to refuse him, so I agreed to take him to Li Wenjia.

The process of seeing Li Wenjia didn’t require much effort, to be honest. She was now kept in a mental asylum in the city. We went there during the weekend, just when Li Wenjia was being fed by some nurses. She had completely lost her sanity. Her hair was wily, her skin was pale, and the straight jacket that she had on was covered in solidified vomit. The hollow eye socket where the fox eye used to be was covered with gauze.

Li Wenjia refused to take any medicine. She kicked and rolled on the floor, shrieking in a voice that sounded like a little girl.

“Mommy! Help me! Brother! Please come and save me!”

The professor burst into tears when he saw this.

I, on the other hand, thought she was lucky. Based on what she’d done, I thought she deserved worst than the cruelest punishment in the world. Now, she was exempted from the death sentence because of her mental state and was kept in here instead of the prison. Although, looking at her now, I couldn’t say that this place was much better than the prison.

As we left the mental asylum, the professor suddenly grabbed my arm and demanded, “Song Yang, please tell me what happened to her!”

“No,” I shook my head. “I can’t tell you anything about this.”

The professor continued to plead desperately; he even resorted to kneeling down on the ground. He told me he would never live in peace if he didn’t know what happened to Li Wenjia. I felt sorry for him, but I gritted my teeth and just left him there.

In the next few weeks, it was all peace and quiet in Nanjiang City. I was completely alone on campus as Dali was still receiving treatments in the psychiatric ward. I would visit Xiaotao once every few days to accompany her. I didn’t know what to say to comfort her though, so all I could do was be with her.

By then, it was very clear to me that we had gotten much closer now that we’d been through so much together. I felt that there was a tacit understanding between the both of us that needed no words to explain it.

In the blink of an eye, it was already November. Dali had returned and he was back to his normal self. Shiwen was back too. Although he wasn’t responsible for murdering Zhang Yan, the college felt that the incident had put a blemish on the campus morale. After all, more than thirty thousand people saw him kill Zhang Yan with their own eyes. If this ‘murderer’ was allowed to stay on campus, how would the students feel? What would the parents think?

So, his academic advisor called him to his office and gently persuaded him to drop out. After much consideration, Shiwen eventually agreed.

On Shiwen’s last day in college, Dali and I went to send him off. After this tragedy, Dali grew closer to Shiwen. He carried Shiwen’s luggage all the way from our college to the train station and gave Shiwen a lot of encouragement too. Shiwen was a changed man after the incident, and he’d become much more reserved and spoke very little.

“My dad’s going to kill me for dropping out of college after four years!” he lamented right before getting on the train. “What will I do now?”

“What’s the big deal?” Dali replied. “Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs graduated college anyway! This has nothing to do with your worth as a person. I know you’ll do well, brother!”

Shiwen patted his shoulder and said, “If you ever get to Taidong City someday, let’s have drinks together, okay?”

“Sure!”

Shiwen turned to me with sad eyes and said, “Song Yang, I don’t how I could ever repay you for what you did to me. If there’s anything I can do for you at all, just call me!”

“Come on, Shiwen,” I replied with a smile. “Don’t be so formal. I didn’t do much at all!”

“No,” Shiwen argued. “Without you, I’d be in prison right now!”

“I only did what’s right,” I said. “Hurry up! The train’s about to move!”

After getting on the train, I heard Shiwen lament, “Life is so full of uncertainties!”

When I met Shiwen again years after that, he was already a successful entrepreneur. He said this tragedy forced him to contemplate the value of life and how fickle it could be. If he hadn’t been through this, he would’ve gone on living frivolously day by day as a spoiled rich brat without making any effort to achieve anything on his own.

By the way, Shiwen’s father was the owner of a company that produced various cosmetics and toiletry products, and there was a particularly famous sanitary pad called ‘Little Bear Dula’ produced by this company that would one day be the source of wealth for Dali and me.

A few days after sending Shiwen off, I received a call from an unfamiliar number. The man on the other end introduced himself as Captain Xing, leader of Task Force 3. He asked me if I could spare some time and advise him on a case.

I was a little puzzled by this call. Shouldn’t Xiaotao be the one to contact me in circumstances like this? Was Xiaotao suspended? Or did anything happen to her?

“Where is Officer Huang?” I asked.

“She’s working on another case right now,” Captain Xing replied. “So I had to take on this case instead. It’s not a big case, really. It just happened this morning. All we need is for you to confirm one thing. Would you be able to help us?”

He was very kind and polite to me, so I didn’t have the heart to refuse him.

“What exactly do you need me to confirm?” I asked.

“The victim is suspected to have been killed by poison,” he said. “But we can’t find any trace of the poison anywhere.”

My ears pricked up at the mention of poison. Recently, having nothing to do, I concocted an elixir that could be used in a poisoning case according to a formula I found in The Collected Cases of Injustices Rectified. I was excited about the chance of testing it out in this case.

Half an hour later, a police car came over to pick us up. I picked up my bag of tools and called for Dali. As we went downstairs, Dali chirped, “Dude, look at us! Going here and there in police cars! Aren’t we the celebrities of the campus now?”

I glanced at him.

“If you brag about this to other people again, I swear I won’t let you come with me anymore! We must keep a low profile, you understand?”

If it weren’t for my ‘reputation’ on campus, Li Wenjia wouldn’t have had the idea to frame me for the murder of Zhang Yan that day. It all started because Dali had started the gossip on campus about me being a young detective.

We got into the police car and found that it was Captain Xing himself who picked us up. He was a young officer in his early thirties. He was dark-skinned and gruffly handsome. As we settled in, he briefly summarized the case to us.

In short, a couple was staying in a hotel room this morning. As they were having sex, the woman started to twitch violently and had difficulty breathing. The man thought it was just her orgasm, so he didn’t take much notice. Later, he found that the woman’s body had gone cold. When he checked her pulse, he realized that she was already dead, so he called the police immediately.

The coroner had confirmed that the death was caused by poisoning, but it wasn’t clear how the victim was poisoned or what poison was used. The couple had eaten together, had stayed in the room together, and even drank from the same bottle of wine in the room together, yet only the woman was poisoned.

Blood testing would definitely detect the poison eventually, but it would take too long—at least a few days. Captain Xing was afraid that it would delay the solving of the case too much, so he thought of asking me to help instead!