Chen Shi turned on the light, and the man lying on the floor was Big Ox. The open abdominal cavity was bloody, like a bottomless black hole. His face was fixed in an expression of extreme pain and his right hand gripped a mobile phone so tightly that the tempered glass screen protector on the phone was bulging.

The items in the house were neatly arranged and there were no signs of struggle. The blood stains on the floor and walls were still a bit warm. Based on this, it was speculated that the murderer had left the scene less than two hours ago.

"Why would it be Big Ox who died?!" Chen Shi muttered to himself in disbelief. "It stands to reason that the murderer already knew that Zhang Xiao was the person he was looking for."

"It's 4:00 in the morning, and Captain Peng is still resting. Let's stay here until dawn and call someone over to deal with it!" Lin Qiupu suggested.

Chen Shi asked Lin Dongxue to go to the car to sleep for a while. She had been awake the whole night and she could barely open her eyes. He checked the scene himself and tried not to touch anything.

Compared with the last homicide, the murderer’s technique this time was even cleaner. There were almost no additional injuries on Big Ox's body. It seemed as though he had been injected with anesthetic and had his internal organs directly taken out. Big Niu was likely to have woken up in pain afterwards. The murderer had already left by then, and Big Niu struggled alone in the house for a while before dying in despair.

His right hand clenched the phone so tightly that it couldn't be removed. Chen Shi was afraid that forcibly prying his fingers away would break his finger bones, so he could only wait for Peng Sijue and the others to find a way.

Chen Shi carefully observed the wound of the deceased, then looked at the bloody handprints on the wall. He said to Lin Qiupu, "Have you noticed that the murderer is left-handed?"

"Really?" Lin Qiupu raised his head from the phone and said, "I’m looking at the photos sent by the seven people just now, and I can't see any problems with them. I think you guessed wrong this time. The murderer shouldn’t be among these people."

Chen Shi went to the door to check, and said, "The lock has not been picked, and the deceased is dressed casually. This shows that the murderer is most likely someone he knew... The same as the last crime scene."

"The people they know may not be among the nine."

"I still stick to my reasoning. There must be an explanation for what happened tonight."

"Maybe the murderer just wanted to divert our attention, or he couldn't find Zhang Xiao, and killed someone randomly. Let me say something I probably shouldn’t. If I were the murderer, I would think all nine of them deserve to die!"

"If that’s the case, the murderer could kill them one by one from the beginning. If he could send the body parts by post, it means he knows everyone's address. Why wait until the police intervene before doing it?"

"To pursue a kind of criminal effect. To punish them or something." Lin Qiupu shrugged.

"I won't debate with you anymore. Your reasoning ability still isn’t as good as Dongxue's. You’re just blindly guessing."

Unwilling to accept, Lin Qiupu snorted, carried over a chair to sit down on and rested. He yawned for a long time.

Around 6:00, the two of them went to eat something nearby. They were exhausted from staying up all night, but after their sleepiness passed, they didn't want to sleep anymore. Their bones just felt a little bit sore. Maybe it was too cold in the hospital.

Chen Shi saw early-rising residents throwing trash outside through the window. He said, "Where do you reckon the murderer would throw the guts of the deceased?"

"They’re not in the hazardous garbage bin again, right?"

"Let’s go find it."

However, they weren’t found in the nearby trash can. Chen Shi looked back and found that there was a surveillance camera opposite the trash can. The murderer was probably concerned about this, so he didn’t throw the viscera there.

As the sky gradually lightened, Lin Qiupu made a few phone calls. After half an hour, a police car arrived. Peng Sijue had brought people over to survey the scene.

Chen Shi asked if there were any results from yesterday’s autopsy. Peng Sijue said, “The tool used to saw the legs is a saw, which is similar to Duan Lin’s previous wounds. It may be the same murder weapon. No biological information left by the murderer was found at the scene. The footprints on the head were found to have been left by a pair of leather shoes in the deceased’s shoe cabinet. The murderer had changed into these shoes to commit the crime after entering the house. The deceased had been injected with chloroform as an anesthetic. In addition, some lime powder and sand were found at the scene."

"What about the blood on the wall?"

"It’s the deceased's own blood."

Lin Qiupu was looking at his mobile phone. He handed it to Chen Shi. There was a blurry picture on it. "This suspicious person was found on the surveillance footage at the crime scene yesterday."

The picture showed a person wearing a black jacket and cap, with his hands in his pockets. His features were almost unrecognizable.

With a head full of doubts, Chen Shi returned to his car. Lin Dongxue was curled up in the back seat and sleeping soundly. Chen Shi lowered his seat and sorted out all the clues in his mind. He gradually fell asleep and had a strange dream.

At the same time, in an inconspicuous illegal Internet cafe in the city, Zhang Xiao was smoking a cigarette and typing away at lightning speed with both hands on the keyboard. Fearing that the police would track him down, his cell phone had been turned off.

He was using the PC-version of WeChat to send a message to a woman. "...American scientific research shows that sex between more than two people can make a woman secrete a special melatonin, which causes them to age a little slower than those of the same age. It can be up to ten years slower. Actually, I feel this matter is no big deal if you think carefully about it. Are you interested in trying it out?"

"I originally had a good impression of you, but I didn't expect you to be thinking about these disgusting things. Goodbye, and don't contact me anymore!"

Sending a message again, the WeChat prompt read: "You’re not a friend of the other party".

"Fuck!" Zhang Xiao was so angry that he smashed the keyboard. He was exploiting the "prey" he had cultivated by asking them one by one to participate in a threesome.

No matter how favorable their impressions of him were, or if they were taken in by his flirtatious, bad boy persona, women wouldn’t agree to such a thing by nature. They all blocked Zhang Xiao.

What happened in the hospital last night, the fact that the murderer was pursuing him, and the fact that the police had found out that he had killed Duan Lin: these various realities forced Zhang Xiao to the brink of collapse.

Knowing that his death was approaching, he wanted to fulfill this long-cherished wish before he died. Without spending money, using only his mouth, persuading two women to have a threesome with him.

As long as he got to try once, he could accept his death.

Zhang Xiao took a big gulp of the Coke next to the computer, rubbed his eyes, and looked through his list of friends. There weren’t many people left to try it on. He wasn’t too familiar with these women, and they wouldn’t necessarily even agree to a normal date. The success rate was infinitely close to zero.

A notification prompted that someone had added him. It was a girl named Amy. Her profile picture was pretty good-looking. Zhang Xiao agreed without thinking about it.

"Hello, you chatted with me in the mall last time and you left me your WeChat." The other party was very proactive.

"Oh, it's you!" In fact, Zhang Xiao couldn't remember her at all. Since he had struck up a conversation on his own initiative previously, she wouldn’t be of bad quality. He had no patience left and quickly broached the topic.

After some idle chat, he gradually brought up the topic, "...I was betrayed by the woman I loved deeply, and this became a sore point. So I came up with this strange idea. I want to know why a person would try this kind of thing."

This time, he changed his strategy, trying to move her.

"Why?" The other party seemed to be humoring him and also seemed curious.

As a chatting veteran, Zhang Xiao directly attacked. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, he would leave it at that. "Do you want to try this with me? I think people should try everything at least once in their lives. Be it good or bad, they should give it a try."

"Sure!" the other party replied.

Zhang Xiao was ecstatic. Great! Finally, a silly girl has been fooled. This dream that would let him die without regrets was half accomplished!