Guan Xia made a conscious effort to control her expression, maintaining a calm demeanor as she reached out to shake hands. "Hello, my name is Guan Xia."
After exchanging greetings, the three of them sat around a small round table—Pang Le in the middle, with Guan Xia and Lu Tingfeng on either side. Though the table was small, the arrangement meant Guan Xia and Lu Tingfeng ended up facing each other.
Fortunately, Pang Le was a chatterbox. The moment they sat down, he eagerly began ordering dishes while talking to Lu Tingfeng, giving Guan Xia plenty of time to adjust to Lu Tingfeng’s striking beauty.
Pang Le barely glanced at the menu before ticking off a few meat dishes, then turned to Lu Tingfeng. "You didn’t finish last night’s story. Go on, what happened next?"
Lu Tingfeng first poured a cup of hot water for each of them before leisurely replying, "Where did we leave off again?"
Without even pausing to think, Pang Le blurted out, "You mentioned you got separated from a friend, and then you fell into a pit and broke your leg."
Lu Tingfeng let out an "oh" of realization. "That pit—if you could even call it that—wasn’t very big. It was narrow, more like a mountain crevice. Luckily, it wasn’t too deep and was well-hidden. If I hadn’t been running in a panic, stepped on a rock, and lost my balance, I never would’ve stumbled into it. No one would’ve found it otherwise."
Pang Le sucked in a breath. "Your luck is… something else. On one hand, you’re unlucky enough to run into killers burying a body while hiking with friends. On the other, you’re lucky enough to find a hiding spot while being chased. So what happened next?"
Guan Xia had been confused at first, but Pang Le’s brief recap helped her piece together the story. She gripped her cup, listening intently as she looked at Lu Tingfeng.
Lu Tingfeng continued, "We hid in that crevice for a full day and night. Originally, we planned to stay just until dawn, then climb out and head down the mountain to call the police. But with my leg broken, even though there were footholds on the rock face, I couldn’t make the climb."
Though Lu Tingfeng’s tone was calm, her storytelling was vivid. Guan Xia found herself holding her breath.
Lu Tingfeng went on, "I told my friend to go ahead without me, but she refused. We even argued about it twice."
As if lost in the memory, Lu Tingfeng absentmindedly spun her cup. "With my leg broken and us stranded in the middle of nowhere, I was nothing but deadweight. Worse, we had another friend who’d gotten separated. We didn’t even know when we’d lost him, where he was, or if he was safe. The killers had guns—if we ran into them again, we were dead. Our only chance was to get down the mountain as fast as possible and find a spot with signal to call the police."
"Guns?" Guan Xia startled at the mention of another gun-related case—one where the person involved had also been hunted. It only reinforced her impression that Lu Tingfeng seemed like a protagonist straight out of a novel.
Lu Tingfeng snapped back to attention and explained to Guan Xia, "Yeah, homemade hunting rifles."
Homemade guns? These killers were far more brutal than the ones Guan Xia had encountered.
"What happened after that?" Guan Xia couldn’t help but press. "Did you split up in the end?"
Lu Tingfeng shook her head and chuckled. "That friend of mine is as stubborn as I am. No matter how much I argued, she wouldn’t leave me behind. She even yelled at me, asking if I’d hit my head too hard when I fell. We were lost, trapped in a hidden crevice—even if she made it down and brought back help, there was no guarantee they’d find their way back to me. What if I didn’t last that long? So she spent half a day stubbornly hauling me out and carried me down the mountain on her back."
Both Pang Le and Guan Xia listened with admiration. This was the kind of life-and-death bond few people ever experienced—the kind where someone refuses to abandon you, no matter how dire the situation.
Lu Tingfeng sighed, her eyes crinkling with a smile as she revealed the ending. "Despite how dangerous it was, all three of us made it out alive. The friend who got separated took a different route up the mountain and managed to evade the killers. The two of us who hid in the crevice were hungry, exhausted, and injured, but we got out in one piece. My friend even led the police back to where the killers had buried the body. Since we’d been chased all over, the killers had left behind plenty of evidence. The case was solved quickly, and they were arrested."
Lu Tingfeng added thoughtfully, "At the time, the whole thing just felt like terrible luck. But looking back, all that’s left is the thrill and a sense of accomplishment. If we hadn’t accidentally stumbled upon those killers burying a body, who knows how many more victims there might’ve been."
Guan Xia didn’t speak but nodded in agreement. Having faced killers in two separate cases herself, she knew the terror of those moments—but afterward, beyond the lingering fear, there was also an indescribable pride.
After Lu Tingfeng and Pang Le discussed the experience a bit more, Lu Tingfeng suddenly turned to Guan Xia and asked casually, "Pang Le mentioned you studied art. Which academy did you graduate from?"
Assuming Lu Tingfeng was just being polite to include her, Guan Xia smiled and replied, "I graduated from the provincial art academy here."
"The provincial one? Dingyuan Province? What a coincidence," Lu Tingfeng said, looking surprised. After a brief hesitation, she added, "Would you mind if I asked you about someone? A childhood friend of a friend of mine. She didn’t go to your school, but she worked nearby. You might’ve crossed paths at some point."
Guan Xia shrugged, not expecting to be of much help.
But then Lu Tingfeng handed her a photo and asked, "Have you ever seen her before?"
Suddenly, a system interface popped up.
You are being questioned by the police. You suddenly remember—on the evening of November 14, 2019, at 8:57 PM, while strolling through a food street with a friend, you noticed a middle-aged man acting nervously and suspiciously. His attention was fixed on a young girl not far away, and you sensed he might be following her. You decide to report this to the police.
As the text faded, a video played—a bustling food street where Guan Xia and a once-close friend (now long gone) chatted while eating stinky tofu. Among the passersby, a young girl’s face was outlined in red: slender eyebrows, large almond-shaped eyes, a delicate nose, and a small mouth—exactly the person in Lu Tingfeng’s photo. Walking beside her was an equally handsome young man, the two clearly a couple.
After the couple passed by, a middle-aged man with his head outlined in a red frame appeared just a dozen meters away. He was very tall, estimated to be over six feet, with a lean build and wearing a black hooded sweatshirt. His face was half-hidden by the hood as he walked with his head down, making it hard to see his full features. Soon, a young boy chatting with his friends and not watching where he was going bumped into him. The middle-aged man staggered from the impact, and though the boy frantically apologized, the man ignored him entirely. Instead, he shoved the boy aside roughly, took a few quick steps forward, and scanned the crowd intently, as if searching for something. When he failed to find it, he turned back and glared at the boy with unmistakable anger before striding away.
Because of that turn, Guan Xia got a clear look at the man’s face.
He had thick eyebrows, narrow eyes, and sharply defined facial features—an unexpectedly handsome middle-aged man. But his furious expression twisted his good looks, making him appear aggressive and full of hostility.
This video was longer than the previous ones, leaving Guan Xia staring at the photo in silence for an unusually long time.
It wasn’t until Lu Tingfeng spoke again that she snapped out of it.
"Did you remember something?" Lu Tingfeng asked.
Guan Xia gripped the photo tightly, struggling to keep her expression neutral before replying, "This person… does look familiar. I must have seen him somewhere before, but I can’t recall where or when."
She calmly handed the photo back, watching as Lu Tingfeng’s eyes flickered with disappointment before he carefully tucked it away and resumed his conversation with Pang Le.
Once his attention was no longer on her, Guan Xia exhaled quietly and leaned back in her chair, toying with her cup as if listening while her mind raced in chaos.
This system update had come entirely out of the blue, bringing with it a flood of information.
The most baffling part was the first line—both normal and yet not: You are being questioned by the police.
Lu Tingfeng was a police officer, so what did it mean for him to suddenly show her a photo without identifying himself? Was this a routine inquiry, or was it a test?
Guan Xia carefully replayed his earlier reactions and words. At the time, everything had seemed natural, but now, upon closer scrutiny, it all felt deliberate—first casually bringing up her alma mater, then pretending it was a coincidence to ask her about someone.
She didn’t want to suspect anyone, but the words on the system interface and Lu Tingfeng’s behavior made it impossible not to question his motives. She even wondered if he had known about her beforehand. And if so—how?
The answer came to her quickly. Only a handful of people knew about the peculiarities of her activated system. Pang Le would never talk, which left only the police officers she had provided clues to—the ones who had shown particular interest in her.
Guan Xia thought of Xu Nian, Qi Bai, and Wang Yu, her emotions complicated. She wasn’t angry, just puzzled. If they were police, why not just ask her directly? Why resort to such roundabout methods?
