In the small southwestern border city of Lanjiang, the dampness hung so heavy it felt wringable. The sweltering heat of July clung stubbornly to the skin. Along the street, the leaves of ancient banyan trees drooped listlessly, stirring only when cars rumbled past, churning up waves of dust-laden heat.
Inside the "Tranquil Listening Psychological Counseling" center downtown, the air conditioning blasted frigid air tinged with the sterile scent of disinfectant, a stark contrast to the muggy world outside. As the glass door swung open, wind chimes overhead chimed lazily, as if burdened.
Lin Ruoxi peered through the narrow window of the second-floor lounge, watching as that familiar patrol car—its roof dulled by wear—struggled to turn around at the street corner. Splashing through puddled roads, it rumbled toward the old residential area in the eastern city, where history tangled with modernity. She withdrew her gaze, her fingers brushing the intricate peony embroidery on the sleeve of her sky-blue qipao. The fabric felt smooth and cool. On her left wrist, an antique silver bracelet hung loosely, accentuating the delicate curve of her bone.
"Ms. Ruoxi, what're you looking at?" Xiao Zhang, the front-desk receptionist fresh out of nursing school, called up. Her cheeks were still rounded with youth, and she clutched a thermos cup. Her voice was crisp. "That stern-faced cop left again? In such a hurry—didn't even hear me calling!"
Stern-faced cop? A ghost of a smile flickered at Lin Ruoxi's lips. Ling Yuming's sharp features always radiated an untouchable severity, his wind-beaten and sun-scorched skin indeed deep-toned. "Stern-faced"—somehow the description fit uncannily well.
She didn't respond. Instead, she returned to the armchair by the window. Sinking into its softness felt like shutting out the world. On the matte-white coffee table before her lay the latest issue of Criminal Psychology Research, an ordinary gel pen beside it.
From downstairs came Xiao Zhang's drawling sigh, mingling with the faint hum of the front-desk computer, buzzing in Ruoxi's ears.
"Sigh… things are stirring again in the East End," Xiao Zhang murmured, her voice laced with that local mix of neighborly concern and gossip-hungry intrigue. "Lao Huai Well Alley—a whole family… a tragedy! Today, this morning! Auntie Wang at the street corner said the child… oh, what a sin! Worse yet—" Her voice dropped, turning conspiratorial. "Rumors fly that… it's that ghostly 'Tug and Pull' nursery rhyme again! Spooky stuff. Feels like they stumbled upon something unclean!"
Lin Ruoxi's gaze lingered on the journal's cover, where a geometric spiral yawned like a whirlpool. Her index finger traced its edge absently. Xiao Zhang's murmurs of "what a sin" and "unclean things" failed to stir even a ripple in Ruoxi's calm eyes.
"Nursery rhyme…" The words escaped her lips softly, like dust settling. Her finger skimmed the tabletop, leaving a near-invisible trail of moisture—a secret path instantly frozen, then casually wiped away.
She lifted her glass, took a sip of lukewarm water, and looked out the window. Leaden clouds pressed down on Lanjiang's patchwork rooftops like a vast, filthy rag. A ripple of irritation grew within her—unrelated to Xiao Zhang's chatter or the so-called "creepy nursery rhyme." This stifling, humid weather was the real intruder, making every breath a labor.
East End, Lao Huai Well Alley
Time felt frozen here, trapped twenty years in the past. Brick walls glistened darkly with grease and steam. Cracks scarred the cement, patches of moss sprawling across its surface. Makeshift tin and plastic shacks tangled like parasitic vines around the frail skeletons of walk-up apartments. The air hung thick with mildew, cheap frying oil, and the sour tang of rotting garbage.
"Crime scene! Watch your step! Don't step anywhere they shouldn't be!" shouted Ling Yuming, his voice slicing through the crowd buzzing beyond the makeshift police barrier. His dark blue service uniform was soaked through, plastered to his muscular back. Stubble shadowed his jaw, his furrowed brow carving his already sharp features into something harder—a boulder weathered relentless by storms.
The scene was on the top floor of Building Three, west unit. The dilapidated wooden door gaped open, spewing a bizarre stench of sickly sweetness mixed with dust and decay. July's furnace-like heat stewed the miasma into something thick enough to choke on.
The new forensic assistant peeked inside and instantly choked back a gag.
Ling Yuming ignored it. Donning booties and gloves, he ducked through the doorway. The cramped living room lay nearly bare, yet the sight within was enough to freeze blood.
A family of three. Or rather, three corpses contorted in unnatural positions.
The wife lay face-up by a faded plastic coffee table, eyes wide and frozen in terror, her mouth stretched unnaturally wide. Not far away, a small boy curled in the oil-stained corner of a cloth sofa, his tiny body twisted as if folded by an unseen force.
The most chilling, however, was the man. He sat slumped in a groaning wicker chair opposite the door, his upper body folded backward at an impossible angle. His head lolled unnaturally against the backrest, neck twisted near ninety degrees. His suffocated face, swollen and purple with horror, stared blindly at the cracked, water-stained ceiling.
The fatal wound was unambiguous—a slash deep to the bone across the man's neck. Clean. Brutal. The light beams from the forensics team swept the chair's base, illuminating a spray of dried, dark-brown blood spattered like violent stars across the cracked cement floor in a stark fan shape.
Beyond this violence, the room was eerily "clean." The window—old-style with a latch—was locked tight from the inside, its wooden frame thick with dust inside the sash. The only entrance door was secured by an internal deadbolt lock—confirmed by both the reporting neighbor and the patrol officers who'd kicked it in. The lock's metal tongue slide showed no signs of forced entry.
A perfect sealed room.
The tiny apartment was jammed with cluttered, worn furniture. Officers moved meticulously around the chaos. Cameras flashed white light periodically. An officer struggled to shift a heavy, old-fashioned chest of drawers, revealing beneath it a grimy tangle of what looked like fabric fibers.
"Captain Ling!" A bespectacled forensics officer, Officer Xu, squatted near the boy's twisted form. Carefully, he parted a few fallen plastic building blocks with tweezers, revealing a small object gleaming with cold, metallic sharpness beneath. "Look at this!"
Ling Yuming crossed over instantly. It was a metal fragment no larger than a fingernail, its edges razor-sharp, its shape peculiar.
"Looks like… some kind of specially crafted silver leaf?" Xu speculated cautiously, lifting the fragment into the light with the tweezers. A cold gleam slid along its sharp edge.
"Preliminary assessment is a fragment sheared from the edge of a sharp instrument," chimed in Liang, the head of Forensics, his voice dryly precise. "Material and toolmark analysis pending."
Another officer emerged from beneath a narrow single bed in the bedroom, pale-faced. He handed Ling a hard plastic-bound booklet. "Found under the mattress, Captain Ling. The boy's 'drawing book'… turn to the last page…"
Yellowed paper displayed a heart-stopping panorama of clumsy, scarlet crayon scrawls pressed deep into the page. Twisted black lines sketched crude figures, each roughly drawn head replaced by an irregular oval dripping thick red stains.
The final page was shockingly, unnervingly blank. At the bottom, scrawled in clumsy but insistent strokes:
Tug and pull, the moon is gone,
Puppet eyes spin,
Round and round, gone they fall.
Beneath the writing, several pencil dots were indented randomly, like an aborted attempt at a simple sketch.
"Nursery rhyme…" Ling Yuming's voice rasped like frozen gravel. An invisible chill seemed to coil through the stifling air. Every officer felt the hair prickle on their necks.
Xiao Zhang's vague murmurs about "weird nursery rhymes" now crystallized into this line of childish script radiating monstrous dread. Ling's gaze, sharp as an eagle's, swept every corner—the cramped window frame, the cluttered floor, the shabby furniture, the flaking ceiling plaster. He searched obsessively for hidden exits, but the evidence remained mercilessly consistent: door locked, window shut.
This goddamn sealed room!
The officers resumed their meticulous, suffocatingly slow work. Suddenly, Xu made another discovery near the doorway on the grimy, sticker-plastered surface of an ancient refrigerator.
"Captain Ling!" Xu's voice was a suppressed gasp.
Wedged deep in a near-invisible corner seam of the refrigerator was a tiny, crudely carved wooden puppet head. The wood seemed salvaged from something older, barely thumb-sized. Two rough dots of black paint served as eyes. There was no nose, no mouth. An almost transparent nylon thread was tied to its base, vanishing into the jumbled clutter packed behind the fridge.
As Xu held his breath and nudged the taut thread with the tip of his tweezers—
Squeak…
In the living room center, a cheap, relatively newer cartoon penguin wall clock suddenly emitted a grating, metallic click—the sound of a mechanical spring winding tight.
Then, Crack! Crack! Crack!
The penguin figure atop the clock abruptly snapped backward. An object slightly larger than a walnut tumbled from the gaping maw that served as the penguin's throat—like something vomited forth.
Thump. It slammed onto the mottled cement floor below, bounced twice, and settled near Ling Yuming's feet.
Silence. Absolute. Every eye fixed on the object—a smooth sphere of brass and hardwood, its surface etched with intricate geometric openwork, impossibly complex. It lay there, radiating icy, sinister beauty. Beneath the dim lights, tiny intersecting springs were faintly visible within its labyrinthine depths.
An artifact from hell.
"An escape-artist puzzle ball?!" Liang choked out the name, shock overwhelming professionalism as he lunged forward.
Ling Yuming moved faster. His arm shot out like iron, blocking Liang. His rock-hard face twitched, his stare drilling into the cold orb, trying to pierce its secrets.
"Nobody move!" Ling's voice was dangerously low, each word scraped raw from his core. "Everyone, take one step back!"
His gaze didn't shift from the puzzle ball. He didn't even glance at the bizarre puppet head in the fridge seam. Instead, he spun around, his sharp eyes like searchlights raking the edge of the small, cluttered dining table in the corner.
There, lying half-buried in a crumpled canvas shopping bag moments before—it was gone.
"That!" Ling pointed at the empty spot, his voice cold as frost. "The record!"
Only seconds ago, Officer Li, documenting photos, clearly recalled seeing the corner of a hard cardboard sleeve for an old LP peeking from the bag's open mouth. Dark red background, garish patterns, illegible blurred title.
Now, it had vanished. Only the gaping mouth of the canvas bag remained on the corner of the table.
As if an invisible phantom hand had snatched the critical evidence right from under their noses.
A chill—deeper, more cloying than any air-conditioning—crept up Ling Yuming's spine. A sealed room! Mechanisms! A nursery rhyme! A missing record! The fragments collided chaotically in his mind, refusing to form a coherent chain. This tiny, dirty space felt like a meticulously laid trap, mocking them.
Just then, his phone vibrated sharply in his pocket.
Ling answered brusquely, recognizing the internal office number. "Speak!"
"Captain Ling!" It was Li from Internal Coordination. "Central Command just fed back the traffic cam review near the scene." Li's voice was urgent. "Got recordings from six street-corner cameras within one hour before and after the incident timeframe near Building Three. Cross-referencing vehicles and pedestrians now, nothing major yet… Wait…" Keys clattered rapidly as Li flipped through feeds. "Huh? This is... strange."
"Spit it out!" Ling snapped impatiently.
"Well... just about a quarter past the estimated incident time, at the Lao Huai Well Alley and Main Street intersection…" Li paused, choosing words carefully. "It caught that… counselor from 'Tranquil Listening,' the one you know, Ms. Lin." Hesitation crept in. "She's seen walking out from the street corner. Carrying one of those reusable grocery totes. Just… walking calmly toward the central hospital."
Ling Yuming's brow knotted instantly. His hand tightened on the phone.
Tranquil Listening Psychological Counseling Center? Lin Ruoxi?
His mind flashed back to half an hour ago, outside that brightly lit, unnervingly cool center. When he'd looked up, catching just a glimpse—a faint silhouette at a second-floor window, blurred as if seen through frosted glass. Disappearing fast.
It was her.
"Confirm it's after the incident?" Ling demanded, his voice lowering further, tight with unconscious tension. "Exact time?"
"Screenshot timestamp: 09:37:03. Incident reported at 09:21. We breached the door at 09:25." Internal Li's voice held no doubt. "Difference is about fifteen, sixteen minutes. She was caught on the closest street corner to the scene."
09:37. Barely twelve minutes after they'd broken into the bloody scene.
Tranquil Listening was downtown, in the heart of the old city. Getting from Lao Huai Well Alley took at least ten minutes by car. A seemingly frail counselor, alone, carrying groceries, strolling leisurely on a street bordering the murder scene just over ten minutes later?
Logic screamed in his head like metal stressed beyond its limit. Coincidence? An absurd thought forced its way in: Had she left the counseling center early, only to arrive ahead of time and linger near the stench of death?
Too close. Time and space—both coinciding impossibly!
Ling Yuming's jaw clenched like a vice. He slammed the phone shut, shoving it back into his pocket with a thump. His eyes swept the room—the three grotesque corpses frozen mid-agony, the disturbing nursery rhyme drawing fallen to the floor, the puppet head with its transparent tether in the fridge seam, the icy puzzle ball lying silent at his feet…
Finally, his stare locked onto that empty corner of the table where the record had vanished. It hung in the air like a huge, mocking black question mark.
Ling Yuming looked up, as if he could pierce the filthy concrete and crumbling plaster, gazing hard in the direction of the city center.
"Ms. Lin…" The three syllables rolled silently, sharply, across his tongue. A predatory sharpness—cold, assessing, unfathomable—flickered through the darkness behind his eyes.
In the corner, Xu was finally holding his breath again, tweezers poised to brush the transparent nylon thread for the second time.
Almost simultaneously—
Click.
The cheap plastic throat of the cartoon penguin clock, still hanging central in the living room, shuddered almost imperceptibly. A thin metal sheet dangling beneath its pendulum sprang upward abruptly, jerked by some unseen force.