The doors and windows of the top-floor west apartment in the tube building were sealed tight, turning the space into a stifling tin can. Inside, the intense beam of the scene examination light sliced through the polluted air, kicking up tiny dust motes that danced wildly within its cone. The smell of blood, the mustiness of decaying furniture, and an indescribable cloying sweetness mixed together, stubbornly clinging deep inside the nostrils, making each breath feel like swallowing a glob of viscous liquid.
Technician Xu Xiao half-kneeled beside the refrigerator. The tip of his tweezers was now only a hair's breadth from the transparent nylon thread stretching between the puppet head and the clutter behind the fridge. The harsh echo of Ling Yuming's shout – "Nobody move! One step back!" – had just faded, leaving the air frozen. Everyone held their breath, terrified gazes fixed on the cold, hollow mechanism sphere near his feet, and the utterly vanished LP sleeve jacket that should have been on the corner of the table.
A few seconds of deathly silence.
The sphere, crafted from brass and hardwood, lay inert. Its complex internal springs reflected small, sharp glints under the intense light, entirely motionless. No explosion as anticipated, no sudden poison needles, no unexpected sound. It lay there, a beautifully crafted trap hiding its deadly fangs at the last moment.
"Lao Liang," Ling Yuming's voice was pressed low, his Adam's apple bobbing. "Deal with this sphere first. Carefully." His jawline was locked tight, his sharp gaze never leaving the dangerous object.
Technical Team Leader Lao Liang, nearing fifty with greying hair but possessing remarkably steady hands, gave a silent nod. He retrieved an extremely precise buffer clamp and explosion-proof microwave-absorbing blanket from the innermost compartment of his case, cautiously approaching. His movements were delicate, as if disarming a bomb nestled in an infant's cradle.
While Lao Liang handled the deadly mechanism, Ling Yuming's gaze swept like an icy searchlight back to the empty table corner. The canvas shopping bag was still lying open, its edges showing faint fibers plucked out during a rapid snatch.
"Who is responsible for scene fixation?" His voice was layered with frost.
The young officer in charge of photography and evidence collection, Officer Li, turned ghostly pale, sweat beading on his forehead. "L-Ling… Captain! I was here! Never left from the moment we breached the door! Kept shooting photos! That… that bag! I photographed it, it was definitely inside! The sleeve corner was a dark red!" His voice shook, nearly frantic. "Zhen de! Hard is see ghost lo!* Who dares pinch it right under my nose ma!" (Translation note: The italicized section in Chinese is Xiao Li's outburst in thick Sichuanese dialect: "真嘞!硬是见鬼了嗦!哪个能在我眼皮子底下摸走嘛!" – meaning "Really! It's like seeing a ghost! Who could have stolen it right under my nose?")
Xiao Li's desperate lapse into thick dialect felt jarring in the tense atmosphere, but underscored his panic and certainty. No one dared lie on such a scene, in front of such a captain. Ling Yuming's cold gaze swept over every tense, bewildered face in the room. Everyone instinctively avoided his eyes.
Unless…
His gaze snapped towards the window – the latch on the old wooden sash window was secured tight, and the dust on the inner frame and glass showed not a single sign of disturbance. No exit. Unless there was an undiscovered "secret passage" in this room, or… some ghost who could temporarily disappear.
"Search!" The word was ground out between Ling Yuming's teeth, his eyes shifting towards the messier clutter near the dining table. "Everywhere! Especially behind anything that could block the view, gaps in cupboards! Don't leave a single blind spot!"
Officers sprang into action. Suppressing fear, they searched with heightened efficiency. The clatter of pots and pans, the rustle of old newspapers being shifted, momentarily broke the deathly quiet. But no one dared breathe too deeply, half their attention on their task, half on the corner where Lao Liang was using thick, cushioned clamps to painstakingly enclose the dangerous sphere.
Just then, Technician Xu Xiao's voice returned, faintly raspy, carrying the distinct diction of his native southeastern Guizhou: "Cap'n… this thread… 's a bit odd."
He maintained his half-kneeling posture, the tweezers' tip still not touching the nylon thread, but brought closer for better inspection. "'Tain't tight, see… just lying slack here… seems like… yi, seems like it's laid out for show?" He tapped the tweezers lightly near where the thread met the fridge gap – no tension, just casually lying there. This was the thread supposedly connected to the fridge's shadow, from which the Penguin wall clock's "throat" had coughed up the deadly sphere earlier.
A decoy?!
The discovery sent ripples through the stagnant air. But the cloud of suspicion thickening over Ling Yuming's mind only grew darker. Someone had meticulously crafted this seemingly sealed space, leaving behind the nursery rhyme, the puppets, mechanisms, and the "deliberately" vanished record sleeve – like completing a bizarre ritual puzzle.
"That nursery rhyme," he spoke, voice low, gaze shifting towards the tech team. "Scan that kid's drawing page for documentation. Pay special attention to the paper itself, any special marks or interlayers. And that metal fragment."
"Understood!"
The investigation crawled forward under an unprecedented veil of strangeness. No fingerprints – the preliminary tech sweep found the scene disturbingly clean. "Friggin' weird, really a ghost house lo!"* A new assistant couldn't help muttering in Chongqing dialect. The sound was small, but the mix of fear and frustration resonated with everyone. (真他妈见鬼了,简直是个鬼屋! – "Zhēn tā mā jiàn guǐ le, jiǎn zhí shì gè guǐ wū!")
Ling Yuming walked to the window. The dust on the latch was undisturbed. His eyes gloomily assessed the narrow view outside: decrepit clothes poles, spiderweb-like electrical lines, the silent red brick wall of the building opposite. Nowhere for climbing or leverage. The puzzle of the locked room held stubbornly in everyone's mind.
Lao Liang finally secured the cold mechanism sphere within thick shockproof padding and placed it into a special anti-explosive container. A collective, barely perceptible sigh rippled through the room, but the pervasive chill intensified. At that moment, Forensic Pathologist Shen Xingran and her assistant finished their preliminary exam and approached.
Shen Xingran, backbone of the Municipal Forensics Center, early thirties, hair meticulously coiled in a bun, gold-rimmed glasses, gaze cool behind the lenses—almost inorganic. The kind of woman who could sip coffee unfazed by the most horrific mutilated corpses. She removed her latex gloves, her voice flat but delivering information with immense impact:
"Cap'n Ling, initial assessment. Male victim's neck wound: a single, precise incised wound. Depth, angle, and wound morphology are highly unusual. Exceptionally accurate strike. The female and the child show definitive signs of asphyxiation, but no clear ligature marks on the neck. Appear to have been in a brief, unnatural deep sleep before death." She paused, the lenses reflecting the light. "Crucially, based on liver temperature and rigor mortis development, the preliminary post-mortem interval is estimated… last night, between 23:00 and 01:00."
23:00 to 01:00?!
It hit like a thunderclap!
Every officer on-site paled. Ling Yuming's pupils constricted violently. He whipped his head toward the Penguin wall clock on the wall – its hour hand now pointed bizarrely at 9:38 AM, frozen. Lao Liang had just carefully removed it; its internal gears seemed intact.
"Last night?" Ling Yuming's voice was ice. "Say the time again?"
Shen Xingran adjusted her glasses, tone unequivocal: "Preliminary findings point to 23:00 to 01:00 last night. Error margin shouldn't exceed plus or minus one hour. Detailed lab analysis is needed for precision, but the overall window is correct." Her gaze swept the three distorted corpses. "Based on corpse appearance and ambient temperature and humidity."
A blast of cold shot up Ling Yuming's spine from his soles, threatening to freeze his reason!
They'd received the report and breached the door at 09:21 AM! Meaning these three people had been dead for at least eight hours! But the scene? Doors and windows locked! A virtually sealed room at near-ambient temperature! The male corpse's severed carotid artery wound – conventional wisdom dictated that eight hours of blood loss and rigor mortis should leave far more than the relatively "fresh," small pool of spray on the floor!
Moreover, the complainant – Granny Zhang downstairs – insisted she'd heard a man scolding his child upstairs for being disobedient around 8:00 AM! A huge time gap! A terrifying chasm in logic!
Lao Liang carefully brought the Penguin clock over, brow furrowed. "Cap'n, this clock… externally intact, internal gears and spring normal, just… no power. According to the model, it uses a button battery, a bit specific, but that kind usually lasts over a year. What's odd… it stopped exactly at… 9:38." He paused. "Found this inside the battery compartment."
He used tweezers to hold up a minuscule, wafer-thin fragment of black plastic.
"This thing was jammed between the positive and negative terminals, breaking the circuit," Lao Liang's voice held disbelief. "Seems… seems deliberately inserted to stop it."
Deliberately stopped the clock at 9:38 AM? Minutes after their arrival?
"Damn it!" Ling Yuming slammed a fist onto the cracked, flaking wall, dislodging a small cloud of dust. He paced like a caged, enraged predator. Nursery rhyme! Puppet head! Mechanism sphere! Vanished record sleeve! Deaths occurring a full eight hours earlier, preserved unnaturally! And this plastic fragment stopping the clock!
All these insane puzzle pieces crashed into the growing, horrifying connection point in his mind – Lin Ruoxi!
A notification ping sounded from a tech team laptop. The officer monitoring quickly opened it—screenshots of partial surveillance footage from the Laoguai Well alley entrance during the incident timeframe.
Ling Yuming strode over.
The image was timestamped 09:37:03. Blurry. The shadow of an old scholar tree fell across the street corner bend. A woman's figure, dressed in a simple, elegant cheongsam, side-on to the camera, carried a white non-woven shopping bag bearing a nearby supermarket logo. Her pace was unhurried. She looked down slightly, as if watching for uneven pavement, a few strands of dark hair brushing her delicate jawline. Her expression was unclear. That cheongsam pattern—celadon with wisteria branches—was exactly what Lin Ruoxi had worn at the counseling center today!
The angle and distance placed her coming from the direction of Building 3, the very scene of the murder. The timing was uncanny. Her shopping bag looked almost empty, flat—hardly capable of holding a thick, hard-backed LP sleeve jacket. Where was that thing?
All the clues felt like barbed vines tangled together; the harder he pulled, the deeper the thorns cut.
"Wrap it up! Seal and remove all evidence!" Ling Yuming's voice was hoarse, carrying undeniable resolve. "Tech Surveillance! Enhance those few seconds! I need to see if she carried that bag into the alley! Also, check all street cameras before and after, track her approach!" His eyes swept the room, especially the newcomers. "About the case—before we get back to the station—zip it! I hear one more word about 'ghost houses,' file your own transfer to the Archives for dusting!"
Everyone held their breath.
Ling Yuming cast one last look at this hellish, cramped room. The cheap landscape painting half-ripped off the wall, leaving blurry glue residue; the wooden head with only eyes at the end of the nylon thread disappearing into the fridge gap; the invisible void at the table corner… the three silent bodies, covered in white sheets, being lifted onto stretchers. And the nursery rhyme's last blood-dripping line, scrawled by the boy in his twisted position, seemed to float soundlessly in the frigid air.
It felt like a cold slab of stone pressing down on his chest.
...
The atmosphere in the Lànjiāng Municipal Criminal Investigation Unit headquarters was more oppressive than ever. The tech team's area buzzed with bright lights and low machine hums; the autopsy room was notified for an overnight shift; the surveillance team pored over alley-entrance screenshot blowups, hunting for nuances in Lin Ruoxi's movements.
Ling Yuming shut himself in the small conference room. Spread before him were scene photos, the preliminary investigation report, and the tech team's initial findings on the strange metal fragment.
"Material is high-hardness surgical-grade special alloy," a tech delivered the report. "Commonly used in precision surgical instruments or… the blades of certain high-spec custom engraving tools. The fracture pattern on the fragment's edge is highly unusual. Not caused by forceful breakage, more like… microscopic structural failure due to high-speed, high-frequency impact on an extremely hard, pinpoint object. In short, quite rare."
Surgical instruments? Engraving tools? High-speed impact?
Ling Yuming saw again the horrifyingly clean cut across the male victim's neck. If the weapon was a specially crafted blade like this…
The phone rang abruptly. It was the unit's officer tasked with monitoring local chatter and social media, her voice tense: "Cap'n Ling! Bad news! Get to the Lànjiāng Online community forum! And some local short-video groups!"
Ling Yuming's brow jumped. He clicked open the internal link. Bold, inflammatory headlines flashed on the screen:
[EXPLOSIVE! Building 3, Laoguai Well Lane Massacre! The Sinister Nursery Rhyme Echoes Again!]
[EXCLUSIVE! "Pull Pull, Drag Drag, the Moon's Gone" – The Ominous Rhyme Overhangs Lànjiāng! Has the Decade-Old Curse Returned?!]
[Living History! Murder Scene Reveals Riddle Sphere and Mysterious Prophecy! Police Stumped…]
Grainy, but clearly scene-specific photos from the building staircase were being frantically reposted. The descriptions were vivid—locked room, the rhyme note, puppet head in the fridge, mysteriously dropped mechanism sphere… detail far exceeding anything likely leaked through normal channels! Even the photo of the boy's final, scrawled page was clearly visible! Blurred, but the text readable!
"GODDAMN IT! HOW'D IT LEAK SO FAST?!" Ling Yuming slammed a fist onto the desk, sending the water cup jumping. "WHOSE SHITTY MOUTH SPREAD THIS?!"
The wave of furious pressure radiating from the captain permeated the entire office. Every officer, veteran or newbie, present at the scene today exchanged uneasy glances, their faces grim, knowing they were targets of suspicion. Especially the new assistant who'd cursed on-site; he looked deathly pale.
Just then, Ling Yuming's personal phone rang. Grim-faced, he pulled it out. On the screen was a number—no name saved, but chillingly familiar—the landline number for the "Stillness Counseling Center" front desk.
He stared at the digits, brow furrowed into a knot. Seconds later, he answered, pressing the receiver tight to his ear without speaking.
Silence stretched for two seconds from the other end. Then, a voice came through—gentle, calm, carrying a barely perceptible touch of warmth, like a summer creek murmuring over smooth stones, lightly tapping against the receiver:
"Captain Ling?" It was Lin Ruoxi's voice.
Ling Yuming's body snapped taut! His knuckles whitened around the phone, the veins at his temples throbbing visibly. The office plunged into absolute silence. Every eye locked onto him.
"Speaking." Ling Yuming's voice was low, tight, struggling to contain something.
Another momentary silence hung from her end, as if weighing words. Then Lin Ruoxi spoke again, the tone still soothingly pleasant, yet like a thin sheet of ice over seething magma:
"I apologize for disturbing you so late. Our reception just received several anonymous calls asking about… rather unusual matters." She paused, a touch of precisely calibrated concern entering her voice. "The callers sounded anxious, even panicked. They mentioned… a nursery rhyme? And something about… 'eyes opening and gone'? As a psychological aid organization, encountering such suggestive, panic-inducing public events… well, we need to understand the situation directly from the responsible authorities…"
Her phrasing was professional, watertight—the responsible concern of a counseling professional monitoring public mental health.
But Ling Yuming felt an electric shock rip up his spine!
"'Eyes opening and gone'"?—This was the exact phrase from the boy's nursery rhyme at the murder scene! The hidden message on the final scrawled page! An essential detail the police had just confirmed internally regarding the time-trick with the clock stopped at 9:38 and the actual nighttime death! Public leaks only mentioned the "Pull Pull, Drag Drag, the Moon's Gone" line! How in hell did she know this hidden, core phrase?!
Had she been at the scene? Was she the "ghost"? The one who snatched the sleeve jacket under their noses? Impossible! Time and physics forbade it!
Then how…
Lin Ruoxi on the phone seemed oblivious to the frozen silence and the raging currents beneath. Her voice remained even, tinged with a hint of constructive concern:
"Captain Ling? If there truly is unreleased information involving group psychological suggestion or sources of panic induction… we could also provide some professional assessment. What do you think…?"
Ling Yuming snapped his head up, eyes like ice-fused ice picks, piercing the air. He ground out words from deep in his throat, a dam holding back a tidal wave:
"Dr. Lin. I believe… we need to talk. In person."
Silence stretched for a heartbeat on the line, filled only with the faintest electrical hiss, as if silently calculating.
Then, Lin Ruoxi's voice came again, still cordial, yet dropping like an abyssal depth charge onto a placid lake:
"Agreed. I'm at your convenience. However…" She drew the word out slightly, seeming to weigh her words, or perhaps offering an offhand reminder, "…Captain, I can't help feeling—there seems to be… a line missing from that nursery rhyme? It feels… incomplete."
A line missing? That jagged "Pull Pull, Drag Drag, the Moon's Gone"? "A puppet's eyeballs, roll and roll, fall down"?! And the "eyes opening and gone"?! Still not complete?!
Before Ling Yuming could react, Lin Ruoxi added softly, wrapped in that impossible-to-resist cloak of professionalism:
"When you've sorted your direction, we'll talk. Psychological blind spots… are often harder to breach… than physical passageways. Ah, one more thing," her tone shifted, almost conversational, "Next time, perhaps you should advise Officer Li to debrief… a bit farther from those old speakers. The echo really distorts what's said."
Her words hung in the air. Then, clearly, crisply, unmistakably audible over the phone line—a distinctly feminine voice with a northern accent called out nearby: "Xiao Li! The Chief wants you! Now! The 'eyes opening and gone' audio analysis is in! Major breakthrough!"
It was exactly the voice of the office's admin officer—not from a speaker, but from ambient noise! Xiao Li had just taken a call outside Ling Yuming's office door, in the corridor!
All the blood in Ling Yuming's body seemed to surge to his head! He crushed the phone, knuckles cracking under the strain, veins bulging like furious dragons across the back of his hand!
Lin Ruoxi concluded gently: "Well then, that's settled for now, Captain."
Beep… Beep… Beep…
The dial tone hammered, cold, monotonous, like stones falling onto a grave.
In the large office, the air felt instantly vacuumed out. Ling Yuming stood frozen, the long-dead phone clutched in his hand, like a statue carved from ice. Outside, the city's neon bled through the venetian blinds, casting shifting bands of uncertain light across his hard-edged face.
He slowly lifted his eyes, sweeping over the stunned, bewildered, even frightened faces in the office. Shen Xingran, Lao Liang, the admin officer clutching the freshly printed recording transcript, looking helpless… everyone waited for his command.
That figure carrying the shopping bag, walking around the street bend, posture relaxed… the celadon cheongsam, the strands of dark hair, the face looking down in the blurred surveillance image, expression obscured yet seeming to hold a faint smile… surfaced with horrifying clarity.
Psychological blind spots… harder to breach than physical passageways…
How much did she know? How did she know it? Was she the key to unraveling this… or… the next deadly shard inevitably meant to fit into this bloody puzzle?
Psychological blind spots… harder to breach than physical passageways…