After a long pause, Ji Xun cautiously asked, “Is… is it the same situation on your end?”
“Not sure yet, still investigating,” Shen Kui said anxiously. The class reunion wasn’t until Saturday. She felt like she could hardly wait that long.
“Could it really be like the post said… that the accident back then was all a conspiracy?” Ji Xun’s heart raced with anxiety as he thought it over. “The people behind it wanted to use this post to gather us, survivors, together, and then wipe us out in one fell swoop?”
“That’s possible.”
“Wait!” Ji Xun suddenly remembered something. “I sent the thread’s creator a private message before, and he replied!”
“What?!” Shen Kui’s mind jolted.
Ji Xun pulled out a photo from his phone. “Here, this one. At first, I thought the creator was just trying to get attention, and I didn’t like him much, so I sent a bunch of messages to scold him. He replied with this picture. I looked it up online. It’s called an ouroboros…”
What Ji Xun said after that, Shen Kui couldn’t process at all.
She stared rigidly at the pattern on Ji Xun’s phone. A profound sense of absurdity engulfed her, leaving her unable to think for a moment.
She could never have imagined that the ouroboros in the picture was exactly the same as the tattoo on the boss’s arm!
Was this just a coincidence… or…
Suddenly, Lu Ting’s shattered face flashed before her eyes.
If…
If Lu Ting’s death really had something to do with this…
“Hey, hey! Are you listening?”
A hand waved twice in front of Shen Kui’s face. She snapped back to reality. Ji Xun looked at her with concern. “You okay? Staying so still is scary.”
“I’m fine. Where were you just now?” Shen Kui quickly pulled herself together. She still needed to confirm things about the boss. For now, she didn’t intend to let Ji Xun know.
“Oh, I was just saying… I’ve also looked up a lot of information online about this ouroboros. It’s pretty intense. There are all sorts of claims: immortality, infinite cycles, and so on. But the mainstream view generally interprets the ouroboros as representing an ‘endless universe’… roughly that meaning. There’s a bit of a theological concept in there.”
“An endless universe,” Shen Kui murmured.
“Yeah, so doesn’t that just make the whole thing even crazier? At first, I thought the thread’s creator was just messing with me. But now that things have come this far, I just realized—maybe this thing is trying to hint at something for us?” Ji Xun said, his voice growing unexpectedly excited. “Like time loops, crossing space, that kind of stuff.”
Shen Kui was baffled. “Weren’t you scared out of your mind a moment ago? How come you’re excited now?”
“You don’t get it. Being killed by ordinary people versus being killed by some mysterious force… for people like us, the meaning is totally different!” Ji Xun spoke with righteous nonsense. “In our otaku circles, if something like this actually happens, it’s the kind of brag you could tell your grandkids about.”
“Only problem is, by the time you have grandkids, we might already be dead,” Shen Kui said bluntly, dousing his excitement. “Whatever is behind this, based on the clues we have now, we’re still far from the truth.”
“That’s true,” Ji Xun said, deflating like a balloon, his face full of gloom as if the word “doomed” had been stamped on his forehead.
Shen Kui paused for a moment in thought, then said, “I think our top priority is to find a way to contact 412L. I have a plan…”
She briefly outlined her idea to Ji Xun. His eyes immediately lit up. “Awesome, sis! Leave this to me. I’ll handle it, no problem!”
“Let’s hope it all goes smoothly,” Shen Kui said, her thoughts less optimistic. After a moment, she added, “There’s one more thing. I’m planning to ask the museum if they can provide a list of the seven missing artifacts.”
“What’s the point of getting a list? Even if we can confirm my mom’s brooch was stolen from there, the two of us still couldn’t catch the thief.”
“Think about it,” Shen Kui said slowly. “If we can verify that the relics we received are among the seven missing items from the museum, then it’s highly likely that the remaining items belong to the other five survivors. We could use those leftover items to trace back information about the other survivors.”
“Even so, what clues could we really get? The brooch doesn’t have my mom’s name on it.”
“I’ve asked the museum staff. Every displayed artifact has a background description. Even if the information isn’t detailed, it can at least help us narrow the search.”
Ji Xun thought over the logic several times and sincerely admired her. “Wow, sis, coming up with a plan like this in such a short time is amazing.”
“Don’t rush to praise me yet,” Shen Kui said, her expression serious. “We still need you to take action. Using relics to trace people is a clumsy method. It takes a long time and might not even yield results. But right now, at least one shortcut is worth trying first.”
Ji Xun stared at her, completely bewildered.
Shen Kui smiled faintly. “Ask your dad.”
“Oh.” Ji Xun nodded instinctively, then realized: “Ah?! No way, no way. I swore I’d never contact him!”
Shen Kui narrowed her eyes, pretending to be fierce as she threatened him. “Think about your classmates.”
“I really can’t, I…”
“Think about your mother’s death.”
Ji Xun tried to resist. “But…”
Seeing him waver, Shen Kui quickly made her decision. “No buts. It’s settled. Now go and bring me good news!”
“I’ve got things to do, gotta go. We’ll talk on WeChat.” Shen Kui finished her coffee in one gulp, grabbed her bag, and dashed out. “I’m waiting for your good news!”
*** ***
After saying goodbye to Ji Xun, Shen Kui took a taxi home.
Although Tian Ke had repeatedly invited her to stay longer last night, Shen Kui felt that things were far from over. She didn’t feel secure, especially after what happened with Lu Ting last night. She was even more unwilling to let Tian Ke get caught up in her problems.
On the way home, Ji Xun, belatedly realizing he’d been played, angrily scolded her. “Now I get it. All that stuff you were saying just now—relics, lists, and everything—was just to confuse me, wasn’t it? Your real goal was to make me go find my dad!”
“You finally figured it out,” Shen Kui thought to herself, secretly amused, and replied with a cute cat emoji.
Back home, Shen Kui took a shower. After running around all day, the humid, stifling weather had left her sticky and uncomfortable.
After showering and changing into her loungewear, she felt refreshed, and her mood lightened considerably.
Ji Xun’s appearance had brought a new turning point and greatly eased the pressure Shen Kui had been under.
This was a good start, she told herself. With the first teammate on board, they could find a second, a third… until they uncovered the truth behind it all.
Perhaps the coffee she’d just drunk hadn’t kicked in yet, or maybe the exhaustion from staying up all night had suppressed its effect. Shen Kui had only planned to rest her eyes, but unknowingly, she fell asleep.
She woke in the middle of the night, shivering from the sudden drop in temperature. Lately, the weather has been unpredictable. The daytime heat still soared above forty degrees, yet at night the temperature could drop below twenty.
She pulled the blanket tightly around herself, shivering, trying to get a few more minutes of sleep.
The room was silent in the darkness.
Shen Kui turned left and right but couldn’t fall asleep. She finally gave up and opened her eyes, staring blankly at the ceiling.
Just waking up, her mind was still groggy. At first, Shen Kui didn’t even realize what she was seeing, simply staring at the ceiling in a daze.
After a while, as her consciousness gradually cleared and her brain started working, she belatedly realized: above and slightly ahead of her, inside the smoke detector, a faint red light was flickering!
Strange.
This thing had clearly been broken last week. So why was it suddenly lighting up now?
Shen Kui immediately thought back to the unusual tape on the door lock when she got home yesterday. Could someone have tampered with it then?
She quickly swung herself out of bed, turned on all the lights, and used two stools to make a makeshift ladder to climb up.
Carefully, she opened the smoke detector’s casing. And in the spot where the signal light should have been, she found a hidden pinhole camera!
“No wonder…” Shen Kui murmured.
No wonder someone had messed with the door yesterday, yet nothing in the house seemed out of place. It had been waiting here all along.
After the shocks of the past two days, Shen Kui had grown almost numb. She calmly removed the camera, restored the smoke detector to its original state, and then turned off the lights again. Following all the online guides for detecting hidden cameras, she meticulously checked the entire house from top to bottom. Only after repeatedly confirming that nothing else was amiss did she sit back on her bed.
Thinking over the past couple of days, if the leather jacket delivery could be considered neutral, the pinhole camera was clearly malicious.
If there was a camera in her home, could Ji Xun also…?
She remembered Ji Xun mentioning that the deliveries appeared at his home out of nowhere. If someone had the ability to place packages in his house without him knowing, surely installing a camera would be just as easy.
No, she had to warn Ji Xun.
Shen Kui picked up her phone, just about to send a message to Ji Xun. Suddenly, a thought jolted into her mind.
She realized a blind spot she had overlooked.
If someone could sneak into her home to install a pinhole camera, why not just do the same as with Ji Xun and leave the package directly at her house?
Why take the risk of it not being delivered properly, going through such a long detour, and sending it to the office instead?
Unless…
Unless the person could be certain that even if the package was left at the office, it would still end up in her hands.
Shen Kui’s mind involuntarily flashed again to Lu Ting’s shattered face.
At that moment, a sudden, violent, and urgent knock exploded at the door—like a thunderclap right beside her ear—shattering her thoughts!
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Sam Williams On TYMIMA Chapter 152