After returning to the Weird Investigation Bureau, Ning Xu first stopped by the restroom. She slipped out of her gray jacket and black jeans, changing back into the standard all-black uniform of an investigator.
She walked into the archives, sat down at her designated workstation, and entered the name "Qi Si" into a list categorized as "Dangerous, but Recruitment Possible."
After browsing through the newly added entries in the database for a while, she got up and headed toward the main office.
She had just rounded a corner when a clamor from the direction of the main entrance reached her ears, still a good distance away.
Her interest piqued, Ning Xu changed her course and walked toward the source of the commotion.
A dozen or so investigators had formed a circle. Most were just watching the spectacle, but two of them were holding a long banner, about to hang it from the ceiling.
Ning Xu drew closer and glanced at the banner. The words "Welcome Fu Jue from Headquarters for Guidance and Inspection" were written across it, and she couldn't help but smile.
As the top-ranked player in the Weird Game and the captain of the Weird Investigation Bureau's headquarters action team, Fu Jue spent his entire year traveling to branch offices in various administrative districts. Whether he was handling supernatural incidents or conducting inspections, it was all part of his routine.
Normally, his inspection of the Jiang City branch was scheduled for June. For some reason, this year, he was two months early.
The banner was finally hung, albeit crookedly, its edges fluttering slightly as it dangled from the ceiling.
A few investigators began to mutter amongst themselves.
"He could've come any time, but he shows up now. He probably saw we rooted out the Sila Guild's influence and made some real progress. Now he's here to take the credit."
"That Fu Jue... always putting on that selfless, 'for the good of all mankind' act. Doesn't he ever get tired of it?"
"Everyone at headquarters is rotten to the core. Remember when that 'Fate Dice' they had in containment went missing? I bet it was an inside job..."
Ning Xu heard it all but acted as if she'd heard nothing. With an indifferent smile, she turned and disappeared into the depths of the corridor.
...
After parting ways with Jin Yusheng, Qi Si returned home, promptly swapped his phone's SIM card for a new one, and dragged a suitcase out of his closet. He began packing some daily necessities, planning to move back to his old family home in the next day or two.
The blue clothes Jin Yusheng had worn during their meeting were a prearranged signal. It meant: *someone is being watched by officials, but the situation isn't urgent. They don't plan to act immediately.*
Qi Si had always held a passive attitude toward any anti-Federation movements and lacked the fervent conviction of organizations like the Balance Church. Since they hadn't come knocking on his door yet, he saw no reason to stay put and wait for the situation to escalate into a direct confrontation.
Of course, he wasn't naive enough to believe that simply moving would allow him to evade the surveillance of a government agency. After all, security cameras were ubiquitous these days; no matter how careful one was, leaving behind a trace was inevitable.
What Qi Si wanted was to negotiate on his own turf, in a place where he could completely guarantee his personal safety. If he could secure some benefits, all the better—he wasn't entirely opposed to some form of cooperation with the Kyushu Guild. But if talks broke down, well, a seamless process of murder, dismemberment, and feeding the evidence to pigs wasn't too much trouble either.
To him, the government's presence was like the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head, destined to fall one day.
Rather than waiting for the conflict to fester and become irreconcilable, it was better to face it early, deal with whatever they threw at him, and carve out some space to survive.
As for what to do about Jin Yusheng, who was now essentially a hostage in the Federation's hands... he probably wouldn't die anytime soon. For the rest, he would just have to rely on his consistently good luck.
While cooking himself a bowl of instant noodles, Qi Si made the decision to sacrifice a pawn to save the king, feeling no psychological burden whatsoever.
He finished his dinner quickly and went into his bedroom. From a drawer, he pulled out the tin foil paper he had bought not long ago. Sitting at his desk, his fingers became a blur as he began folding paper ingots.
It took less than two hours to fold all the paper. Qi Si then crossed the living room to the balcony, retrieved an iron bucket from a corner, and returned to the bedroom. He swept all the neatly stacked paper ingots from his desk into the bucket.
This time, he showed no sign of finding it troublesome. With brisk efficiency, he carried the bucket back into the living room, placing it at the entrance of the master bedroom. Then, he rummaged under the coffee table for incense, candles, and a lighter, arranging them on the table in preparation.
Only after all this was done did it belatedly occur to him that today was only April 1st. The Qingming Festival was still three days away.
It was still early, not yet eight o'clock. Qi Si tilted his head in thought for a moment, then pulled a medical kit from a cabinet beneath his bookshelf before pushing open the master bedroom door.
The room, unopened for a long time, was surprisingly free of dust. Only the faint, musty odor of decaying wood from the old furniture wafted out, relentlessly cultivating an atmosphere of death.
Carrying the medical kit, Qi Si walked to the bedside. He took out an alcohol-soaked cotton swab and began to meticulously wipe down the skeleton specimen lying on the bed. He moved slowly and gently, caressing every edge and corner with the same reverence one might show a lover.
Two human skeletons lay side-by-side. Because they had been properly treated, they were quite light; the mattress beneath them showed no sign of indentation.
Viewed from a distance, the perfectly smooth bedsheets combined with the stark white skeletons looked uncannily like a fantastical image rendered on a computer, stripped of all reality and approaching a kind of false illusion.
With a light but firm touch, Qi Si traced the crevices of the bones through the alcohol swab. His sensitive fingertips, honed by years of preparing specimens, could feel the texture underneath. This connection allowed him to see past the illusion and know that this scene was, in fact, one of absolute reality.
By the time he finished cleaning both skeletons, the night had deepened. The master bedroom window faced away from the street, offering a view of nothing but the dark, heavy sky and the scattered lights of a few distant homes. Qi Si tiptoed out of the room and gently closed the door behind him.
The exhaustion he had been suppressing rose up, a dense and suffocating wave. He put the medical kit away, collapsed onto his bed, and fell into a deep sleep.
Outside, a heavy rain began to fall.
...
March 12th, six years ago. A night of pouring rain.
Qi Si was curled up in the spare bedroom reading a book when his parents knocked on the door.
Their faces were etched with a clear sadness and worry. They spoke to him in fragments, offering countless words of caution as they bid him a solemn farewell.
At the time, Qi Si was engrossed in a novel titled *Murder on a Rainy Night*. He silently watched them go downstairs, walk out the door, and drive away in their car.
The rain fell harder and harder, crashing down from the high heavens and splashing into a misty spray on the pavement below.
Still just a teenager, Qi Si leaned against the window, gazing at the puddles covering the ground. In his mind, he sketched out the image of a rainy-night murderer, waiting with feverish anticipation for his parents to return so he could share the bloody tale with them.
But that night, his parents never came back. All he got was a phone call from the police.
A large truck, they said, had overturned on an overpass, crushing a small car beneath it. The couple killed inside the mangled vehicle were his parents.
The moment he heard the news, Qi Si felt little grief. When he arrived at the scene and saw the scattered flesh and blood, he felt the same familiar excitement he always did at the sight of gore. His face flushed and his breathing grew ragged.
In his brief, sixteen-year-old worldview, death wasn't the end of everything. People had souls; after they died, they could still be ghosts...
He had always gotten along well with ghosts and monsters, he thought. His parents were just going to be with him in a different form.
That night, ignoring the protests of the police and paramedics, Qi Si took his parents' bodies directly home.
He laid the two corpses flat in the center of the living room, patiently wiping away the bloodstains with a towel, piecing the displaced skin and flesh back to where they were supposed to be.
Humming a tuneless melody, he cleaned the house. Seeing how late it had gotten, he made three bowls of instant noodles.
Then he remembered that his parents were dead, that they were ghosts now. Even if they needed to eat, they would consume incense. So he went downstairs and bought a large bundle of incense and candles, lighting them one by one with a lighter.
With all preparations complete, Qi Si breathed in the clean, sacred fragrance of the offerings that filled the house. He sat quietly beside the bodies, arranging the candles into various shapes—a triangle, a square, a heart...
He waited and waited and waited, bored, from late night until dawn, and then until the next deep night. But his parents' souls never appeared.
Qi Si stared blankly at the bodies, which had begun to decompose. He clumsily tried to stanch the corpse fluid seeping from their ruptured skin. For the first time in his young life, he felt lost.
Fortunately, he had always possessed a coolness of mind far beyond his years, and he wasn't one to give up easily.
He forged income statements to pass himself off as a legal adult, delaying the intervention of relatives. Simultaneously, he tried every method he could find—from books, from rumors—to locate his parents' ghosts.
To better preserve the bodies, he taught himself specimen preparation using information he found online. He clumsily scraped the rotting flesh from the corpses, wiped the bones clean with alcohol, and reassembled them into the form of human skeletons using iron nails.
It was the first time Qi Si had ever made a human specimen. During the process of handling the bodies, his mind settled into an unprecedented sense of peace. It was as if he had found his life's pursuit, his true calling, the path his future would take.
If he couldn't have their ghosts with him, keeping their bodies as a memento seemed like a decent alternative.
Sixteen-year-old Qi Si smiled.
He changed into clean clothes and, for the first time in days, went downstairs and outside. He looked at the empty streets and the sparse crowds but couldn't find any of the familiar figures he was used to seeing—the disemboweled, the hanged, the ones with severed limbs...
Qi Si suddenly realized that there were no more ghosts in the world. Everyone coming and going was just a person.
More accurately, for some unknown reason, he had suddenly lost the ability to see ghosts. He had become an ordinary person.
And so he thought, *Ah, so my parents are still here with me. I just can't see them anymore...*