Chapter 5

(Everyone is capable of lying.)

After hearing the first item, Gu Liang and Yang Ye immediately rushed to the scene of the crime, and listened to the remaining three points along the stretch of the corridor because they were racing against time. According to the broadcast’s instructions, they only had twenty minutes to investigate the scene of the crime. Once the twenty minutes were exhausted, the crime scene would be cordoned off. It also signified that they only had one chance to check the corpse and the surroundings for leads.

Lawyer Zhang’s room was the furthest from Boss Bai, and by the time Gu Liang and Yang Ye rushed to the scene, the rest were already there.

Brother Bai was seated on the ground by the door, ghastly white and shaking.

Maid Liu was standing at the corridor calmly, as if the sight before her was a common occurrence.

Son Bai still possessed some energy but he did not have the audacity to go into the room to take a look. Instead, he covered his eyes with his raised hands, and he would try to take a peek from between the cracks of his fingers intermittently.

Inside the room, Boss Bai was lying on his back beside his desk and a knife jutted out from his chest. The outflow of blood was not too much and the colour had darkened slightly.

Gu Liang could only push forth a premature hypothesis that he had died before he was even stabbed when he witnessed the scene.

Thinking that, Gu Liang walked into the room without any hesitation. He knelt in front of the deceased and swiped up some blood from his chest, noting that the blood had already gone cold.

Then, Gu Liang opened his shirt placket to examine him. Apart from the knife wound on his chest, there were no other injuries on his person.

He turned his attention towards the table. The table was in a neat and orderly manner. None of the various household items were askew. There was no sign of a fight having occurred.

All these observations matched up with Gu Liang’s previous hypothesis— when Boss Bai was stabbed, he did not put up the slightest resistance or struggle because he might already be dead.

If that was the case, it suggested that Boss Bai did not die from a knife wound.

And before he was knifed, he might have been poisoned to death.

Additionally, the lunch box that Maid Liu prepared in the kitchen this afternoon, which she had Son Bai deliver to Boss Bai’s room, was still situated on the desk, intact.

Gu Liang stood up and walked to the desk, opening the lunch box to inspect it. The biggest compartment was filled with rice while the other three smaller sections contained three different dishes, and whether it was the rice or the dishes, none of them showed the slightest indication that someone had touched it.

What this implied was – at least on the surface – Boss Bai did not eat any of the contents from the box.

It seemed like Boss Bai did not die from the poison Son Bai planted.

Internally, Gu Liang murmured, This is a little strange.

— Was his insulin the cause of his death?

As he harboured numerous doubts, Gu Liang routed to the back of the table to continue his search.

And he actually made a discovery.

There were fragments of broken earthenware on the ground behind the table, and the soup contents was similarly spilled across the floor, and even the leather upholstery and chair legs were not spared from soup stains.

It was not difficult to recognise it. These earthen jar fragments belonged to the same earthen jar Maid Liu used to cook the chicken soup.

Did it mean that the insulin-drugged chicken soup in the earthen jar had already been smashed to pieces?

How did it break?

Before the earthen jar shattered, did Boss Bai drink the soup?

While Gu Liang was deep in his contemplation, he suddenly heard a “kacha” noise.

When he lifted his head to take a look, Gu Liang realised that the chicken soup and broken earthen jar had been photographed by Yang Ye.

“Where did you get the camera from?” Gu Liang could not help but ask.

Yang Ye said: “It’s a detective privilege and a special tool which allows for the gathering of photographic evidence. It saves detectives from remembering the wrong details and letting that affect the case solving.”

“Oh.” Gu Liang replied, neither bland nor interested in tone. He stood up and looked at Maid Liu who was standing at the entrance. He asked: “Do you know why this earthen jar has been smashed into pieces?”

Maid Liu nodded and answered with much enthusiasm. “When I was delivering the chicken soup, I got into an argument with Boss Bai. He toppled the earthen jar, saying that he refused to drink the soup I made.”

Gu Liang grasped the crucial information immediately. “Did he drink the chicken soup before he toppled the earthen jar?”

“He did not drink it,” said Maid Liu.

Gu Liang issued a soft exhale before he addressed everyone present. “Mn, I can say how I committed the crime then. Similar to what Girlfriend Huang previously posited, my poison was certainly in the chicken soup. Since Boss Bai did not drink a single drop, the suspicions on me can be removed completely. I’m not the real murderer in this case. Isn’t that so, Girlfriend Huang?”

After saying that, he glanced at Yang Ye, who only gave him a smile that was not a smile. “That’s difficult to say. We still don’t know how he died. There’s a knife in his chest too.”

Gu Liang: “Ever since we left the dining room, I was in my room sleeping. There’s no possibility of me stabbing him with a knife. Weren’t you in my room?”

Yang Ye said: “There was an hour interval where I was in the state of feigned death. In that period of time, I can’t guarantee that you were in your room.”

In Gu Liang’s honest opinion, the expression Yang Ye displayed on his face while he was saying those words was like an open target, itching for a punch.

He glared at Yang Ye coldly, no longer speaking. Rather, he focused on inspecting Boss Bai’s room instead.

Despite searching everything once, he did not find anything that was of value to him.

When the allotted twenty minutes for crime scene inspection concluded, the system made a broadcast requesting for everyone to leave the scene and check the other rooms.

Gu Liang went to Maid Liu’s room first.

The maid’s room was rather minimalistic and there were not a lot of objects.

The only brightly coloured feature was the photo on the bedside table, and its bright colours were attributed to the red pen markings.

— It was a couple photograph featuring a woman and Boss Bai, and Boss Bai’s visage was crossed out with a red pen.

Sauntering forward, Gu Liang lifted the photograph and saw the words scribbled on the back of the frame: “You killed my older sister! Just you wait, I will take revenge for my older sister!”

This piece of clue presented Maid Liu’s motive for killing in an oversimplified and crude way— Maid Liu wanted revenge for the harms that Boss Bai dealt to her older sister.

Silent, Gu Liang stared at the photograph for a long moment before he took the photo frame apart.

In doing so, he managed to find that the photo frame was hiding a small paper sachet.

And when he unfolded the paper wrapping, Gu Liang spotted a single sentence: “The poison is called ‘I am not the cinnabar mole in your heart’, it causes immediate death upon consumption, and a mole will appeared between the deceased’s eyebrow – From ‘Hello Poison Speciality Store’.”

Gu Liang: “……”

— The system’s naming sense was truly peculiar and elegant.

At this moment, Maid Liu appeared at his door: “What have you found?”

“I found the clues for the cinnabar mole poison. This was what you gave the deceased?”

Gu Liang raised the paper sachet and looked at Maid Liu: “In all honesty, it’s completely safe for you to admit it. There was no cinnabar mole between Boss Bai’s eyebrows; his death was not related to the cinnabar mole poison. Your suspicions can be removed as well.”

Staring at him, Maid Liu fessed up. “I used the poison twice. The first instance was when I poisoned the chicken soup after you left the kitchen.”

That earthen jar of chicken soup had the addition of insulin, the instant death “I am not the cinnabar mole in your heart”, and perhaps even Brother Bai’s feigned death medicine.

Tch, that jar of chicken soup was genuinely too poisonous.

Maid Liu narrated: “Afterwards, I brought the soup to Boss Bai and I couldn’t resist asking after my older sister, and I went on to ridicule him a few times. His anger peaked, he toppled the soup and even chased me out, saying he would fire me.”

Gu Liang knew that Maid Liu was reading out her script contents.

The real truth of the matter could be that the bald man acting as Boss Bai was already white in the face and unable to speak by then, and the prescribed lines in his script were said by the men in black instead. As for the chicken soup, the men in black could have helped him topple it.

Maid Liu continued to speak: “Since the chicken soup was wasted, I could only try to poison him again. Coincidentally, Boss Bai didn’t come out to eat his lunch, so I prepared an individual portion for him, and dashed the rice and dishes with the ‘I am not the cinnabar mole in your heart’ poison again, which makes for the second instance where I poisoned him. Later, I told Son Bai to help deliver the lunch box to him. I was thinking, if Boss Bai died from the poison, I could push the blame to Son Bai because I would be giving Son Bai a chance to use his poison. But as reality would prove it, he did not eat the food.”

This was a scripted game of deductive reasoning; all assumptions had to be grounded in the plot and character settings, and the discovered clues served as a foundation.

As Gu Liang was pondering, he detected something keenly. He scrutinised Maid Liu, “ Your order of thinking is very clear. Compared to the likes of the black-clothed NPCs whose faces are impossible to discern, your type of NPC is dissimilar from them. Where did you come from? What exactly is this game?”

“I can only divulge the fact that I was once a player like you. As for the others… apologies, I’m not allowed to say anything. Focus your attention on the game itself instead.”

Maid Liu rose to her feet and left, “I’m going to the other rooms to search for clues.”

After another third of an hour, Gu Liang had roughly flipped through the entirety of the second floor of the villa once.

Since he was done with the individual rooms on the second floor, he went to the first floor.

His first destination was the kitchen, and he realised that one knife was missing from the rack.

Incidentally, he encountered Maid Liu again. When Gu Liang questioned her about the knife, Maid Liu conveyed that the knife missing from the kitchen was the same one sticking out of Boss Bai’s chest. The knife had a notch because she accidentally dropped it, which was why she recognised it.

With the given information, it was not difficult to glean the stabber’s action timeline.

Apart from the detective who had the privilege of free movement in the afternoon, the other players had to obey the general plot development and return to their rooms to sleep, except one person— he had detoured to the kitchen to retrieve a knife before he went back upstairs, entered Boss Bai’s bedroom and stabbed him.

* * *

The last place Gu Liang had to check was the balcony.

Just as he stepped in with his front foot, Yang Ye followed, close on his heels.

The balcony was not small in size but because there were too many flowers, the amount of foot space was reduced greatly.

And with Yang Ye joining him, it was inevitable that the balcony would become a tighter squeeze in an instant.

Gu Liang glanced at him. “Why don’t I go out and let you have the floor?”

T/N: I like how the ML and MC are going, “Since this game isn’t hard enough, I’ll make your life harder”. :’DD