83 Shopping Mall

83 Shopping Mall.

It was a popular landmark mall in Shancheng's new district.

Many Shancheng residents chose 83 Shopping Mall as their first choice for a post-meal stroll or a day of shopping.

Even if it meant taking the subway for several stops.

The mention of 83 Shopping Mall by Zheng Wuyou seemed to connect everyone's thoughts.

Everyone's surprised gazes gathered on her.

Including Miao Laisheng next door.

"How did you know I'd been to 83 Shopping Mall?" Hu Yu looked stunned. She and her friends really had gone shopping there.

"I went too! I bought drinks there before going to the internet café."

Guo Mu's burly body shot upright, as if he had found the key to why they had been locked up here.

"I took hobby classes there..." Wansi lowered her head, cautiously glancing up at everyone. Her faint voice was still clear in the silent room.

"My girlfriend and I had a date there." Wen Dian blushed as he thought about it, replacing the words "at the hotel upstairs" with a more artistic phrasing.

"I haven't been there, but I was looking into materials related to 83 Shopping Mall."

Miao Laisheng had never expected that a case file related to a shopping mall would bring him into this place.

And by now, he had roughly guessed the connection between everyone.

Aside from the short woman, who knew nothing, only Sun Wu and Uncle Cai had yet to speak.

When Uncle Cai heard the words "83 Shopping Mall," the flesh on his face visibly twitched.

The light in his eyes dimmed in an instant.

He hesitated for a moment before speaking. "My wife... something happened to her at 83 Shopping Mall."

Those words struck Zheng Wuyou like thunder.

The woman whose accident she had witnessed with her own eyes was actually Uncle Cai's wife!

His wife was the woman who had suddenly collapsed in the supermarket on the mall's basement level...

"Ah! No wonder there were so many people gathered there when I went to buy drinks at the supermarket."

Guo Mu came to a sudden realization. He had never imagined that a small moment of curiosity would drag him into this.

"Uncle Cai, was your wife with a child?"

Zheng Wuyou cautiously put the question out there. Even though she knew the answer, she still hoped Uncle Cai would say no.

That would make her feel a little better.

The scene back then had been so horrific that even she, who often dealt with organs and corpses, could not help but shudder inwardly.

She did not dare imagine whether Uncle Cai would be able to withstand the blow if he saw the body.

Uncle Cai said nothing. He only nodded heavily.

Now it all made sense.

Everyone was more or less connected to the accident at 83 Shopping Mall.

And that accident could not be explained by common sense.

Uncle Cai's wife had been shopping by the shelves in the basement supermarket with her child.

Zheng Wuyou and her companions had been standing right beside her.

In a cheerful atmosphere, something discordant was bound to happen.

Uncle Cai's wife had raised her hand to reach for an item on a higher shelf when, without warning, she fell stiffly straight down. With a thud, she landed across the middle of the aisle, startling people on both sides of the shelf.

Everything had still been normal up to that point.

Zheng Wuyou and the others turned in confusion to look at the unfamiliar woman, initially assuming she was overworked or perhaps suffering from low blood sugar.

After Zheng Wuyou bent down and checked her basic indicators, she suddenly realized that the woman looked as though she were asleep.

The little girl beside the woman was clearly bewildered. Her tears burst forth like a breached dam as she began crying at the top of her lungs.

Perhaps because 83 Shopping Mall was so well located, the emergency responders arrived quickly.

With Zheng Wuyou and the others' help, they lifted the woman onto a stretcher.

Zheng Wuyou and the others breathed a sigh of relief. As they pushed their shopping cart again and prepared to check out and return to school—

An odd sound suddenly came from the stretcher behind them.

Against the supermarket's gentle music, it was especially jarring.

When they turned back, they saw the emergency responders set the stretcher down and begin checking the woman's vital signs again.

Most of the woman was obscured by the responders, with only her head left exposed.

Then, before their very eyes, those tightly shut eyes...

Exploded.

Zheng Wuyou felt a small piece of something splatter onto the hem of her clothes.

It was the first time she had ever encountered a scene like that, and she froze where she stood.

Then things that defied all reason began to happen.

If Uncle Cai's wife's eyeballs had exploded due to increased intraocular pressure, perhaps that could be explained, however reluctantly.

But...

As the emergency responders administered first aid, Uncle Cai's wife's abdomen rapidly swelled.

At a jaw-dropping speed, it expanded into the shape of a hemisphere.

That afternoon, everyone in the basement supermarket heard a deafening bang.

And Zheng Wuyou and the others stood in the middle of that aisle, where blood sprayed everywhere and organs flew through the air.

Her vision blurred. The body on the stretcher seemed to be suspended in midair, every segment of the spine distinctly visible.

A trace of blood's warmth still lingered on Zheng Wuyou's face.

That day became her most unforgettable twenty-first birthday.

When she came back to herself, Zheng Wuyou only remembered the police cordoning off the area and taking the innocent students who had been dragged into the incident to the station.

After they gave statements based on the surveillance footage, their counselor came to collect them and took them back to school.

She was the first witness.

Guo Mu, Sun Wu, Hu Yu, and Wen Dian were all secondary witnesses.

Uncle Cai was a family member of the victim.

Wansi had been attending her hobby class. She had probably run into the aftermath after class, so she counted as a secondary witness too.

What about Miao Laisheng?

Zheng Wuyou cast a questioning look at Miao Laisheng. Everyone present was connected in one way or another to the accident at 83 Shopping Mall, so what was his connection?

"Do hired hands usually take this long to eat?"

After the sun set, the temperature in the mountains plummeted.

The old man outside had been standing in the cold wind for who knew how long. After hearing the room fall silent for a while, he impatiently knocked on the door with the Smoking Pipe in his hand.

He then opened the door and saw the leftover Corn Porridge at the bottom of the large bowl.

Angrily, he kicked the string of firecrackers behind Uncle Cai's chair against the Black Soil wall.

"You people—cough, cough... What a waste of food. Leave once you're done eating. I provide meals, not lodging for everyone."

The old man's angry, aged voice echoed through the room. He picked up the bowl of remaining Corn Porridge, and the saliva from his cough sprayed into it.

Heartbroken, he slammed the door shut behind him.

Wen Dian suddenly realized that the old man had been coughing like that before bringing them the bowl of Corn Porridge.

Disgusted, he could not stop himself from dry-heaving.

"So we were brought here because his family wanted revenge?" After Guo Mu said that, he saw everyone staring at him in disbelief. He immediately realized he had clearly said the wrong thing and hurriedly slapped himself across the mouth. "Pah, what the hell am I saying? Uncle Cai, that's not what I meant."

"Uncle Cai probably couldn't create a mountain village halfway up a mountain in just a few hours." Hu Yu rolled her eyes at him speechlessly. This guy always brought up exactly what no one wanted to mention.

Even if he could do that, there was no reason to drag himself into it.

Why come to this godforsaken place just to torture himself?

"Honestly, I never expected that all of you had met my wife."

Zheng Wuyou could understand what Uncle Cai meant.

If he had been the mastermind behind all this, he would not be sitting here with everyone, piecing it all together.