Before dawn, in a bedroom.
"Biaozi, quit sleeping. Time to get to work!" A bespectacled young man in his twenties, dressed in black, spoke to a short, stocky young man lying on the bed.
"Long, what time is it?"
"Almost three!"
The stocky young man immediately sprang out of bed.
They had both graduated from college that year. They were classmates, and they had barely started working before they found themselves unemployed.
After the cataclysm, transportation had ground to a halt, and they had no way to return to their hometown. They had no choice but to remain in Hedong City. The little cash they had left soon ran out, and they couldn't find work. Half a month ago, their landlord had come over and made a scene, telling them plainly that if they didn't pay the rent, he'd kick them out.
That was when the two of them began to consider taking a desperate gamble.
Their first job hadn't gone smoothly. They'd barely opened the bedroom door before they woke the homeowner.
Panicked and tense, they decided to go all the way and stabbed the entire family of three to death, including a little boy of seven or eight. They'd both trained in martial arts, and ordinary people stood no chance against them.
In their panic, they'd only managed to snatch a necklace from the young wife's chest before hastily fleeing the scene.
At first, they'd lived in constant fear, terrified the police would show up at their door. But then they realized the police hadn't traced the crime back to them at all.
Without electricity, there were no surveillance cameras, and even DNA testing was impossible. Besides, they'd made a point of wearing rubber gloves, leaving no fingerprints behind. With no eyewitnesses, the case was extremely difficult to