Analysis

Fan Li seemed to have thought of something. His expression turned strange for a moment, then he picked up the sneakers and headed for the door.

He walked along the hallway as if he were going downstairs.

Everyone followed. Agile Fatty and Jiang Cheng were at the back of the group, and when they passed the boy's bedroom, Jiang Cheng pulled Agile Fatty inside.

"What are you doing?" Agile Fatty asked in alarm.

"Checking a few things."

"Why are you dragging me along to check them?"

Jiang Cheng opened the bedroom drawers one by one. Before long, he crouched beside the bed and fished out a pair of slippers from underneath it. Then he picked them up, looked at Agile Fatty, and replied calmly, "Because I'm scared."

Agile Fatty: "."

A while later, Jiang Cheng and Agile Fatty arrived in the living room downstairs. They saw Sister Nuan and the others gathered around the shoe cabinet. Every shoe had been taken out and arranged neatly on the floor.

Hearing Jiang Cheng come downstairs, Fan Li set down a pair of women's casual shoes he was holding. Agile Fatty saw that all three of them looked grim.

Just as Chen Xiaomeng opened her mouth to speak, Jiang Cheng said, "Did you find that there weren't just two boys in this villa, but two girls as well?"

Fan Li's eyes flickered. He looked as though he was about to say something, but held back. After a moment, he asked in a low voice, "What exactly do you do?"

"Enough with the irrelevant questions. Tell me what you found first." Jiang Cheng set down what he was holding and looked at him calmly.

Fan Li picked up two pairs of shoes and showed them to Jiang Cheng. They were both women's casual shoes, and the sizes were identical. Based on what they had determined earlier, they belonged to the same girl.

With a grim expression, Fan Li turned both pairs over to reveal their soles. "The sole of the pair on the left is badly worn on the outside, while the wear on the pair on the right is concentrated on the inside."

He looked up and met Jiang Cheng's eyes. "Sole wear is related to the way a person walks. Once someone develops a habit like this, it's almost impossible to correct. So these shoes belonged to two different people. There are two girls in this villa."

"But why is there only one girl's bedroom on the second floor?" Chen Xiaomeng asked. "And why is there only a single bed in it?"

Jiang Cheng shook his head. "Both of the small bedrooms upstairs belong to girls, so each of them has a single bed."

"What do you mean?"

"I found this in the bedroom covered in military posters." Jiang Cheng took out the slippers he'd found under the bed. "They're on the small side. You can compare them with the casual shoes."

There was no need to compare them, really, but Fan Li still took the slippers and placed them beside the casual shoes. Now everyone could see that their owner was probably a woman.

"Isn't it a bit of a stretch to say a girl lived in that room based on one pair of slippers? Maybe a girl left them in the boy's bedroom."

"And judging by the way that bedroom is decorated, it looks like a boy's room."

"But men don't use something like this in their bedrooms." Jiang Cheng reached into his pocket, pulled out a packet, and handed it to Chen Xiaomeng, who had raised the question.

She took it and raised her eyebrows. It was an opened packet of sanitary pads.

Sister Nuan looked at Jiang Cheng. "So both bedrooms upstairs belonged to girls, and one of them had a more masculine personality and habits."

Jiang Cheng nodded. "That's right."

Chen Xiaomeng seemed to have just come to her senses. She looked confused. "Then where were the other two boys living? We only found three bedrooms in this villa."

One was the master bedroom, where the man and woman of the house lived.

Based on their deductions, the other two small bedrooms belonged to the two girls in the villa.

"Could they have been on the third floor?" Agile Fatty said quietly. "We haven't been up there yet."

Before he could finish, Sister Nuan shook her head. "I doubt it. I looked around when we arrived. Only the first and second floors have windows. The third floor is a windowless room."

Under normal circumstances, no one would put a bedroom in a windowless room.

Chen Xiaomeng seemed to realize something, and her expression grew tense. "So... the two boys weren't members of this family. They were outsiders!"

Fan Li shot her a cold glance. "Intruders, you mean."

"And they weren't boys, either. They were two grown men," Jiang Cheng added.

At that, Chen Xiaomeng shuddered violently.

Indeed, now that the theory that the two were the man and woman's children had been disproven, the two pairs of shoes they'd left behind told a different story. One was close to Jiang Cheng's size, and the other was even larger than Fan Li's.

Jiang Cheng looked at the two pairs of sneakers laid out on the floor. "The first time I saw them, I thought something was off. They're cheap and worn out, and they clearly don't match the other shoes in the cabinet. The people who live in this villa don't seem like the kind to settle for something like that."

Silence fell over the living room. Their previous theory had been overturned, and the story had shifted from a fairly straightforward family tragedy to an invasion by criminals.

After a while, Agile Fatty glanced around and spoke quietly. "So two men broke into this villa, took out the man and woman of the house, then held their two daughters captive before killing them."

"Remember the water stains left behind after the female ghost passed? And the woman's hair in the bathtub in the first-floor bathroom?" Sister Nuan said with a grim expression. "The ghost was probably drowned in that bathtub."

"As for Xie Yu, after he was scared to death, he was dragged away and beaten. That was the female ghost's revenge. It also explains why she put the intruder's shoes on him."

"She imagined that he was the person who had abused her."

By the time they finished analyzing the truth behind the case, the sky had grown light. This time, no one told Agile Fatty to make breakfast. They simply ate some bread rolls and other snacks to tide themselves over.

It wasn't that they felt sorry for this agile fatty. They were running out of time.

Jiang Cheng had already noticed that the days in this world were getting shorter and shorter, while the nights were growing longer.

By his estimate, after two more nights at most, daylight would vanish from this world completely.

"What'll happen after the daylight disappears?" Agile Fatty asked, his eyes as wide as light bulbs. His throat bobbed heavily.

Jiang Cheng turned around and patted Agile Fatty on the shoulder, reassuring him. "Don't worry."

Some color returned to Agile Fatty's pale cheeks.

Jiang Cheng continued, "Worst case, the ghosts will come out and kill people without restraint."

Agile Fatty: "???"

The group walked along the second-floor hallway. They planned to use this relatively safe stretch of daylight to search the villa a second time.