The You in My Eyes

"Didn't you tell us to be careful of Gu Yunqing?" Ye Miaozhu said coldly. "He's dead."

Zhang Yangxu looked around. There was indeed no sign of Gu Yunqing. "Did he die by the river too?"

Ye Miaozhu said nothing and only lowered her head.

"I see." Zhang Yangxu turned to Ning Zhe. "Can you tell me what happened? The circumstances surrounding Gu Yunqing's death, and why you say their deaths had nothing directly to do with that river?"

Ning Zhe had no objection. "But first, I need to know what happened between you and that thing pretending to be Xie Sining after the call ended. How did you get away from it?"

He was still so wary... Zhang Yangxu knew himself well. He nodded slightly, then continued:

"After the warning call from Feng Yushu was cut off, I tried calling back several times, but none of them went through. While I was trying to call her back, Xie Sining did nothing. She just watched me silently without saying a word. At the time, I didn't know she was already dead, that she'd been replaced by the river. The only clue I had was Feng Yushu's cryptic warning: 'Be careful of Xie Sining.'"

"To be honest, Ning Zhe, I don't trust you. So I didn't fully believe Feng Yushu's warning. I even seriously considered whether you were just making a scene to drive a wedge between Sining and me. After all, you're all alone here."

"I pretended to be calm and continued toward the Ancestral Hall with Xie Sining, but my doubts hadn't gone away. I decided to test her."

At this, Zhang Yangxu paused. "On the way back to the Ancestral Hall, I deliberately brought up the New World Group's bid for the real estate project in Ancient Tablet Town. Our conversation touched on a lot of laws and regulations related to that field. Her responses... were strange."

Ning Zhe immediately became interested. "Now we're getting to the point. What was strange about them?"

The subject involved commercial secrets, and Zhang Yangxu seemed hesitant, but he spoke anyway:

"Sining is a highly experienced professional lawyer with a first-rate reputation among her peers. I know a thing or two about the law, but my knowledge is nowhere near hers. Before making decisions, I often consult her, and she can usually give me clear, prompt answers. Sining has always been reliable."

"But during this conversation, she didn't feel quite so 'reliable.'"

"Some of the professional legal questions I asked about real estate, she could answer—and she answered extremely quickly, with exactly the same answers I'd had in mind. Other questions, she couldn't say a word about and couldn't give a single clear answer to. But with Sining's ability, there was no way she couldn't answer questions of that level. It struck me as very strange."

"I kept asking her about other things, and as the conversation went on, I gradually worked out a pattern:"

"She could answer most of the questions when I already knew the answer. But the ones she couldn't answer were usually ambiguous questions whose answers I didn't know."

"In other words, she only knew what I already knew, and didn't know what I didn't."

Ning Zhe's brow furrowed as he listened to Zhang Yangxu's account. "You mean the thing impersonating Xie Sining could read minds, or maybe access memories?"

It had used the other person's memories to disguise itself as someone they knew?

"No, I don't think so."

Zhang Yangxu continued, "Besides professional legal questions, I also asked her more personal things that only I knew, like whether my bank card PINs were all the same, how much I sent to my mistress's card each month... things like that. She couldn't answer any of them."

If the impostor really could read minds, it wouldn't have been stumped by those questions.

"Maybe it was pretending?" Ye Miaozhu said. Lying wasn't hard. If the thing really could read minds, it might have been faking it.

Ning Zhe waved a hand. "Let Director Zhang finish. Give us the details."

Zhang Yangxu nodded slightly and described his conversation with Fake Xie Sining in detail.

Based on his account, Ning Zhe pieced together a clear pattern.

When Zhang Yangxu asked Fake Xie Sining a question, there were three possible scenarios:

1: The legal question wasn't very technical, and Zhang Yangxu knew the answer and believed Xie Sining knew it too.

In this situation, Xie Sining could give the correct answer quickly and accurately.

2: The question was personal, such as a bank card PIN. Zhang Yangxu knew the answer but believed Xie Sining shouldn't.

In this situation, Xie Sining would simply say she didn't know.

3: The legal question was highly technical. Zhang Yangxu didn't know the answer, but believed Xie Sining should.

"This situation was the strangest. At first, Xie Sining would confidently say she could answer. But after saying, 'I know,' she would freeze in place. She wouldn't blink or breathe, and her heart wouldn't beat... A rasping sound came from her throat, like a computer program hitting a bug and repeatedly reporting an error. She kept repeating the last sentence she'd said before getting stuck."

At this point, a strange expression crossed Zhang Yangxu's face. "It was almost like... a game NPC whose scripted scene had been triggered incorrectly."

"Or a rule stuck on a bug, unable to function properly."

Ning Zhe sighed. "He Family Village is a place that rigidly follows tradition. Everyone and everything we've encountered here... even this whole world, operates according to some established rules."

Rules were rigid and absolute. There was no room for ambiguity or pretense. One was one, and zero was zero. There was no half-zero, half-one. If something was forbidden, then it was forbidden. If you broke the Snake God's rules, then you broke them. There was no such thing as, "Burying half a person today doesn't count as a funeral."

You either knew something or you didn't. The rules might fall silent, but they wouldn't lie.

Zhang Yangxu nodded emphatically. "That thing wearing Sining's face... Every move it made was exactly like the Xie Sining I remembered, but the one thing it wasn't like was the real Xie Sining herself. It was the person in my memories, not the real her. Do you understand what I mean?"

The Ghost had replaced not "Xie Sining," but "the Xie Sining Zhang Yangxu believed in"... Was that it?

Ning Zhe furrowed his brow. He felt as though he'd grasped some crucial clue, but couldn't make out its exact shape.

"After all my tests and questions, once I was finally certain, deep down, that the 'Ghost' in front of me definitely wasn't Xie Sining, it vanished," Zhang Yangxu said. "Like a wisp of smoke drifting away, it disappeared completely. That's how I got away from it."

"Then why did you tell us to be careful of Gu Yunqing?" Ning Zhe asked again.

"Because after escaping from Xie Sining, I hurried back to the Ancestral Hall. There, I met someone."

Zhang Yangxu said, "I saw Gu Yunqing standing alone in front of the Lotus Platform. He reached out and turned the page of the Almanac hanging on the Snake God statue, flipping it to tomorrow."

Then he died.