Chapter Twenty-Three

After making the call to the police, Liu Mumu thought about the ominous reading she had drawn and couldn't shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen.

When she usually drew an excellent fortune, there was a fifty percent chance she'd gotten it wrong. When she drew the worst possible fortune, there was a ninety-nine percent chance it would come true.

An hour later, her ominous premonition came true.

She was taken from her home to the police station in a patrol car.

The officers didn't look particularly fierce, and none of them laid a hand on her. But they were all tall and burly, and they flanked her as they escorted her out, as if she might try to run away at any moment.

Even if she did run, she couldn't outrun them.

Liu Mumu was completely baffled. What kind of unlucky person got hauled in twice in one week, just like her?

Last time, she'd happened to stumble upon Zhan Hongye's dead body. What was it this time?

When she arrived at the station, they took her straight to an interrogation room. Once again, Fang Chuan was the one questioning her.

Captain Fang seemed to have completely forgotten their past fortune-telling acquaintance. His stern face looked like a door god pasted up for the New Year: square and fearsome.

"As far as we know, you and Zhan Ni were very close." Fang Chuan glanced at her as he asked.

"I don't think we were particularly close," Liu Mumu replied cautiously. In fact, from now on, she would definitely keep her distance from Zhan Ni.

"Is that so? Your chat history says otherwise." Fang Chuan flipped through the file in front of him. "We found your old messages on Zhan Ni's phone. They mention money changing hands, as well as offerings and rituals. Do you have anything to say about that?"

Liu Mumu frowned. "If you'd read the whole conversation, you'd know she said she was having some trouble and that something was wrong with her body. She came to me for help. We were high school classmates, of course I'd help her. I read her fortune and charged her ten thousand yuan. That's all."

But Fang Chuan wasn't so easily convinced. His voice turned cold. "You didn't just read her fortune. You also taught her how to use that vase to hurt people, didn't you?"

"I didn't!" Liu Mumu's eyes widened. That accusation was outrageous!

Fang Chuan wasn't moved. He continued, "An hour ago, you called the police and said a friend of yours named Zhan Ni was trying to jump off a building. Her last phone call before she tried to kill herself was to you. What did you talk about? Why did she call you?"

Liu Mumu didn't particularly want to answer him, but she endured it for the sake of clearing her name.

"I don't know why she called me. She said she hated me and blamed me for refusing to read her fortune again. She said she'd inherit her father's and brother's estate and become very rich. I thought something was wrong with her, that something might have happened, so I went along with what she was saying and talked about her future and her fate, trying to stall for time until someone could come help."

"That's all?" Fang Chuan didn't seem to believe her.

"That's all. And I know Zhan Ni was rescued. If you don't believe me, you can ask her."

Liu Mumu hadn't expected her troubles to come from messages the two of them had exchanged. There was nothing unusual about them.

She was curious: what exactly were they investigating?

Fang Chuan closed the file and said, "Zhan Ni hit the back of her head when she was rescued. She's still unconscious."

Liu Mumu tried to give an example to prove just how innocent she was. "I called the police after hanging up with her. If I were a bad person, why would I call the police?"

"Oh, perhaps that was how you planned to clear your name." Fang Chuan's expression didn't change.

"I'd never use such a stupid way to clear my name!" Who did he think she was?

"Who knows?" Fang Chuan could be incredibly irritating sometimes.

"Anyway, I had nothing to do with this." Liu Mumu slapped the table, then quickly pulled her hand back. It hurt a little.

"I hope that's true. But until Zhan Ni wakes up, I'm afraid you'll have to stay here and cooperate with the investigation."

"You're being completely unreasonable!" Liu Mumu was about to explode at his absurdity. "I want to see your consultant. I don't want to talk to you, you stupid square-faced human!"

Did she mean him by "square-faced human"?

Fang Chuan felt his face. He thought his features were very manly. She clearly had no taste.

He shrugged, gathered his papers, and left.

He really wasn't deliberately targeting Liu Mumu. This was just standard procedure, though the girl probably wouldn't see it that way.

There were too many suspicious things about Zhan Ni's suicide. Whatever the reason for the murders, the fact that the siblings had turned on each other was already shocking enough. Why had she chosen to kill herself after acting against him?

The news that Zhan Huitian was still alive remained under wraps. The time she chose to kill herself was only a few minutes apart from when she had cursed her brother to death.

Zhan Ni didn't know that their special department existed. If she and her brother had been bitter enemies, then after killing him by such a covert method, she had no reason to worry about being traced. There was no need for her to kill herself.

Her phone records showed that Liu Mumu was the person she contacted most often. It wasn't surprising they'd focused on her.

Fang Chuan left the interrogation room and said to Yan Xiu, who was waiting outside, "I don't think she's the one pulling the strings. The deeper we dig into the Zhan family case, the murkier it gets.

"Unfortunately, neither sibling is conscious, so we probably won't get any leads out of them for a while. Liu Mumu might know some details we don't. Why don't you try sounding her out?"

Yan Xiu glanced toward the interrogation room, where Liu Mumu was curled up in her chair. "Why do you think she'd tell me?"

Fang Chuan gave him a thumbs-up. "You are, after all, the future boyfriend she's got her heart set on. Have some confidence."

Yan Xiu looked at Fang Chuan, his handsome face expressionless.

Fang Chuan grinned, feeling not the slightest bit guilty about using his colleague's looks to get information. "I'll look forward to hearing good news."

After Liu Mumu waited a while, the interrogation-room door opened and Yan Xiu came in to take over.

He was wearing a dark blue suit, with no tie and the top two buttons of his shirt undone. Unfortunately, Liu Mumu wasn't in the mood to admire him.

The camera in the interrogation room had been switched off. Yan Xiu sat down across from Liu Mumu with easy elegance. The girl looked like a puffed-up pufferfish, ready to swell with anger any moment.

After collecting herself, Liu Mumu said, sounding especially aggrieved, "I didn't do it."

Yan Xiu nodded. "I believe you. But we have to follow procedure. Based on the evidence we have, you're very suspicious."

"What's suspicious about me?" she protested.

Yan Xiu looked her over and said, "Everything."

So that earlier claim that he believed her had just been a lie, a heartless man!

"...Who exactly are you looking for?" Silence wouldn't solve anything, so Liu Mumu spoke up.

"The person who gave Zhan Hongye a cursed artifact, or the person who helped Zhan Huitian kill Zhan Hongye. It could also be the person who lured Zhan Ni into killing Zhan Huitian. We don't know how many people are involved."

Liu Mumu gaped, unsure which part of that she should be most shocked by.

"So when Zhan Ni called me just now, she really had killed her brother? With that vase?"

"Yes."

"I didn't teach her. I absolutely never told her how to use the vase. But..." Liu Mumu hesitated. "I did tell her not to give other people her birth date and time so carelessly. Could she have guessed how to use the vase herself?"

"Possibly."

"But why would she kill herself afterward?" Liu Mumu rarely got such accurate readings. Maybe her latent potential had been awakened when she sensed that something was wrong with Zhan Ni. The first thing she saw was Zhan Ni standing on a rooftop.

It had looked as though she was about to jump.

"Could someone have controlled her?" Liu Mumu didn't wait for Yan Xiu to answer and started speculating on her own. "She realized she'd been manipulated into killing someone and couldn't handle the shock, so she wanted to kill herself? That doesn't quite add up."

The next moment, Liu Mumu rejected her own theory. "When she called me, she seemed fairly calm. She didn't sound like she regretted killing anyone. She'd already planned to kill herself then."

"You think someone was controlling her?" Yan Xiu listened intently. They hadn't considered that possibility.

But as soon as Liu Mumu brought it up, he thought of Zhan Hongye's death. Before he died, he had walked into the Binjiang Building on his own, which also suggested he might have been controlled.

"Probably..." Liu Mumu said hesitantly. "Although I don't really want to speak ill of her, from the time I read her fortune to the moment she saw with her own eyes that her father wanted to use her as an offering, I clearly told her how to solve the problem: smash the vase and put an end to it once and for all."

"Good idea. Who taught you that?" Yan Xiu interrupted, intrigued.

The girl knew quite a lot. Cursed artifacts were uncommon, and no one had used them in recent years. They were things from decades ago.

Liu Mumu rolled her eyes. "I'm not telling you."

Yan Xiu smiled and returned to the topic. "She didn't agree to destroy the vase?"

"That's right. Then Zhan Hongye suddenly died, and the person threatening her was gone, so I stopped paying attention to the matter. But I don't think she wanted Zhan Hongye to have a bad opinion of her, even though he'd wanted to hurt her."

"She wanted the comfortable life Zhan Hongye gave her, so she was willing to risk her own safety to stay with the Zhan family. Someone that greedy probably isn't all that fragile." Yan Xiu got straight to the point.

"Maybe. Then, at Zhan Hongye's funeral, we heard a lawyer telling someone that Zhan Hongye had asked about changing his will.

"You know he left his entire estate to his son, right? Zhan Ni didn't get anything. Hearing that must have hit her hard."

"The inheritance..."

Yan Xiu nodded. "Losing out on a huge inheritance is a good motive for murder. The remaining question is, Zhan Huitian used the vase to curse Zhan Hongye to death, so how did the vase end up in Zhan Ni's hands? Did she ever tell you?"

Liu Mumu shook her head. "No. Maybe she stole it? Have you considered that when the vase was in Zhan Huitian's hands, he might have wanted to use Zhan Ni as an offering too? Maybe she found out, so she decided to kill her brother first?"

Liu Mumu didn't want to think Zhan Ni was that deranged, but with the lure of the inheritance added to the mix, it was hard to say what she might do. And if Zhan Huitian had killed his own father, perhaps he wouldn't have spared Zhan Ni either.

"The truth is, Zhan Huitian didn't sacrifice her. Zhan Ni sacrificed herself," Yan Xiu said. "When we found her, she had wounds on her hands and signs of having performed a sacrifice on her body. She had made a second offering using the cursed artifact.

"She followed every step correctly: first the offering, then the murder. If you didn't tell her, who did?"

After Yan Xiu finished speaking, they both fell silent.

They had both noticed that some parts of Zhan Ni's actions didn't make sense.

If they added another person to the picture—someone who told Zhan Ni things she shouldn't have known, or even did something to her—then her choice to kill herself after cursing Zhan Huitian to death seemed to make sense.

And when she contacted Liu Mumu before trying to kill herself, it might simply have been an instinctive attempt to save herself.

The police suspected that person was Liu Mumu, but Liu Mumu was certain it wasn't her.

If it wasn't her, there had to be someone else.

"Do you have any suspects?" she asked.

Yan Xiu looked at her.

"Other than me."

"We do. Dozens of them. We're still eliminating them one by one." Yan Xiu sounded a little helpless.

Even before this, they had suspected there was a sizeable organization behind Zhan Hongye. At first, it might have worked with him, but recently it had chosen a new partner, Zhan Huitian, and abandoned Zhan Hongye.

But after Zhan Huitian was cursed and Zhan Ni attempted suicide, things became much more complicated.

Clearly, for some reason, the people behind it wanted to end the partnership and wipe out the entire Zhan family.

Zhan Hongye had far too many social connections. After excluding ordinary people, dozens remained, all masters he had once been on good terms with.

Even after removing the frauds, there were still more than twenty.

More than twenty people—and that didn't even count those who'd recently had financial dealings with him or those he'd personally visited in the past few days. Any one of them could be suspicious.

The phone that was most likely to contain secrets—Zhan Hongye's—had yet to be found. There was nothing unusual on Zhan Huitian's phone, while Zhan Ni's contacts happened to include Liu Mumu, and their messages touched on the case.

Liu Mumu's round, almond-shaped eyes gleamed as she suddenly asked Yan Xiu, "If you find the real culprit, will you let me go?"

"Of course."

"If I cooperate with the police and give you an important lead, do I get a reward?"

Yan Xiu raised an eyebrow. "That can be arranged."

"And that square-faced guy has to apologize to me for a whole day." She held up one finger.

"No problem." Yan Xiu's lips curved into a handsome smile. Once the case was solved, Fang Chuan wouldn't mind saying "I'm sorry" all day.

At last, Liu Mumu turned her bright, shining eyes toward him. "And we have to add each other as friends."

Yan Xiu fell silent for a moment. She really was persistent.

"Fine," he replied, sounding a little helpless.

"Go outside and leave me alone for a while. Come back in five minutes."

Yan Xiu didn't refuse. He got up and left.

Five minutes later, the door opened. Liu Mumu said to the two people outside, "Ning Yuan is the person you're looking for. He's at the high-speed rail station right now and plans to leave Qingcheng at twelve."

Fang Chuan stuck his head inside. "We've investigated Ning Yuan. He's just an ordinary fortune-teller, possibly a fraud. He even has a record. He got someone's fortune wrong once, which led to trouble, and he was held in a detention center for more than ten days. Zhan Hongye was the one who got him out."

They had noticed Ning Yuan because he was in Qingcheng recently and had shared a meal with Dong Zhenghao, helping Zhan Hongye trick Dong Zhenghao into revealing his birth date and time.

But Ning Yuan often took on fortune-telling jobs like that; this wasn't just a one-off. During the days he'd been in Qingcheng, he'd attended at least five such dinners. He could simply have been used by Zhan Hongye, and there was no way to conclude from that alone that he was involved.

Still, Liu Mumu sounded so certain that Fang Chuan decided to believe her. After all, she was the one who'd even correctly predicted the end of his romance. She was worth taking seriously.

Ning Yuan was at the high-speed rail station and could leave at any moment, so Fang Chuan hurried to send people there. Whether or not he was involved, they'd find out once he was brought in.

Master Ning wasn't wearing a traditional Chinese tunic suit today. He had on an ordinary black tracksuit and a baseball cap, and he'd shaved off his mustache. He looked at least ten years younger.

Among the crowd of travelers, he was thoroughly unremarkable.

A Bluetooth headset hung from his ear. He looked down at his phone, playing with it, and occasionally glanced up at the display above the ticket gates.

Information about arriving high-speed trains scrolled continuously across the station's enormous screen.

Travelers came and went through the waiting hall, while several Railway police officers made their rounds.

When two officers passed by him, he showed no reaction. Just then, the train he was taking was called for boarding. Travelers waiting nearby surged toward the gate, and he stood up too, following unhurriedly behind them.

Suddenly, someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind.

The muscles in Ning Yuan's body tensed instantly. He turned and saw the two Railway police officers who had just walked past him.

"Sir, please show us your ID."

Ning Yuan hesitated briefly, then took his ID card from his pocket and handed it over. "May I ask what the problem is?"

"It's just a routine check." The Railway police officer looked down at the photo on the ID, then back at the person in front of him. "Ning Yuan?"

"That's right."

"We received a report that you've been spreading superstition and using it to commit fraud. Please come with us."

As soon as the officer finished speaking, the first person who flashed through Ning Yuan's mind was Liu Mumu.

Liu Mumu, back at the police station: she was innocent.

Ning Yuan instinctively glanced around. The police officers who had been scattered nearby had all come over. Running wasn't a realistic option.

Perhaps things weren't as bad as he thought. If it was only fraud, it shouldn't be a serious problem.

Although he thought that, he showed no sign of it. Instead, he protested loudly, "Officers, you must have the wrong person. I absolutely didn't commit fraud."

The officers didn't give him any more time to talk. They escorted him away at once.

Outside the waiting hall, Fang Chuan was already waiting with a team.

To avoid causing a panic, they hadn't gone straight in to arrest him. Instead, they'd contacted the Railway police and asked for their help.

Passengers on high-speed trains couldn't carry dangerous goods or restricted weapons with them, so even if Ning Yuan put up a fierce resistance, it would be easy enough to subdue him. The Railway police had no trouble with that and were happy to help.

When Ning Yuan saw the specialized handcuffs Fang Chuan had taken out, his expression finally changed. Unfortunately, he had no chance to regret it. They slapped the handcuffs on him, put a hood over his head, and escorted him away.

Fang Chuan had planned to bring him back and interrogate him right away. Even if Ning Yuan refused to say anything, forty-eight hours would be enough for Zhan Huitian to regain consciousness.

After coming that close to death, Zhan Huitian would surely be willing to help the police identify the person behind it.

But none of that had had a chance to happen yet. Fang Chuan had just returned to his office when two subordinates he'd left behind to watch Liu Mumu stopped him.

Before leaving, Fang Chuan had arranged for Liu Mumu to be taken out of the interrogation room and sent to Consultant Yan's private office, since she had provided a potentially useful lead. He called it letting her rest, but really, it was a form of keeping her under watch.

At least it showed his attitude: they shouldn't offend a fortune-teller with real skill too badly.

He had even assigned two officers to guard the door.

When Fang Chuan returned, his subordinates told him that Liu Mumu hadn't tried to escape or anything, and she hadn't even gone to the bathroom. But... ever since she entered the office, strange noises had been coming from inside.

Consultant Yan had been called to see the director and hadn't returned. Each time the officers heard a noise and called out to ask what was happening, Liu Mumu answered. It didn't sound as though anything serious had happened.

Fang Chuan tried the doorknob. The door was locked from the inside.

He leaned close to the door and called, "Liu Mumu?"

There was no response.

He thought for a moment, then messaged Yan Xiu, asking him to come back and open the door.

Fang Chuan regretted it a little. He shouldn't have taken the easy way out and stuffed Liu Mumu into Yan Xiu's office. The guy's ornaments were supposedly worth a fortune. What if that girl had gotten upset about being dragged in there and was smashing everything to pieces?

A few minutes later, Yan Xiu returned and saw a crowd gathered outside his office. He asked in confusion, "What's going on?"

Fang Chuan steeled himself and stepped forward. "Ahem, you know how I left Liu Mumu in your office earlier?"

"Mm." Yan Xiu nodded. He'd agreed to it.

"Well, they said there were strange noises coming from inside."

Yan Xiu took out his key and unlocked the door. He'd barely pushed it open a crack when something came flying down and smashed beside his foot. It was a globe, as if it had been hit by a spell that shattered it into pieces.

When the office door was fully open, the scene inside made it look as though a typhoon had swept through the room all by itself.

How had anyone even managed this? Everyone in the doorway had a head full of question marks.

Consultant Yan's priceless artistic ornaments were all lying on the floor, missing arms and legs. And why had the ceiling light exploded? Had Liu Mumu jumped up and headbutted it?

"Liu Mumu?" Yan Xiu called her name, his face still composed.

"Over here." From beneath the solid-wood desk, Liu Mumu stuck out one pale arm.

Two scrapes marked her arm, already beading with blood. They were impossible to miss.

"What are you doing down there?" Fang Chuan asked tentatively.

Liu Mumu poked her head out too. Before she could say a word, one leg of the desk she was hiding beneath suddenly snapped with a crack. The desktop tipped over, and if she hadn't scrambled out quickly, it would have nearly hit her.

Fang Chuan turned to Yan Xiu. "I remember your desk was pretty expensive. Don't tell me you got swindled?"

Yan Xiu: ...

Consultant Yan was stumped. He was starting to wonder the same thing.