Chapter 14

But Zhen Liu still insisted on examining the victim's body first and came to a preliminary conclusion—everyone had probably made a move last night.

Zhen Liu found multiple abrasions, several knife wounds, and signs of blunt-force trauma to the head. The victim's face even appeared to have been forcefully smothered with a pillow. On top of that, the color of the victim's lips looked wrong, suggesting possible poisoning. To die in so many different ways really wasn't easy.

Zhen Liu immediately found traces of what he himself had done, but he did not pay them any special attention, or simply skipped over them. He remained exceptionally calm and treated everything equally.

Though he had guessed that everyone had done something, without knowing the fatal wound, Zhen Liu did not want to reveal what he had done too early. Even with only Professor Lu present.

Just like Agatha's classic Murder on the Orient Express, everyone hated the victim to the bone. The difference was that, in their case, the five people who acted had not discussed it with one another. This was not a collective crime, merely a convergence of coincidences.

"Three blades, two poisons." Professor Lu offered a term commonly used in murder-mystery games. He apparently assumed Zhen Liu was not an experienced player and patiently explained, "It's like the victim being slashed three times and having two different poisons in his body."

Of course, it was only an analogy. It did not mean the victim had necessarily suffered three knife wounds and two poisons. It meant he had been "killed" five times using different methods.

Actually, if Zhen Liu had even a little knowledge of murder-mystery games, he would have immediately realized that this situation, where "every suspect was on the way to draw a knife," was one of the most overused tropes in the genre. The other players had probably noticed it right away.

Only now did Zhen Liu suddenly understand. To give every player a sense of participation, and to make everyone suspicious, this arrangement was the easiest.

Therefore, to find the real murderer, they did not need to figure out who had acted last night. They needed to determine the victim's fatal wound, each person's method of murder, and the time each person had acted the previous night—who acted before whom, and who acted afterward—then squeeze out the murderer through elimination.

After examining the body, Zhen Liu began investigating the crime scene. "This doesn't look much like the primary crime scene."

The victim did appear to have been stabbed in his own room and died in a pool of blood.

But...

For one thing, before the test results came back, they could not conclude that all this blood necessarily belonged to the victim. Zhen Liu had once watched a crime documentary where a murderer, due to unusual religious beliefs, deliberately soaked victims in animal blood after death. That was certainly an exceptional case, but it did not mean such a thing was impossible. A suspect might have had some other purpose as well.

For another, the blood might not have flowed from wounds inflicted before death. Blood did not begin clotting until twenty-four hours after death. Before then, if blood vessels were directly severed, there would still be obvious bleeding.

"People generally do not bleed much after death, nor do they produce the kind of blood spray seen when they're stabbed while alive. Under Earth's gravity, the blood simply flows into a pool and gathers there." Following Zhen Liu's gaze, Professor Lu looked at the slightly darkened pool of blood. "But the scene is a little contradictory."

There was a great deal of blood, yet no trace of spatter.

Professor Lu also agreed with Zhen Liu. This did not seem much like the primary crime scene.

That raised another question. Had the murderer moved the body? Why? Or had someone mistakenly believed they had killed the victim, or that someone they wanted to protect had killed the victim, and moved the body to deliberately make the case harder to solve?

After that, Zhen Liu and Professor Lu found no more useful clues in the victim's room. They only found a pillow that appeared to have been used to smother the victim, and handed it over to 333 for lip-print and fingerprint testing.

Zhen Liu also noticed that the victim's room had already been searched before they entered. Although whoever had done it had tried their best to restore the original arrangement, they had still missed some details. The victim was left-handed, as could be seen from the previous night's dinner and the placement of most everyday items in the room. Yet several items had inadvertently been placed where they would be more convenient for a right-handed person. It was an instinctive action made by the person who searched the room while hastily putting things back, one they might not even have realized.

After noticing this, Zhen Liu did not say anything. Theoretically, whoever had tampered with this place would definitely rush over during the evidence-search phase to conceal the fact that they had searched it earlier.

But only he and Professor Lu had come here so far.

Of course, the person who had searched this room was not necessarily the murderer. They might have searched the victim's room merely to recover leverage the victim had used to threaten them. What Zhen Liu was curious about was whether that person had found the leverage, and whether they had found only their own or everyone else's as well.

After recording every spot Zhen Liu found suspicious with the recorder, they went next door to search Basketball Qiao's room.

Everyone had only stayed here for one night, so theoretically there should not have been many personal belongings in the rooms. But Basketball Qiao seemed to be an exception. His room showed plenty of signs of daily life, with an unbelievable number of things scattered everywhere and luggage thrown about in complete disorder. Professor Lu remarked, "Is he planning to live here permanently?"

Professor Lu's actual personality probably was not as silent as the one he was currently portraying.

What they had expected to be a simple evidence search instead took the two of them quite some time. There were simply too many miscellaneous clues in Basketball Qiao's room. Zhen Liu even directly found the note the victim had used to threaten Basketball Qiao.

—[Tonight, let's have a good talk about your match-fixing.]

The note Zhen Liu had received contained roughly the same message. This time, he took the initiative to ask Professor Lu, "Did your note say something like this too?"