The living room was still utterly silent and deserted, without a single person in sight-not even a corpse. Yet it was a complete mess. The sofa lay overturned on the floor, its front facing upward, and paintings of all kinds covered the walls. Li Wei entered first and switched on the lights. He avoided looking at the paintings around him and forbade the others from doing so as well. Instead, he kept his gaze on the floor, carefully assessing the traces left behind.
"Hmm. It looks like this wasn't where the incident started either, but someone was definitely attacked here. There should have been two men over there, drinking and smoking. Look, there's still half an unfinished cigarette in the ashtray."
Li Wei pointed to the coffee table in front of the sofa, motioning for the others to come over and look.
"They were drinking and smoking here, perhaps chatting as well, when something suddenly happened. It might have been a scream, or some other noise that caught their attention. The man who was smoking put his cigarette in the ashtray and stood up. Then, right at that moment, something rushed over and attacked him, knocking the sofa over in the process. The other man took advantage of that thing attacking his companion to run outside."
The Trio stared at the scene in stunned disbelief as they listened to Li Wei's explanation. They had seen these traces too, but until he explained them, they had been unable to connect them.
Yet after hearing Li Wei's account and looking at those traces again, the three found it all so obvious, so simple, that they even wondered why they hadn't figured it out themselves...
"All right. It looks like this wasn't the initial scene, and that painting isn't here either."
Li Wei