Things had grown complicated.
Che Quan watched the scene. A few seconds later, he turned and went downstairs.
As soon as he returned to the second floor, the frightened residents all began asking him what he had seen.
Standing one step above the others, Che Quan surveyed them and answered with a question:
"Who knows the resident in Room 602?"
Everyone froze at his words, exchanging looks filled with unease and speculation.
Suddenly, a woman who looked to be in her early forties said hesitantly, "I... I know him."
Che Quan looked at the woman.
Everyone else turned to look at her, too.
Seeing this, the woman glanced around at them. Just as she was about to speak, the voice of the officer handling the evacuation came from upstairs.
"Make way, everyone, make way! This is an active investigation. Anyone not involved, please clear the area."
The middle-aged woman thought for a moment, then said to the people gathered on the second floor, "This isn't the place to talk. Let's go to the community office."
The community office was barely a dozen steps from Building 4 of Gubei Apartment.
Though called an office, it was really a storage room, with an old, round black table and a stack of more than a dozen red plastic chairs.
Everyone took a chair, gave it a quick wipe to clear off the dust, and sat down.
They gathered around the table and listened as the woman said with an air of authority:
"The man in 602 owns that little convenience store next to our apartment building. His name's Zhang Bei. He's forty-something and still a bachelor. Whenever he has a little to drink, he goes on a drunken rampage. I bet he was the lunatic pounding on young Che's door in 201 yesterday!"
"Oh, so I wasn't imagining it! You all heard it too, right? Last night, in the middle of the night, someone was hammering on a door! It scared me half to death."
A slender young woman hugged her arms around herself, shivering slightly at the memory.
Xuan Shuhui nodded in agreement. "Yes, I heard it too. But with residents in our building disappearing and jumping to their deaths lately, I didn't dare go out and look. So it was the door to Room 201."
Xuan Shuhui sounded as though she had merely made a passing remark, but it suddenly made everyone realize something-
"Wait, how did you know he was pounding on 201's door? Which apartment do you live in?"
Everyone began firing questions at her.
Meanwhile, Che Quan stood a short distance behind the group, silently studying everyone present with an indifferent gaze.
Xuan Shuhui was calculating, both yesterday and today. She was almost certainly a player.
Che Quan heard the middle-aged woman respond openly to their doubts. "Oh, I live in 101, right below young Che. How could I not know? It was so loud! Besides, I'm not the only one in the building who knew. Didn't someone call the police? I heard everything perfectly clearly downstairs."
Che Quan stared at the woman, studying every tiny change in her expression. This was another of his vampire abilities.
Determining whether someone was lying.
But the instance had restricted some of his abilities, including this one-he could only use it once a day, and it did not activate automatically. He had to consciously choose to use it.
Che Quan discovered that the woman really was telling the truth.
So someone else had called the police.
And the convenience store owner, the so-called "Uncle Zhang," was most likely a player too. Yesterday, he had told a lie riddled with holes in an attempt to draw information out of Che Quan.
He just did not know why the man had suddenly been murdered...
Che Quan looked at the people present and pressed his lips together. He was about to speak when Xuan Shuhui said exactly what he had been planning to say.
"Oh, what a headache. Everyone's so frightened now that I don't even dare go outside. Since we're all here, why don't we introduce ourselves first? That way, we can look out for each other in the building and feel a little safer.
I'll go first. My name is Xuan Shuhui, and I live in Room 301."
Xuan Shuhui's suggestion was perfectly reasonable, and everyone agreed.
The middle-aged woman spoke first. "My name is Wen Ping. Building 4, Room 101."
The second person to introduce herself was the quiet-looking young woman who had been standing beside Xuan Shuhui all along.
"My name is Fu Na. I live in Room 401. I... the girl across from me in 402 is called Yu Yan. She's a college classmate of mine. She disappeared a month ago."
At those words, silence fell over the room.
After a little while, a male voice finally broke the deathly silence. "Could your friend be the one from the missing-person case...?"
Fu Na said nothing, only lowered her eyes.
That was as good as confirmation.
The young man was briefly at a loss for words. Not knowing what to say, he rubbed the back of his head and tried to make up for it by changing the subject. "Um, my name is Cui Tang. I live upstairs from you in 501. If anything happens, you can come to me."
The others introduced themselves in turn after Cui Tang.
Che Quan listened to each of them, committing the details to memory.
Finally, it was the strange man's turn to introduce himself.
His voice was as deep and unpleasant as before. "I live in 202. My name... I don't want to say."
Almost everyone felt uneasy at his appearance, but no one said anything.
Then Che Quan told the people present, "I saw a leg on the sixth floor."
"Wh-what?"
An outgoing, friendly middle-aged woman, Wen Ping had been about to chat with everyone. At those words, she was instantly dumbfounded.
Che Quan continued in the same flat tone. "A young woman's leg. Very slender, with a rose-pink high heel on the foot. Does that ring a bell for anyone?"
Hearing this description, Fu Na turned deathly pale. "I remember Yanyan was wearing those shoes the day she disappeared."
Che Quan looked thoughtful. "How do you remember it so clearly?"
"Because we'd arranged to go to the movies together. She said she wanted to wear her new shoes. The ones you described were the new shoes we bought together."
Reeling from the news, Fu Na spoke as though murmuring to herself.
The others barely dared to breathe.
Older and a little braver, Wen Ping could not help stammering, "Young Che, this... this leg you mentioned, wh-what does that mean?"
Che Quan said nothing. Beside him, Cui Tang, who did not seem particularly tactful, bluntly explained for him, "It means she might have been dis... dismembered."
Xuan Shuhui's expression tightened.
At those words, Fu Na collapsed straight onto the floor, trembling all over. "No! Who could she possibly have offended...? How could this happen...?"
Everyone else looked sympathetically at the distraught Fu Na.
Che Quan remained unmoved throughout. He swept his gaze over the eight people in the community office.
He now had a fairly clear picture of the residents of Building 4 of Gubei Apartment.
The two residents on the first floor were the easygoing middle-aged woman Wen Ping and Zha Jia, a provocatively dressed young woman wearing brightly colored high heels, her brows now tightly knitted.
On the second floor were Che Quan himself and the strange man whose face he still had not seen.
On the third floor were Kang He, a woman with depression who had already jumped to her death, and Xuan Shuhui, a calculating woman he suspected was a player.
On the fourth floor were the quiet young woman Fu Na and her college classmate Yu Yan, who had disappeared and might have been dismembered.
On the fifth floor were the clueless young man Cui Tang and the somewhat gloomy Liao Zhiming, who wore thick black-framed glasses.
And on the sixth floor were the murdered player Zhang Bei and the sleazy Jin Jiang, who kept staring at the long legs beneath Zha Jia's short skirt.
According to the instance rules, among these eight people, one was a vicious murderer with antisocial personality disorder, and another was a pervert.
To clear the instance, he probably just had to find those two pieces of trash and kill them before they killed him.
Che Quan's lips curled slightly.
Just as I thought. A stupid instance, without the slightest challenge.
Before you continue