A disaster?

At that moment, the man with tattoo sleeves raised his hand and looked at Goat Head. "Hey, referee, how do aliases count? Is that considered lying?"

Goat Head neither nodded nor shook his head. He merely said flatly, "I will no longer take part in any stage of the process. You only need to write down a name according to your own judgment. All you need to remember is that 'the rules are absolute.' Finally, I will personally 'punish' the losers."

The word "punish" rang out with such force that everyone shuddered.

"Th-that proves I wasn't lying!" Tiantian cried anxiously. "If I were lying, I'd be dead by now, right? Even if it's an alias, my alias really is 'Tiantian'!"

No one answered her. They had reached the crucial stage where their lives were on the line, and no suspicious detail could be overlooked.

"Then it's my turn to talk." The tattooed man curled his lip, looking thoroughly reluctant. "If this lady's story doesn't count as a lie, mine definitely doesn't either."

"My name is Qiao Jiajin. I live in Guangdong, and I don't really have a job. Before I came here, I was collecting a debt."

Qiao Jiajin's Mandarin was poor, so everyone had to listen closely.

"People these days really are something. They'll agree to anything when they're borrowing money, then start crying about how hard they have it when it's time to pay it back."

"Those bastards call us debt collectors devils. Say we're cold-blooded."

"But that prick ought to look at it another way. When he was at his most helpless, when he needed money most, I was the one who lent him a hand. When no institution would lend him money, I did. To him, I wasn't a devil. I was a savior."

"And how did he treat his savior?"

"He went around crying about how hard his life was, saying he'd been swindled out of two million. Then he condemned us debt collectors for being cold-blooded, trying to get himself out of trouble by winning his neighbors' sympathy. But we signed a contract when he borrowed the money. We explained all the interest to him, clear as day. Now he can't pay it back, and that's our fault?"

"Last night, I decided to teach him a lesson. I took him up to the roof of a tall building, but then an earthquake suddenly hit. I hadn't intended to kill him, but that prick actually pulled a knife in the chaos and tried to kill me!"

"In all the confusion, he pushed me off the roof, and I crashed into a billboard. What happened after that... I can't remember."

Everyone frowned after hearing the man's story.

Tiantian, however, seemed to have spotted something. She gave an angry laugh and said, "See! I was wondering why you were trying to smear me! Turns out you're the liar!"

"What? What makes you say I'm lying?" Qiao Jiajin demanded viciously.

"I was in Shaanxi, and you were in Guangdong!" Tiantian pointed at him. "You made that whole story up based on mine! There was an earthquake where I was, and somehow you had one too. I got hit by a billboard, and you just happened to crash into one! If that isn't lying, what is?"

"Why should I care where you were? I was in an earthquake." The tattooed man glared at her. "Keeping that to myself would be lying! As for the billboard, it's not like there's only one billboard in the whole world, is it?"

"Anyway, you're lying!" Tiantian said, pointing at Qiao Jiajin. "Only bad people do your kind of work in the first place. It's no surprise you'd lie too!"

"Hah. Like your line of work is any better than mine?"

Qi Xia watched the two argue fiercely and felt that something really was strange about this.

It wasn't because either of them had said something untrue, but because he had also experienced an earthquake.

He hadn't been in Shaanxi or Guangdong. He had been in Shandong.

Could an earthquake cover such a vast area?

This earthquake had spanned half the country, affecting three provinces.

If everything they said was true, wouldn't this be an unprecedented disaster?

"Stop arguing. Let's get this over with." The muscular man sitting across from them silenced the pair, then looked at the next woman. "Your turn. If we're going to judge who's lying, we should let everyone finish first."

Both of them snorted at that and fell silent.

The woman beside Qiao Jiajin nodded timidly and began, "Um... m-my name is Xiao Ran. I'm a preschool teacher."

The young woman named Xiao Ran looked badly frightened. Her voice was quiet and trembling.

"Before I came here, I was waiting with a child for his parent to pick him up. His mother always used to come, but then I heard she'd gotten seriously ill. Something was growing in her brain, and she needed surgery... so his father had been picking him up these past few days instead. But his father seemed to keep forgetting to come..."

"It was already past six last night. My workday had actually ended long before that, but for some reason, the child's father just wouldn't answer his phone..."

"I didn't know the child's address, so I couldn't take him home. All I could do was stand with him at the intersection and keep waiting."

"I actually had something to do that evening too... I'd made an appointment with a counselor. I felt like I didn't really enjoy my current job, and I hoped the counselor could help me work through that."

"But I never expected to wait for hours. I missed my appointment that evening too."

"Just as my mind was wandering, the whole ground suddenly began to shake. I was terrified... it took me several seconds to realize it was an earthquake..."

"An earthquake doesn't feel the way people describe it... the ground wasn't bouncing up and down. It was swaying from side to side. It felt like I was standing on a table, and someone kept shaking it..."

"I immediately gathered the child beside me into my arms, but I didn't know what to do either. I saw the Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple cracking in the distance... luckily, we were standing in an open space."

"Then I saw a car that had lost control hurtling toward us... all I could do was stagger off to the side with the child in my arms, but the shaking ground made me fall with every step I took."

"The last time I fell, I hit my head... then I passed out. When I woke up, I was already here."

There was little that stood out in her account.

The only thing Qi Xia found strange was the mention of the "Three Pagodas of Chongsheng Temple."

Those three pagodas were in Dali, Yunnan.

Qi Xia gently stroked the card on the table. Although his hand covered the word, he knew it said "liar."

Could there be more than one liar?

If "the rules are absolute," then Goat Head's earlier statement that "there is one and only one liar" had to be absolute too.

Since I drew "liar," none of the others can be liars. There's only one liar.

They're all telling the truth.

Yet the stories spanning those three provinces seemed to be subtly connected.

It isn't just the earthquake. Even the things they described are connected. Isn't that far too strange?

At that moment, everyone's gaze shifted to the next person: the middle-aged man in a white coat.