Outside the Zoo, Xiao Shuai and Yin Tiger listened to Ren Ye, their faces pale and their hair standing on end.
"N-not mutual destruction?" Yin Tiger stammered in shock.
"My head's a mess right now. I need somewhere quiet to think this through." Ren Ye held his forehead, his face equally pale, and murmured, "There's a possibility that we've all been fooled...!"
Xiao Shuai looked around and spotted a closed breakfast shop. "The people there have run off. Let's talk there."
An hour later.
Inside the fast-food restaurant, long since deserted, Ren Ye sat blankly in the darkness, silent as a statue.
He had maintained that position for almost an hour.
Neither Yin Tiger nor Xiao Shuai interrupted him. They only waited patiently.
Time flew by. There wasn't much time left before they had to submit their missions to Song Mingzhe and Pan Lianrong at five that evening.
There wasn't a single light on in the empty breakfast shop. Only the dim yellow streetlights outside shone through the windows onto the sides of their faces.
Ren Ye sat upright in his chair, sunk so deeply into the mire of his memories that he couldn't pull himself free.
He began retracing everything from when the confinement Secret Chamber's killing mechanism had been broken, countless disjointed images surfacing in his mind.
The black dog that had suddenly appeared in the first-floor corridor on the first night after they solved the Secret Chamber; the second-floor living room's ceiling light that had suddenly gone out the second night; Tan Pang saying he had smelled something after separating from Yin Tiger inside the Tiangong Building...
These scattered images began lining up one by one in Ren Ye's mind. Whenever the sequence failed to make sense, he tore it all down and started over...
The