Netherworld Investigator

I gradually regained my consciousness. The first thing I saw was a dark room. It was still the scene of the murders. The tables and chairs that have just been set up have all been overturned, and they are exactly the same as we saw when we came! The phone I used to put on the table fell to a corner, but it was still shining a light.

Huang Xiaotao was on the ground. The mask fell off her face and was on the floor beside her. She was coughing violently and a stream of clear saliva flowed out of her mouth.

I noticed that there were two shoe prints on her abdomen, one from me and one from Wang Yuanchao.

There were a lot of bloody scratches on my arm, and my mouth was burning with pain. Wang Yuanchao’s punch had been so strong that I lost a tooth, and my gum was still bleeding. 

I was angry at him for this at first, but then realized that if he hadn’t been that violent, Huang Xiaotao and I would not be able to wake up and we would continue to be trapped in this hallucination. We might even end up hurting each other seriously. It was like we were both possessed by the devil back there…

Huang Xiaotao suddenly yelled out my name. I panicked and wondered if she was still hallucinating. 

“Song Yang! That was horrible! What a horrible scene!”

She walked towards me and held me tightly. Her hug was so forceful that she almost suffocated me. I could feel her warm tears falling onto my neck. Although her pair of D-cup breasts were pressed against my chest, my emotions were in disarray at the time, so I didn’t appreciate the moment as much as I should have.

I hugged her back. Huang Xiaotao’s soft body shivered in my arms, but later I discovered that I was shaking even more than her!

Fortunately, a hug could really make people feel better—much better than any medicine. Gradually, we calmed down and slowly broke away from our hug. Huang Xiaotao tried to wipe her tears with the back of her hands, so Wang Yuanchao handed her a Kleenex.

Huang Xiaotao always had a bright and charming personality every time I saw her. I had never seen her like this before. Tears were streaming from her beautiful eyes, yet somehow, I thought she never looked cuter, and I couldn’t help but stare longingly at her. My heart leapt wildly. This was a feeling that I’d never experienced before!

Huang Xiaotao noticed me staring at her. Suddenly, she hit my chest with her fist in anger. 

“What the hell were you trying to do, Song Yang?” she yelled. “I could’ve died of fright!”

Her loud voice woke me up from my daze.

“You can’t blame me for this,” I said, “I followed a recipe written in the book.”

“What recipe?” asked Huang Xiaotao.

I picked up the mask that fell on the ground and looked at it. “Do you still remember the concoction I made in the lab this afternoon? The recipe was written in the book. It says that this medicine can evoke emotions. But in fact, it’s a hallucinogenic drug!”

“Bastard, you nearly scared me to death you know?” Huang Xiaotao violently grabbed the mask in my hand and threw it to a corner of the room.

I cursed under my breath and vowed never to use this Murder Reenactment technique ever again!

At that time, I really thought that it was my ancestor’s fault. But when I went back and flipped the book later, I found out that the name of this concoction was called Dream Entry, and the note behind it described how it could make you enter into a dream state while still awake. I had previously misunderstood the sentence to mean evoking emotions, when in fact it was a warning that said the concoction will make you hallucinate! I guess I had to brush up on my Classical Chinese knowledge.

Apart from that, I even made another stupid mistake, which was to mix in the herbs at a wrong dose. I was lucky there had been no irreversible damage! All in all, I was the one solely to be blamed in this matter.

But there was something else that I could never have anticipated that happened that night. The incident formed a bond between me and Huang Xiaotao that I was ever so grateful for. Many years later, I would look back at this incident and thank my ancestor who invented the Murder Reenactment Technique, because it brought Huang Xiaotao and I together—but that’s a story for another time.

I asked Wang Yuanchao what had just happened. He explained that when Huang Xiaotao and I started pretending to chat and eat together, we seemed like a real couple. Then, after I suddenly said that I had a headache, we started to quarrel with each other.

Wang Yuanchao was very hesitant to stop us at the time. He didn’t know if he should wake us up. But the longer we fought, the more serious the fight became, until finally he felt he must jump in and forcibly wake us up.

I was forever grateful that we didn’t all wore the mask. If that had been the case, the three of us might lie dead here with the masks still on our faces, and forever recorded in the police archive as a case that can never be broken.

Huang Xiaotao had calmed down by now. She asked me, “Did you hear a strange voice back then?”

“Yes,” I replied.

She then asked Wang Yuanchao, but he did not hear anything. Apparently, the voice appeared at the time of the incident. A family of three suddenly suffered unexplainable headaches at the same time, and then their temperament changed. This was undoubtedly the key to this case.

I sighed.

“I think what made this family temporarily lost their minds was probably…”

I was interrupted by the sound of the white mice in the cage that suddenly squeaked very loudly. They shook the cage desperately until it almost fell off the window sill. 

“That’s bad!” I cried. “Something’s coming into the house!”

“Something? What do you mean by ‘something’?” asked Huang Xiaotao, her face turning pale.

I picked up the phone from the ground and walked over to check the mice. After seeing it, all three of us sighed in relief. There were cat paw prints on the layer of flour next to the cage, and it continued all the way to the stairs.

“Huang Xiaotao, you stay here and guard this place,” I said. “Old Wang and I will go out and chase the cat!”

“Nope! No way!” protested Huang Xiaotao. “I’m not staying in this creepy house alone! Wang Yuanchao, you stay here! I’ll go out with Song Yang!”

I had no choice but to relent. After I went out with Huang Xiaotao, I noticed that there were no street lights on the old street at all. The only light came from the inside of the houses on the street. The whole place was pitch black otherwise.

I decided that our best plan would be to separate our ways and each look for the cat in different directions. But Huang Xiaotao suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “It’s much better if we move together. What if something happens?”

I wanted to say that splitting our ways would be more efficient, but I was afraid that something might really happened, so I agreed.

One direction of the old street was a wide road, while the other was a small alley. I thought that the cat was more likely to escape into the alley, so we decided to look for it in this direction.

After walking for some distance, I suddenly realized that Huang Xiaotao had been holding my arm all along. Wasn’t she acting a bit too intimately? When I looked down at her hand, she quickly retracted it and said, “Don’t misunderstand! It’s not that I’m afraid or anything…”

I wasn’t sure if it was my own wishful thinking, but I noticed how Huang Xiaotao suddenly acted strangely.

“I must’ve frightened you back there. How should I make it up to you?” The moment I uttered the last word, I immediately realized how embarrassing I was. Why am I being so weird in front of Huang Xiaotao? Didn’t I always think of her as a friend and colleague?

Huang Xiaotao made no reply. She merely walked on with her head hung low. I got worried so I turned to her, but to my surprise, I saw that her face was even redder than mine!

Her skin had always been fair and delicate and white, and now that her cheeks were blushing, she looked especially adorable! 

I wasn’t sure if she was blushing out of shyness or anger, because she suddenly glared at me and said, “No, thank you!” Then she strode forward.

I was utterly confused and didn’t know what to say to that. A woman’s heart truly was the most inscrutable thing in the world—much more so than a hundred murder cases!

We came to the alley, and the light from my phone suddenly dimmed—it seemed that the battery was almost out. I asked Huang Xiaotao to take out her phone. She searched through her pocket and said, “Oh no, I think I left it at the house!”

Soon enough, my phone died, and we were left in pitch-black darkness.

At this moment, I suddenly heard the sound of something rolling on the ground. I saw a little girl kneeling on the ground, playing with a ball. She turned her head towards us when she heard our footsteps, and I saw her eyes glow in the dark!