(the next day)
The morning mist had not yet dissipated as Chen Chunhua knelt on the white marble steps, wiping the bronze door carvings. Last night's rain had accumulated in the grooves of the door knocker. As she wiped the cotton cloth over the gilded animal heads, she heard the crisp sound of high heels crushing dewdrops behind her.
"A person like you is worthy of touching my little Qingliu?"
Yi An raised the corners of her mouth, which was painted with CL red velvet lipstick, and the morning light shot cold arrows on her Van Cleef & Arpels earrings.
Before Chen Chunhua could stand up, she felt a sharp tearing pain in her scalp - Yi An grabbed her hair and lifted her up, and the diamond-studded nails sank into the tender flesh of the back of her neck.
Butler Li froze behind the porch pillar, holding the tea tray. Ripples of Ceylon tea formed in the bone china cup. He remembered that twenty years ago, when Hua Yueyao punished the servants by making them kneel, he had turned his face away in the same way.
"Didn't Auntie Wang teach you how to bow?" Yi An pushed Chen Chunhua away, his silk nightgown brushing across her swollen knees. "Even the dogs in the Ye family know better than you." He suddenly raised his foot and crushed the back of her hand that was supporting the ground, the Jimmy Choo crystal heel pressing on her finger bones and spinning.
Suddenly, there was a sound of something heavy falling from the second floor. Ye Qingliu rushed down the spiral staircase barefoot, his pajamas buttons undone, revealing his collarbone. He said to Yi An, "I insisted that Aunt Chen hold me!"
Yi An's pupils shrank suddenly. Twenty years ago, when her cousin was protecting the gardener, she had ripped open her pearl necklace and shouted the same words.
She suddenly laughed, and the diamond ring left a crescent mark on his cheek. "Even the frequency of trembling eyelashes when lying..."
"You imitate it so well." She rubbed Ye Qingliu's hair with such force that it was like she was wiping antique porcelain. When the hair rope broke, her black hair swept across the Cartier cheetah bracelet on her wrist.
"Even the way the ends of your hair curl up when you lie..." The diamond-studded nails suddenly pinched his earlobe, "It's a pity your mother never pleads for the lower class.
Hua Jinyue emerged from the room clutching a rag doll and suddenly hurled the entire jar of watercolor onto the Persian carpet. Steward Li screamed in alarm as he tried to stop her, but he slipped on the paint and the Qianlong-era blue-and-white porcelain cup shattered into eight pieces.
"Very good!" Yi An untied the belt of her silk nightgown and pulled Ye Qingliu into her arms. As the boy struggled, he kicked over an antique clock, and the gilded hands stopped at the time of his cousin's car accident.
She sniffed the wormwood in the child's hair and dug her fingertips into his shoulder blade. "You two siblings are very united."
Chen Chunhua took the opportunity to pull Hua Jinyue away, but Yi An wrapped his belt around her neck. The Hermès crocodile leather pressed against her throat, and she could hear the throbbing of her carotid artery. "Why don't we play a game?"
Yi An pressed Ye Qingliu's face against his collarbone and said, "Count to a hundred heartbeats and see how many beats this bitch can hold on to."
"Ninety-seven, ninety-eight..."
Hua Jinyue suddenly bit Yi An's ankle, and her silk nightgown ripped open, revealing the rose tattoo on her lower back - which completely overlapped with the seat belt marks in the autopsy photo of her cousin's car accident.
Ye Qingliu took the opportunity to knock over the enamel incense burner, and the agarwood ash blinded everyone's eyes.
"All of them, go to solitary confinement!" Yi An wiped the dust off his face, his Cartier bracelet casting a shadow in the morning light. "Butler Li, take them all away!"
(Time dividing line————————)
Bulletproof glass cuts the fifty-square-meter basement into a honeycomb-shaped prison cell, and each pane of glass is embedded with fragments of Ye Qingliu's mother Hua Yueyao's relics.
The LCD screen on the ground glowed with a cold blue light, and two sets of math problems were played in real time: on the left was the calculation of the acceleration of gravity when the mother fell from the building, and on the right was a calculus equation encrypted with musical notes.
Ye Qingliu's children's watch was hanging on the air outlet of the central air conditioner. The sound of the second hand beating was amplified thirty times, perfectly overlapping with the audio of Hua Yueyao's heart monitor when she was dying.
There is a medical refrigerator in the northwest corner, and a pain-relieving patch is frozen in the fingerprint lock of the cabinet door - only half a patch will be spit out if you answer three questions correctly in a row.
Whenever the LCD screen lit up red, it meant Yi An was adjusting parameters in the monitoring room. The difficulty of the questions increased exponentially with the amount of blood seeping from Chen Chunhua's knee: the first drop of blood triggered a quadratic function, the tenth drop escalated to a Fourier transform, and now a topological puzzle written in German was emerging from the ground.
There are three levels of error penalties:
1. First offense: The overhead showerhead sprays liquid nitrogen mist mixed with orange blossom scent, forming ice crystals on your eyelashes.
2. Reoffending: A robotic arm embedded in the wall ejected the horsehair whip that his mother hated the most during her lifetime, and whipped his face that resembled his mother the most.
3. Third offense: All screens begin to loop the doctored home video, replacing the footage of Chen Chunhua feeding medicine with the footage of poisoning.
Ye Qingliu curled up in the corner of the third cell, his thin pajamas soaked with cold sweat.
He was calculating the acceleration of gravity on the glass for the fifth time with his scabbed index finger when he suddenly discovered that the g value had been replaced by the stock code of the day his mother fell from the building.
The image of Chen Chunhua kneeling on the ground flashed in the lower right corner of the LCD screen. Ye Qingliu bit his tongue and smeared the blood on the Σ symbol.
"9.8m/s2..." Ye Qingliu tremblingly entered the standard gravity value, but was interrupted by a sudden video interruption.
The surveillance footage moved up two degrees, clearly showing Chen Chunhua using her fingernails to dig out the glass shards from her knee - this triggered a hidden formula, and the screen popped up the Lagrange multiplier method encrypted with blood.
When the error signal for the seventh question sounded, liquid nitrogen mist gushed out. Ye Qingliu rushed towards the freezer, his bare ankles sticking to the -20°C metal surface, tearing off a thin layer of skin.
At the moment when the icy fog was everywhere, he saw the crystal hairpin in the glass interlayer refracting a strange light spot - that was the distress signal secretly hidden by Chen Chunhua, marking the location of the loose screws of the ventilation pipe in Morse code.
Ye Qingliu pressed the pain relief patch on his bleeding earlobe and discovered that the adhesive back of the patch was engraved with a fragment of his mother's suicide note using micro-engraving technology.
Ye Qingliu grabbed the frozen pain-relieving patch and cut open the vein in his left hand, letting the blood drip onto the capacitive touch area of the screen.
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