"Huh? Nobody's here?"
Since everyone was free, and Zhen Hu brought up the topic of visiting Yuan Fang, Mingmei, Muchen, Lu Xiaoyao, and Zhen Hu decided to go together to Yuan Fang and Bai Xiao's residence.
In the old residential area, Yuan Fang and Bai Xiao lived on the first floor. The door was not locked, and they thought there was someone inside. But when they pushed it open, they found that there was no one there.
"Why isn't the door locked when no one's around? Did they just go out temporarily and not go far, so they didn't lock the door?"
When Lu Xiaoyao and the others first discovered that no one was in the house, she immediately offered her guess.
Mu Chen stood at the door of a room in the dimly lit house. The apartment buildings in the old neighborhood were far inferior to the current ones in terms of both layout and size.
When the four of them stood together in the living room, the room felt exceptionally cramped, with all sorts of odds and ends crammed into the already small space.
Zhen Hu turned on the incandescent light, and by the light he could finally see the furnishings in the room.
Old, dilapidated, and small are all you need to describe everything in the house.
The room was filled with neatly sorted junk, as if waiting to be sold off all at once.
However, if you look closely at those broken and scrap items, you'll find that some of them are not just simple trash.
After looking around the living room for a while, Mu Chen walked to the door of a house that looked dark and empty.
"It doesn't seem like it... it seems more like she went out last night because of Bai Xiao and hasn't come back."
Mingmei saw Mu Chen staring at the neat bed in the room. Mingmei glanced at it as well. Then Mu Chen said the sentence he had just said, but it sounded a bit strange to Mingmei.
"Bai Xiao was arrested last night, and then Yuan Fang was summoned. It's late at night, and he just got out of bed. He probably didn't even have time to make his bed after hearing about this, right?"
In Mingmei's opinion, it would be more convincing if the bed in the bedroom were even more messy.
"No, because he didn't sleep at all." Mu Chen felt that Yuan Fang hadn't slept at all last night. "How can a husband sleep soundly at home when his wife is out killing someone? Doesn't he worry that his wife will get hurt while she's out?"
"With someone like her, who would dare let her suffer a loss?"
Having sparred with Bai Xiao last night, Lu Xiaoyao felt she had a lot to say on this topic.
"If she's so rough with someone, whoever she touches is just unlucky, right?"
While Lu Xiaoyao was talking, Mu Chen and Ming Mei had already walked to the kitchen next door.
Mu Chen stood in front of the kitchen trash can, staring at the yellowed and aging outer parts of the leftover leafy greens that had been picked and discarded. (www.cascoo.net)
However, at this point, these unwanted cabbages, besides being old and yellow, also looked wilted, indicating that they had been there for quite a while.
"There's still soup simmering in the pot, but judging from the oil floating on the surface, it wasn't made this morning."
Although she has absolutely no talent for cooking, Mingmei is quite adept at distinguishing between good and bad ingredients.
After all, that's where our family started.
When she was little, Mingmei heard her mother say that when her uncle was young and immature, he would slack off and play games all night, and then pretend to be hardworking and get up early to make spicy hot pot in the kitchen.
Afterwards, her mother deliberately turned off the heat preservation setting on the large pot of red oil soup, just waiting for her uncle to jump into the pit the next day _(：3」∠)_
"However, that doesn't necessarily mean anything, does it?" Even if the soup was made last night, does that mean people have to eat bone broth ramen first thing in the morning if the soup was made the night before?
"Yes, that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but—"
As he spoke, Mu Chen found the hidden electronic alarm clock among the pile of bottles and jars of seasonings.
After fiddling around for a bit, Mu Chen successfully found the timer—03:00.
At this hour, what else could it be but staying up all night?
"Logically speaking, Yuan Fang should be working at your place today, right? Staying up late to make soup and setting an alarm clock, I really can't believe that Yuan Fang doesn't know anything."
Mu Chen didn't believe it before, and now that there's evidence, he's even more dismissive.
...
Wow! What is this? What is this?
While the two of them were discussing the true owner of the house in the kitchen, the other two people in the house were also getting restless, as if they had discovered something extraordinary.
"Holy crap! Is this a whetstone?"
Lu Xiaoyao noticed the rough, round stone next to the washboard in the bathroom, and soon an idea came to her.
It's just a bit odd to have a whetstone in the bathroom.
"It seems so." Zhen Hu also came over to take a look, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw some conspicuous dried water stains on the floor tiles under the stone.
It looked as if this dark gray whetstone had been used not long ago. The person who used it seemed to have finished in a hurry, leaving water stains with mortar everywhere, and quite a bit of it had also dripped onto the ground.
His gaze finally landed on the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom, where there was a puddle of water that didn't look like it had been splashed out, but rather like it had gathered up on its own.
As for why this is the case...
He cursed inwardly for not rummaging through other people's homes, but Zhen Hu's hands still opened the cabinet under the sink. He was stunned by the various knives displayed on the specially made knife rack.
Small axes, small saws, and some sharp little hammers—don't be fooled by their small size; they look very sharp and are quite heavy.
All sorts of deadly things are available here.
Lu Xiaoyao was also stunned by the scene.
When Mingmei and Muchen heard the noise, they came out and followed their low cries to the bathroom door. They were startled by the cabinet, which wasn't large but was crammed full of tools used in the crime.
"My god, if this weren't a game, the police would have come and taken these things away by now, right?"
Lu Xiaoyao was surprised, but then she realized that it was illogical for these things to be here.
“That’s true, if this weren’t a game, we wouldn’t have had the chance to discover these things…” Zhen Hu replied to Lu Xiaoyao while squatting down to carefully observe everything in the cabinet.
"Hmm...it seems like two things are missing here."
With sharp eyes, Zhen Hu noticed two empty slots on the knife rack, and then looked at the "weapons" on the left and right sides of the empty rack, and said, "One should be some kind of axe, and the other... these over there seem to be some kind of spikes or thorns."
"An axe! Bai Xiao attacked me with an axe yesterday!" Upon hearing that one of the axes was missing, Lu Xiaoyao immediately realized that Bai Xiao must have taken it with her.
"Then what about that awl?" Mingmei, who had been silent until now, spoke up softly. "Yesterday, after Bai Xiao was subdued, there were no awl-like weapons on her body, and nothing like awls was found around the corpses she killed."
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