Chapter 50: Suspicion

This was Li Wanying and Qi Xin’s home?

Qi Ran swept her gaze over her surroundings… perhaps it shouldn’t even be called a building. Calling it a bare shell of a house might be too generous. Most of the outer walls had collapsed, revealing the brick structure and twisted steel rebar within the debris. The ground was piled high with sand and gravel; shattered and whole bricks were scattered everywhere. Where windows once stood, only splintered wooden frames remained. Over half the roof had caved in, and through the fragmented beams, one could glimpse the silent night sky. The only intact piece of furniture was a wooden table, even draped with a blackened lace tablecloth, now buried under a thick layer of crushed stone and sand.

In the midst of this wreckage, its existence seemed utterly jarring.

Qi Ran frowned slightly. She was almost certain this was not her mother’s home. Setting aside the fact that this place looked like a ruin baptized by war, Li Wanying’s apartment was on the third floor of a ten-story building, nothing like this standalone, collapsing shack.

She was about to say something but forcibly stopped herself. A tiny, hairline crack seemed to split open in her heart… The fissure was deep and black, as if something utterly terrifying could crawl out of it at any second. The fear from before surged back, and only one chilling thought remained in her mind’s lake:

Lake Cutter!

Had Jiang Zhique been controlled by the Lake Cutter? For a moment, she was at a complete loss for what to say or do, Miss Ah Qiao’s words involuntarily echoing in her mind—

“Your heart, or rather your soul, will become a lump of putty, something that can be freely molded and kneaded. You could become so miserly overnight that you refuse to spend a single dollar, or equally willing to throw away a fortune on a total stranger. You will become a puppet completely.”

Perhaps because this realization was too shocking, even though she was trying hard to control her expression, Jiang Zhique still noticed her momentary pallor. She asked, puzzled, “What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you’ve got amnesia after waking up.”

Beside the dancing firelight, the fair skin of her profile was tinged with a rosy glow, even showing a hint of lingering baby fat. But Qi Ran’s attention wasn’t on her face; it was on her wrists, hidden beneath tightly buttoned shirt cuffs. On the pale skin peeking through the gaps, countless eyes were staring intently at her, like a swarm of snakes choosing their prey, gnashing their teeth in anticipation of a potential feast… Without Miss Ah Qiao’s help, she wouldn’t even be enough to fill the gaps between the snake tattoos’ teeth.

Damn it, why was she subconsciously assuming Jiang Zhique was her enemy? Could the Lake Cutter have tampered with her mind too? Qi Ran again felt that chilling sensation of “invisible cockroaches in the air,” a shudder from the deepest part of her soul. Because the moment suspicion is born, nothing in this world can be trusted anymore—not even yourself.

Taking a deep breath, Qi Ran closed her eyes, forcing herself to calm down. Calmness was the only thing she could rely on now.

When she opened her eyes again, she had organized her thoughts and spoke to Jiang Zhique, who sat by the fire: “I think one of us has fallen into a Lake Cutter’s trap.”

Jiang Zhique’s movements suddenly stiffened.

Qi Ran didn’t pause, rapidly recounting everything from her own memory to the now-tense girl before her. As she spoke, she looked directly into the girl’s eyes. She shed her loose school uniform, which could easily conceal weapons, and held her hands out in front of her, showing she wasn’t making any improper moves. She knew that if she made the slightest suspicious gesture, the girl before her would not hesitate to summon her snake tattoos to defend herself.

—After all, if their positions were reversed, if she had the snake tattoo and Jiang Zhique were the defenseless ordinary person, she would not hesitate to neutralize Jiang Zhique’s ability to act before explaining the situation. This “neutralization” could mean restraint, or it could mean breaking a leg. She didn’t know what degree of “neutralization” existed in Jiang Zhique’s understanding, but it certainly wouldn’t be anything pleasant.

Watching her actions, Jiang Zhique sat on the other side of the sofa, a perfectly appropriate distance between them. She placed her hands where Qi Ran could see them, the buttons of her cuffs still tightly fastened. The leaping firelight illuminated the unconcealable tension in her eyes.

Qi Ran understood this was because Jiang Zhique wasn’t sure if she herself was an ordinary person. Perhaps the extracted memory in her own mind was just a fabrication planted by the Lake Cutter. Once a person starts to doubt, there are endless points to suspect; no one can recall every second, every detail of their past memories.

After summarizing the previous events in the briefest terms possible, Qi Ran finally slowed her speech and asked Jiang Zhique in a low voice: “In your perception, what differs from what I just described?”

Jiang Zhique frowned deeply, thinking before replying: “First, I have a question. How do you know about the Lake Cutter? If what you said is true, you shouldn’t have had any contact with the Circle before the car accident, right? Did the ‘me’ in your understanding, or perhaps Li Siwen, tell you?”

Qi Ran shook her head: “A ghost who claimed to be the last Family Head of the Tao Family told me—in my perception, I told Li Siwen about her existence, chronologically after he extracted my memories.”

She didn’t tell the full truth about Miss Ah Qiao, using the previous half-truth, half-lie as her account.

Jiang Zhique nodded slightly: “In my perception, that part aligns.”

Seeing Qi Ran’s completely cooperative demeanor, her expression relaxed a little. She pondered and said, “What you said earlier is mostly the same as my memory, but the events diverge after we left that shop.”

“First, we didn’t pick the lock like you said—” Jiang Zhique paused briefly, her expression somewhat complex. Qi Ran could understand the tangled emotions in that complexity; doubting your own memory was far from a pleasant feeling. “I do know how to pick locks, but we didn’t do that. The door here wasn’t locked at all; it was just ajar. We pushed it open and came in, splitting up to search for any possible secret chamber or hidden door. But in the end, we found nothing. Just as we were about to give up, you suddenly fainted and slept until now—”

“I have a question. If it happened as you say, and I just mysteriously fainted, why did you put me on the sofa and wait for me to wake up, instead of informing Li Siwen or simply dragging my unconscious body back? With your strength, dragging me back shouldn’t be difficult, right?” Qi Ran’s tone was a calm inquiry, not a more aggressive rhetorical question.

Jiang Zhique reached up, showing the left side of her spread-collar shirt collar. A tiny black dot was sewn there: “In your perception, didn’t we show this to you?”

A lie.

In Jiang Zhique’s perception, neither she nor Li Siwen had shown her this bug, Qi Ran thought. She was just using the Lake Cutter as a pretext to gloss over the matter of the listening device.

She knew this was a lie because when Jiang Zhique said it, her eyes unconsciously flicked downward, not meeting Qi Ran’s gaze but looking at her nose—a characteristic of Jiang Zhique when she lied. Qi Ran didn’t expose the lie, continuing to listen quietly.

Jiang Zhique, unaware her lie had been detected, just continued: “He knows what happened, so I didn’t need to inform him. The reason I didn’t move you is because I didn’t know why you fainted. If the cause was related to the environment here, moving you rashly could cause irreversible consequences—that would be pointless risk-taking.”

“A reasonable explanation,” Qi Ran said calmly. “Any other points of conflict?”

Jiang Zhique shook her head. Just then, her cell phone rang. Qi Ran saw the caller ID: it was Li Siwen.