“A small bloodstain? How big? What shape is it?” Bai Chunian suddenly pressed.
Lan Bo hesitated, pausing for a moment before answering, “A single drop.”
Bai Chunian said, “I see,” but deep down, he was already certain that the person he was speaking with was not Lan Bo.
Lan Bo’s observational skills were well-known; they were on par with those of a mole. Of course, deep-sea fish have poor eyesight, so this was understandable.
And when Bai Chunian asked, “What’s in the gym?” Lan Bo had blurted out that there were bloodstains on the floor. If it had been a large pool of blood, it would naturally have been easy to spot, but he had said there was only “a single drop.”
This wasn’t something Lan Bo would have noticed without being prompted.
In fact, long before Bai Chunian left the gym, he had placed two dumbbells behind the door on the path leading to the gym. The dumbbells were hexagonal and didn’t roll easily on the floor, so pushing the gym door open required some effort—which meant it would take a little extra time to open the door.
But Lan Bo showed no sign of having been hindered in any way, and Bai Chunian was certain that this fake Lan Bo he was talking to was not on the same level as him.
Bai Chunian suspected that the fake Lan Bo was talking nonsense.
Or perhaps someone had tipped him off.
That’s because there was indeed a bloodstain on the gym floor where Bai Chunian had walked—a stain that had been smudged. He had deliberately withheld this information from Lan Bo to verify the location of the Lan Bo he was speaking with.
As for the detail that the bloodstain had been smudged, Bai Chunian suspected that his fake self had told the fake Lan Bo about it. He wasn’t sure how they had communicated—it was possible they’d used the security cameras as well—but that didn’t matter. Bai Chunian believed that the real Lan Bo was most likely on the same floor as him, and in the room right behind him.
It took Bai Chunian some time to find the dorm code, but he managed to locate a small purple flashlight. He shone it into every corner of the room and finally spotted the indentations left by previous presses on the keypad.
He pressed the numbers in order—“14579”—and the dorm door unlocked.
Bai Chunian gently pushed the door open a crack and peered inside. He clenched the small knife in his hand, pinching the short razor blade between his fingers, then swiftly pushed the door open and glanced inside.
There was no one behind the door. Bai Chunian turned to survey the other corners of the room. After all, there was at least one Image Entity in this building that wanted him dead.
Once Bai Chunian reached the center of the room, the door he’d come through closed behind him. He was already accustomed to this mechanism and calmly examined the other details.
It was a dining bar.
Pale yellow wallpaper adorned the walls. Behind the clean bar counter were an exhaust hood and an induction cooktop; to the right was a wine rack.
A bottle of wine sat on the bar counter.
It looked exactly like the restaurant Lan Bo had initially described; this was the same room he’d seen in the surveillance footage.
Bai Chunian picked up the wine bottle and examined it. The bottle was made of dark, nearly opaque glass, sealed with a cork. The wine inside appeared untouched, though the cork seemed to have been pulled out and then reinserted.
Since wineries use machines to insert corks, it’s easy to push the cork into the bottle. However, once the cork absorbs the wine, it swells and expands. Trying to remove it and reinsert it exactly as it was will always leave some traces.
Bai Chunian took a closer look at the label on the bottle; it appeared to be in Spanish. Since he needed to communicate with colleagues from other branches of the IOA, Bai Chunian had done some intensive Spanish study for a while. He had no trouble with everyday conversation, but reading the text was a bit more difficult, as he wasn’t very proficient.
He walked over to the wine rack with the bottle in hand to examine it. It was a simple wooden rack, with planks slanted against each other to form square compartments.
Bai Chunian crouched down, examining each compartment one by one. He carefully shifted the rack aside, leaving a faint pink mark on the wallpaper.
“……” Bai Chunian lifted the wine bottle again and held it up to the light to examine the wine inside.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have any tools on hand, and he couldn’t remove the cork with just his hands or mouth.
Never mind. He’d figure out the door code first. Bai Chunian simply tore the label off the wine bottle and slipped it into his pocket.
Just then, Lan Bo suddenly muttered, “Failed,” over the communicator.
Bai Chunian immediately sensed something was off and pressed him: “Did you see anything?”
Lan Bo had already left the gym and entered the dormitory, where bunk beds with metal railings stood.
He rushed straight to the keypad. Sure enough, a note was taped to it with a Band-Aid. Without a second thought, Lan Bo ripped the note off and hid it in his hand. After glancing around to make sure no one was watching, he unfolded it to take a look.
After reading the note, Lan Bo carefully folded it up and tucked it away with the three other notes he’d found behind the round mirror in the bathroom, on the calendar in the infirmary, and stuck to the barbell. He stuffed them all into the bandage wrapped around his arm and patted it down.
It had been a long time since Xiao Bai had written him a love letter, and Lan Bo was far more interested in the note than in these shabby rooms.
However, he still had to heed Xiao Bai’s words. Lan Bo immediately began searching, climbing up and down between the bunk beds, and finally discovered a stack of A4 papers tucked under the pillow of an upper bunk.
Lan Bo pulled out the carbon pen that was clipped to the stack and tossed it aside. He skimmed through the papers; the text was densely packed with English, making his head spin, so he clamped the stack between his teeth and climbed down the ladder.
A single sheet slipped out of the stack, fluttered twice, and landed right at the foot of the bed.
Lan Bo had no choice but to hold the stack in his mouth, crawl on the floor, and reach out to grab it. He caught the corner of the page and yanked hard. With a snap, the paper tore, and he managed to pull out only half a page.
Lan Bo glanced at it. Fortunately, he recognized one of the words highlighted in red: “fail.”
He muttered the word under his breath when suddenly he heard Bai Chunian ask him over the communicator, “Did you see anything?” Startled, Lan Bo crawled over to the combination lock with the remaining documents still clenched between his teeth and entered the code according to the note Xiao Bai had left him.
While waiting for the door to open, Lan Bo idly scanned his surroundings and noticed several smudges of blood on the floor.
Bai Chunian pressed further, “Did you see anything? Is there anything in the room?”
Lan Bo replied impatiently, “There are a few bloodstained footprints.”
“Footprints? Which direction?”
Lan Bo stared at the floor for a long moment: “From where I am, to the other door.”
“Where are you standing?”
“Next to the combination lock.”
“Oh… so you’ve already figured out the code?”
“Yeah.”
Bai Chunian chuckled. “I’ve got something interesting going on here too. I’m currently in that restaurant where they serve wine. The code here is 89456—exactly the same as the one you told me you guessed by randomly pressing buttons.”
Lan Bo frowned. “I wasn’t lying to you. Even though you’re not Xiao Bai, you’re a Cat Head, and I don’t lie to Cat Heads.”
…It seems the fake Lan Bo is just as cute—after all, the original is adorable.
“We can work something out. Once I find my wife, I’ll bring her home, and then you can go back to the Caribbean to fill in for the Siren. How about that?”
“Sirens can’t work substitute shifts. They have to lead their people on migrations, clean up trash and oil spills in the ocean, and deal with nuclear waste—a Siren’s work is important, unlike that of your civil servants.” Lan Bo argued with him in all seriousness.
“Fine, fine, I won’t argue with you. What’s the code to your dorm?”
Lan Bo pulled out the note Xiao Bai had left him and glanced at it again, then replied truthfully, “36597.”
“Alright, let’s go.”
Just as Bai Chunian pushed open the door to the next room and let out a surprised “Huh?”, the door in front of Lan Bo swung open as well.
Lan Bo pushed the door open. His first instinct was to check the combination lock for any note Xiao Bai might have left, but the scene inside the room demanded his immediate attention.
An unpleasant odor filled the room. It was a restaurant, though he couldn’t be sure if it was the one he’d passed earlier. The walls were covered in warm pink wallpaper. Aside from the bar counter and range hood, which were still in place, the PVC countertop had a dent in it.
The wine rack had been completely overturned and shattered. A broken wine bottle lay on the floor, its black glass scattered everywhere.
As usual, a note was stuck to the keypad. Lan Bo peeled it off, glanced at it, and froze for a moment.
Lan Bo described what he had seen, and Bai Chunian stayed in constant contact with him.
“What kind of smell is it?” Bai Chunian asked.
“Maybe… nuts. Bitter.”
There was a silence on Bai Chunian’s end, as if he were thinking. After a moment, he said slowly, “I see. The research institute is behind this again. They didn’t kill us; they want us to clean up their mess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain everything later. For now, just do as I say.”
After pushing open the door to the dining room, Bai Chunian returned to the restroom where he had been earlier. The restroom was equipped with a toilet; one side of the wet-dry separated bathroom featured a red tiled wall, and the red laser in the corner of the ceiling was still glowing.
He had hoped the mirror would transform into a surveillance feed, allowing him to choose his call partner again, but this time the mirror showed no reaction.
Bai Chunian reached for the round mirror to reflect the laser code, when suddenly something occurred to him.
The first time he’d deliberately let Lan Bo test the code, he’d told Lan Bo to enter the code he’d seen while passing by the restroom—74692—but Lan Bo had said, “Wrong,” and argued with him, insisting the code was clearly 96472.
Bai Chunian rested his chin on his hand and thought for a moment, then tried entering “” on the keypad.
A ding sounded, and the green light came on—it was actually correct.
Before Bai Chunian had a chance to think it through, he suddenly noticed something odd. He leaned closer to the keypad of the code lock. Above the keys was a recessed slot designed to prevent peeping while entering the code. Bai Chunian pressed his face against the bottom of the slot and reached inside to pick at it.
At the top corner of the keypad, Bai Chunian managed to pry up a sticker.
He continued to pick at it for a moment, lifting one corner of the sticker until he could pinch it between two fingers. Then, using a bit of finesse, he pulled it downward. Slowly, he managed to peel off a layer.
The layer he peeled off was just a standard keypad sticker—like a keyboard cover—used to keep out dust. When it got worn or dirty, you could peel it off and replace it with a new one; the company’s IT department always kept a stack of them in their drawers.
But when Bai Chunian happened to glance at the keypad again, he suddenly broke out in a cold sweat.
The keys on the keypad, now stripped of their stickers, looked extremely strange—the characters were all reversed. The first row showed the reversed numbers 3, 2, 1; the second row, 6, 5, 4; and the third row, 9, 8, 7.
Bai Chunian compared the positions on the keypad to those on the sticker. If he pressed the buttons in the normal order shown on the sticker—that is, “96472”—the actual sequence entered on the keypad would be “74692.”
Bai Chunian immediately grasped the trick. He stuck the sticker back in its original place, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the half-sheet of A4 paper he’d picked up in the dorm earlier. He tore off a small strip, wrote “Passcode: 96472” on it with a carbon pen,
Worried that Lan Bo might not understand, he paused to think, then wrote a line of pinyin in Mermaid Language at the bottom and drew a simple sketch of a cat’s paw. After finishing, he retrieved the Band-Aid he’d taken from the infirmary, cut a piece from it with a razor blade, and stuck the note onto the retractable round mirror. As long as the real Lan Bo passed by this room, he should be able to find his reminder.
He chewed on the cap of his pen as he calculated the codes for the next two rooms, writing them down on separate notes. If the test succeeded, he would leave the notes for Lan Bo.
After writing the two notes, Bai Chunian added a line at the top: “Lan Bo, I’ve completely figured out what’s going on. Now all that’s left is to verify my theory. Lan Bo, be careful. Love, Bo.”
“Oh, and when you get to the gym, tell the guy who’s been in touch with you that you saw a smear of blood on the floor.”
That way, the fake version of himself would think the real Lan Bo was right behind him. If he tried to kill Lan Bo, he might end up killing the fake Lan Bo instead, or he might run into Bai Chunian himself—either way, the real Lan Bo wouldn’t get hurt.
After fixing two password bugs, I ran a hundred verification checks only to realize I’d made another stupid mistake. I was so frustrated I wolfed down three pastries.