Another Murder, Another Sigh

Xie Qingcheng and He Yu were the last to leave the auditorium.

When they stepped outside, they found students moving in clusters toward the dormitories under the guidance of teachers and police, while the campus broadcast looped its announcement: 'All students please remain calm. Do not wander alone. If you are in an isolated area, contact your teacher, roommate, or classmates immediately. Return to your dormitories in an orderly fashion…'

But the broadcast was no match for the noise.

Out in the open, every pair of eyes was fixed on a phone screen — or on the campus landmark: the Broadcast Tower.

The tower had been purpose-built for students in broadcasting and media arts, modeled after a professional television station, its entire facade capable of full-coverage illumination.

Tonight, the control system had been hacked. The whole tower was locked in a blinding red — like a blood-slicked blade driven into the earth — and across its surface, in bold black lettering visible from kilometers away, several lines of text blazed in the dark.

W,

Z,

L,

Drop the Handkerchief Death Game. Begin.

Beyond the tower itself, the attacker's software had also seized every smartphone signal across campus. The phones still worked — but a small window had appeared on every screen that could not be closed.

Tens of thousands of tiny glowing frames turned Huzhou University's nightscape into a river of foxfire, except every star in that river was broadcasting something monstrous.

Xie Qingcheng looked back down at his phone and saw that the text in the video matched what was projected on the Broadcast Tower.

It read: W, Z, L — Drop the Handkerchief Death Game. Begin.

But in the video, beneath each letter, a ring of uncanny little digital dolls sat in a circle. One of them — a girl — swayed and giggled outside the ring, a crimson handkerchief dangling from her hand, just like the childhood game.

Behind the letter W, the girl had already dropped the handkerchief behind one of the little boy dolls. The boy was running; the girl skipped after him, still smiling.

Then —

The girl caught him. Still giggling, she grabbed the little boy doll by the head and wrenched it clean off.

Seconds later, every phone on campus chimed in unison with the same thin, childlike singing: 'Drop it, drop it, drop the handkerchief — set it softly behind your little friend, and don't let anyone tell him…'

Amplified across countless speakers, that gentle nursery rhyme became something that raised every hair on the body — a chorus that rang through the entire campus.

The students stared, terror compounding by the second. They pressed together in clusters; some refused to go back to the dormitories at all, convinced that staying out in the open was safer. The more timid were already sobbing. Phone ringtones clashed with the singing in a constant din — parents calling in from everywhere. The incident had blown up too fast and too wide: in the age of instant messaging, what was happening at Huzhou University was already spreading virally across every platform, drawing an avalanche of attention.

'Hello — Mom! I'm fine… but I'm so scared…'

'Waaah, Dad! I'm with my classmates! Yeah! I won't go anywhere, waaah…'

In the chaos, Xie Qingcheng called Xie Xue. She was at home making wontons with Auntie Li. He exhaled, gave her a brief summary, told her to stay inside and not go out, and asked her to check in with him every hour. No lingering — he ended the call.

When he looked up, he found He Yu watching him quietly. Their eyes met; He Yu glanced away.

'…'

It was only then that Xie Qingcheng registered: no one had checked on He Yu.

Almost everyone around them had received something — a call, a message, from family or a friend. He Yu's phone had stayed silent the whole time, still as standing water. His expression matched it.

Xie Qingcheng was about to say something when the Drop the Handkerchief melody cut off, and every phone on campus lit up with the same oversized photograph. The moment it appeared, the officer standing nearby let out a quiet 'fuck.'

A second later, a voice came through the officer's radio — his captain, incandescent with rage: 'That's a crime-scene photo the Police Force just took as evidence! How the hell did it end up in their hands?!'

Everyone's attention snapped toward it.

The photo was completely unredacted.

It was disturbing, sensational, and brutal: a male corpse strangled in a disheveled hotel bed, tongue protruding, body entirely bare — except for a pair of Red High Heels on his feet.

The room itself was immediately recognizable to half the student body. That was the university-run hotel, wasn't it?

Every year during enrollment season, parents came to drop off their children and often stayed there. The rates were decent, and a Huzhou University student card got you a discount. After the enrollment rush cleared out, the hotel settled into a steadier trade — student couples keeping it in quiet, regular rotation.

A wave of hushed 'holy shit's broke out across the crowd, mostly from the male students — the girls, on the whole, had less tolerance for this kind of image, and many were already turning away in tears, faces buried in their hands. The guys absorbed the visual shock a bit better, and plenty of them recognized the place on sight: the same bed, the same room where they'd taken their girlfriends. Jesus — what used to be a love nest was now a murder scene. Who'd ever dare book a room there again? One look at that bed and it would kill the mood permanently.

Young Master He had never patronized a budget hotel like that — and besides, he had no girlfriend to bring. So he furrowed his brow, genuinely puzzled by why the 'holy shit's coming from the guys around him contained something beyond sheer horror.

But he had read something else in the image. He turned, whatever friction had existed between him and Xie Qingcheng momentarily set aside, and looked directly at Xie Qingcheng's face.

And in Xie Qingcheng's eyes he found the same suspicion that had just surfaced in his own —

Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital.

The method of killing resonated with Chengkang Psychiatric Hospital in a way that was hard to ignore.

First, the clothing. The victims were both men, yet both had been dressed in feminine attire at the time of death. Liang Jicheng had been put in full women's clothes; this corpse wore Red High Heels.

Second, the music. Neither He Yu nor Xie Qingcheng would ever forget the song that Jiang Lanpei had hummed while dismembering the body in that office — the moment they had believed Xie Xue was dead, and from the other side of the door, drifting through, had come the madwoman's low, eerie singing: 'Drop it, drop it, drop the handkerchief — set it softly behind your little friend, and don't let anyone tell him…'

Third, the three letters WZL — a precise echo of the cryptic message the two of them had once found in the Neverland Cave.

Gradually, more and more students began recognizing the similarity to Jiang Lanpei's methods. A fear-laced murmur spread through the crowd.

'…Jiang Lanpei…'

'Right — Drop the Handkerchief. That's the song she sang while she killed. I read it in the paper…'

'Don't those Red High Heels look like the shoes in the newspaper photo of Jiang Lanpei?'

'God, I heard that shoes represent evil spirits — and carrying someone off…'

One student, seemingly shattered with fright, lost control entirely and screamed: 'It really is Jiang Lanpei! Jiang Lanpei's vengeful ghost is coming for blood!!'

The scream set off a cascade.

He Yu had mentioned it to Xie Qingcheng before: after Jiang Lanpei's brutal death, given the nature of her suffering and how she had died, a rumor had taken hold among the student body at some point — that if you wrote down a scumbag's name and his preferred cause of death, signed it from Jiang Lanpei, the vengeful ghost she had become would come and collect.

The photograph now playing out across every screen was an unmistakable echo of that campus legend, and with the amplification of thousands of phones, the students' emotions were being pushed past any reasonable threshold.

Watching the scene deteriorate, the police and teachers tasked with evacuating students raised their megaphones and bellowed with everything they had:

'Everyone quiet!! Students — do not crowd here. Follow your teachers back to the dormitories! We will keep you safe!'

The students were herded forward in fits and starts, but their eyes never left the murder photo.

Years of over-sheltering had left them with almost no tolerance for this kind of imagery — and faced with something genuinely bloody and terrifying, they found they couldn't look away. Fear begged them to stop; something more compulsive kept pulling their gaze back. The more frightened they became, the more they looked; the more they looked, the worse the chaos grew.

The evacuation was already a struggle. Then, as if on cue, the video on every phone changed again.

The photograph vanished. The screen reverted to the WZL Death Game — the Drop the Handkerchief display.

But something had shifted from before.

Behind the W, the dead man's name had been filled in: Wang Jiankang. The little digital figure beside his name had gone dark and still, frozen in the frame where the boy's head had been wrenched off, every smiling player locked in place.

And below W — Wang Jiankang — the letter Z. The digital children behind it, which had been motionless until now, began to spin at speed. The little girl holding the red handkerchief ran giggling in circles, weaving behind the others, ready to drop it at any moment…

The Second Round of the Killing Game had begun.

Xie Qingcheng and He Yu looked at each other, both thinking of the line they had found in the Neverland guestbook: 'WZL will meet with harm in the near future.'

At the time, they had both assumed WZL was one person's initials. It had never crossed either of their minds that it might be the first letters of three different names.

W — Wang Jiankang was dead.

Z — who would that be?

He Yu's phone rang.

He Yu startled, and when he saw the name on the screen, he paused for a full second before picking up — with an Adaptation that wasn't quite there yet: '...Dad.'

He Jiwei had just stepped out of the airport when his secretary forwarded him the footage from Huzhou University's viral murder case. 'What's going on at your school? What kind of security operation lets something like this happen?'

He Yu said nothing.

He Jiwei: 'Where are you right now?'

'Outside the campus auditorium.'

'I'll have Chief Li send someone to pick you up.'

'No need.' He Yu scanned the crowd — it was packed past sardine capacity, and Xie Qingcheng was standing right there beside him. If a police car came to collect him now, Xie Qingcheng might not say anything, but the look in his eyes afterward would drop another full octave in contempt. 'Don't bother, a car can't get through anyway. I'll head back to the dorm in a bit.'

'But what if something happens —' He Jiwei had caught the din on He Yu's end by then. He stopped walking. Exhaled. 'Is there anyone you know around you right now?'

He Yu glanced at Xie Qingcheng.

He wasn't sure, really, whether this man counted as someone he knew.

Or whether things were still as they had both once decided: that what existed between them was a doctor-patient relationship, clean and complete, and nothing more.

'Hello? He Yu, are you listening?'

He Yu was about to answer when a boy's voice came through from his father's end of the line: 'Dad! Slow down — I left something on the plane, I need to go talk to the crew.'

'…' Hearing that, He Yu's expression went flat. 'It's fine, Dad. I have someone I know here.'

He glanced at Xie Qingcheng.

'I'm with Dr. Xie.'

'Xie Qingcheng?'

'Yeah…'

'What's he doing there with you — is he treating you?'

He Yu genuinely didn't know how to answer that.

Since the hotel incident, Xie Qingcheng had done nothing but pick fights with him. He couldn't really say he'd ever been properly counseled.

And yet, somehow, he felt considerably better. His attention had stopped circling entirely around what had happened with Xie Xue.

He hadn't noticed it until now. He didn't have much trust in Xie Qingcheng — had always felt like Xie Qingcheng was just exploiting the situation, making his life difficult. But in this moment he realized that might have been the treatment all along.

Psychic Ebola had significant psychological components alongside the physiological ones. Xie Qingcheng didn't practice pure pharmacotherapy — what he emphasized was the guidance and reconstruction of a patient's inner world. Calling him a touch idealistic wasn't entirely unfair.

It was also why Xie Qingcheng was unsuited to short-term consultations but well-suited to long-term accompaniment. A therapist like him rarely sat across from someone and said: 'You're unwell, let's talk about it — tell me what's on your mind.'

He intervened in ways that were woven into ordinary life, the kind that went unnoticed. He had always wanted his patients to feel like ordinary people.

In psychological treatment, what mattered wasn't how polished or dazzling a doctor's words sounded in the moment.

What mattered, in the end, was what comfort the patient had found — and what had shifted in their state of mind.

He Yu realized that through all his weeks of bickering with Xie Qingcheng, all that energy spent trying to outmaneuver every trap Xie Qingcheng set for him, he had actually come a long way out of the wreckage of that heartbreak.

The realization held him still for a moment. He looked up at Xie Qingcheng. '…'

He Jiwei: 'Why have you gone quiet again? What's wrong now?'

'Nothing.' He Yu cleared his throat and shifted his gaze from Xie Qingcheng. 'Right — yes, he's treating me.'

'This Xie Qingcheng… we tried to keep him on before and he wouldn't stay, tried to hire him and he wouldn't take the job, insisted on working pro bono.'

He Yu could hardly explain that he'd bitten the man during an episode at the hotel and rattled him badly enough that Dr. Xie had felt compelled to step in out of sheer exasperation. He hedged: 'He just… checks in occasionally. Nothing formal.'

He Jiwei paused. 'All right. Then stay with him — don't go back to your own room. A bunch of kids crammed together, what safety is that? Stay with your Dr. Xie, go back with him to wherever he's staying.'

He Yu: '…Dad, that's not really appropriate.'

'What's inappropriate about it? He raised you from when you were small. He'd be glad to help with something like this.'

'He's not my doctor anymore.'

'That's a separate matter. Outside of any professional arrangement, aren't there still human ties? Why else would he still check in on you occasionally? Besides, things didn't end badly between him and our family — why keep such cold, precise accounts? If you're too embarrassed to ask, put him on the phone. I'll talk to him.'

The younger boy's voice came through again from He Jiwei's end: 'Dad, why are you walking so fast — who is it? He Yu?'

'…Got it.' The moment He Yu heard that voice, he had no more appetite for the conversation. 'I'm hanging up.'

After he ended the call, He Yu's gaze settled on Xie Qingcheng. He cleared his throat. 'So — '

Xie Qingcheng: 'Your father wants you to come back with me.'

'…You heard.'

Xie Qingcheng made a quiet sound of assent and fell into step with He Yu as the crowd moved them forward. The campus was on lockdown; there was no getting back to Huzhou Medical. But he could go to Xie Xue's dormitory — he'd mentioned it to her just now and already had the key code.

After a long press through the crowd, the two of them made it back to the dormitory. Xie Qingcheng opened the door.

'Come in.'

The lights clicked on. The everyday warmth of the room absorbed the oppressive weight that had followed them in from outside. The horror was still unfolding — but in here, it receded to something more like watching fire burn on the far bank of a river: police-versus-killer as cinema, no longer suffocating.

And this was Xie Xue's room, which meant the coffee table greeted them with a spread of junk snacks and a plush bear.

And two cups of instant noodles she hadn't thrown away.

He Yu: '…'

Xie Qingcheng: '…'

Hard to feel like you were in any real danger.

Xie Qingcheng closed the door, loosened the top button of his collar, and set about cleaning up after Xie Xue with a face of stone.

He Yu surveyed the living room, which offered no clear surface to stand on. He had visited Xie Xue's place before, but she'd always tidied up before letting him in.

He had not anticipated that the untouched version looked like a recycling depot.

For a moment, this struck him as more profoundly disturbing than the murder scene photograph of Wang Jiankang. It was difficult to reconcile a room this chaotic with the neat, put-together person Xie Xue was on the outside.

He stood in the doorway with his hands behind his back for a good while before carefully venturing: '…Is it always like this?'

'Always has been.' Xie Qingcheng had been her parent long enough to have made his peace with it. Without changing expression, he picked up a stuffed bear Xie Xue had left on the floor, gave it a pat, and set it back on the shelf.

He Yu: '…………'

'Go put some water on. Make us tea.'

'…All right.'

Boiling the water, He Yu found that the tea set left in the sink was a double set — and the strainer had some tea leaves in it, a red tea that Xie Xue wasn't particularly fond of.

Something flickered at the edge of his thoughts, but before he could pursue it, Xie Qingcheng called from the living room: 'Use the Tibetan tea on the third shelf of the tea cabinet. That's what I drink.'

He Yu acknowledged this, and concentrated instead on hunting through Xie Xue's chaotic stash of snacks and drinks for the Tibetan tea his 'Director Xie' had requested. The red tea and the double set slipped from his mind.

The room was set to rights before long. Xie Qingcheng looked, as he always did, sharp and composed and faintly above the ordinary world — but that was only one face of him.

A man who had started raising a sister eight years his junior while still a teenager himself was never going to be anything as simple as that.

When He Yu came out carrying the tea tray, Xie Qingcheng was bent over picking up the last stack of books strewn on the carpet.

The posture suited him. His legs were straight and long, his waist lean, and when he folded down the line of his shirt pulled taut — the narrow, controlled line of his torso showing clearly beneath it.

Hearing He Yu, he straightened, slid the books back onto the shelf with one hand, and glanced sideways at him — chin lifted slightly, a silent directive for Secretary He to set the Tibetan tea on the now-cleared coffee table.

Secretary He: 'I used the Snow Field Cold Fragrance. That's the right one, isn't it.'

'Yes.'

Director Xie finished tidying, went to wash his hands, and settled onto the sofa, tugging his collar loose.

Through the wall, the noise outside was still audible — the crowd, the sirens — and if Xie Qingcheng turned his head even slightly, the living room window offered a clear view of the tower, standing like a blade of judgment drenched in blood-red light.

On the phone screen, the little girl behind the Z was still spinning, handkerchief in hand.

Xie Qingcheng: 'A hacker?'

He Yu: 'Has to be. The lockdown covers all mobile devices in this zone and the Broadcast Tower.'

As he spoke — partly because having two phones running the same video in the same room was irritating, and partly out of the competitive instinct that came with being a hacker — he opened his phone and started keying in a sequence of commands.

'…Interesting. They're using the latest equipment from the United States — I've worked with it once before.' He Yu said, quietly, after a moment. 'Wide signal radius, but it has a bug. Breaking free from it isn't actually that hard.'

He kept his eyes fixed on the decryption code running across the screen, pressing into the opposing system's defenses.

A few minutes passed.

He Yu's phone went quiet.

Released from the signal's reach, he set it aside without ceremony.

'That simple?'

'My skills aren't exactly at the bottom of the rankings.' He Yu, ranked among the top five in the hacker dark web, said this with complete modesty. 'He shouldn't have come anywhere near me with this.'

'Can you stop the signal across the whole area?'

He Yu smiled slightly. 'No. I don't have the original hardware — can't go that far. And that's the Police Force's job. If I wade in, I'd just make myself a target for investigation. I won't shield your phone either — keep it on, let the video run.'

That was reasonable. Xie Qingcheng agreed.

He Yu settled into the seat across from Xie Qingcheng and asked: 'By the way — did you know Wang Jiankang?'

Xie Qingcheng was a professor at Huzhou Medical; Wang Jiankang was almost certainly some kind of university administrator. He Yu had only asked on a whim — so he wasn't expecting Xie Qingcheng to take a sip of his Snow Field Cold Fragrance Tibetan tea, close his eyes briefly, let the back of his neck rest against the sofa, and say two words: 'I did.'