A week after the resolution of the Cursed Piano case, Huang Xiaotao called me and said that she received formal acknowledgement of her contribution to the case, and a thick stack of bonus cash too!

In the report that Huang Xiaotao handed in, she made it a point to praise my autopsy methods and invaluable contributions to the resolution of the case. Thus, I received a bonus too. Since I wasn’t a police officer, she applied for a position called Special Consultant for me, which I must admit sounded very cool.

Soon afterwards, 18,000 yuan was transferred to my account. For a poor college student, that was no measly sum at all. I gave half of it to Dali, who received it reluctantly.

“Dude, this is way too much! It’s not like helped you much at all.”

“Think of it as an unexpected fortune. And as unexpected fortunes go, it’s better to share them than to keep it to myself. By the way, I need to give Lao Yao a thousand yuan too.”

“No, no, no,” said Dali. “Let me give him that out of my own share! Dude, you did most of the work. There’s no way I can live with myself getting more money than you! No, stop arguing, I insist! As a matter of fact, I’ll go get the money now.”

Since Dali wouldn’t relent, I had no choice but to agree to the arrangement. After a while, Dali came back and said, “Lao Yao called you a wicked man.”

“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t he want the money?”

“He said he’d been helping you since the beginning and that he should’ve gotten more than a thousand yuan.”

“That greedy bastard,” I sneered. “As if money is the main point of a criminal investigation…”

9,000 yuan wasn’t much at all, but it was enough for me to buy some materials and even to save some for when I needed more later.

I bought a pile of medicinal herbs, and borrowed a lab from a professor at the chemical engineering department to concoct some secret elixirs. When it all boiled down, I ended up earning almost nothing for solving this case. But then again, it didn’t matter to me, because all I really wanted was the chance to solve a case.

The fact that I could now use what I learned to clear the names for those unjustly accused just as my ancestor Song Ci did while also accumulating more experience and more knowledge was all I could ask for.

Two days later, I received a call from Huang Xiaotao in the middle of the night.

“Song Yang, can you come over now?” she asked. “We’re investigating an extraordinary case here, and we desperately need your help.”

“Right now?” I asked, surprised to hear the urgency. “But it’s already eleven, and there’d be no more buses outside the campus gate right now.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Huang Xiaotao. “I can arrange for someone in my team to go pick you up immediately. Wait outside the campus gate half an hour from now.”

Before I could say anything, she hung up.

I splashed cold water onto my face to wake myself up and refresh my mind, then tried to wake Dali up. But the second I touched his blanket I sensed that something off — I pulled his blanket away and saw that the idiot wasn’t even in bed! He stuffed his pillows under his blanket to make it seem like he was sleeping there. I cursed Dali under my breath. I knew that he must be using the money he just got to sneak out and play League of Legends again.

I put on my clothes and packed everything that I felt I might need into my backpack, then walked out of the dorm.

When I reached outside the college main gate, I found the idiot in an internet café that he often frequented. He was wearing headphones, chatting away with a girl without a care in the world. In front of him were empty paper plates with bamboo skewers on them and some more empty drink bottles.

I tapped his shoulder. He turned around and was shocked to see me.

“Dude!” he yelped. “What are you doing here? Oh, I bet you can’t go to sleep so you came here to surf the net, huh? Come on, there’s a free computer right here, I’ll teach you how to play Demacia Championship!”

“Forget your freaking game, dude!” I said. “There’s going to be a random dorm room search any minute now!”

“What?!” exclaimed Dali. “But it’s going to be midnight soon, are they crazy?”

“Why else would they call them random room searches, you idiot?” I argued. “Come on, hurry up! I heard that if they find out you’re not in your room they’ll never let you graduate!”

Dali dropped everything and ran out of the internet café with me. On our way he kept mumbling to himself about the excuse we could use to explain our absence. When we reached the main gate of the college, I saw a black Mercedes parked there with a big burly man standing on the curb leaning on the car. He had a cigarette in his mouth, and it was flickering in the darkness.

This had to be the police officer that Huang Xiaotao sent to pick us up.

“Get in the car!” I said.

“What car?” Dali asked. “Aren’t we going back to the dorm?”

“No, I lied,” I said. “Huang Xiaotao just called and apparently there’s a new case. I knew that if I didn’t lie to you like that, there’s no way you’d come with me.”

“Shit, dude!” he exclaimed. “How could you betray your old friend like that? I didn’t even say goodbye to the girl just now! No way, I gotta explain it to her.” He then pulled out his cell phone and launched the QQ app.

When we got to the car, I saw a big burly man who was probably in his early forties. He had a cigarette in his mouth. His physique looked strong like that of a boxer’s; his face was cold and jagged; his chin was full of stubbles; but the scariest things about him were his eyes — they were piercing, like that of a predator, and I knew when I looked at his eyes that he’d killed someone before. If I didn’t have that phone conversation with Huang Xiaotao earlier, I would’ve assumed that he was a member of a triad.

The second Dali saw the man, he immediately shuddered and hid behind me.

“Are you Song Yang?” the burly man asked, his voice hoarse and low.

“Yes,” I answered.

I found that I didn’t dare to meet his eyes, because it felt as if they were piercing through me like a pair of daggers. I could imagine him forcing confessions out of criminals without saying a word if he stared at them with those eyes.

“Team Leader Huang asked me to give you a lift,” he said, then stretched an arm to open the car door for us. “Get in the car.”

The end of his cigarette glowed in the darkness as he spoke, it looked almost like a tiny fireball.

I was about to get into the car, but Dali grabbed my arms and stopped me.

“Dude,” he said, “are you sure this guy’s a police officer? Look at him! I sense something wrong with this guy. Why don’t you ask him for his police badge before we go with him? He could be some criminal trying to get his revenge on us.”

I laughed.

“We’ve only solved one case, dude,” I said. “And the only criminal we’ve caught is Deng Chao, a college student. There’s no way anyone would want to take revenge on us right now. You worry too much. Get in the car.”

Dali reluctantly followed me into the car, sitting beside me in the back seat. I saw the police officer sweeping a glance at us through the rearview mirror before driving the car ahead.

“How should I address you?” I asked him.

“My surname is Wang.”

“Officer Wang,” I said, “What kind of case are we going to investigate? Can you at least give us some rough details of what happened?”

“That’s right,” echoed Dali, full of curiosity, “you woke us up out of bed so late at night, so I’m guessing it must be a huge case, right?”

“You’ll see when you get there…” the burly officer replied monotonously.

He said nothing else for the rest of the journey. I began to wonder why this man needed to be so terse and secretive. Then I suspected, just like Dali, whether he really was a police officer or not.

Half an hour later, we were driving along a street with shops on both sides. Most of them were already closed, and the shutters were all densely covered with advertisements. I scanned through them and saw many signs that said ‘adult healthcare’ and ‘sex supplies.’ The street itself was littered with garbage and the dirty sewage flowed in the uncovered drain. Judging by my first impression alone, this was not a nice neighborhood at all.

The car then turned into a narrow alley which was filled with many small hotels with bright neon signs. One of those was called the Yuelai Hotel. A few police cars were parked around this hotel, and the police beacon light illuminated the alley. There was a crowd gathered there too.

“Have you been here before?” Dali asked.

I shook my head and said no. Although I’d been studying here for four years, I rarely ever went out and explored the place, so most of the area surrounding my college remained foreign to me.

“This place looks really familiar…” Dali mumbled to himself. “Right! It’s a red-light district!”

“How did you know?” I asked him. “Don’t tell me you’ve been here before!”

“No way, dude!” he vehemently denied. “I’m not that kinda guy! I just heard about it from that fatso Sun — you know him, he stays on the same floor as we do! Haven’t you noticed how shady that guy is?”

“I can’t say, I don’t normally talk to people like that.”

When Dali mentioned the words red-light district, I was reminded of a no man’s land near Nanjiang City. It was near a bus stop, so there were many people there doing businesses, legal and otherwise. Violent fights among hooligans were a common occurrence in that area, and they often ended with a few people dead. There were some really shady businesses there that scammed women from other countries with false promises of high-salaried positions to go work there, but in the end, they were tricked into becoming prostitutes. So that was the kind of place that we were heading to.

The burly officer finally stopped the car. The minute we got out, I saw Huang Xiaotao running towards me.

“Song Yang! Thank god you’re finally here!” she said. “We’re at our wits’ end about what to do!”

“What happened here?” I asked.

“A hotel customer found a woman’s dead body under the bed in his room,” she explained. “There’s something strange about the way she died.”