Time seemed to freeze in the ward. The pale walls, hospital bed, and glass windows had all turned into distorted reflectors, reflecting a strange, dizzying white light.
Clang—
The sound of metal handcuffs broke the deadly silent confrontation. Li Yuxin's hands kept shaking, and her whole person seemed to fall apart immediately. It took several minutes before she uttered a sentence intermittently with the clattering sound of her teeth: "…you…how… …know..."
"Do you think that you'll be fine as long as you hide the truth of He Liang's death, and will be able to get out of jail after you complete your sentence for stealing?"
"….."
Jiang Ting leaned down and whispered in her ear: "Hot summer nights, mid-July. This sentence means that in the evening in mid-July, the gorgeous sunset falls somewhere at 8:09, declaring the end of the youth, and the beginning of the time of punishment and the long night that follows is the entire execution process. Do you think the punishment for killing He Liang is over? No, far from it. Why don't you think about why you were the one who was chosen in the first place?"
"….."
Li Yuxin's beautiful face was pale and frightened, and she couldn't stop gasping as soon as she made a sound, but Jiang Ting grabbed her hand forcefully.
Jiang Ting's three fingers were still wrapped in gauze, and Li Yuxin's hand was also injured in the struggle. The two equally white, slender and scarred hands grasped each other tightly, giving the illusion that the left hand was clenching the right hand.
"Tell me," he said, "and I'll take you out of this nightmare, otherwise you'll never be able to escape from those people for the rest of your life."
"No…" Li Yuxin whispered hurriedly, "It's not just me…"
"I'm not the first… ahead of me, still, there are…"
Jiang Ting's eyes flashed.
The metal chain jingled, that was Li Yuxin holding Jiang Ting's finger tightly as if she had gained unspeakable courage from this move:
"But the… two people before me, they are… both dead."
Dead.
Both were killed.
As if the day and night were reversed, the scene changed. Everything around the ward receded from the girl's eyes, and the scene that was repeated countless times in the nightmare gradually invaded the field of vision and devoured all the senses.
It was the golden-red sunset sinking below the horizon, the night rising from the end of the wilderness, and He Liang, who was tied up, knelt on the ground tremblingly.
The ghosts surrounded the open space, and the girl holding the knife was so weak that she could not even stand.
"Go kill him," said a smiling voice in her ear.
"No… no…"
"This coward betrayed you for his own life, so he must be punished."
"Please, let us go, please…"
"Go kill him, otherwise you'll also lie down underground holding hands with him."
"I can't do it, please, please, please!"
The crying girl has forcibly turned her head away. In the ground pit not far away, two rotting corpses were holding hands and cuddling with each other. Their empty eye sockets were facing the sky, and black internal organs and maggots were faintly visible in the bones.
"Look, this is the end of it." The voice was still smiling, always seeming to be very happy, and said, "You will suffer the punishment together."
You will suffer the punishment together—
The girl burst into tears, and her heart-rending wailing rose from the wilderness to the sky, and gradually became the same voice as the desperate choking in the ward:
"I don't want to kill, I don't want to kill He Liang, why is it me?"
"What wrong did we do to be punished, I don't know, really don't know…"
"You didn't do anything wrong," Jiang Ting wiped away the tears on the girl's face and whispered, "Listen, when I call the policeman later, you'll tell him everything, you know the part about how He Liang was killed."
"I-I don't dare," Li Yuxin sobbed: "I really don't dare, I—"
Jiang Ting said: "You dare. He Liang was indeed killed by you, but dead men tell no tales. If the kidnappers cannot be caught, no one can prove that you were indeed coerced. Do you want to sit in prison for the rest of your life because of other people's crimes?"
Li Yuxin shook her head like crazy.
"Then do you want to go back to school, let the police apply for a meritorious award for you, and restore your reputation in front of all your relatives, friends, teachers, and schools?"
"….."
Li Yuxin's face was pale, and following Jiang Ting's soft and low voice, as if bewitched, she nodded at a loss for a while.
Jiang Ting said, "Then you know what to do."
Just as he was about to stand up, Li Yuxin grabbed him and pulled him hard like a life-saving straw: "Officer, you—why do you want to help me?"
Jiang Ting didn't answer right away, his face didn't show the difference between joy and anger, and after a while, he turned his head and looked out of the hospital window.
Through the glass window, he saw Yan Xie was standing in the corridor, he was talking on the phone with someone, and it was impossible to hear the conversation from here.
"…Because the target he really wanted to execute was neither He Liang nor Shen Xiaoqi." Jiang Ting spoke in Li Yuxin's cold ears, his voice was so low that only the two of them could hear: "It was me who betrayed him."
Li Yuxin's pupils suddenly widened.
The voice that was always calm and familiar came from the phone: "It was neither He Liang nor Shen Xiaoqi… It's me who betrayed him."
Then there was a click in the corridor behind him, Yan Xie turned his head and saw Jiang Ting standing at the open door of the ward, and he said to him concisely: "Come in, she is willing to explain."
"Oh, okay." Yan Xie's face showed no abnormality, and he hurriedly said to the mobile phone: "Continue the search and rescue and keep in touch, I will contact you as soon as I have news." Then he pressed the button and put the mobile phone back in his pocket. After that, he stepped forward and hooked Jiang Ting's shoulder: "How is your hand?"
——When he asked this, he clenched Jiang Ting's wrist, and at the same time, his other hand slid from Jiang Ting's back shoulder to his waist and gently took off something small from the edge of the belt.
It was the microphone that he pinned up by hugging when he left the ward just now.
"It's okay, it doesn't matter." Jiang Ting's face was full of unconcealed exhaustion. He pulled his hand back: "Don't worry about me."
Yan Xie walked into the ward and turned to smile at him.
This smile is actually a bit weird, but because it is extremely short, no one noticed it.
Li Yuxin was leaning on the snow-white pillow of the hospital bed, her lifeless face finally regained a trace of blood, and she immediately struggled to get up when she saw Yan Xie coming in, speaking very hoarsely: "Can you really count my meritorious performance and send me back to study? "
Jiang Ting sat far away in the armchair at the other end of the ward, with his hands folded on his thighs, like a static and graceful statue.
Yan Xie glanced at him, then immediately withdrew his gaze and nodded: "Yes, I promise."
——His expression was quite meaningful, but Li Yuxin didn't notice it. She was fully focused on that promise.
"I didn't see what that person looked like." The girl finally squeezed out the first sentence: "I only heard his voice."
Yan Xie narrowed his eyes.
"In July last year, I was with… He Liang, we were dating. Because of the bad grades in the final exam, my dad was scolding me at home all day long. I ran out in a fit of anger and called He Liang to come out to accompany me…We both walked along the road until it was dark and we were almost out of the county town. At that time, a car came to take us home."
Li Yuxin swallowed dryly, and Yan Xie immediately asked, "What car? What does the driver look like?"
"It was a silver Hyundai. It was dark at the time, and I couldn't see the driver's face. It was a man in his thirties or forties. Soon after we got in the car… I don't know how we fell asleep."
Yan Xie didn't say a word and actually, he couldn't say anything.
Two unarmed and defenceless sixteen-year-old high school students got into an unknown vehicle in a daze; their safety awareness was terrifyingly low.
"When we woke up, we were already in that place, there was no one around, it was all mountains and wilderness. We were very scared, but we shouted to call someone, but it was ineffective. So we could only keep walking… For the next two days, we spent the next two days in the woods." Li Yuxin couldn't help sobbing: "We didn't have anything to eat or drink, He Liang was injured, and we both had a fever…"
Yan Xie suddenly heard something weird: "No one kidnapped you?"
"I didn't know that we were kidnapped at all. It wasn't until I came back that I heard that He Liang's parents received an extortion call." Li Yuxin sobbed: "But we really didn't know it at the time. It was just that we kept walking and walking in the mountains, and we both didn't even see anyone else in the first two days!"
Yan Xie seemed to understand something, but he didn't say it, and asked, "What about the third day?"
Li Yuxin's expression was like someone was strangling her.
"On the third day, we met…" After a while, she forced a few words out of her throat: "Those people were wearing black clothes and their faces were covered."
—People wearing black clothes and covered faces?
"How many? Male or female? How did you meet them?"
"I don't know where they came from. On the third day, we climbed to the open space on the top of the hill and passed out. When we woke up, we found these people surrounding the open space. He Liang was tied up; he was kneeling on the ground and was begging and pleading… I tried to run but they caught me. I desperately called for help, begging them to let us go, but someone held the phone to my ear—"
Li Yuxin's eyes widened, it seemed that so long had passed, yet the terror at that time was still deeply immersed in the bone marrow:
"The voice said on the phone that He Liang was a coward who betrayed me and told me to kill him. I begged him not to do that, but he said that if I didn't dare to do it, I would be punished with He Liang. Like, like…"
Yan Xie asked, "Like what?"
"….." Li Yuxin shuddered and said after a while, "There is a pit on the ground."
The ward was terribly quiet, and Yan Xie and Jiang Ting both focused on the girl's face that didn't look like a living person's:
"In the pit…there are two corpses…a man and a woman, holding hands…"
"He said that if I didn't kill He Liang, I would be like the girl in the pit…"
Yan Xie's face changed completely. He knew what Li Yuxin's words meant: last year's 712 was not the first serial kidnapping incident!
Before He Liang, there were at least a pair of victims!
"…So you killed He Liang?" Yan Xie's brain buzzed and he heard his own voice asking the question.
Li Yuxin dodged and avoided his gaze.
"No," the girl muttered, "I don't know anything, I… I fainted. When I woke up, He Liang was… already dead."
Yan Xie raised his eyes to look at Jiang Ting, who silently lowered his eyes.
In the ward, only Li Yuxin's trembling breathing and choking could be heard. After a long time, Yan Xie slowly nodded and said, "Okay."
——Yan Xie is that kind of person: he rarely talks nonsense when handling cases, and he takes action to solve what he can take action to solve.
But as long as he is willing to say it, every word he speaks is a nail, and it can never be changed by an external force after being nailed.
Jiang Ting breathed a sigh of relief, but it didn't show on his face. He didn't seem to see Yan Xie's sharp gaze, and the muscles on his face were still relaxed. He asked Li Yuxin indifferently: "Afterwards, those people let you go?"
Li Yuxin shook her head, and when she opened her mouth, she heard the sound of her teeth clattering: "No, no, no. They drove several off-road vehicles, moved He Liang to one of them, and took me down the mountain in the dark at night… After going down the mountain… They sprayed something on my face and I suddenly fell asleep. When I woke up again, a whole day had passed, because the sun was setting down again. Then I saw the off-road vehicle parked on the top of the hill, they put He Liang ——remove He Liang, who was motionless with his eyes closed, out of the car…"
The girl's speech was incoherent, she wanted to hug her head, but she could only struggle with the handcuffs in vain:
"A big hole was dug in the ground…they put He Liang in it, put him inside…"
"Then they filled the pit with soil… ah ah ah!"
Her thread-like nerves that were stretched to the limit finally broke, and she let out a sharp cry like a ghost.
Yan Xie raised his hand and pressed his tightly furrowed eyebrows. With this action, he slowly digested the huge amount of information in Li Yuxin's words just now. After a while, he sighed hoarsely amid the girl's tragic cries.
"The executioner is not a single person, but an organisation with perfect mobility. The leader of the organisation targets young men and women who love each other. After the kidnapping, they throw them into the barren mountains, then they make extortion calls, send blood clothes, and notify the execution time. The two hostages struggled to survive, and then when the execution time came, the girls were forced to kill the boys, and if the girls did not dare to attack, they would kill both at the same time and bury them hand in hand."
Yan Xie shook his head and took a deep breath: "This sense of sacrifice and ritual feels like a cult, but I don't know what 'betrayal' and 'coward' mean."
Jiang Ting did not speak.
Yan Xie pondered for a moment, then suddenly raised his chin at Jiang Ting: "Hey."
"What?"
"Why do I feel that this organisation is a bit similar to the drug cartel behind Feng Yuguang's case, Could it be the same group?"
Although it was a question, Yan Xie's oppressive ending seemed to hint at something vaguely, causing Jiang Ting to drop his gaze.
Looking at his side cheeks slightly, there are long, beautiful streamlines formed from the eyelashes to the tip of the tail. It makes him a little cold and hard to get close to.
"Actually I was thinking about another thing," he said suddenly.
Yan Xie said "Huh?"
Jiang Ting ignored him: "Li Yuxin?"
It was unknown whether the girl was still crying or collapsed because of exhaustion. The wailing has gradually subsided, and her body twitched from time to time. When she heard the words, she raised her battered and exhausted face.
"You said that when the kidnappers coerced you to execute He Liang, there were two bodies of a man and a woman in the pit next to him. But after He Liang died, he was buried on another hillside a whole day's drive away?"
Li Yuxin bit her lip and nodded.
Jiang Ting turned to Yan Xie: "Although I can't figure out why he was buried elsewhere, is it possible that the kidnappers will use He Liang's body to terrorize the next pair of hostages?"
——This is really too easy to associate. Before Jiang Ting could finish speaking, Yan Xie said: "Tianzong Mountain!"
"Ma Xiang!" Yan Xie took out his mobile phone and dialled the number, and quickly instructed: "The kidnappers are not individuals, but a gang. Immediately notify the city bureau to send someone to obtain the information about ins and outs from 12:00 noon to 12:00 p.m. on July 16 last year. All mountain roads in the hinterland of Tianzong Mountain are monitored, and the target is off-road convoys, so notify me immediately!" He then covered his mobile phone and asked Li Yuxin, "Can you still remember any landform features where He Liang was executed, and where He Liang's body was buried? Any information? This is critical! Any detail must be given to the police!"
Under the watchful eyes of the public, Li Yuxin shuddered and said, "Yes."
——She was so sure all of a sudden that not only Yan Xie, but Jiang Ting was also surprised.
"There is a large flaming red tree on the hillside where He Liang was buried. They forced me to stand in the open space and watch the dirt hole be filled up. That person told me on the phone—"
"'I thought you were a fowl rolling in the dirt but who would have known that you would have the fate to see this phoenix tree'." Li Yuxin's face showed a mixture of irony and despair: "That's my life, this is my life. For the first time in my life, I saw the Phoenix Forest with my own eyes."
Yan Yan suddenly raised his phone: "Ma Xiang…"
"Yes! —Hey brother Yan? What's wrong?"
"I'm with Consultant Lu, and I seem to know why the kidnappers used the blood of the white-tailed sea eagle this time." Yan Xie paused and said, "Also, notify the provincial department and Director Lu to use aerial photography to survey the entire Tianzong Mountain. The place where the kidnappers are going to kill Shen Xiaoqi is a phoenix forest."