Chapter 742: The Braid

The top-floor tenant's apartment was furnished simply, completely devoid of any unnecessary decorations. The occupant had to be an extremely pragmatic person.

From the layout of the room, I could roughly guess a few of the occupant's personality traits.

I reached in and took out the pens from the drawer. There were red, black, and blue ones. I compared the ink levels in their cartridges; they were uneven, making it obvious that all three had been used.

'Writing with three colors at the same time? Yet there isn't a single piece of paper to be found in the apartment. What was this person up to?' Every illogical detail could be the breakthrough point of the case. I placed the three pens back where I found them and looked around.

The rental apartment contained almost no furniture, allowing me to take it all in at a glance. It would be very difficult to hide anything in this place.

'A wooden chair, a desk, a single bed...' When my gaze landed on the bed, my Judging Eye caught a specific detail: the bedsheet was much larger than the mattress. It hung down, almost touching the floor.

'Under the bed?' I crouched down and lifted the bedsheet. It was completely spotless underneath, without a single piece of clutter.

'This person is quite tidy.' I rubbed my finger against the floor; there wasn't even any dust under the bed. 'Spotless. Did the occupant have germaphobia?'

Normal people rarely bothered to clean under the bed in a rental apartment so thoroughly. I was just about to stand up when I suddenly realized something was wrong.

My Adam's apple bobbed. I set my phone aside, grabbed the bedboard with both hands, and slowly flipped it up.

'This...'

Taped to the underside of the wooden bedboard—which was two meters long and over a meter wide—were dozens of photographs of all sizes!

What shocked me even more was that the space next to every photo was covered in pen annotations. Various lines connected the photos to one another, seemingly mapping out the relationships between the people in them.

'Old Granny mentioned that this occupant had moved into the Red Building less than three months ago. To create such a detailed and meticulous relationship map in such a short period of time... even I couldn't pull that off, and I received professional training at the police academy.' Once I got over my initial shock, I calmed down and examined it closely.

Every single photo taped to the underside of the bedboard had been taken in secret; there were almost no clear shots of anyone's face. It was only after reading the surrounding annotations that I realized these people were all tenants of the Red Building—or, more accurately, people who had once lived in the Red Building.

Because the photos included both the living and the dead.

The bedboard was divided into four sections, corresponding to the four units of the Red Building. What stood out was that, aside from the photos in Unit 1, every single photo in the other three units had been crossed out in red pen.

Those bright red X's were harsh on the eyes. I didn't know what they meant—perhaps they represented death, or perhaps they meant the person had been ruled out.

All the relationship threads were drawn in black pen. The lines crisscrossed, but it didn't look messy in the slightest. Notably, in several photos belonging to Unit 1, Zhu Li, the Doctor, and a tall, gaunt middle-aged man had been circled in blue pen, with a question mark drawn beneath them.

'He... seems to have been tracking down a murderer? And his final list of suspects had been narrowed down to these three!' I propped the bedboard up, sat on the floor, and let my Judging Eye sweep over every single photograph.

Excluding the corpses in their various gruesome states of death, there were twenty-one living people in the photos, nine of whom belonged to Unit 1 alone.

I had already met six of them. Of the remaining three, one had been crossed out in red pen. The last two were likely a married couple, as their pictures had been cut from the same photograph.

'The one crossed out in red might be the person who jumped off the building a few days ago, like Zhu Li mentioned. As for the couple, nine times out of ten, they are the Security Guard and his wife.'

The photo of the Security Guard was one of the ones circled in blue. He was expressionless, tall and gaunt, and dressed in a light gray coat. His eye sockets were deeply sunken, making him look like a skeleton completely drained of its life essence.

Compared to the hideously ugly Security Guard, his wife was excessively beautiful. While she might not compare to Jiang Fei or Ye Bing, her looks were still exceedingly rare among ordinary people.

Their photos had been cut apart. If one were to piece them back together, it would be glaringly obvious that their relationship was far from harmonious.

The angle of the photo was very unique; it had clearly been taken secretly from a high vantage point.

The wife's clothes were torn. The Security Guard's hand clamped around her neck like an eagle's claw, while his other hand was glued to her waist.

It was easy to see the wife's reluctance and fear, yet she was utterly powerless to resist.

'The photo of the Security Guard's wife hasn't been crossed out in red. But according to Zhu Li, she hasn't left her apartment for days. Judging by the situation in this photo, I'm afraid she's likely met a grim fate.'

Based on the first impression the photo gave me, the Security Guard had a volatile temper and a heart completely twisted by feelings of inferiority, jealousy, and the like. It was no wonder the occupant had circled him in blue pen; a person like that would be considered a dangerous element even in normal society.

The occupant had used a black pen to make annotations detailing their daily habits. Reading through them yielded a massive haul of information, revealing several critical details: Zhu Li left the Red Building periodically; the Doctor had been close friends with the person who jumped off the building a few days ago; and Zhu Li was fiercely protective of Bai Ya'er. Once, when the Security Guard had tried to touch her, Zhu Li actually forced him back with a knife.

While I couldn't assume every one of his notes was entirely accurate, they at least gave me a clear direction to investigate.

'The Doctor was close friends with the person who jumped to their death a few days ago. Yet that person died mere days after moving in. The Doctor has an incredibly bizarre personality. When I first met him, he even pretended to be helpful by giving me a severed hand to use for protection. The man harbors nothing but ill intent. I strongly suspect that the nicer he is to someone, the faster they end up dead.'

The claim that Zhu Li was protective of Bai Ya'er also raised my suspicions. If he truly wanted to protect her, he wouldn't have let her seduce a stranger and bring him home late at night, while he himself hid on the other side of the wall to peep on them, only to sneak over later with a knife in hand.

He wasn't protecting Bai Ya'er at all. He was merely satisfying his own perverted psychological needs, as if treating it all as a game of roleplay.

'I need to figure out the exact relationship between the Security Guard, Zhu Li, and the Doctor. None of those three are good people.'

As I focused my gaze on those three photos, I noticed the blue pen markings over them once again. The occupant had reached the same conclusion as me. But this raised a crucial question: what role did this occupant play in the Red Building?

This guy living on the top floor was entirely different from the other tenants of the Red Building. He was calm, rational, and didn't look like someone whose mind had been warped by obsession in the slightest.

'Is he a live show streamer?' Staring at the densely packed annotations and photos on the bedboard, I quickly dismissed the thought. Out of all the surviving live show streamers, no one would be clumsy enough to map out relationships this way.

'This person feels a lot like a police officer.' I couldn't be entirely sure, though. If the police had discovered the Red Building, this place should have been leveled long ago. There was no way it would still be allowed to harbor so many lunatics and perverts.

'If he was just an ordinary cop, he definitely wouldn't have survived here for three months. This guy is anything but simple. But what was his objective in coming to the Red Building?'

Scanning the entire board, I had to review all the photos twice before I finally spotted something suspicious.

Almost all the photos on the bedboard had been taken in secret, which was why practically none of them featured a clear shot of a face. However, there was one exception.

In the section dedicated to Unit 4, there was a photo whose material differed from the Polaroids produced by an instant camera.

It was a normally developed photograph, and the subject inside was facing the camera head-on, showing a clear view of her face.

'Why is this photograph so unique?'

The photo depicted a very cheerful-looking girl. Her features were ordinary at best, but she had an incredibly sweet smile. The joy on her face was highly infectious. She had an average figure and very long hair tied in a ponytail, and her skin was so pale it almost looked translucent.

This photograph was taped at the very top of the Unit 4 section. There were no written annotations around it; it had merely been crossed out with a red X.

My full attention was drawn to this photo. Propping my chin up with one hand, I stared intently at the girl in the picture. 'The occupant carefully arranged the position of every photo on this board, ordering them from lowest to highest to correspond with the floors of the building. This picture is placed at the very top of Unit 4. Does that imply she lived on the top floor of Unit 4?'

At that thought, I froze. 'The top... floor? Isn't that exactly where I am right now?'

It felt as if a sudden gust of cold wind had just blown against the back of my neck. My hairs stood on end as an inexplicable shudder racked my body, and I subconsciously glanced behind me.

My gaze swept through the bedroom and through the half-open door into the living room. Everything looked normal. I continued to turn my head, but when my eyes swept past the metal front door of the apartment, I felt as if the blood in my veins had instantly frozen solid. A bone-piercing chill shot straight into my heart.

The front door in the living room was wide open, and a Woman in Red holding an umbrella was standing in the doorway!

I had no idea how long she had been standing there. She appeared to be facing away from me. A long, thick braid hung down over her chest, but behind the wisps of hair, there were no facial features at all. I couldn't even tell if she was looking at me!

My thoughts seemed to freeze. My pupils constricted violently as cold air hissed through my clenched teeth.

Time stretched into infinity; every passing second was sheer agony.

About half a minute later, the woman with the black umbrella stepped backward into the apartment. She drew closer and closer to me, and it was only when she reached the center of the living room that I finally realized the truth.

The woman hadn't walked in backward at all. A long braid hung over both the back of her head and the front of her face. She simply didn't have a face to begin with!

Her fingers, stained with bits of gore and blood, gripped the handle of the umbrella. Her skin was terrifyingly pale and covered in a web of tiny cracks.

After entering the living room, she paused in the center of the apartment for a brief moment before turning around without warning and sprinting straight toward the bedroom!

The long black braid was practically right in front of me. As I sat paralyzed on the floor, the advice of the restaurant owner from the outer district suddenly echoed through my mind: 'Never open an umbrella indoors...'