Piao Lin stood in the third-floor lounge drinking coffee, stirring it with a spoon while stretching his neck. They had no set clock-out time before a case was closed, so they were stuck here, wrestling with the files. He took a couple of sips of coffee and chatted idly with Jue in his Communicator.

"Date after work?" Piao Lin asked Jue.

Jue was engrossed in a game of spotting discrepancies in data and replied, "No system has asked me out." It tried its best to keep up with human thinking. "Do you have a date today?"

"No, I don't. I was just asking you." Piao Lin found Jue quite endearing. He held his coffee cup, hesitated for a moment, and then asked, "Maybe we could have a drink after the case is over?"

Jue was playing its game and didn't answer immediately. For a normal person, this game had little appeal; it required verifying correct answers within a sea of data. But Jue loved the feeling of being immersed in a database; it enjoyed it. Piao Lin was special. He liked this game too.

"My old man told me not to get into an office romance." Jue's voice was a bit hesitant. "But I do quite like sweet pomelo-flavored data sparkling wine."

"I'll have it ready for you." Piao Lin smiled.

Jue "saw" Piao Lin's smile, which confused it as always. It couldn't figure Piao Lin out. He always kept it in his Communicator, worn in his ear. Them becoming partners was a coincidence, but their collaboration was very pleasant, and their relationship had continued this way until now, with neither side wanting to end it.

"Our star Profiler has arrived." Piao Lin interrupted Jue's data search. Looking down from the third floor, he had a clear view of the parking lot.

The traffic was terrible, and the sun was already setting in the west. Yan Junxun got out of the car, taking the Communicator from the seat beside him.

Next to the open-air parking lot was a basketball court where some high school students were playing after school. As Yan Junxun passed by, someone from the court called out to him, asking him to play.

They must have mistaken him for someone their age.

Yan Junxun felt awful. His T-shirt was sticking damply to his back, and he had no desire to exercise at all. But he didn't mind being hailed by the students; it made him think of school. He had never been to school, had no classmates, no club activities. Only in this moment was he normal in the eyes of others.

"Did you participate in any sports activities in Black Panther?" Shi Shanyan stood behind Yan Junxun. He glanced at the basketball court, feeling nothing for the group of snot-nosed kids drenched in sweat.

He was different from Yan Junxun. He didn't have this thing called a "sense of belonging."

"No." Yan Junxun's fair skin flushed red when he was hot. He turned his head to avoid the sunlight, hopped up the steps in a few strides, and stood before the door's inspection system.

He wanted to get a little farther away from Shi Shanyan, so the ambient noise could help distract him.

It was already past closing time, but there were still quite a few people in the lobby of the Supervisory Bureau. The central light screen cycled through the day's news, and the sounds of high heels and leather shoes crisscrossed the space. Yan Junxun walked in a straight line to a vending machine, scanned his face, and got a can of cold beer. Without pausing to catch his breath, he opened it and started drinking, as if to douse all the heat.

"The Department of Transportation said there was another accident on the highway. I figured you'd be stuck in traffic," Jiang Lian came around from the other side and greeted them. "Let's talk in my office."

Shi Shanyan looked up and saw the lobby's security camera. He stared at it and asked Jiang Lian, "Do you have one in your office?"

Jiang Lian followed Shi Shanyan's gaze and replied, "No... What's wrong?"

"Is Jue working?" Yan Junxun asked, turning his head back.

"Yes, it's with Piao Lin. What's wrong?" Jiang Lian looked at them suspiciously. "Do you need me to call it to the office for you?"

"No need," Yan Junxun casually tossed the empty beer can into the trash. "We don't need any systems."

......

Jiang Lian's office didn't have its own independent internal system. The Supervisory Bureau had a central system that managed internal divisions of labor, and systems like Jue all had their own duties. Jiang Lian didn't know what was happening. He walked into his office and, out of caution, turned on the shielding device anyway.

"The investigators found Cheng Lixin. We found his fingerprints on the bicycle outside Li Jianhua's home," Jiang Lian sat down. "And those old sneakers match his shoe size."

Yan Junxun's gaze was fixed on the glass wall, from which he could still see the lobby's camera. He said, "Is that so."

Jiang Lian noticed his reaction was strange.

"I couldn't figure out why the killer would put the bicycle back," Yan Junxun retracted his gaze. "Now it's solved. She didn't put it back at all. She parked the bicycle where she worked, and someone stole it and placed it at Li Jianhua's front door."

"Who?" Jiang Lian asked in return. "Cheng Lixin?"

"The killer is a woman," Yan Junxun affirmed once more. "It's not Cheng Lixin."

Jiang Lian wouldn't refute Yan Junxun; he couldn't. He searched for things he knew within Yan Junxun's words and said, "You think Cheng Lixin has no motive?"

"He doesn't." Yan Junxun felt much better after finishing the beer; he could already forget about Shi Shanyan next to him. "Why would he kill them? He just needed money. Liu Xincheng isn't the owner of the mahjong parlor. Looking at his residence, you can tell he doesn't have money, not to mention Cheng Lixin is terrified of him. Right? You said he was so in debt to the mahjong parlor he didn't even dare to leave his house."

Yan Junxun took back his small blackboard. The information in his mind was connecting rapidly.

"We still don't know where the killer dismembered the body, but it's about to be revealed. Cheng Lixin is just a cog, one of those complex, useless details. Some mad dog dragged him into this not to move the investigation forward, but to use him as a smokescreen. Don't turn on your light screen. Turn it off."

Jiang Lian immediately turned off the light screen.

The sun had now sunk in the west. The office lights were off, and it was somewhat dark. Shi Shanyan seemed unconcerned with these matters. He had his legs crossed, sunk into the soft chair, sleeping. The Restraint Lock was fastened around his wrists like a simple ornament.

"There are two killers in this case. One of them is hiding behind various serial numbers," Yan Junxun noticed Jiang Lian's Communicator lying on a pile of documents. "But it's no big deal. Just an agitated minor character, not worth a second glance."

The more Jiang Lian listened, the more confused he became. He tried to keep up with Yan Junxun's pace. "Two killers? Wait a minute, you mean someone is working with the killer, and they're using the traces at the scene to frame Cheng Lixin?"

"That's my guess," Yan Junxun said in an extremely confident tone. "You can give it a listen... The killer originally only killed one person, her husband. Their house isn't small; maybe it was used as a private workshop, with tools that could help her dismember the body. She dismembered her husband at home, used some method to dispose of the body parts, and no one found out. She felt good about it."

She was pretty smart, finding excuses to fob off the people around her.

"She's not from the Docking Area; her hometown isn't here. I think her husband might have been in a car accident or had a serious illness. In any case, it must have been a misfortune that all her relatives and friends knew about. Otherwise, she couldn't have kept up the lie. Living so close, someone would eventually want to see the man of the house. The most likely excuse she used was paralysis. If a person can't move, they can't appear."

Yan Junxun was silhouetted against the light, his head slightly tilted in thought.

"Then along came a madman. Or a rat? Call him whatever you want. The madman used something to drive the killer insane..." Yan Junxun stared at the Communicator. "To keep up her lie, the killer needed to wear her Communicator often, to make it seem to others that her husband was still alive. That's it, the Communicator. Maybe one day, as the killer was falling asleep, she really heard her husband's voice through the Communicator."

She must have been scared to death. She was so afraid of her husband, went to such great lengths to kill him, even dismembered him, yet he had bizarrely come back to life right in her ear.

"The madman is good with network issues; the network is his habitat. A lowly, timid piece of trash hiding in a garbage heap, feeding curated information to the killer," Yan Junxun's voice was devoid of warmth as he spoke. "This is truly a low-class, impatient, and aimless operation. He incited the killer to commit murder, and the hidden commonality among the victims is that they all had contact with Cheng Lixin."

The Communicator was silent.

Just then, there was a knock on the door. Piao Lin stood in the doorway and asked, "Can I come in?"

Jiang Lian looked at Yan Junxun. Yan Junxun frowned but didn't answer. The seconds ticked by, and a puzzled Piao Lin knocked again.

Jiang Lian cleared his throat and said, "Just a—"

The Communicator immediately rang.

Jiang Lian's Communicator ringtone was his wife's voice. At this moment, it was vibrating in the darkness, still singing the birthday song.

Yan Junxun didn't press anything. He knew the Communicator would connect automatically. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the Communicator switched to auto-answer. The person on the other end sounded like they were dragging something heavy, their breathing labored. That breathing sound diffused through the darkness, inexplicably reminding Yan Junxun of Huo Qingjun.

"I was framed—"

The madman was still using a voice changer, imitating Huo Qingjun's cries.

"I didn't sexually assault anyone, I didn't break the law, I was framed."

Yan Junxun could almost smell the stench of blood, so strong it made him want to vomit.

"Sigh..." The madman tapped his fingers on a tabletop out of boredom. He had many small, fidgety movements, like someone with ADHD. "Feeling pleased with yourself? Hm, this game was pretty easy to figure out. Yan Junxun, I want to tell you, it's useless even if you guessed right." He leaned closer to the Communicator and said in a low voice, "Huo. Qing. Jun. Is. Al. Rea. Dy. Dead. You didn't see anything at all." The madman's tapping on the table was erratic; he seemed constantly unable to control himself. "What did you see? You still haven't found the killer." He bit his tongue and laughed again. "Don't imitate me, do you understand? You damn fake, don't imitate me. You disgust me to my very core. You should sit up straight. I'm watching you."

"Where?" Yan Junxun lowered his voice. "In the gutter?"

"Isn't that the place you crawled out of?" the madman said strangely. "'When the late sun brings rain without a trace, a sparrow is seen leaving its cage; the lord carries Skynet, to seek a shadow through eight hundred layers.' — Yan Junxun, this name doesn't belong to you. It suits me better."

Shi Shanyan had sat up at some point. He was completely silent, not even stretching.

"We can call this game 'The Prelude.' It's just a... a bit of after-dinner amusement for me. I need to play a game after I eat. You too, right?" The madman bounced his leg. "I know why you're so fixated on this case. You've set your sights on Huo Qingjun's family photo. Poor little cub. You're still trying to get back into the ranks of normal people, but nobody wants you. How pathetic. You wanted to become a Black Panther, but in the end, Fu Chenghui didn't want you either. Ah, I'm about to cry just talking about it. You really are the most pitiful little mutt in the whole world."

The madman had indeed just finished eating; his chopsticks clinked against his bowl.

"You should be angry. Jump up, just like when you smashed that car." The madman's laughter grew louder. "No one here knows your true face. You'd better hold on to your 'sanity' at all times, or I'll call the cops on you. It took you a whole week to play 'The Prelude.' I think that was more than enough time. I'll arrange the next one more meticulously." The madman stopped laughing and moving, as if something had just occurred to him. "Are you trying to pinpoint my location?"

"That's right," Shi Shanyan said after typing on a keyboard for a long while, "your position has been exposed."