Chapter 23: The Real Culprit!
The door slammed heavily against the wall as Chen Ge rushed into the room and yanked open the window.
"Damn! This high?"
Standing by the windowsill and looking down, the drop was at least three or four meters to the ground.
Urgent footsteps echoed from the hallway—the landlord and the tattooed man were closing in fast.
Chen Ge had no time to think. He climbed out the window, gripping the sill with both hands while bracing his feet on the first-floor security bars.
"He must have seen us moving the corpse!"
"We can't let him get away!"
The landlord's ugly, furious face appeared at the doorway. He raised a cleaver, his expression twisted with rage. "Still trying to run?!"
With that kind of threat, Chen Ge didn't hesitate. He let go and jumped.
His arm scraped against the wall, and his clothes were torn open by the security bars. After landing, he rolled on the ground, grabbed the tool hammer he'd dropped, and sprinted toward the outer wall of the compound.
"Hurry! Catch him!" the landlord roared, hurling the cleaver at Chen Ge.
A chill ran down the back of his head as Chen Ge saw the cleaver embed itself in the grass behind him, missing by a hair's breadth. Cold sweat poured down his face. "I absolutely cannot fall into their hands—they've already made up their minds to kill!"
The security door of the apartment building swung open, and the fat man and the woman who had been lying in wait on the first floor charged out, clutching iron shears used for trimming shrubs.
"A bunch of lunatics!" Chen Ge ran for his life, darting like an arrow toward the compound's iron gate. He stepped on the landlord's newly replaced lock, grabbed the rusted chain, and vaulted over the gate to escape.
The apartment building was surrounded by a dense forest. The night was pitch black, making it impossible to see the path. With the pursuers hot on his heels, Chen Ge rushed headlong into the woods in his panic.
It was a chase—one fleeing, the other pursuing. Flashlight beams swept past occasionally, and the landlord and tattooed man's curses rang out behind him. Chen Ge didn't dare look back. His only thought was: Get out of here!
His clothes and pants were shredded by branches and vines, and he was covered in mud and leaves. After running for a full fifteen minutes, he finally shook off the landlord and his crew.
He crouched in the bushes, watching the faint lights scanning in the distance, his fingers digging into the soil as he gasped for air.
That was too close!
Trapped in the apartment building, a single moment of hesitation or a wrong choice could have cost him his life.
"Is this trial mission always this hard?" The tasks issued by the black phone were a gamble with life and death, and what made it even more terrifying was that it all happened in reality.
Shaking off the landlord for now didn't mean he was safe. Chen Ge huddled in the bushes, dreading the thought of turning his head and suddenly seeing the landlord and the others with their shears and cleaver right behind him.
Once his heartbeat returned to normal, Chen Ge slowly stood up from the bushes. The landlord's flashlight beam had vanished. The deep forest was dead silent at night, with barely any insect chirps or bird calls.
"Which way should I go?"
He was unfamiliar with the area, and after running wildly through the woods, he couldn't even tell north from south anymore.
"Maybe I should just hide here until dawn?"
Chen Ge pulled out his phone and saw that the livestream was still going. The screen had been black for over an hour, and the chat was flooded with question marks. This bizarre livestream had even seasoned veterans scratching their heads.
He didn't bother interacting with the viewers. Checking the time, he was about to open Heshan's reply when he suddenly heard the rustling of branches from behind him to the side.
Chen Ge quickly shoved the phone back into his pocket to prevent the screen's light from giving away his position.
Gripping the tool hammer tightly, his palms sweaty with tension, he stared fixedly at the bushes where the sound came from.
After a moment, a faint beam of light shone through.
"Someone? Who's there?"
Just as Chen Ge was about to spring up and swing the hammer, he heard a familiar voice.
"Wang Qi? Didn't he leave the apartment building ages ago? Why is he back in the middle of the night?" Chen Ge was curious, but he knew well that curiosity killed the cat. He stayed crouched, motionless.
"Did I see wrong? No way." Wang Qi swept his flashlight around a few times, unwilling to give up as he paced in place.
"I absolutely can't go over there. This guy's problems are no less serious than those of the tenants in Ping An Apartment." Chen Ge not only avoided approaching Wang Qi but actively moved away, heading in the opposite direction.
After walking a short distance, Chen Ge noticed the terrain getting steeper. It seemed he had run the wrong way and ended up deep in the back mountain.
Pushing through the bushes, he came across a slope. Surrounded by trees, Chen Ge spotted a very crude wooden hut with a sign nailed to the door. He leaned in to read it: "Prevent fire like preventing a pandemic; never be careless. Improve the investment environment; start with afforestation."
"This looks like a forest ranger's place." He tried pushing the door. It wasn't locked, and with a creak, a strange smell wafted out.
"What's that?" He didn't dare turn on his phone's flashlight, only increasing the screen brightness.
The hut was small, with various daily necessities scattered around like a garbage dump.
Sniffing the air, Chen Ge moved toward the source of the strongest odor. Lifting the bed board, he found a huge pile of moldy clothes underneath.
"A hoarder?" What he saw was worse than he'd imagined. Most of the clothes under the bed were women's, never washed, and covered in stains.
He pulled out a few items to compare sizes and found they were all the same size, likely belonging to the same person.
"The dirt on these hasn't completely dried. It looks like someone wore this within the last day or two?"
With his skill in mortuary makeup, Chen Ge had a deep understanding of human body lines and structure. As he measured the sizes with his fingers, an image of the female corpse walled up inside the building flashed through his mind.
"The sizes match perfectly. These clothes probably belonged to the woman in the wall!"
Why would a dead person's clothes be hidden in this hut? And someone had worn them just days ago!
Chen Ge's heart began to race. He spread the women's clothes on the ground and fished out some crumpled scraps of paper from the pockets, with faintly written phrases like "I love you" on them.
"This handwriting..." Chen Ge pulled out the note he'd taken from the doll's body and compared the two. The handwriting was about eighty to ninety percent similar.
"The note in the doll was from five years ago, but these women's clothes were clearly dumped here within the last few weeks. Five years apart—why are they so alike?"
The same handwriting, the same love letters. Could the culprit behind both cases be the same person?
He picked up the clothes again, about to close the bed board, when a peach-colored phone fell out of an inner pocket.
"The victim's phone?"
He picked it up and pressed the power button, finding the screen on an unsent text message.
"Help me?"
A bad feeling crept over him. Trembling, he opened the sent messages folder. Every single message contained only two words—Help me!