Puzzle Madness

Chapter 182 Autumn is the Hunting Season (18)
Ai Xi paused briefly and sighed. A hint of weariness lingered on her face—the sky outside the air-raid shelter must already be pitch black.

"Okay, I just wanted to talk to someone. Just be my best friend for five minutes; there are some things you can't tell everyone."

boom! boom! boom!
Finally, the knocking began outside the iron gate, growing louder and louder. It sounded like someone was wielding a hammer, relentlessly forging something; the sharp sound almost pierced the skull.

Dust settled down, making the entire air-raid shelter seem to sway and shake. The iron gate gradually developed bulges and uneven surfaces.

The two were trapped in the cage, and Ai Xi simply used her thumb to push the blade longer:
"That's right. It's not complicated. I have a friend—he's very talented, and his talent has brought him very good character."

"But now: more and more people are discovering his talent. Originally, we had similar interests; but he is going to enter a world I don't understand—a world where people might hurt him; most importantly, I am not a part of that world."

"Changes in circumstances could cause friends to part ways. I can't accept that possibility; he's a friend I can't lose. But I can't say these things to him."

"He should live according to his own wishes and do whatever he wants, right?"

The boy with the eyeglasses managed to tilt his head back, his fingertips digging into the sole of Ai Xi's shoe. He seemed to have been somewhat intrigued by the topic, his eyes shining and his lips trembling.

He has neither admitted to Ai Xi's accusations nor denied them:

"Are you asking me if I'm right or wrong? You—you're actually the same kind of person as me, what's the difference between us? You definitely know which method is the best."

"If you find a way to kill him or imprison him, won't he be yours forever? He'll also—never leave your world. That's what a true friend is."

"Just like Huang Youtian, Datou Hong, and Suantang Bak Kut Teh—friends I only met once, pen pals—but, but! They will always remain in this air-raid shelter: with my father, forever my friends."

"As you saw earlier—in the exhibition hall—there are so many of my friends. You can do it too."

Ai Xi raised an eyebrow and tilted her head. It was hard to tell if she was mocking or genuinely surprised.
"Strange, why do you people all say the same things? Do you share brains or have telepathy or something?"

"Your guesses and opinions about others are just projections of your own thoughts: it's probably just judging others by your own standards. Do you want to understand what healthy friendships should exist in normal people?"

Click, click, click: She slightly shortened the blade and rubbed it with her fingertips.

"Friends are certainly not like what you describe. Friends are not your exclusive possessions, nor are they something you have to hold onto tightly."

“Originally, if he had something he particularly wanted to do, I would have supported him. But now it seems he doesn’t: so, I want to pursue the power to protect our friendship.”

Even if he changes, he will always be my friend. That's what friendship is about: sacrifice and compromise are inevitable.

"I helped my friend for the sake of my own inner peace and tranquility: there's nothing better. Alas, how foolish I was; how could you possibly understand?"

The boy with the eyeglasses squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. He began to avoid Ai Xi's gaze, yet didn't know where to look:
"Stop with the empty talk. The knife is in your hand; whatever you say is right."

"You still want to kill me, don't you? You just said—[you] I'm not the first one you've caught."

Ai Xi shook her head slightly, expressing her disdain with a sneer:
"Look at you, people like you only care about yourselves, don't you? You don't even listen when I talk to you."

"Of course, as I said before: if you cooperate, I won't damage your collection. Is your life part of your collection? Probably not."

"Anyway—I'm trying to get into his world right now. When you go to a new place, the first thing you have to do is get to know your surroundings: explore, deal with some simple goals, and gain some experience."

"To be honest, your superpowers are all very similar—I know them pretty well. I've also collected samples of the psychopathic serial killer. You are his worst version, too fragile."

"Next, I need more resources: so that I have some room to operate and handle things when something happens. It would be best to build a platform or organization. They would help me."

The boy with the eyepiece no longer wavered; his gaze held a more complex mix of emotions, including anger and mockery.

His teeth ground together, making a grinding sound, but the corners of his mouth kept turning up higher. Finally, he couldn't hold back any longer and burst into laughter:

"You think you're so great, huh?! A little more ruthless than the average person, a little more willing to use your brain."

"You—you have no idea what terrifying things are out there: I, I saw a monster that could deflect bullets with its eyeballs!"

He twisted his head with all his might, revealing to Ai Xi the long, gruesome scar on his neck hidden in his collar:
"That's something you can't handle with these little tricks! The monster in the yellow raincoat is a real monster, real violence—"

"Haha--keep going: one day you'll know what's truly terrifying."

Ai Xi was taken aback, and her slender eyes suddenly curved into an almost crescent shape.

She laughed too, and her words even carried a hint of lightness:

"Oh! So you've run into him? Why didn't you say so sooner! What a coincidence! Was it close range? Your eyeball bounced off a bullet. Wow!"

"You're quite good at handling corpses—you're a forensic pathologist, right? Haha, I should have remembered earlier that you had to deal with the police for your work; no wonder. No wonder it took more than a month for people to actually start disappearing in the air-raid shelters. You only became obsessed after meeting him."

Ai Xi raised her hand to cover her mouth, as if she were whispering:
"He told me about you, he told me who you were again. Ah, probably around the end of summer vacation, right?"

"You might not remember, but he was the one who took you to the hospital. Weren't you hit in the neck by a bullet that bounced off his eye? You recovered really quickly."

"No wonder you're a little better than other inferior products. Mong Cai really is a small place."

The smile came and went quickly. When Ai Xi lowered her hand, that subtle, sly understanding vanished in the blink of an eye:

"Okay, five minutes have passed. You're a terrible listener."

The banging outside the iron gate grew more urgent, like a roof during a downpour. The gate began to bend, and hemispherical protrusions burst forth from the metal door panel, scattering the rusty fragments everywhere.

The ground was faintly showing cracks—fine, dense, spiderweb-like fissures.

A sharp scream burst from the boy's throat, like a drowning person finally getting another breath of air:
"--Wait! I can help you too! I can be your tool, your weapon! You don't have superpowers, do you?!"

Ai Xi stared at the tip of the utility knife, where blood was flowing from the boy's ankle:
"Okay. Is there any way to keep you in check? I don't think we can sign a contract or anything like that. Do you have a solution?"

boom!
The door hinge finally snapped along with the door frame, and the rivets shot out like bullets; the iron door crashed down, raising waves of dust.

Ai Xi could feel a powerful, almost animalistic panting breath behind her, like a blower—it sounded like some kind of brown bear. [Goodness, goodness.]
The imagined assassin outside the door was approaching with incomprehensible howls and shouts.

The man with the eyepiece stared wide-eyed at the blade on his chest; blood was practically spurting from the corners of his eyes.
"me--"

Ai Xi gripped the knife hilt with both hands and interrupted him:

"Hmm, there's no good solution? I think so too."

She slammed the utility knife she was holding down into the space between the boy's second and fifth ribs: where his heart was located.

The boy with the eyepiece tensed up, then began to convulse like a fish; his hand stretched out straight, it was unclear whether he wanted to grab the human skin on the wall or the monster outside the door—
Pfft! Pfft! A string of bright red bubbles emerged from the corner of his mouth and slid down his neck.

Ai Xi gripped the handle of the utility knife tightly, then twisted and rotated it once more.
Snapped!
It had only turned halfway when the fragile blade broke off—but the eyepiece was no longer moving.

call--
A spinning, heavy object crashed down on the back of her head, accompanied by gusts of wind as sharp as blades. The gale whipped Ai Xi's hair, the strands flapping wildly, and even the hair tie came undone.

But when Ai Xi turned around, there was nothing behind her except for the bent and deformed iron gate shaking on the ground, making muffled noises from time to time.

She turned on her flashlight, illuminating the room where the smell of blood was beginning to seep out.

The thick black fog had completely dissipated, and the dust that had been blown up slowly drifted down, not much different from Christmas snowflakes.

Whoever broke through the iron gate has vanished without a trace, leaving little mark on the world.

The thought-body cannot exist independently of the delusional individual:
Ai Xi had already verified this. Pseudo-double assassins were more common and more vulnerable than she had imagined.
-
The serial killer is dead, but the job isn't done yet.

Ai Xi has no intention of dealing with the four fresh bodies in the air-raid shelter—Eyeglass Boy, Wong Yau Tim, Sour Soup Bak Kut Teh, and Big Head Hong—as well as the remains left behind by other victims.

Her physical strength would hardly be able to support such a project, and the moving process might leave more traces: that was not her karmic debt, and avenging them was all that Ai Xi could and wanted to do.

The dead cannot perceive the actions of the living, and Ai Xi only wants to fill the void in her own heart.

Nothing in the world is as satisfying as making yourself happy.

She pulled a pre-packaged replacement blade from her stockings and put it into the utility knife; then she carefully shoved the blade into the wounds that Eyeglass Boy had just sustained: Eyeglass Boy's shirt and stockings were also reduced to shreds and embedded in the blade.

One stroke after another. Ai Xi carefully swirled and stirred until the muscle tissue was shredded as finely as possible.

The wound must be properly damaged so that no one can determine one's gender and age by the angle and depth of the puncture.

Fire would have been a better option: however, the flames and the damage they could cause would have meant the scene was discovered much sooner; and preparing the tools would have been more troublesome. Ai Xi didn't have that much spare money for such things, and carrying them on her commute would have been even more inconvenient.

The blade trapped in the blurred heart is not a problem—Xixiao brand stationery has a large production volume, making it difficult to trace its source; Ai Xi originally took it from the warehouse of the Children's Palace when he was in the model airplane class.

Secrecy is Ai Xi's advantage: she intends to maintain this advantage as much as possible.
-
When Ai Xi emerged from the basement of this abandoned house on the outskirts of the city, it was already past midnight; this was another entrance to the air-raid shelter.

When she reached the asphalt road where no footprints would be left, she took off her men's sneakers, took out the cardboard stuffing inside and stuffed it into her pocket, then casually tossed the shoes aside; and walked on the hard road surface in her long socks.

There were dark red stains seeping through her stockings, the result of prolonged and intense friction. She had calluses, but calluses would eventually break.

These men's sneakers are a few sizes larger than Ai Xi's shoe size. They were picked up from a garbage dump next to Ai Xi's house. Although they are a new model that was just released this year, the synthetic leather upper is already mottled and tattered.

Ai Xi knew that law enforcement officers or other interested parties would easily discover that the shoes were a disguise, but that didn't matter.

Nothing needs to be done too meticulously; the exposed corner of an iceberg can actually obscure the view of others.

She walked slowly into the city, hiding in the shadows by the roadside; she found a phone booth on an empty street: inserted the card, and dialed.

Moths swarmed around the hot light bulb, occasionally bumping into the glass with barely audible fluttering sounds.

Even though it was the dead of night, Ai Xi knew her friend would answer the phone—he slept late on weekends and had just had his landline reinstalled two weeks prior.

"Hey?"

The background music was 16-bit music from the MD; Ai Xi realized that Dou Dou was playing "Magic Strong Unification War":
"Me? Secretly playing Yu Yu Hakusho?"

Beep—the pause button was pressed on the other end of the phone.

"Yeah, let's practice our moves."

Ai Xi scratched the tattered little advertisement pasted on the microphone with her fingernail, then threw the crumpled piece of paper on the ground.

"Oh, I'll come over and play with you now."

The sound of pages turning came through the microphone, hurriedly—he must be flipping through a strategy guide, looking up the move list:

"Come on! This time we're banning your brother Lu Yulu from using him, it's too much of a cheat."

Ai Xi raised her index finger and pressed down on a moth that was perched on the glass.
"Okay, then I'll try Illusionary Sea. It can give you half your health bar."

The sound of smacking lips in dissatisfaction could be heard, its volume fluctuating.

"Tsk! They use this kind of scoundrel character every day."
-
When Ai Xi arrived at the entrance of Tianhu Community, she ran into Dou Dou, who was waiting for her downstairs.

So they ate Guilin rice noodles together as a late-night snack and went home to play games; Huanhai was slightly weaker than Lu Yulu's brother in terms of performance, but DouDou still couldn't beat him, so she just gave her a pair of slippers to wear.

DouDou didn't ask her why she was dressed so strangely today, or why she wasn't wearing shoes: he never asked.

Just like he never asked Ai Xi about anything else.

(End of this chapter)