Once Doctor Li and Aunt Ding recovered their wits and learned the truth, they would realize that Chen Ge had been pulling the strings all along — and that he was the one who truly needed to be eliminated.
Dancing on the edge of a blade. Chen Ge had understood his position from the very start, but he had no choice but to play this game. He needed to cripple as many tenants in the building as possible before Doctor Li and Aunt Ding figured out what was happening. Once they united and still couldn't pose a threat to him, he could take over the building in broad daylight.
"Aunt Ding, stay inside and rest. Lock the doors and windows, and be careful. Datou and I will go take a look." Doctor Li's face remained expressionless. Chen Ge couldn't read what he was thinking, but one thing was certain — Doctor Li had taken the bait.
This was a golden opportunity to clear their suspicion. Naturally, neither of them would let it slip.
Seeing Doctor Li bite, Chen Ge stood up and turned to Aunt Ding with a look of genuine concern. "I'm not sure whether the person who killed the landlord is the same one who killed Qu Gui. You're staying here alone, so please be careful."
"I'll keep that in mind." Aunt Ding didn't catch the deeper meaning in Chen Ge's words. She lay on the couch, putting on a weak and frail appearance.
"Let's go. Aunt Ding needs to rest." Doctor Li was the first to open the security door. He leaned in and whispered something to Datou.
Chen Ge activated his Ghost Ear and caught the faint sound of the word "agreement."
His expression didn't change. He followed Doctor Li out of the room at an unhurried pace.
In terms of schemes and cunning, Doctor Li was a fairly formidable person. The problem was that he underestimated Chen Ge far too much.
Perhaps he had instinctively cast himself as the predator — someone who preyed on the weak. Each successive kill had swollen the devil inside him to monstrous proportions, and ordinary people were nothing more than prey waiting to be chosen.
If he could ride the current and pin the blame on someone else, great. If not — if there was no way to pass the buck — he'd simply eliminate everyone who knew the secret.
That warped psychology was why he hadn't taken Chen Ge seriously. To be fair, it wasn't entirely his fault. Who could have imagined that an outsider would piece together most of the truth from scattered clues in such a short span of time?
Of course, as time went on, his suspicion of Chen Ge would only deepen, and his desire to kill Chen Ge would grow ever stronger.
Aunt Ding lived on the fourth floor, and Datou was her neighbor. After Doctor Li finished whispering to him, Datou made an excuse to step into his own apartment for a moment.
Half a minute later, Datou emerged, his expression perfectly normal.
"Aunt Ding needs her rest. Let's leave her be." Chen Ge glanced around at the group. "That middle-aged guy on the third floor still hasn't come back?"
"Let's just go to him directly. We can save some time that way." Doctor Li spoke up immediately, never realizing that every word Chen Ge said seemed designed to guide him toward a particular action.
He didn't feel like he was being manipulated. He just felt that working alongside Chen Ge was comfortable — like someone always arriving with a pillow the moment you felt drowsy.
The group went straight to the door of the middle-aged man on the third floor. Chen Ge knocked for a long time before the man finally opened up.
"Sorry about that — my stomach was acting up. Had to spend a while in the bathroom. So, where are we headed next?" Beads of sweat clung to the man's forehead, and his breathing was still slightly ragged. He didn't look like someone who had just finished using the toilet.
"We're doing a floor-by-floor sweep. Since you've already opened the door, let's start with your place." Without waiting for the man to object, Doctor Li walked straight into the room, with Datou right behind him.
"You can look around all you want, just don't break anything. I've got a lot of precious collectibles in here." The middle-aged man seemed to have already dealt with his "secret." He wasn't worried at all about Doctor Li finding anything.
Watching the man brim with confidence, Chen Ge shook his head inwardly. It was entirely possible to manufacture a secret when none existed — and the person doing the manufacturing had nothing to do with him. Right now, he was more like a bystander.
Everyone filed into the rented room. The middle-aged man's apartment was a mess — empty bottles and household garbage littered the floor. The cleanest spot in the entire room was the wall covered with posters of women.
"You plaster all these portraits on your wall and you're not scared when you get up at night?" Chen Ge's manner of searching was completely different from what it had been at the electrician's home. He kept his eyes fixed on the posters, holding the middle-aged man in conversation and buying time for Doctor Li and Datou to act.
"Why would I be scared seeing them at night? Isn't it a wonderful feeling?"
"What's so wonderful about staring at posters?" Chen Ge glanced over at the couch and noticed that the women's underwear was still strewn across it in a heap.
The fact that the underwear hadn't been put away meant the man didn't care if people saw it. These items couldn't possibly constitute his secret.
At first Chen Ge had assumed the man was merely a fetishist, but now he suspected things were more complicated. This sleazy middle-aged man probably hadn't stopped at just collecting underwear — he must have done something far worse.
"Hey! Come take a look!" Doctor Li's voice rang out from the man's bedroom. Everyone crowded toward the doorway.
Doctor Li pulled back the black cloth draped over the wardrobe and swung open the door. Inside sat a collection of pornography — videos and books with extremely explicit covers.
"They're all part of my private collection. I never distributed them. Not against the law, is it?" The man leaned against the doorframe.
"Might any of these tapes have recorded something else?"
"If you don't believe me, go ahead and check for yourself. But with this many titles, it'd probably take you months to get through them."
The middle-aged man moved to shut the wardrobe door, but Doctor Li caught his hand. "Open the locked box under the bed. Let us have a look."
"Don't push this too far!"
"You wouldn't want to be wrongly accused of murder, would you? Open it up. If it has nothing to do with the killings, we won't say a word." Doctor Li's face was blank, his voice cold enough to make anyone instinctively afraid.
"Fine, I'll cooperate. But when I come to your place later, I'll be doing a thorough search too." The man issued a meaningless threat as he pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the wooden box beneath the bed.
Inside were female body mannequins, so lifelike that from a distance they were virtually indistinguishable from real people.
"This is my wife. She's kept me company for a long time." The man stood next to the wooden box, refusing to let anyone touch the mannequin.
To anyone unfamiliar with doll-making, the mannequin would simply seem beautifully crafted. But as it happened, Chen Ge was a master of the art.
He knew every material used to make dolls, and none of them could produce skin this convincing — unless what had been used was real human skin.
The mannequin in the box was fundamentally different from most commercial dolls. It was divided into dozens of detachable components — every part of the body could be taken apart and swapped out. Compared to a finished doll, this was more of a body frame, with the face, hair, skin, and everything else customizable.
The middle-aged man showed off the mannequin in the box, but only let people look — never touch. Apart from the mannequin, there was indeed nothing else in the box. The building's tenants had never interfered with anyone's personal quirks.
"Seen enough? Can I lock it back up now?" The man was about to close the lid when Datou's voice suddenly echoed from the bathroom.
"What the hell is this?!"