The house suddenly fell silent.
A cat?
Mu Wang and Zhao Kepu, who hadn’t encountered Xiao Mei at all, said nothing. The others, after thinking for a moment, slowly revealed looks of dawning realization.
Shen Xiaoxiao clapped her hands in excitement. “Of course it’s a cat!”
“That body that can slip in and out of anywhere is definitely a cat. After all, cats are liquid.”
“Just now, Liu Zhengxing said he saw Xiao Mei eat a bird raw, but it wasn’t Xiao Mei eating it—it was the cat! Lots of cats catch and eat birds, and some even torture them. I read a news story about a stray cat destroying over a hundred bird nests, killing every hatchling inside.”
She looked at Jiang Yan, “So is this cat a yao—a cat spirit? Did it possess Xiao Mei or hide real Xiao Mei away and pretend to be her?”
Jiang Yan shook her head.
Just as she’d determined earlier with the swallow’s feather, she could easily tell if something was a yao through contact.
So she was certain—this dead Xiao Mei before them wasn’t a cat yao, nor was she possessed.
Since it’s not a yao nor a person, then it could only be—a cat.
A cat, in the biological sense.
Due to the haunted house illusion, this cat only appeared as Xiao Mei to everyone; they’d all been made to see her that way.
And even though it was a cat, it couldn’t actually fit into a two-centimeter-thick sliding door, or keep dying and resurrecting. Thus, this was an exaggerated cat.
An energy field wouldn’t contain anything truly meaningless: if the haunted house’s creator included a cat, and had it display as Xiao Mei, then this cat must be significant. It was bound to Xiao Mei.
In other words, it had a prototype.
With this thought, Jiang Yan looked up at the others. Before she could speak, Mu Wang handed over a photo.
He said succinctly, “Found this on the next desk over. Didn’t have time to show you yet.”
Jiang Yan took the photo.
In it, Yang Shumei sat holding a tabby cat. Unlike the madness from before, she looked neat, leaning back in a rocking chair listening to music. She seemed tired but content; exhaustion lingered in her eyes, yet the corners of her mouth were curved in a smile.
She was smiling.
Jiang Yan held up the cat hair she’d pulled from Yu Renwan’s wound and compared it to the photo—same color. It was the same cat.
“So this cat really existed, it lived with this family once. Only…”
Jiang Yan faltered, brow furrowing.
Shen Huanhuan asked softly, “What’s wrong?”
Jiang Yan replied, “This amusement park’s core is the children. According to Liu Zhengxing, he and Yang Shumei only had one child—a girl who died within days of birth. That child wouldn’t have the memories or abilities to create an attraction, nor would she fit the criteria for a spirit to target.”
“The previous attractions showed: the main spirit latch onto children who are dying, weighed down by parents, consumed by despair.”
“That premature baby had just been born, had no contact with the world, and knew nothing. Could she even understand despair?”
Shen Huanhuan caught the unspoken meaning.
“You think there’s another child?”
Jiang Yan nodded.
“This is probably a four-person family. The child who died early didn’t know her parents’ personalities or past and had no memory to construct this kind of scenario, so the haunted house was created by the other child.”
Upon hearing this, Shen Huanhuan suddenly recalled the pile of children’s clothes in the wardrobe.
Some were for infants, some for kids of five or six; there were both boys’ and girls’ styles. She’d thought these were all bought in anticipation of the lost child, but now it seemed that wasn’t right.
These clothes belonged to someone else.
She hurried over to the wardrobe, bending to pick up the stack of children’s clothes. Meanwhile, Yu Renwan swallowed the pill Jiang Yan gave her. The wounds on her neck and arms vanished in no time.
[As expected from the Spirit-Consolidating Pill. Didn’t Jiang Yan use it to save Cheng Guang’s life once?]
[That’s the one. This pill is super rare, meant to save lives. Yu Renwan’s wounds could’ve healed on their own, but Jiang Yan just gave it to her.]
[QAQ, I regret not applying for this mission. If I’d tried a little harder, maybe I could have become Sister Yan’s teammate too. Sigh.]
Yu Renwan broke off just a little, put the rest back in the jade bottle, and handed it to Jiang Yan.
But Jiang Yan didn’t take it. She popped the stopper, dumped out the half-used pill, and tossed it back to Yu Renwan.
“It’s yours.”
Yu Renwan fumbled to catch it, gripping it tightly with both hands—even though it was small enough to hold in one.
Her clasped hands looked as if in prayer.
Jiang Yan smiled, then looked to Shen Huanhuan, who was spreading all the clothes on the bed in the master bedroom. Jiang Yan glanced over them; before, Shen Huanhuan had only checked them quickly, but now she laid them all out.
A few minutes later, Jiang Yan found a candy wrapper in a pair of overalls, and Shen Huanhuan discovered a slip of paper in a boy’s shirt, with Liu Zhengxing’s name and phone written on it.
“To keep the child from getting lost,” said Shen Huanhuan.
Jiang Yan nodded.
Two minutes later, Jiang Yan pulled a boy’s name from a hoodie pocket.
[Liu Yitian]
Seeing the name, Shen Huanhuan exhaled.
“Given this name, the boy must have been the second child, while the first, the girl, was probably nicknamed Tiantian. ‘Yitian’ is a bit feminine, carrying a very sentimental tone.”
Jiang Yan shared her view.
After the first child’s death, Yang Shumei’s mental state steadily declined, but she still gave birth to a second child. Yet that child’s life was clearly not good—he suffered a lot, and near death was chosen by the spirit, making him the haunted house’s real master.
And since this child chose a scenario reliant on illusion for the clearance method, he must have had his reasons.
He, Liu Zhengxing, Yang Shumei, and the little tabby must have had an unhappy story.
Why did the boy make the cat appear in Xiao Mei’s form? There must be a very precise motivation.
Shen Huanhuan proposed her theory: “Maybe it’s about abusing the cat?”
“Say, if Yang Shumei, in her unstable mental state, abused the tabby—maybe even long-term, causing its death—while Liu Zhengxing did nothing to stop her. So after death, the cat, resentful, comes back for revenge; it kills Xiao Mei, then imitates her to torment the boy and Liu Zhengxing, wanting their family to rot in fear.”
“And because of his parents, the little boy died to the cat’s ghost; after death, he was pulled into the energy field and created the haunted house, populating it with his own memories, like the mother-who-is-actually-a-cat setup.”
Zhao Kepu, who had yet to get a word in, strongly agreed: “That totally makes sense!”
“Or maybe Xiao Mei never abused the cat—it was Liu Zhengxing all along, and the cat, trying to spare the innocent, protected Xiao Mei and the boy. Then, the ghost posed as Xiao Mei and came after Liu Zhengxing, making him live in terror!”
“As for Xiao Mei and the boy… Maybe something worse happened, and in the end the boy died.”
Shen Xiaoxiao bobbed her head repeatedly: “That’s possible too!”
“So now we just keep looking for clues, right?”
“Mm,” Jiang Yan replied.
“From now on, focus on the clues. Whether living or dead, there’s always a hiding place for secrets—only by finding them out will we know where the real Xiao Mei is.”
“Alright!”
Shen Xiaoxiao answered loudly, then dashed out, high on excitement.
They’d already wasted quite a bit of time here. To speed up the process and make the most of Yu Renwan’s abilities, Jiang Yan told her to use her full strength.
This time, unlike usual, Yu Renwan always kept her abilities at one-third power for safety. But on Jiang Yan’s suggestion, she let her entire psychic constitution loose.
The result was immediate.
Mere steps into the hallway and the massive chandelier above began to wobble violently. Within seconds, it came crashing right toward her head. Jiang Yan reached out to pull her aside, but Shen Huanhuan threw a bind around them both and yanked them safely away.
Bang—!
The glass chandelier shattered at Yu Renwan’s feet with a noise like an earthquake.
Shen Xiaoxiao slapped Yu Renwan’s shoulder: “Come on, let’s go! It’s clue-hunting time!”
Yu Renwan turned her head and blinked.
“As fast as possible,” Jiang Yan said coolly.
“O-okay.”
Yu Renwan quickly focused and jogged into the study next door.
In the study, everything toppled toward her in a tumultuous crash. Jiang Yan caught the collapsing bookshelf with one hand, while Mu Wang leapt up and held down the wobbling display pieces on the top shelf.
But one sculpture tottered especially hard. Even after he righted it, it fell off seconds later.
The head shattered on the floor, exposing layers of memo paper inside.
Shen Xiaoxiao squealed and pounced, carefully brushing away debris.
Everyone crowded around. The memo belonged to Liu Zhengxing, just two pages.
The first page read:
[March 4th]
[Damn it, that cat actually died, and all that foaming was a nightmare to clean up!]
Shen Xiaoxiao looked up: “It really was animal abuse!”
“Bastard, that cat really is out for revenge—Liu Zhengxing is trash!”
Jiang Yan picked up the second note and shook her head.
This page detailed the cat’s real cause of death:
[I was already so tolerant of it—gave it nice food, a nice place, and put up with its attitude to play with it. But it had to run out, and ate rat poison! Dead is dead, but what do I tell Yang Shumei? She’ll lose her mind again!]
[Last time that stinking cat hid under the bed and couldn’t be found, Yang Shumei thought it died and lost her mind, screaming and threatening suicide. Now that it’s actually dead, she’ll be even crazier! If her family weren’t well-off and her an only child, what man would put up with a crazy wife? Damn!]
Jiang Yan looked down at the notes for a while.
After a moment, she said:
“Even after having a second child, Yang Shumei’s mental state never recovered. She would threaten suicide just thinking the cat might have died. That means the cat was her emotional anchor—she transferred all her longing and maternal love for the lost first child onto the cat. As for the second child—how he lived, whether he was loved or not—she didn’t care at all.”
“And with her mental state so poor, it’s unlikely she’d willingly give birth again. So, odds are Liu Zhengxing raped his wife.”
“Yang Shumei didn’t love that child.”