Chapter 56: Prophecy

When they opened the door, Chen Liangdi was lying on the sofa, and an empty bottle of sleeping pills was on the coffee table.

Chen Liangdi's face was calm, even carrying a smile. It seemed she had left very peacefully.

The room was tidied up very neatly, as if she had prepared specifically for her departure.

"It looks like suicide." Qi Fei felt somewhat emotional, thinking of the old lady's longing for her son.

"Neighbors in the building have known each other for many years and are very familiar with each other's daily habits. The resident living opposite Chen Liangdi found that the old lady didn't get up early to go for a walk today, and she didn't answer the phone, so they called the police," said the police officer who arrived at the scene first. "We found someone to pry open the door and found that she had already passed away."

"Do you remember my agreement with Chen Liangdi? I promised her that this year during the Qingming Festival, I would perform a free rebirth ritual for her husband and son to transcend them. It's only January now. Someone who had arranged things for April suddenly committed suicide. It's just too abnormal," Zhong Kui said.

Qi Fei looked around at the furnishings in the room. The time of Chen Liangdi's death was indeed too suspicious.

"The computer host is still warm." Zhong Kui's calm voice came from the bedroom, breaking Qi Fei's low mood. He immediately walked toward where she was.

In this nostalgic bedroom, the scene of Chen Liangdi missing her son was still fresh in his memory. He didn't expect that coming back today, the old lady would already be dead.

"Damn it! I should have known Chen Liangdi was targeted by the killer. I should have sent someone to stake out Room 202, then she wouldn't have had an accident!" Qi Fei said with annoyance.

"Put away your savior complex. The person is already cold, but the computer is still warm. It seems the computer was turned off later than the person!" Zhong Kui said.

Qi Fei knew the problem as soon as he heard it: "Don't touch this computer yet." He said to Zhong Kui while putting on gloves and restarting the computer.

With that retro boot screen, after waiting for a long time, the computer desktop finally appeared.

The text on the desktop had changed. It was no longer the sentence from last time: "Mom, I'm home." Instead, it had changed to: "Mom, come with me."

It seemed that Chen Liangdi, who firmly believed that her son's ghost had returned, chose to commit suicide after seeing this sentence.

Qi Fei stared at this sentence for a long time. He turned around and, through the bedroom door, could just see the portrait of Chen Liangdi's son on the living room wall. It was facing Chen Liangdi's body, and the young face in the black-and-white photo was watching with a smile, which was indescribably creepy.

Chen Liangdi was dead, and the clue about "Daddy-Long-Legs" was more than half broken.

"Oh no, Xiao You." Qi Fei thought that the killer might be trying to silence witnesses. "I have to tell Team Liu to strengthen the protection of the hotel."

"Are you sure the killer did this to silence witnesses?" Zhong Kui asked from the side. "If that were the case, the medicine he gave Xiao You wouldn't have been cephalosporin. If he had changed it to a more toxic drug, it would have killed two birds with one stone—both the adult and the child would be dead, and the clue of the so-called Daddy-Long-Legs wouldn't have been left behind."

Qi Fei was silent. At first, he thought the motive for Yue Fengsheng's case was very clear—that Yue Fengsheng had offended someone by causing trouble while drunk. However, as the investigation deepened, things seemed far from as simple as he had thought.

The autopsy room welcomed a new corpse, and several people gathered around Chen Liangdi's corpse to discuss.

Only Zhong Kui was exceptionally quiet, sitting in a corner of the autopsy room, slowly flipping through Xiao You's drawing book.

"The cause of death is very clear..." Xiao Tao started with the same familiar sentence, the same as when he faced Yue Fengsheng's corpse. "Taking an overdose of sleeping pills. And judging from the autopsy, there is no damage to the mouth or nose, and the medicine is relatively evenly distributed in the body. The deceased should have taken the medicine herself. Basically, we can rule out the possibility of being forced to take it."

"We looked into it. Chen Liangdi had serious sleep problems, and sleeping pills were medicine kept at home. Judging from the purchase records, the sleeping pills found at the scene were indeed purchased by Chen Liangdi herself," Wu Shanqiu said from the side.

"Hmm, the evidence department also sent news. Besides the fingerprints of Chen Liangdi and Zhong Kui, no third person's fingerprints were found on the computer," Qi Fei said disappointedly.

"How could someone who is confident enough to come and go freely in other people's homes leave clues for you so easily?" Zhong Kui's voice came from behind them.

She showed them one of Xiao You's drawings. On the drawing paper was a gray-haired stick figure and a cluster of black lines in a room.

Qi Fei knew this was the content they had confirmed with Xiao You at the hotel last time. Xiao You had said that this gray-haired stick figure was Chen Liangdi.

"What is this drawing?" Wu Shanqiu looked at this immature drawing style, unable to understand it.

"It's a prophecy," Zhong Kui said expressionlessly.

"What do you mean?" Qi Fei couldn't help but ask.

Zhong Kui didn't answer, just turned the drawing book sideways.

The originally standing gray-haired stick figure became a lying-down figure, and that cluster of lines was originally crooked, but now it looked more like a ghost standing beside Chen Liangdi.

"Although the brushstrokes of a child's doodle are messy, the start and end of the strokes are still very obvious. This drawing is meant to be looked at sideways," Zhong Kui said.

As she was speaking, Qi Fei's phone rang again. He answered the phone with an expression of disbelief: "What? Guiyue Apartment has been called out again? Who died?"

As he spoke, he immediately turned on the speakerphone.

"It's not a dead person, it's a fire alarm. There's a fire downstairs. The fire isn't big and has already been controlled. It's arson, and the suspect has been controlled. It's a resident of the building," the voice on the other end said.

Soon, several people rushed to Guiyue Apartment.

The fire had been extinguished, and a large area of the apartment's exterior wall had been blackened.

Late at night, many people were gathered downstairs at the apartment, many of whom were holding mobile phones to film or even live-stream.

The frequently troubled Guiyue Apartment began to attract more and more people's attention.

Qi Fei avoided the crowd and found the person who started the fire. He saw a woman in her fifties standing in the corner in fear, her face blackened by smoke, looking terrified.

Qi Fei was no stranger to this person—it was the person who discovered Chen Liangdi hadn't gone out and called the police—the hostess of Room 202, Zhao Xiaozhen, who lived opposite Chen.

"Did you start the fire? What's the situation?" Qi Fei looked at the disheveled Zhao Xiaozhen and asked.

"They all say our Guiyue Apartment is a haunted house. I'm burning some paper money to transcend the dead so they don't come to make things difficult for us old neighbors!" Zhao Xiaozhen put her hands together, looking very pious, not like she was joking.

Zhong Kui laughed when she saw this and stepped forward: "You should have come to me for this work!"

Zhao Xiaozhen was stunned by her words, looking at Qi Fei and then at Zhong Kui.

"Are you that fortune-telling policewoman?"

Qi Fei was unhappy when he heard this and quickly clarified: "She is just our consultant, not a police officer. We police don't do this."

"However, I see the number of people you are transcending is a bit high, isn't it?" Zhong Kui's face was smiling, but her eyes were very cold. ===== CHAPTER 57 =====