nycdaug Chapter 303: Famous Work
Chapter 303: Famous Work
Chapter 303 His Breakthrough Work
Do you know which of the two of us is the murderer?
When Yan Xun heard Fang Shuo say that, he wondered if Fang Shuo knew he was eavesdropping.
A few minutes earlier, Lin Wen had also approached him alone, saying she hoped to cooperate with him to resolve the family secret as soon as possible.
Yan Xun didn't know whether Lin Wen was the old man himself or a player like Wen Yuanzheng who was parasitized by the old man—anyway, whatever the truth was, Yan Xun felt that Lin Wen's actions were at the old man's behest.
Even because she and Fang Shuo sent her messages one after the other, Yan Xun felt for a moment that the two of them were acting together to deceive her.
[Yan Xun: Why?]
[Yan Xun: I don't think we're very close? If I remember correctly, our relationship is just average.]
Lin Wen: Fang Shuo betrayed our alliance.
Lin Wen: I've decided to find a different collaborator.
[Lin Wen: Choosing the right partner is sometimes the key to successfully escaping a dungeon.]
When Yan Xun saw Lin Wen's first two sentences, he thought she was simply talking about cooperation. But when she mentioned "the key to successfully leaving the instance," he suddenly realized that Lin Wen might have something else in her words.
[Yan Xun: I don't understand, can you explain it clearly?]
[Lin Wen: When I first entered the instance, I thought I had found the right partner, and that I was blessed by Lady Luck. Now I realize I was wrong.]
Lin Wen's words were a bit too formal and didn't fit her usual straightforward and direct personality.
Yan Xun squinted at the screen, then waved to Lou Yanchuan in the room, "Grandpa Lou, come here for a moment."
Lou Yanchuan turned his wheelchair around and said, "You're here, the sketch comedy performer."
He came to Yan Xun's side and looked at the phone Yan Xun handed him.
"What do you think?" Yan Xun lay on his pillow, turning his head to look at him.
"It seems like there's something more to her words," Lou Yanchuan said. "Is she trying to imply the existence of your grandfather?"
"I guess so," Yan Xun said. "When she first entered the instance, she thought she had found the right partner, which could be interpreted as her referring to Fang Shuo. But if it really was Fang Shuo, she wouldn't have needed to be so subtle."
"The old man must have been parasitizing her consciousness when she first entered the instance."
Yan Xun then pointed to the second half of the message, "With the blessing of Lady Luck, anyone in this kind of dungeon who suddenly finds out they have a personal old man who can help them clear the dungeon would first think they've become the protagonist of a Dragon Pride novel."
After all, that's what Wen Yuanzheng thought before.
“She said she was wrong, which means she realized that… old men are like parasites; it’s easy to invite a god but hard to send him away. This one is a parasite that came to haunt him himself.”
"There's one more thing," Lou Yanchuan added, pointing to the side blessed by Lady Luck, "Is there another meaning here?"
“For example, the old man believed you were protected by the sun god and thought you had made a pact with the sun god, and he told Lin Wen about it,” Lou Yanchuan said. “She also wanted to use this keyword to imply that she already knew about it?”
Yan Xun pondered, "It's not impossible."
"It seems she hasn't fallen out with the old man yet; she's just using this method to hint at it to me."
Yan Xun replied quickly.
[Yan Xun: I understand, but at least show some sincerity.]
Lin Wen's reply was also timely. She first recounted what had happened in the crew-cut man's house and the secret of that house, and then said to Yan Xun—
[Lin Wen: He already knew about this clue, but he didn't tell me.]
[Yan Xun: So how did you know this secret?]
[Yan Xun: I remember you didn't investigate Cun Tou's place, and you didn't have much interaction with them.]
[Lin Wen: This is my secret, I can't tell you.]
“She did it on purpose,” Yan Xun said. “She deliberately revealed that she already knew the secret of Cun Tou’s family, but Fang Shuo did not share this with her, which made us suspicious of how she knew this secret.”
"Logically speaking, she didn't explore the Cun Tou family, and her interactions with Xie Qingdu were limited to their time at school. It's impossible for her to know so much."
“She was trying to imply that the old man had helped her get these clues, reminding me of his existence again,” Yan Xun said. “She was worried that I hadn’t noticed before, and she was implying that she had an old man with her who was giving her advice.”
Yan Xun quickly responded, indicating that he understood everything Lin Wen wanted to say.
Lin Wen told Yan Xun all the clues she had shared with Fang Shuo at the dinner table.
[Lin Wen: The problem now is that I don't know his modus operandi, and I can't find any evidence.]
Lin Wen: I suspect he knows something.
[Lin Wen: So I'll keep the voice chat running... you can find some clues and evidence in it.]
That's how the opening scene came about.
However, Fang Shuo's acting was so bad that Yan Xun wanted to laugh.
He really didn't understand what the point was for Fang Shuo to pretend that he knew nothing at this moment.
"Don't you know who the murderer is?" Lin Wen asked calmly.
“There are only two of us,” Fang Shuo said. “Then the murderer must be among us.”
"Could it be me...?" Fang Shuo wondered.
"But in my memory, we were a model couple. I have always been very supportive of your career and have even said that I support all your decisions."
"But haven't you always struggled to become famous and been ridiculed as a man who lives off a woman?" Lin Wen asked.
"So I'm going to kill you?" Fang Shuo argued, "Isn't that a bit too arbitrary?"
“Fang Shuo, we have the same goal,” Lin Wen said. “Our goal is to find the secret of this family.”
"Do you intend to obscure the clues and monopolize the mission rewards for yourself?"
"How is that possible!" Fang Shuo's voice was somewhat excited. "We're teammates."
"That's good," Lin Wen said. "How many details can you recall?"
“I only remember going to the master’s house,” Fang Shuo said. “I was interested in the stories he mentioned and wanted to find out more details.”
Fang Shuo recounted in detail everything he had seen at the master's house.
“The master told me that there was also a strange thing in the village where he grew up,” Fang Shuo recalled. “A villager once heard a child crying in a grave. When he followed the sound, he found the child’s hand that was not completely buried.”
"He quickly dug the child out. The child was not very old, and looked to be no more than 2 or 3 years old."
“He has been crying ever since he was dug out. Some people want to know who abandoned him, but there are no surveillance cameras in the village. Maybe the person who abandoned the child knew about this and deliberately left the child in this place.”
"The child was quickly raised by the village. To prevent him from knowing that he had been abandoned, the villagers lied and said that his parents had died early. At the same time, other rumors spread in the village, saying that the child was a jinx. How could there be a living child in a grave? He must be a monster from the grave."
“A strange thing happened in this village. There was a man who studied these mystical things every day. He fell off a cliff in the middle of the night after drinking. It is said that he was researching how to bring the dead back to life before he died.”
Lin Wen listened for a while, then said, "This matter doesn't seem to have anything to do with our secret."
"I just wanted to show you that I had absolutely no intention of hiding anything from you," Fang Shuo said. "This is all the memory I can recall."
"I listened to the master tell these stories all day long..."
"Until the master received a phone call."
"They said something had happened at another villa and they needed to go there. When I went with them, I saw the scene of the bloodshed," Fang Shuo said.
"Then?"
"Then I was so scared that I didn't have time to look closely and scrambled back to the master's villa."
Fang Shuo looked at Lin Wen sincerely, "I don't remember anything after that."
“Since you can’t remember, I can help you recall some details,” Lin Wen said. “The timeline should be shortly after you returned from the lakeside villa. That day was my birthday, and you said you were preparing some surprises.”
To ensure that Yan Xun could hear clearly on the other end of the phone, she deliberately revealed many details.
“We both looked at all the messages on my phone. One of them was from you. You said you wanted to give me a special surprise on my birthday and go to a place that has special meaning for you.”
At the time, both of them had just entered the instance, and although they checked all the messages on their phones, neither of them understood the meaning of the text message.
“This can’t be used as evidence that I killed you,” Fang Shuo said. “It only proves that we might have gone on a date somewhere on your birthday.”
“What’s interesting is that I found a record of me searching for a certain location on my phone’s map,” Lin Wen said. “The time was right after you sent me the text message.”
"There was also a call from you in the call log, which was made after the text message was sent."
"Why do you think this is, Fang Shuo?"
Why did you specifically call to tell me your location?
Meanwhile, after hearing the key clues from Lin Wen, Yan Xun searched online for the novels Fang Shuo had written before.
I focused my search on one of the works that won an award at the time.
The winning entry tells the story of a murder that no one knows about, told from a first-person perspective. "I" am a car, and the trunk of my car contains a human corpse. That person took "me" to many places.
The novel depicts the entire murder case from the perspective of the killer's car. Although the killer's identity is never revealed, the location where the victim is found at the end makes everyone understand the true identity of the killer who never showed his face.
The deceased was found in a cornfield behind a rural church, a place no one but old Peter would go, and who happened to be the first to discover the crime.
Upon seeing this, Yan Xun immediately got out of bed.
"I'm going out for a bit," he whispered to Lou Yanchuan.
“I’ll go too,” Lou Yanchuan said.
Yan Xun glanced at him and then pushed his wheelchair out.
In the living room, Dad was sitting on the sofa watching TV when he saw Yan Xun pushing Lou Yanchuan out the door. "Where are you going?"
"I want to go for a walk," Yan Xun said. "My uncle too."
Upon hearing this, Dad nodded, seemingly not particularly concerned about their whereabouts, only asking out of habit.
The phone, held in Lou Yanchuan's hand, still played the conversation between Fang Shuo and Lin Wen on the other end.
Yan Xun pushed Lou Yanchuan, almost running, to their home.
He took his phone from Lou Yanchuan's hand, ended his voice call with Lin Wen, and then rang the doorbell.
A few minutes later, Fang Shuo's voice rang out from the other end of the doorbell—
"Yan Xun...?"
His voice sounded a little flustered, "Why are you here?"
"I have something to attend to here and can't entertain you for the time being..."
Before he could finish speaking, the courtyard gate opened, and Lin Wen's voice came through, "Come in."
Yan Xun pushed open the courtyard gate and led Lou Yanchuan into the house.
Not knowing why Yan Xun would suddenly visit, Fang Shuo disregarded his argument with Lin Wen and quickly left the guest room, while Lin Wen followed behind him at a leisurely pace.
The two of them met Yan Xun in the courtyard, who looked very relaxed, pushing Lou Yanchuan in a wheelchair.
"It's so late..." Fang Shuo was interrupted by Yan Xun before he could finish speaking, "I want to go and see your garage."
"Garage?" Fang Shuo repeated the question subconsciously.
Just as she was about to ask Yan Xun why, she realized that Lin Wen had already pushed her away, saying, "The garage is over here."
Yan Xun pushed Lou Yanchuan, keeping up with Lin Wen's pace.
Fang Shuo was left behind, still somewhat confused about what was going on. He vaguely sensed that something was wrong, but he didn't have time to think about it further. He followed the three of them toward the garage.
There are two cars in the garage.
Yan Xun spotted the silver car that was popular in the 80s at a glance.
The "I" in the novel is like an old car that is somewhat outdated. No one knows that there is actually a human corpse hidden in my dilapidated trunk.
It was as if no one expected that the kind-faced old Peter would commit such a heinous act.
No one expected that Fang Shuo, who seemed so timid and submissive, would actually kill his fiancée.
Yan Xun walked over and opened the trunk of the silver car.
The trunk contained a blood-stained rope and bloodstains that hadn't been wiped away, along with a blood-stained hammer.
This is the case in Fang Shuo's most famous work.
“You feel your chance to become famous has arrived.” Yan Xun looked at Fang Shuo beside him. “You want to create a big news story. You remembered what that editor said, so you made up your mind.”
"The best way you can think of is not only to kill a promising new star, but also to make everyone remember you."
"So you chose to link this murder case with your famous work." Yan Xun bent down and took out a hammer from the trunk. "That way, after everyone knows what you did, they will go back and look at your famous work. They will analyze its purpose and dissect your upbringing to find out why you did it."
Yan Xun looked at the hammer in his hand.
“But this kind of thing doesn’t need a reason or analysis.” He handed the hammer to Lin Wen. “The murderer just needs to be hanged.”
"You've already found this secret?" Yan Xun asked Lin Wen.
“You mentioned the garage, and that reminded me of his famous work,” Lin Wen said.