We waited there for the mail carrier.
As we stared begrudgingly at the people coming and going, Lu Daoshi asked nonchalantly, "Didn't you come with your roommate today? Where is he? I thought he’d be with us."
"Don't mention him."
"What's wrong?" Lu Daoshi looked puzzled. "Weren't you two doing great? Inseparable, even. Why the sudden blood feud? Did you have a fight? Come to think of it, when we were cycling over here, your roommate seemed to be following us. He only stopped when we reached the bridge. He looked so pitiful, like he was about to grab your shirt and beg, 'Take me with you.' Did you bully him?"
"I did not. It’s enough if he doesn't bully others."
I meant that literally.
To be honest, I was fuming just thinking about my roommate. That bastard was too cruel. With his abilities, I didn't believe for a second that he couldn't have saved those people. Yet, he spent the whole time lazily watching from the sidelines, acting as if it were none of his business. It was infuriating. While the firefighters were inside saving lives, he told me he was bored. When I ignored him, he actually went off to the lawn to tease a cat with a piece of foxtail grass. He’s a psychopath.
I felt like he completely lacked emotion—at least, emotion toward humans. In his heart, humans were inferior to cats. If a cat had died today, he surely would have been anxious. That bastard.
It reminded me of an old saying: *If they are not of our kind, their hearts must be different.*
So, I told Lu Daoshi, "Everything that has happened so far is related to him. I'm certain he isn't human."
Lu Daoshi gave an "oh" and said calmly, "So he’s the baby’s daddy. Just a little lovers' spat, then."
"..."
I had forgotten that Senior Lu was a hardcore fan of *Zhiyin* magazine—a true "friend of the ladies" who loved a good melodrama.
Just then, the mail carrier returned with his bag slung over his shoulder.
In this day and age, with electronic technology so advanced, very few people sent letters. Consequently, he had only collected about a dozen envelopes; his bag looked quite flat. Seeing us, the mail carrier pulled my letter out from a side pocket. "I saw the sender today."
I looked it over and found that although the envelope still lacked a sender's name, it unexpectedly included a return address: Building 7, No. 486 Fuxing Road.
The mail carrier’s expression turned a bit strange as he looked at the letter.
Lu Daoshi and I exchanged an uneasy glance. "What is it?"
"He didn't seem like the person from before..." I saw the mail carrier shudder involuntarily, a look of terror crossing his face. "I can't quite explain it, but he didn't seem... human. I've never seen a person who looked like that."
"Was he very short, hunched over, and hiding his face?"
"He didn't hide his face; he just wore a hat." The mail carrier’s face turned pale. "I saw his face. His skin was slightly dark with a dry, dull luster, almost like an insect's shell. His eyes were narrow, and the sclera outside the pupils was golden. His eyes were set very far apart. His mouth was pointed and large, and his nose was just two holes. He saw me, too. Is that some kind of atavism? He won't do anything to me, will he?"
I patted his shoulder wordlessly. Knowing that such things existed in the world was a massive blow to one's psyche. This mail carrier was just like me—an ordinary person. His world might not have been large, but it was one he understood completely. Now, what he had seen had shattered all his common sense. That kind of uncertainty is enough to drive a person mad.
"Do you think they eat people?" he asked anxiously as we walked out of the post office.
I didn't know how to answer. That was my greatest fear as well.
But Lu Daoshi laughed easily and said, "We didn't evolve for millions of years to reach the top of the food chain just to be eaten by something."
The mail carrier shrugged, seemingly relieved, then gave a self-deprecating smile and bid us farewell.
As we headed toward Building 7, No. 486 Fuxing Road, I teased Lu Daoshi, "You're certainly confident."
"If there were really things that could just kill humans at will, how would we have a population of six billion? Besides, we are more powerful now than ever before. We have energy, materials, and technology."
"I thought you believed science was useless?"
"It might be useless for explanations, but it's very useful in a fight. What do you think can survive a nuclear bomb?"
I thought about it; he had a point. "But we don't have a nuclear bomb right now."
Lu Daoshi stopped, picked up a brick from the ground, and handed me a steel pipe.
No. 486 Fuxing Road, Building 7, was a residential complex still under construction.
Scaffolding supported the walls, and the green safety netting looked exceptionally eerie in the twilight.
It was a construction site.
Moreover, Lu Daoshi and I couldn't hear a single sound.
"Are we really going in? I don't think the person we're looking for is inside."
Lu Daoshi locked eyes with me for a few seconds. "But you said you don't know who the sender is."
"Fine." I took a deep breath. "I've encountered the kind of thing the mail carrier described. It once disguised itself as a mailman from the Redbud Post Office, entered the dormitory, and tried to steal my letters. I chased it out and encountered something... something terrifying. I only escaped by luck. It's no coincidence the mail carrier ran into it; it was after this letter."
Lu Daoshi snatched the letter from me and tore it open. "It's still an oil painting. It hasn't been swapped... but what is this a drawing of?"
The painting depicted a basement. The lighting was dim, with only a single high window near the ground on the left. In the center of the frame, a person lay on an operating table while a doctor in a white coat performed surgery. A refrigerator near the table was filled with many jars, and various human organs could be seen inside them. But to the right of the refrigerator, where a wall should have been, a woman was curled up. Her long hair was pure white, and she appeared to be pregnant...
I felt a powerful sense of foreboding.
Was this Chun Xiao's final fate?
"The back." Lu Daoshi turned the painting over in my hands. Three words were scrawled there:
—*Don't go.*
Lu Daoshi and I stared at the pitch-black construction site before us.
"I think their target isn't the painting; it's you. Otherwise, we would have lost this painting long ago." Lu Daoshi turned his head. "The handwriting on the painting matches the recipient's address, but the handwriting for the sender's address is clearly different. The sender's address was added later. They know we're looking for the sender, and they're using this to set a trap, waiting for us to jump in. And this 'prophet' seems to have known all this would happen, so he wrote his warning on the back of the painting."
Lu Daoshi and I dropped the brick and the steel pipe and walked toward the brightly lit, bustling areas, leaving that sinister construction site behind us.
"Now all we can do is wait for that prophet to contact us of his own accord. He knows we're looking for him."
"What if he can't make it?" I murmured.
"What?"
"Nothing." I wiped my face. "But now we have something more important to do."
I called Ren Xing. "Where are you?"
Ren Xing let out a long sigh. "Treating infertility..."
"Stop looking, it can't be fixed. Hurry up and pick me up. I have an important lead... about Chun Xiao."
There was a long silence on the other end, followed by a faint, airy sigh. "Buy me a burger and wait right where you are."
In the back seat of the Chevrolet, Ren Xing munched on his burger, filling the car with the aroma.
Lu Daoshi sat in the driver's seat with a dark expression.
After five minutes, he finally couldn't help but ask, "Is this one your boyfriend, and the other one the baby's daddy?"
"This one isn't my boyfriend..."
Lu Daoshi looked at me as if I had disappointed him. "You really are a player, aren't you?"
Ren Xing hummed in agreement. "Hear that? Even people you know say so."
"Watch out, or my roommate might make you disappear."
"Where is your roommate? How did he agree to let you out alone?"
"Don't even start."
Lu Daoshi looked pained again. "I knew it. You two are having an affair..."
Ren Xing finished eating and looked at the oil painting. Once he entered work mode, he became exceptionally serious and professional, looking like he was ready to draw his gun at any moment. He frowned as he studied it for a while. "Where did this come from?"
"A charlatan—er, I mean, I keep receiving these oil paintings from him, and they've all come true, including the explosion at the Humanities Building this morning."
He gripped the painting and gave a dry laugh. "In the future, we police won't even be needed."
"One like him only comes around once every few centuries," Lu Daoshi interjected.
Ren Xing tapped the back of his seat. "Head toward Fuquan Road."
Lu Daoshi made a turn.
I was surprised. "You've been to this clinic?"
Ren Xing rubbed his temples and started calling his colleagues. After finishing the call, he leaned over to tell us, "I haven't been there, but my colleagues have been staking out this black clinic recently. I've seen the photos they sent."
Silence fell over the car. After a while, I said to him, "Officer, I have a request."
"What?"
"You smell a bit strong. Could you please sit back against your seat?"
Ren Xing actually blamed me for being too delicate, accusing me of lacking deep love and respect for the people's police. We were clearly not on good terms.
When we got out of the car, Ren Xing's colleague, who had been staking out the place, came to meet us. He looked just as disheveled and haggard. "Good timing. There's a surgery tonight; we were just about to move in."
Ren Xing was brief: "There's a homicide."
The policeman was distressed. "Dammit, I knew that bastard's skills were subpar..."
"It might not have anything to do with him." Ren Xing gestured toward the warehouse door. "Let's make the arrest first."
Then Ren Xing shooed Lu Daoshi and me back into the car. The area was a network of crisscrossing small rivers. On the flat land across the river, a new home furnishing mall had just opened, so this entire area was filled with warehouses. Between the warehouses were dirt roads lined with clumps of grass. There were very few residential areas nearby, and the night was quiet.
About half an hour later, chaos erupted at the warehouse. I saw an old man in a white coat and slippers bolt out of the back door. Lu Daoshi said, "Fasten your seatbelt," then calmly shifted gears and drove straight toward the old man. The old man screamed and slammed onto the hood of the car, his slippers flying in an arc into the grass...
When Ren Xing handcuffed the old man, he gave Lu Daoshi a thumbs-up. It was hard to tell if it was a compliment or a criticism when he said, "You've got guts."
Lu Daoshi took a drag of his cigarette and calmly exhaled a cloud of smoke.
***
