Chapter Nineteen: The Oddball

"Wouldn't that just mean you're sewing someone else's bridal gown?" Yan Xue asked.

It was hardly surprising that Li Jialong had a few friends who shared his ideals. Birds of a feather flock together; if people do not share the same values and outlook on life, how could they possibly end up playing together and becoming close friends?

But greed does not move until profit appears. Just as Li Jialong had said before, Lin Zhen was, for him, nothing short of a juicy prize: rich, young, and untethered. Clinging to her was absolutely a sure bet. Such an ideal target, one he had even tried to win back relentlessly after the breakup, desperate for reconciliation—so why would he be willing to hand her over to someone else and even help stage the whole thing?

"I already said it, didn't I? This is called resource sharing. How can that be called sewing someone else's bridal gown?" Li Jialong waved a hand, feeling that Yan Xue had not yet grasped the brilliant side of his wisdom. "I wasn't just casually planning to introduce Lin Zhen to some random man! I only wanted to give my good brother a little assist!

"Lin Zhen had already made it clear she wasn't falling for my routine, and to be honest, I really did have some responsibility in this. At first I was careless too. I thought she liked me a lot, so I got a little too showy, spent money like water, and annoyed her.

"She was so determined to break up with me that I figured my chances of getting back together with her were slim. So after thinking it over, I figured I might as well let my good brother pursue her. If it worked, well, since we had history, and we had already agreed in advance that whichever one of them succeeded could later follow Lin Zhen into her rich second-generation circle and help me line up a new target, that would be enough!

"Now do you get it? That's what resource sharing means! I help pave the way for them on Lin Zhen's side, and once things are settled they help me out in return. Then everybody's happy, and that's the only way to win together!"

Yan Xue felt that her worldview had once again been thoroughly overturned. Looking at the self-satisfied way Li Jialong flaunted his own ideas and methods, she honestly did not know what to say.

Somehow, with a brain like that, if he were to put it to honest work, he might actually have been able to run his own affairs rather well.

"So how exactly did you give your brother an assist?" Kang Ge asked him with open curiosity.

Li Jialong curled his lip. "Honestly, I really did waste my feelings on it. I put in so much effort. My job was to keep pestering her and begging to get back together, while my two brothers played the hero by saving the beauty and stopping me, all the while fawning over Lin Zhen.

"To make it work better, I even picked two guys with pretty different vibes in terms of personality, temper, and even appearance. I figured one of them had to be her type, right? We were together for so long, so it wasn't like I couldn't figure out her taste!

"Turns out my two idiot friends hadn't figured out a thing. They were enthusiastic enough about currying favor, though. By the time I got there and saw what was happening, the woman wasn't Lin Zhen at all. I quickly hinted for them to pack it in. We had wasted half the night for nothing!"

"Then didn't you ask the fake Lin Zhen why she was in Lin Zhen's home, living there under Lin Zhen's identity?"

"Why would I ask that? It's none of my business!" Li Jialong said, as if he found the question rather baffling. "That Lin Zhen is a crazy one! For all I know, she was just tired of her current life and didn't know how to explain it to her family, so she found a stand-in to stay at home in her place while she ran off somewhere to go wild!"

"Let's speak plainly. I don't want to circle around this with you either."

Kang Ge thought for a moment, then crooked a finger at Li Jialong to signal him to lean in. Lowering his voice, he said, "To be honest with you, the fake Lin Zhen you mentioned is dead."

"What?" Li Jialong had not expected such a thing. "When you came looking for me, I thought Lin Zhen's family had lost something, or there'd been a fight or some trouble, and you just wanted to ask around and understand the situation. How did someone end up dead?

"Let's make this clear first: when the three of us left, that fake was perfectly fine! We only wanted money. We would never do something as stupid as killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. That would just be stabbing ourselves in the back, especially since I knew full well she was a fake!"

"If we were suspicious of you, we wouldn't be standing here talking to you, would we? You need to understand one thing: you say the other woman was a fake, but you can't deny that she looked very much like Lin Zhen."

"Oh! I understand what you mean!" Li Jialong suddenly saw the light. "So that fake was basically a scapegoat!"

"Smart. I like talking to smart people. It's effortless!" Kang Ge praised him generously. "So if the one who died was really Lin Zhen herself, then as her ex-boyfriend, do you have any leads you can give us?"

"Well... actually, when I think about it, during the time Lin Zhen and I were together, she was pretty decent to me. When we went out to play, when we ate and drank, when we bought things, she hardly ever made me pay. I'm not exactly a promising guy, but I do have a conscience! Now that it's obvious someone was coming after her, I definitely ought to help her with something!"

Li Jialong spoke with great righteousness, but in truth he had his own little calculations: "So after you deal with this case, could you maybe give Lin Zhen a hint for me? Tell her I was worried she might be in danger, so I wracked my brains to provide you with leads?"

"You want her to be moved, and then go back to being good with you?" Kang Ge nodded. "Fine. I'm an honest man too. I call things as they are, so just talk to us first. Later, I'll make sure your contribution is passed on to Lin Zhen without a word changed."

"All right! Brother, that's generous!" Li Jialong grinned and reached out to pat Kang Ge, acting as if they were already old friends and entirely familiar with each other.

He touched his chin, frowned slightly, and began to think hard. But Yan Xue, watching from the side, felt that the way Li Jialong carried himself now was less like someone truly searching his memory for suspicious clues and more like someone striking a pose. To put it bluntly, every strand of hair on his head seemed to ooze affectedness.

"Oh, oh, oh! I remember someone!" After a moment, Li Jialong snapped his fingers with exaggerated flair, as though he had stepped out of a comic strip. "There was one person who was extremely suspicious!"

Yan Xue barely suppressed the urge to roll her eyes at him, and instead adopted a posture of polite attention. Seeing his grand manner, she only hoped he would get to the point and not make it overly dramatic. That alone would be enough.

"When I first started dating Lin Zhen, she was still using that big house of hers as a short-term rental and taking tenants in. I thought it was a bit insane. She wasn't short of that little bit of money at all, so there was no need to do that. With such a huge house, wouldn't it be nicer to shut the door and enjoy it herself? But, well, it was her house, so I wasn't in any position to say much.

"I met some of her tenants now and then. After all, during the early days when we had just gotten together, on the surface it looked like I was the one clinging to her, but in reality she was the one more attached to me. As long as I didn't have class at school, she wanted to stay with me. Sometimes, even when I had class, she would drag me along and not let me go back, saying that if I missed attendance and failed a course, she'd pay for the retake."

When Li Jialong spoke of that sweet stretch of time between them, his eyes were full of nostalgia and resentment. Such an ideal big fish as Lin Zhen had simply slipped away, and he was clearly unwilling to let go.

"There was one person among them whom I saw maybe two or three times. That guy was completely different from Lin Zhen's other tenants. When the others came to her house for the first time, they were basically all very surprised, because they hadn't expected the place to be so enormous. After all, the listing page mainly showed the furniture in the room, and the rent wasn't high. A lot of people came to W City for the first time and had no idea what that neighborhood was like. Before they got to the house, they all thought they were renting a normal apartment or something like that!

"Then when they discovered it was actually a three-hundred-square-meter mansion, they were shocked at first, then delighted, and after that they wanted to book again and come back to stay. After all, with a house that big, most people simply couldn't afford to buy one themselves."

"And what was different about the person you mentioned?"

"That was the really unusual part! By coincidence, when that guy first checked into Lin Zhen's place, I happened to be there, so I saw exactly how he reacted.

"The moment he came in and realized the place was so enormous and so luxuriously decorated, he was surprised too. Then he started sizing Lin Zhen up with a very suspicious look, as if she were using someone else's house to scam people.

"After that, he came to stay at Lin Zhen's place several more times. I ran into him three or four times myself, and that's not counting the times I missed. I just felt that man was odd as hell. On one hand, he kept coming back again and again to stay there, but on the other, whenever he looked at Lin Zhen there was something in his eyes that felt almost like dislike. If not dislike, then at the very least, he didn't much like her."

"What's wrong with that?" Kang Ge asked, though he knew the answer already.

"Of course there's something wrong with it! When people stay in a short-term rental, if they don't like the landlord or they don't like the place, they can just rent somewhere else next time. Nobody's that bored or that eager to make themselves uncomfortable.

"But that man was looking at Lin Zhen with nothing but dislike, and still kept coming back again and again!"

"Your conclusion is a little too hasty, isn't it? How are people supposed to choose? What kind of gaze is that? Those are all your subjective judgments. We can't use something like that to decide who is suspicious," Kang Ge said as though there was nothing he could do.

"How can that be hasty? Not at all! I have evidence!" Li Jialong reached into his pants pocket, feeling around, and after a few pats realized he hadn't brought anything out. "Wait here a moment. I'll go upstairs and get my phone!"

With that, he turned and ran back into the dormitory building, not giving Kang Ge or Yan Xue a second to react.

"This... he won't just disappear and never come back, will he?" Yan Xue felt a little uncertain because of Li Jialong's behavior. "Even if you go into the building to look for him, at worst it would be a case of the monk escaping but not the temple. It's just a little troublesome."

"He won't run, and he won't disappear. Don't worry," Kang Ge said with a casual smile. "Can't you see? He never took us asking him for information as anything serious. To put it more bluntly, he doesn't even think White Moon's death is a big deal. He treats it like somebody else's business, something so light it could float away!

"Think about it. If he doesn't think this matter is serious, how could he possibly feel any psychological burden? Didn't you hear him just now? He was even hoping to use this as a tool to win back his meal ticket!"

Yan Xue sighed and shook her head, a little speechless. "When I dealt with Lin Zhen earlier, I thought her way of thinking and her style of doing things were already eye-opening. I never expected there'd be someone even more extreme. Li Jialong has managed to make Lin Zhen look restrained by comparison. I honestly don't even know whether I should be shocked by his worldview or by how openly he can say all this."

"Speaking of Lin Zhen, call her parents later and ask how things are on their end," Kang Ge said, not bothering to comment further on Li Jialong. Yet when Yan Xue mentioned Lin Zhen, something seemed to occur to him, and his brow furrowed.

"Do you think there's something wrong with Lin Zhen?" Yan Xue's strongest impression of Lin Zhen was her wilfulness and capriciousness, her reckless self-indulgence. She was, in the truest sense, a girl who lived entirely for herself. Aside from that, there was not much else.

"I think Lin Zhen was very afraid. Afraid, not simply worried in hindsight. You understand what I mean, right?"

"You mean Lin Zhen probably knew who might have harmed her, but for some reason she kept it secret?"

Yan Xue understood what Kang Ge meant. She carefully recalled Lin Zhen's behavior and state of mind that day. It seemed that from the very beginning, Lin Zhen had been adamant that White Moon's death had something to do with her; she had not come to that conclusion only after Kang Ge and Yan Xue prompted her. On the contrary, it had been her parents, in the face of the bizarre murder that had struck their home, who had at first simply felt unlucky to have been caught in such a thing, and only became nervous and worried after hearing Kang Ge's hints.

That difference in attitude had not seemed important at the time. Now, thinking back, it did seem a little suspicious.

When Lin Zhen mentioned the strange parcel as a lead, it had already been two or three months since she had last received anything unusual. From Li Jialong's account, if one followed the timeline, their breakup should have happened during the period when those strange parcels were still arriving from time to time.

In other words, even after becoming single again, Lin Zhen was still receiving strange deliveries. She had chosen not to call the police, nor to escape by changing identities. Aside from no longer running the short-term rental, her life had continued along exactly the same rhythm.

That made the matter all the more puzzling. Now, two or three months after what she herself had called the most suspicious event had passed, what exactly was she afraid of?