Zhu Shu hurried up the stairs and rushed back in one breath to Room 304, where Lu Yuwen was staying.

Su Man and Bai Youwei were both already there.

“Well? Did he figure it out?” Su Man asked, barely containing her impatience.

Zhu Shu carefully pulled the door shut, then turned to face Su Man and Bai Youwei and gave a firm, confirming nod:

“I caught a glimpse from the corner of my eye. There were some scraps of paper on the table — he must have torn it up.”

Bai Youwei said: “So he really can read Chinese. If he knows Chinese, then it stands to reason he could have devised a coded message written in Chinese characters.”

“Should we tell the Inspector?” Su Man looked between Bai Youwei and Zhu Shu. “Tell the Inspector, and have him arrested?”

“We don’t even have evidence. How could he possibly be arrested?” Bai Youwei shook her head gently. “He can simply deny it and make up any excuse he likes to clear himself. The situation we’re in right now is this: even though we can almost certainly identify the mastermind behind all this, we have no way to convict him. We need to find more evidence first.”

Su Man clutched at her hair in distress. “Ugh! How are we supposed to find any… That group of people, every single one of them is sharper than the last — there’s no getting a handle on them!”

Zhu Shu knitted her brows with difficulty as well, lowering her voice. “Our task is to help the Inspector identify five killers. Even if we got one of them arrested right now, it would be useless. If even one gets away, everything falls apart…”

“Exactly.” Bai Youwei nodded. “The victory condition requires finding all five. Finding none and failing to find just one — the outcome is the same.”

She pulled the half-torn note from her pocket, set it alongside the copy she had written down, and placed both on the table.

“If we can work out what these characters truly mean, we might find an opportunity to strike back.”

“That’s all well and good…” Su Man stared at the characters and let out a helpless sigh. “But they’re completely incomprehensible…”

The characters on the half-torn note read:

【Trapped Encircle · Solid Group Encircle Back · Diagram⬜Circle Group】

And the characters Bai Youwei had copied from the wall read:

【Four · ⬜Back · ⬜⬜Group · Four⬜⬜Factor⬜Group Garden】

【Daughter · Four⬜⬜⬜ · Diagram Back Trapped Encircle · Solid Group Encircle Back · Diagram⬜Circle Group】

Bai Youwei circled the latter half of the wall message and analysed it calmly:

“The ending portion of this message from the wall is identical to what’s on the half-torn note, character for character.

I suspect Lu Yuwen’s interruption must have disrupted their information relay, making them realize the original method wasn’t safe enough. So they changed tactics — they deliberately posted the coded message somewhere visible to everyone.

That way, the information gets passed along successfully, there’s no risk of being seen through, and it also stirs up a string of tensions and suspicions… Human beings always make more mistakes when they’re under pressure.”

Zhu Shu stared at the characters, her brow deeply furrowed. “If this is the kind of code that requires a key text, then no matter how hard we study it, we’ll never be able to work it out.”

Su Man asked: “What do you mean, a key text?”

“Something you use to decipher the code — usually a book.” Zhu Shu explained. “Say each of these characters represents a page number. You just turn to that page in the key text, and you find the corresponding word.”

Su Man’s expression grew more and more dismayed. “…If that’s the case and we don’t have the key text, aren’t we doomed to lose?”

“Don’t worry, it won’t be that complicated.” Bai Youwei said lightly. “A key text is something that becomes evidence the moment it’s brought into the game. It would be very easy to be caught with it. I think there should be a simpler solution to this coded message.”

Zhu Shu sighed. “I’ve tried breaking apart the component parts, tried phonetic similarity, tried reversing the order — none of it worked. No matter how I approach it, I can’t extract any useful information.”

Bai Youwei thought it over, her expression pensive. “Even though it’s written in Chinese, the people behind it are foreigners… Perhaps we’re overthinking it.”

—