Robert was dumbfounded — he couldn’t even understand what had just happened.

“Why?!” He tried to struggle, but his body wouldn’t obey him. He couldn’t resist as the Inspector snapped the handcuffs onto his wrists.

“Only the killer could understand that note.” The Inspector’s voice was cold and cutting. “The fact that you came here proves you are the killer. What else is there to argue?!”

Robert’s mind felt like it had been struck by a hammer.

His cipher had been cracked?!

That was impossible… How could it possibly be?! Those two must have seen they were going to lose and betrayed him — it had to be that!

The room door opened again.

Bai Youwei and Zhu Shu stood outside, ever so cooperative and well-behaved, telling the Inspector:

“Inspector, someone went into Room 304 and Room 401 too~”

“Excellent!” The Inspector swept out at a long stride. “I’ll have every last one of these rotten criminals arrested! Every one of them!”

Robert stared at them in stunned disbelief. “You two rigged this with that note?!”

“That’s right~” Bai Youwei clasped her hands behind her back and gave him a smile. “Not bad at imitating it, was I?”

“How is that possible?” Robert couldn’t accept it. “How could you possibly have cracked that cipher?!”

“Because it was quite simple, actually~” Bai Youwei shrugged, perfectly matter-of-fact. “None of you understand Chinese — which means the characters on the paper aren’t real characters at all, but symbolic representations. Your teammates simply memorized the shapes by rote.”

“Even so, you couldn’t have guessed the true meaning behind those symbols!” Robert demanded heatedly. “Did they tell you? How did you buy them off?!”

“Ha~” Bai Youwei laughed. “Buy them off? Was that really necessary?

Let me be straightforward with you~ From the start, I’d been suspicious of what those characters truly meant — I just didn’t have a clear direction. Then you mentioned you loved reading detective novels, which gave me a hint. After all, those Sherlock Holmes stories… I’ve read them too.”

Robert’s face went pale.

“There’s one case called ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’ — it also uses a cipher where one symbol represents one letter. Isn’t that right?” Bai Youwei studied his expression with satisfaction, speaking at a leisurely pace. “And then I started thinking: if I were the criminal, trying to convey information quickly within a limited space, what would I need to communicate first?”

Robert slowly bit his lower lip, watching her with barely concealed resentment. “You… deduced it all from that?”

“More or less~” Bai Youwei said with a smile. “What I thought was: the first thing to convey must be identifying the target — whoever you’re planning to act against has to be made clear. But if none of you know each other’s names, how do you refer to people? …Room numbers are the most direct reference, aren’t they?”

Robert said nothing, his face dark.

Bai Youwei continued: “I noticed that within the cipher, the combination representing ‘zero’ appeared repeatedly — in every single message, it showed up without fail. So I made a bold guess that it stood for the English word ‘zero,’ because no matter who you were targeting, the room number would inevitably contain a zero. That gave me four letters: z, e, r, o.

Then, after your cipher appeared, the woman from Room 405 very quickly came to harm — so I deduced that the characters before the zero portion meant ‘four,’ and the ones after meant ‘five.’

Four-zero-five. 405. With that, I could substitute those known letters into the full message and make further deductions from context — which gave me even more letters.”

Bai Youwei narrowed her eyes, the corners of her mouth lifting. “And finally… I used those letters and wrote several notes and slipped them under everyone’s doors. Anyone who could read it would inevitably want to come and take a look, no matter what — just like you, right now~”