Without time to return to her room, Nie Jiuluo stepped through the mess and rushed to the bedside phone to call the front desk.
As soon as they answered, she fired off questions: “Did a man carrying a large canvas bag leave? A large canvas bag, a man?”
The front desk was confused: “Huh?”
“Did you see him or not?”
“No, haven’t seen anyone.”
So he hadn’t reached the lobby yet? Nie Jiuluo felt slightly relieved: “If you see him, stop him immediately, I don’t care how. He stole my things.”
To emphasize the urgency, she added: “Over a hundred… several hundred thousand.”
The front desk was shocked by such a large sum: “O-okay…”
Nie Jiuluo was about to hang up when she thought of something else: “Besides the lobby, does this hotel have any other exits?”
“Yes, three back doors.”
Nie Jiuluo’s heart sank.
With four exits total, the chances of intercepting that man were now only one in four.
The police arrived close to midnight, one older and one younger officer, both quite polite. They first examined Sun Zhou’s room and then reviewed the hotel’s surveillance footage.
Sun Zhou’s room showed property damage but no signs of physical harm.
The hotel’s cameras were mainly distributed in the lobby, elevators, and elevator entrances. Not a single camera had captured the crew-cut man with the canvas bag.
Given the current situation—no actual crime, no criminal behavior or consequences harmful to society—they couldn’t open a case based on suspicion alone. The older officer had Nie Jiuluo file a police report, asking her to explain the situation thoroughly and leave her contact information for follow-up.
This was Nie Jiuluo’s first time filing a police report, and she had no experience. Seeing it end like this, she couldn’t help asking: “Don’t you need to collect fingerprints, evidence, or something… forensics?”
The older officer smiled helplessly while the younger one responded enthusiastically: “You’ve been watching Hong Kong dramas, right? Here we don’t call it forensics, it’s the Criminal Technology Department, responsible for crime scene investigation.”
Nie Jiuluo roughly understood: they belonged to “Criminal” affairs, handling “crime scenes,” and Sun Zhou’s situation might not even qualify as a “case” yet.
While she filled out the form, the young officer explained their current considerations: Sun Zhou couldn’t even be considered “missing” yet—what if he came back tomorrow on his own? Property damage didn’t equal violent kidnapping—what if he had cooperated willingly, voluntarily climbing into the canvas bag to play “disappearing”?
There were too many possibilities. Without new developments, this would remain just a “police response record,” and they could only keep an eye on it and follow up later.
His explanation made Nie Jiuluo uncertain too: she had earlier suspected Sun Zhou was being pursued by gambling debt collectors—could he have staged this with friends to avoid his debts?
Whatever the case, she had done what she could.
After she completed the form, the older officer briefly scanned it: “You’re a sculptor? Is that part of fine arts?”
It fell under that category, so Nie Jiuluo nodded.
“Then you can draw, right? That’s a basic skill, isn’t it? The cameras didn’t catch anything, but you saw his face—could you sketch it roughly?”
This wasn’t an unreasonable request. Nie Jiuluo borrowed paper from the front desk and began sketching. As she was finishing, she heard the sound of rolling luggage wheels at the entrance.
This late at night, someone else checking in? Nie Jiuluo continued drawing but glanced up briefly toward the door.
It was Yan Tuo.
Though not surprising—the county wasn’t large, and wealthy visitors usually chose this hotel.
In the middle of the night, two uniformed police officers watching a young woman drawing in the lobby—this scene couldn’t help but draw attention. Yan Tuo glanced their way, but he seemed to have little curiosity and quickly looked away, heading straight to the front desk.
Nie Jiuluo finished the portrait with a few final strokes and handed it to the older officer.
The older officer couldn’t help but exclaim: the portrait was excellently drawn, and more importantly, the man’s features were highly distinctive—making him easy to identify. For professional reasons, he dreaded “common faces”; when wanted posters went out for those, they disappeared like mud oxen into the sea, with even the most enthusiastic community volunteers unable to identify them.
He took the drawing to the front desk, asking the hotel to make a copy and have housekeeping, kitchen staff, and security check if anyone recognized the face.
The clerk was helping Yan Tuo check in but couldn’t ignore the police, quickly taking the drawing. Like the older officer, her first reaction was admiration for the artwork: “Such talent, drawing this in less than ten minutes.”
The older officer smiled: “She’s a professional, and has real skill.”
Yan Tuo looked at the drawing. The skill was indeed good—the face was so lifelike, capturing the features and expression perfectly.
Though the police were just doing their duty, responding to calls in the middle of the night was still quite taxing. Nie Jiuluo saw them at the hotel entrance before turning back. From several meters away, she saw Yan Tuo waiting for the elevator.
Nie Jiuluo walked over and waited with him.
When the elevator arrived, out of politeness, Nie Jiuluo stepped aside to let him enter first with his luggage. When she entered and was about to press her floor, her hand had barely risen before dropping again.
He had already pressed it—he was also staying on the fourth floor.
Nie Jiuluo moved to the side, maintaining social distance, then fixed her gaze on the elevator doors, just waiting for them to open so she could step out.
Their shadowy reflections were visible in the steel elevator doors. It was clear that Yan Tuo had no interest in his fellow passenger, focused only on returning to his room.
What had he been doing in the cornfield at Xingbazi Township? Stealing corn? And what about his duck? Why not bring it up? Leaving it alone in the car overnight.
Sleepiness washed over her, and Nie Jiuluo lowered her head to cover a yawn.
At that moment, Yan Tuo turned his head quickly to glance at her.
When the elevator reached their floor, Nie Jiuluo stepped out first, with Yan Tuo following: his room was actually in the opposite direction from Nie Jiuluo’s, but he didn’t hurry to his room—he stood at the elevator, watching Nie Jiuluo until he saw clearly that she lived in the second-to-last room on the left side of the corridor.
After returning to her room, Nie Jiuluo quickly washed up and got into bed, but didn’t turn off the lights to sleep right away. She brought her pencil case to the bedside, took out a pen and a long strip of paper, pondered briefly, and then began writing.
She wrote three items:
One, Sun Zhou was bitten by dogs during the day and then carried away in a canvas bag at night, police notified.
Two, a woman in Xingbazi Township is suspected missing.
Three twice encountered a man called Yan Tuo, who had a plush duck sitting in his car’s passenger seat.
She noted the date at the end, then folded the strip three times and twisted it twice, creating a three-dimensional star, and aimed it at her suitcase nearby, tossing it in.
She wasn’t writing these things for analysis: she had a habit of writing down memorable or interesting things that happened each day, folding them into stars for keeping—while others folded lucky stars to make wishes, she used them as a diary.
One star per day, just a few sentences completed the task. Three hundred and sixty-five in a year, easier to maintain than a diary. She already had two large boxes full at home. Such a long span of days and years, yet only two boxes to show for it—time was both weighty and thin.
When bored, she would open the boxes, randomly pick up a star, unfold it to revisit some past day, trying to reconnect with times gone by—sometimes, she still remembered the events written on the paper; more often, they had been completely forgotten.
Seven days in Southern Shaanxi, seven stars already in the box.
Nie Jiuluo turned off the light and fell into an exhausted sleep.
When she next opened her eyes, it felt like she had slept for a very long time, but the room was pitch black. Checking her phone, she found she had only slept for two hours.
She lay there for a while, hearing the pattering of rain outside. The solar halo at the third watch brings rain—ancient sayings were truly magical, it really did rain.
Unable to fall back asleep anyway, Nie Jiuluo got up to use the bathroom. When she returned, she opened the curtains of the window facing the large bed and then lay back down.
This was her habit—when suffering from insomnia, she liked to “watch the night window.” While the room was pitch black, there was always a faint light outside. This contrast between the dark interior and lit exterior gave people a strange sense of security, like being nestled in a hidden eyeball, peeping at the outside world—many of her creative inspirations came during such “peeping” sessions.
It had been raining for a while, and the window was covered with raindrops and crisscrossing rain tracks. The water stains were gilded with the colored light from various signs near and far, as if a dream hung on the window, both brilliant and greasy.
Her thoughts drifted back to her current work.
The witch.
A witch should lurk in night and darkness, with otherworldly expressions and gestures. Devouring human heads would be too obvious and bloody. In literature, there’s the concept of “conveying romance without writing a single word about it,” and sculpture should similarly use simplicity to express complexity…
As she was thinking, a moving black shadow appeared at the bottom edge of the window.
Nie Jiuluo paid it no mind—when watching night windows long enough, such things often happened: sometimes birds, sometimes wild cats, and once, while staying at a grassland camp during a field trip, a marmot had stood trembling outside her window at midnight.
However, after a while, she could no longer ignore this shadow: it was climbing upward, neither cat nor bird—the previously writhing part was a human head, connected to shoulders and arms.
It was a person?
Nie Jiuluo lay still, her heart pounding uncontrollably: this was the fourth floor! Whether planning to steal or murder, wasn’t climbing the exterior wall a bit extreme? Moreover, from what she could see, this person had no safety rope, and their hands seemed to lack suction cups or other climbing tools—how were they managing this vertical climb?
Could there be some VIP staying in the hotel, and this was an expert hired by rivals attempting to steal secrets in the dead of night?
A few seconds later, Nie Jiuluo’s mind went cold.
The shadow had stopped moving at her window, most of the body crouched there in some strange form.
The sound of latches being manipulated and scraped came from the window the person was trying to open it.
While someone passing by outside a window at night was terrifying, as long as they weren’t targeting her specifically, it would just be a frightening moment. But if they were coming for her, that was different.
Moreover, the hotel’s high-floor windows used the most basic, easy-to-pick latches.
Coming for her? Had she offended anyone recently? Did she have any long-standing enemies? Was she carrying anything valuable that someone might covet?
No, none of these—she had only arrived here seven days ago, and before that, hadn’t been to Southern Shaanxi for over a decade.
For a moment, Nie Jiuluo thought about turning on the light but then reconsidered: lighting up would too easily startle them—with the person outside, a sudden light would make them instantly vanish, and then it would be difficult to discover their identity and intentions.
She needed to let them enter—once inside, things would be easier to handle.
Nie Jiuluo held her breath, using the room’s darkness as a cover to reach toward the bedside table as quietly as possible, searching for something to defend herself.
Soon, her fingertips found a pencil, and with it, a pencil sharpener.
She silently withdrew her hand, eyes fixed on the shadow outside the window while, under cover of the bedspread hanging over the edge, she inserted the pencil into the sharpener’s opening and slowly twisted.
She had sharpened pencils countless times and could sense, even without looking, how the thin wood shavings slowly spiraled down and softly fell, as well as how sharp the pencil tip was becoming.
The window opened, and the sound of raindrops instantly became clearer, cold moisture quickly invading the slightly warm and stagnant room.
Afraid that the glint in her eyes might alert the intruder, Nie Jiuluo half-closed them, concentrating on listening to the movements around her, her back beginning to sweat.
She felt certain this person was targeting her.
Indeed, even with closed eyes, she could sense the subtle changes in light and shadow before her—this person was now standing at her bedside, watching her.
Not for money—this person showed no interest in valuables. Then why? Sexual assault? Her beauty had attracted a few boys to climb walls and windows during her middle and high school days, but those walls were never higher than two meters.
A rough sensation touched her throat—it was a man’s large hand with hard knuckles closing around it, almost encompassing half her neck.
An ominous feeling surged through Nie Jiuluo’s heart, and in that instant, her mind became crystal clear.
This person wanted to kill her!
Nie Jiuluo was furious—she was such a law-abiding person, who the hell had she offended? Coming straight for the kill?
If you came to steal money, I’d just need to shout for help.
If you came to assault me, I’d stab you full of holes and let you bleed.
But if you’re trying to kill me…
Just as the large hand was about to tighten its grip, she suddenly opened her eyes and swiftly raised her hand, using all her strength to drive the sweat-dampened pencil deep into the person’s left eye.