Chapter 32: Shen Yi's Warning

The day before, the sun had made a brief, tentative appearance — enough to feel like a promise. Today, the temperature had dropped without warning and the sky had sealed itself over with dark, heavy cloud, the wind coming in hard from somewhere that clearly had opinions about everyone who had planned to be outdoors. It pushed at the buildings and rattled whatever was loose, as though testing whether the city was properly secured.

Sitting in the car, Zhen Nuan could hear it working at the windows, and even from inside, sealed off from it entirely, she shivered.

Shen Yi reached over and adjusted the scarf around her neck, pulling it up a little, his fingers precise and unhurried. He settled it so it covered more of her face, then produced her fluffy earmuffs and placed them on her head with the matter-of-fact attention of someone who has done this before and expects to do it again. "Every time you have to get off the bus," he said, with the dry evenness of someone stating a simple observation, "you look as though you're going to your own execution."

She pouted. "It's not that dramatic."

A brief pause, his hands adjusting the tail of her ponytail with the same unthinking care. "Someone has been watching the area near your building recently. Following your movements."

Her heart lurched.

She held the impulse down — the impulse to deflect, to tell him it was fine, to protect him from worrying in a way that would require her to pretend she hadn't noticed. She couldn't manage it this time. She exhaled and said, honestly: "Something came up at work. A complication. But it's been dealt with now."

Shen Yi made a sound that committed to nothing. "Has it."

"Yes." She could hear the uncertainty in her own voice before she could stop it, and she hurried past it: "You didn't — you haven't done anything, have you?"

His eyes, when they met hers, had the quality of deep, still water — everything below the surface invisible, the surface itself giving away nothing. "Done anything?"

"There wasn't any private resolution."

"No," he said, with the same undisturbed calm. "But no one will be following you or attempting to hurt you anymore."

This was, somehow, more unsettling than the alternative. "What did you do?"

"Nothing that needed doing. Because they stopped bothering you on their own."

She stared at him. "You already found them."

He didn't confirm this and didn't deny it. Sometimes we have more resources than you do. This was simply true, and both of them knew it. The years he and Ji Chen had spent building their network had produced a system of informants thorough enough that very little moved in Yucheng without producing a ripple that eventually reached them. Beyond that, the leading enterprise in Yucheng was Huasheng Group, and nearly every senior executive of Huasheng resided in Shangnan District. Finding what he wanted to find in that area was not a complicated task for Shen Yi.

"Then who are they—"

"I wasn't involved in that. And besides —" his tone carried the light, precise quality of someone closing a door that they consider already closed, "do you honestly think I would help the police arrest people?"

No. She didn't think that. Shen Yi was not built for civic-minded cooperation with law enforcement; whatever the Ji family had become on the surface in recent years, the moral architecture that had governed how they moved through the world hadn't been replaced, only adapted. He would never tip off the police. She understood this, and she did not push. She knew what mattered to him in this particular equation: that she was safe. Everything else was secondary.

"Nuan Nuan." His voice had shifted slightly. Not softer exactly, but more direct. "If something like this happens again — tell me. Don't wait."

I was afraid you'd worry.

"Keeping you safe is my responsibility. Not your colleagues'."

She pressed her lips together and nodded. "I know," she said, quietly. "I understand."

He looked at her for a moment — the lowered lashes, the small pout she made without meaning to, the expression of someone who has agreed and is slightly unhappy about it and is trying not to show either thing. Something in him shifted, just fractionally. He reached over, slipped his hand inside the fold of her scarf, and cupped her face in his palm — the skin of her cheeks soft and faintly pink from the cold.

She flinched. Her eyelashes trembled. The color that rose in her cheeks moved faster than the cold could account for, and her expression, for all its nervous tension, held no actual resistance — only the helpless, slightly frantic quality of someone whose body does not quite know how to accept this kind of proximity without staging a small internal emergency.

His hand moved down, settling warmly around her neck.

She trembled harder. "It's — it tickles a little," she managed, her voice carrying the thin, tentative quality of someone trying very hard to sound normal.

"Sorry." His hand withdrew. "I keep forgetting." He pulled her scarf back up with the same steady care.

Zhen Nuan sat with the lingering warmth of his palm on her face and felt, privately, a complicated mixture of guilt and bewilderment at herself. There was no reasonable explanation for a grown woman being this undone by being touched by her own boyfriend. She was aware that no other man would have stayed — would have kept staying, for years and years, through all of this — the way Shen Yi had. The patience of it was extraordinary, and she knew it, and it made the guilt sit heavier. She had thought about going to see a psychologist, more than once. Shen Yi had not wanted her to put herself in someone else's hands for analysis. She had thought, privately, that he was overprotecting her.

She thought it again now, and then set it down.

"I'm going." She waved at him, pushed the car door open, and the cold came in immediately — not gradually, not politely, but all at once, as though it had been waiting directly outside and had been personally offended by being kept out. She pulled her hood up in one reflexive motion and ran.

By the time she reached the parking lot where Yan Han and the others were already assembled, her entire body was protesting the temperature in specific and detailed terms. The team stood by the car as though the wind were not doing anything remarkable. As though the temperature was simply a neutral feature of the morning. Not one of them appeared to have registered the cold in any meaningful way.

Zhen Nuan, who had registered it with her entire body, was running toward them in snow boots that produced a sound not entirely unlike a small determined animal navigating an obstacle course.

Yan Han heard it before he saw her. He turned, slightly puzzled by the particular quality of the approaching sound.

She was a remarkable shape. A military green padded jacket, wide and round. Mittens of matching roundness. Earmuffs so fluffy they seemed to add to the general circumference of her head. A rabbit fur hat perched on top of all of it. Legs below the hem of the jacket that were, in contrast to everything above them, perfectly slender — giving the overall impression of a very small creature that had been aggressively insulated from the shoulders upward and had then been attached to two narrow sticks at the bottom.

She was running with the particular gait produced by wearing a great deal of insulation and also being cold, panting visibly, her breath rising in small clouds that dispersed in the wind.

Yan Han looked at this approaching figure for a moment and then said to the person beside him, with complete composure: "A fat cat has arrived."

The captain had spoken, and his team responded accordingly and at some length.

Lao Bai: "The kitten seems to have a very low tolerance for cold weather."

Brother Tan, with the considered tone of someone drawing on genuine expertise: "It may be a breed characteristic. Physically, she's quite fragile-looking. Possibly a Scottish Fold. Captain Yan has one at home — he'd know the type."

Cheng Fang: "Cats are extremely sensitive to atmospheric pressure and temperature change. A cold front came through last night, temperature dropped significantly — fully armed response seems appropriate."

Hei Zi: "Being round is also a form of charm."

Su Yang: "She always wears snow boots. They look like little bear paws."

Lin Zi: "A kitten wearing bear paws. Noted."

By the time Zhen Nuan actually reached them, this entire exchange had concluded, and the group had reassembled into an arrangement of tall, composed, professionally serious individuals who were watching her arrive with expressions of complete neutrality.

She had used the run to deal with the worst of the cold and was now only slightly breathless, wrapped so thoroughly in her layers that only the tip of her nose and the clear, faintly damp brightness of her eyes were visible above the scarf. The combination produced, Yan Han observed, an overall effect that was extremely innocent and entirely at odds with her professional context.

She looked at the row of serious faces waiting for her and thought, with a small rush of genuine warmth, that everyone was focused and prepared for today's operation. So professional. She really needed to try harder.

The sound of measured footsteps approached from behind — unhurried, producing a faint musical rhythm against the cold pavement. Everyone turned.

Su Ya had arrived. She was wearing a fitted leather jacket in a sharp, vivid blue, her long hair loose and curling at the ends, moving in the wind with the easy confidence of someone who has never been cold a day in her life. She looked the way someone looks when they have decided that the weather is simply not relevant to their personal presentation.

Zhen Nuan, who had been ordered by the captain on some prior occasion to keep her hair in a ponytail while working, looked at Su Ya's long, gorgeous waves and felt the familiar territory of injustice open up inside her. She addressed this injustice at a volume slightly above a murmur: "Hair down must be so much warmer."

Yan Han's gaze moved to her. Very slowly.

She felt it land. She looked at the middle distance with enormous focus and pressed her lips together.

---

Su Ya approached, pulling her silk scarf away from her face where the wind had pushed it. Her crimson lips curved. "You found them?"

"No," Yan Han said.

Deputy Captain Cheng supplied the explanation: "Su Yang and the third team conducted the search according to your profile. More than twenty individuals matched the criteria. Because the exact size of the group remains unclear and we didn't want to move prematurely and alert anyone, we held off on questioning until we had more solid evidence."

They had also reviewed records of youth street racing incidents over the relevant period, but the two lists didn't overlap in the way they had expected. Su Yang had noticed something that felt off and suspected that certain incidents might have been reported under someone else's name — whether voluntarily or not. The district public security bureau and the local precinct were looking into it.

Hei Zi and Lao Bai had mapped the group's known activity areas in more detail, and the third team was preparing a plainclothes investigation of those locations.

Su Ya nodded. "Progress, then."

"The phones still haven't been found. This morning we're visiting the last known residences of the swimming pool victim and the polytechnic university student — trying to understand their daily habits, reconstruct how they came into contact with this group. If we can find the communication channel, the membership numbers, the operational method — most of what's still open will close."

---

In the back of the van, Zhen Nuan sat with yesterday's notes open in her lap and worked through them with the focused, slightly frowning attention of someone who is determined to understand something completely. She had recorded Su Ya's psychological profile in careful sequence and was going back through each point, pressing on each one, trying to reconstruct not just the what but the why beneath it.

She had written:

1. Ages 17–23. School dropouts or otherwise disengaged. No stable employment. Comfortable family backgrounds.

2. No childhood trauma. Not violent or sadistic. Do not torture. Do not kill intentionally under ordinary circumstances.

3. Involved in extreme sports and parkour. No stable romantic relationships. Freely generous with money.

4. History of public order incidents — noise complaints, street racing.

5. Recently developed intense interest in detective fiction and crime procedurals.

6. Mentally and emotionally empty. Unstable sense of direction or purpose.

7. Operational pattern is evolving. Will shift from disguising kills as suicide to presenting them openly as murder — a direct challenge to the police.

8. If not apprehended before that stage, will escalate further — no longer limited to willing participants. Genuine murder.

She chewed the end of her pen and worked through each entry carefully, trying to hold Su Ya's explanations in mind alongside her own slow analysis.

In the seat directly in front of her, Yan Han glanced back, registered her student-at-revision posture, and turned away without interrupting.

Deputy Captain Cheng had resumed the conversation with Su Ya: "For this kind of team — serial killers operating as a group — what are the common structural characteristics?"

"With very few exceptions where the hierarchy is flat, team killers will almost always have a defined leader and defined followers. The leadership structure is nearly universal."

Zhen Nuan reached for her pen and small notebook.

"Teams of two are the most common formation. Group violence — killing specifically — is different from robbery or abduction in terms of the severity of the crime and the pressure it places on internal relationships. A pair is the most stable unit, least likely to fracture over time or produce internal disagreement. Beyond two people, the dynamics become more complicated."

She continued: "Aside from romantic partnerships, the members of a killing team typically have a significant age gap, with the older member holding clear dominant authority. Occasionally you see the younger person exerting control over the older, but it's the exception."

Zhen Nuan had been listening with the whole of her attention, and before she had quite decided to speak, the question was already out: "If it's a romantic partnership, is it usually the male who leads?"

The people in the forward section of the van, who had been engaged in their discussion, went briefly still at the arrival of a voice from the back — soft and a little tentative, slightly higher than the register of everyone else in the van. Several heads turned.

Zhen Nuan, finding all of them looking at her at once, did something visible with her neck and dropped below the level of the headrests. Only the top of her hat remained visible.

"Not necessarily. Male dominance is the majority pattern, but female-led teams do occur."

Deputy Captain Cheng smiled toward the region where she had disappeared. "Little Cat — start speaking up more. This is exactly right — if you have a question, ask it. You're too quiet. We're not making you uncomfortable, are we? Is it the captain?"

Zhen Nuan surfaced immediately, head appearing above the seat back with the urgency of someone who needs to correct a serious misapprehension. "No, no, absolutely not. Not at all. None of you are — not in the slightest. The captain especially is not—"

She stopped.

The van absorbed a half-second of perfect silence.

Then it did not.

The laughter that broke out was genuine, multiple simultaneous and overlapping, the van suddenly full of it. Even Yan Han, who was holding a bottle of water and had just taken a sip, inhaled incorrectly and spent several seconds coughing with his face going noticeably pink, pressing the bridge of his nose with two fingers.

Su Ya looked at the middle distance with the focused serenity of someone who has elected not to understand what is funny.

Zhen Nuan genuinely did not understand what was funny. She looked at the people laughing and felt, with mild bewilderment, that everyone seemed to be making a sustained effort to find her entertaining, which was very kind of them even if the source of the amusement remained unclear.

Hei Zi, with the expression of someone who intends to press this: "Tell us — how exactly is the captain not rough?"

Zhen Nuan considered this with full sincerity. "In every way. He just — isn't. Not in any way that I can think of."

Every head in the forward section swiveled back toward her with the coordinated interest of people who have found something they want to look at carefully.

Yan Han covered his eyes with one hand and shook his head slowly.

Brother Tan arranged his face into the expression of someone delivering hard-won wisdom: "Rough, though. He is, in certain ways, quite rough."

"He's genuinely not," she said, with the earnest finality of someone who has checked and is confident in the result.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure..." She got to the last word and, without understanding why, found every face in the front section looking simultaneously toward Yan Han and then back at her, smiling and saying nothing more.

She couldn't see, from where she was sitting, that Yan Han had turned toward the group and shaped a clear, silent instruction with his mouth: That's enough.

Lao Bai folded himself back into his seat making sounds that might generously be described as muffled.

Zhen Nuan sat in the back in complete atmospheric confusion. Everyone seemed slightly unusual today. Nothing she had said was particularly amusing, and yet here they were. They were, she decided after consideration, simply being very warm and generous, laughing along with her to make her feel included. That was what it was. She found this thought so genuinely touching that she smiled to herself behind her scarf.

Yan Han heard the small sound of it and turned to look at her. "What are you grinning about?"

"Oh." She arranged her expression into something more neutral. Then it softened again almost immediately.

---

Su Ya drew the van's attention back with the quiet efficiency of someone who has let the room have its moment and is now done with it.

"This case has several unusual features. The group is relatively large, and their dynamic more closely resembles the kind of team you see in organized fraud or abduction rings — people who move through it together, as though completing a shared project — rather than the cold, predatory pattern of the typical serial killer.

Looking at the cases so far, there's no single member who is significantly older or more strategically sophisticated than the others. The upper age limit is probably twenty-three. But there will still be a leader. Someone who is relatively smarter and carries natural authority — whether from age or from the status of their parents. He's arrogant, proud of it, and operates with a basic level of organization. The others who follow him are individually intelligent, have strong personalities, but are cohesive and follow direction. This group almost certainly has pre-existing friendships outside this activity — probably connected through family relationships and parental social circles, the kind that form between children of wealthy families. Despite differences in personality and in who leads whom, their psychological makeup is fundamentally consistent."

"Cohesive... follow direction..." Yan Han repeated this slowly, with the quality of someone turning something over to find the right angle.

Zhen Nuan, sitting directly behind him, heard it and leaned forward slightly. "What is it?"

The furrow in Yan Han's brow had deepened. His mind had gone back to the figures he had watched running through 367 on that day — the masked faces, the fluid motion, the clean division of roles under pressure: "Several young people, roughly the same age, all with strong individual personalities, probably similar worldviews. How do they achieve that level of coherent, ordered function? How do they, in a short time and under active pressure, establish clear individual roles, execute them with discipline, and produce zero internal friction or breakdown?"

He said this and felt something stir in the back of his mind — still shapeless but present.

Su Ya pressed her chin with one finger, genuinely paused. This was, she acknowledged privately, the one place where her own picture had a faint gap in it. Cases of this structure — this particular kind of collective, fluid, self-referential serial operation — had no precedent in any criminal psychology textbook she had worked from, nor in any case she had encountered directly in her career. She was working without a map. It produced a slight, unfamiliar resistance in the flow of her analysis.

From behind Yan Han's seat, at a volume barely above a murmur, Zhen Nuan spoke: "That day at 367 — I was up on the floor above, watching. The way those masked people moved — the route choices, the timing, the way each person knew exactly where to go and what to do without apparent communication. The execution was very clean. The coordination was very tight. It looked exactly like—"

Yan Han did not turn around. He was listening to the small, careful voice behind him, and he let the pause stretch. "Like what?"

Deputy Captain Cheng and the others turned toward her, curious.

"Like... like a competitive online game. The kind where you play in teams. Where you're running around in a chaotic environment with everyone trying to shoot each other and the whole point is coordinated team tactics. The way the roles get divided, the way everyone knows their function, the way the team moves as a single unit without anyone stopping to talk about it..."

Su Ya went still.

Lao Bai's head came up sharply with the particular expression of a person who has just had something click into place behind their eyes. "That's exactly what it felt like!"

Yan Han's eyes came up. Something had settled. "Yes. The hierarchy — the structure of who leads and who follows, the distribution of roles, the discipline — all of it was established in a virtual world first. An online combat team that found its identity and its operating structure in the game, and then carried that structure wholesale into the real one."