chapter 4

Jiang Ning was still mourning the money on our way home.

“You were too reckless. You should’ve talked to me first so we could split it.”

I said nothing.

She kept lecturing me.

I tried to distract her. “Do you think Zhao Chong really killed himself?”

“What? Weren’t those people simply lucky enough to photograph it?”

“Maybe. But the time of death was accurate to the second.”

Besides, there had to be more than one such link, which meant there was more than one “death file.”

If every case was documented that precisely, could luck and quick feet truly explain it?

More importantly, where there was a profit chain, manufacturing deaths was obviously cheaper than waiting around to stumble upon them.

As expected, Jiang Ning fell silent and began to think.

The game had started with her, after all. She could not put the matter out of her mind.

After we returned, I casually browsed the link about Zhang Hua.

The entire site consisted of material about her alone, and it had roughly three thousand followers.

Its servers were overseas, behind layer after layer of outsourced infrastructure.

The link even had an impressive firewall.

No one could have built this without a sizable team.

I was irritated. I had been cheated out of my money, and I was wondering where to start investigating when Jiang Ning suddenly said, “The Whale Game.”

I turned. “What?”

She looked up at me. “I got into the winners’ private group.”

Well. Sometimes the best investigation was simply talking one’s way inside.

According to Jiang Ning, only a handful of people had cleared the spot-the-difference game, but there were still some.

The so-called winners’ group was merely a chat for people who had passed the first two game systems.

Everyone was discussing how to beat the final questionnaire.

Jiang Ning tested the waters with a few questions.

Anyone who had come this far was no naive fool.

They were all wondering whether the remarkably “fresh” deaths—all involving teenagers—might be connected to the infamous Whale Game.

I had heard of it.

It was an online game that manipulated adolescents psychologically. Most of its victims were between ten and fourteen.

Rumor had it that once a child entered the group and accepted the challenge, no one came out alive.

The game had spread mainly overseas. At its peak, it maintained a presence on every major social network.

Whenever a teenager posted a message with the relevant tag, an administrator contacted them immediately.

Once inside the group, the child had to check in after completing a series of small tasks.

They might be told not to speak to their parents for a day, or to stare into a mirror until their own reflection became unfamiliar, then gradually begin harming themselves.

Finally, they were instructed to choose the right moment to die.

Jiang Ning remembered what we had heard at the police station.

“They said he showed those exact abnormalities before his suicide.”

The mirror-gazing. The self-inflicted wounds discovered during the autopsy.

Everything matched.

We soon received an opportunity to test our theory.