Chapter 97

Chapter 97

Nan Mu tried to find a reason why she might not remember a blue-and-white hoodie. “Maybe she just forgot? There were more than three hundred people there that day, after all. It’s normal if she doesn’t remember a few of them.”

Watching his brother struggle so hard to prove Wen Miao had been there, Qiu Ziyu felt awful. But he had no choice but to shatter Nan Mu’s illusion and make him face the facts.

“You’re right. If she were the only one who said that, I would suspect she might have missed someone too. But she wasn’t the only one. You should remember this: before you crossed the skybridge to board the cruise ship, there was a gate on the ground level where you had to scan the QR code on your invitation before you could enter… The two ground staff members helping at the gate also said they never saw a female guest wearing a blue-and-white hoodie.”

In fact, the two ground staff members had been even more certain than the guide when they described it.

-“A woman in a blue-and-white hoodie? No!”

-“Of course I’m sure. That day, every guest who boarded the ship-forget the women, even a female mosquito flying past would have been done up exquisitely from head to toe. How could someone have gone in wearing a hoodie?”

-“There’s no way I remembered wrong. If you showed me a woman in an evening gown and asked me to identify her, I might not recognize her. But if you asked me to recognize a woman wearing a hoodie, I definitely would!”

-“Even the servers who went up were all dressed to the nines, like they were ready to be hit on at any moment… There definitely wasn’t anyone in a hoodie. If there had been, the two of us would absolutely have remembered her. She would have made a very deep impression.”

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Had it been a hallucination?

No. Impossible.

No matter how Nan Mu thought about it, he still believed he had definitely met Wen Miao. Otherwise, how could he explain the blue-and-white fabric on his cuff?

But if that person really had been Wen Miao, how had she avoided everyone and boarded the ship?

Besides, although the Time Machine could send him into the past, it could not send someone into the future.

How had Wen Miao appeared in this era?

Everything was like a dense fog, impossible to unravel.

But a bizarre thought took shape in Nan Mu’s mind. The Time Machine had been invented by Wen Xin using Element 178, which Wen Miao had discovered. Then could Wen Xin and Wen Miao also have invented a Time Machine capable of traveling into the future?

The idea sounded absurd, but before he went to No. 110 Lijiangbei Street and saw a Time Machine that could return to the past, if someone had told him there really was a Time Machine in this world capable of crossing time and space, he would have found that absurd too.

That made him think of Wen Tangtang again. If Wen Xin and Wen Miao really had invented some kind of device, Wen Tangtang would definitely know about it.

“Wen Tangtang… she still refuses to talk?”

Qiu Ziyu hadn’t expected Nan Mu to suddenly bring her up, and he froze for a moment.

In the Wen Tangtang murder case, both witness testimony and physical evidence were complete. Although Wen Tangtang had refused to speak from start to finish, that did not prevent them from closing the case. At this point, they were just waiting for the public prosecution, and the remaining work was probably just paperwork.

The main reason was that, lately, because of the Lion Mountain buried-body case, he had been running around outside every day and had not paid any attention to it.

Qiu Ziyu thought for a moment before answering, “We haven’t interrogated her recently… But a couple of days ago, I think Fang Yue mentioned Wen Tangtang. He said she suddenly fell ill and was released on medical parole.”

Nan Mu frowned, his chest tightening. “Wen Tangtang is sick? What illness does she have?”

If she qualified for medical parole, it couldn’t be anything minor.

“I really don’t know the specifics…” That question genuinely stumped Qiu Ziyu. He scratched his head. “The day Fang Yue told me… I think it was the day after the cruise ship accident. Weren’t Wang Zheng and I busy pulling you guys out of the water and getting you to the hospital? When Fang Yue called to tell me, I didn’t listen that carefully.”
Nan Mu sighed. After all, they were classmates. “Have Fang Yue ask around and find out what’s actually wrong with her. If that doesn’t get us anywhere, and if circumstances allow, bring in a specialist to take a look. If you need money, come to me.”

Qiu Ziyu knew Nan Mu wanted to help Wen Tangtang because of Wen Miao, and he was about to talk him out of it. But on second thought, Nan Mu wasn’t short of money. If doing this would make him feel a little better, he might as well let him do it.

Just as Qiu Ziyu agreed, his phone rang.

He stepped out to take the call and came back with a frown.

“What is it?” Nan Mu studied him.

“That matter you asked me to look into – they just called. They said they’ll send me the results right away.”

He meant the investigation Nan Mu had asked for the day he woke up.

That day on the cruise ship, after seeing the scar on Huangfu Junsheng’s head, a notion had occurred to Nan Mu: when he and Wen Miao were asking about Gu Zhishu’s attending physician, Doctor Liu, Nurse Lin had mentioned something. During Gu Zhishu’s operation, Doctor Liu performed surgery on two patients at the same time, and the other patient had the exact same condition as Gu Zhishu. Doctor Liu was a foreign specialist; getting him to fly in for such a difficult case must have cost a fortune.

According to the Gu Family, Doctor Liu was flown in by that other patient; he operated on Gu Zhishu only because Gu Zhishu happened to have the same condition. It was mostly a coincidence.

Then could the one who brought Doctor Liu over have been Huangfu Junsheng?

He had a bold guess: if Gu Zhishu truly had no illness, why would Doctor Liu operate on both Gu Zhishu and Huangfu Junsheng at the same time?

Since Huangfu Junsheng had invited Doctor Liu, he must have actually been ill.

But Gu Zhishu really wasn’t.

Given Huangfu Junsheng’s personality, for a major craniotomy like that, how could he possibly agree to Doctor Liu running two tables at once? Even if Doctor Liu had the skill to do simultaneous surgeries, Huangfu Junsheng would never have agreed.

Unless… Doctor Liu had to operate on two patients at the same time – say, remove something from one person’s brain and then… transplant it into another’s.

When Qiu Ziyu heard Nan Mu’s guess, a chill crept up his back.

After all, cracking open someone’s skull to take something out and then putting it into someone else’s… that was the sort of ghost story he’d only ever read in tabloids as a kid.

“But it makes sense, doesn’t it?” The more Nan Mu thought about it, the more convinced he became. “That explains why before the surgery, aside from the forged medical exam report, Gu Zhishu had no symptoms. But after the operation, he started getting sick. Someone must have put something in there!”

Qiu Ziyu still felt something was off. “Trick him into surgery just to put something in? To what end?”

Nan Mu froze for a moment, then quickly caught on. “Then it’s a swap. There’s something that has to exist, so they moved the good one into Huangfu Junsheng – and moved Huangfu Junsheng’s bad one into Gu Zhishu.”