Chapter 5

Chapter 5

“I’ll go after him right now.” I was so furious that I was starting to lose my grip on reason.

“Don’t be reckless!” Siri stopped me just in time. “Even if you catch up to him now, it won’t do any good. We need a foolproof plan.”

“Then what do we do now? I’ll listen to you.” I forced myself to calm down.

“First, clean up your murder scene. Otherwise, before you even find the real culprit behind all this, you’ll be locked up at the police station.”

So, following Siri’s instructions, I cleaned up the bloodstains at the scene, left behind reasonable fingerprints and footprints, then wrapped Xu Yihe’s body in a quilt and temporarily hid it in the storage room.

“Based on the anonymous message you received last night, we can analyze that the sender does care about you to some degree. So this anonymous person is very likely a close friend or relative of yours, or someone who likes you.”

Once the scene was cleaned up, Siri began analyzing who the mastermind behind everything might be.

Aside from my parents, Xu Yihe was my only close friend or relative. My parents would never do something like this, so they could be ruled out as well.

That only left the people who liked me.

I was fairly decent in every respect, so quite a few people had pursued me. But because I only had eyes for Xu Yihe, I barely remembered any of them.

“The photo of you in the basement was your college ID photo. From this, we can infer that this person may have been one of your college classmates, or someone who attended the same university as you.

“In addition, if one of the bodies in the basement is mine, then this person must be highly skilled in all kinds of programming. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here, and he wouldn’t have been able to exploit an internet vulnerability to send you anonymous messages.

“Taking all of the above into consideration, can you narrow down the relevant candidates?”

After listening to Siri’s analysis, a name suddenly surfaced in my mind-Xiao Chengyu.

Xiao Chengyu was my senior in college. Back at school, he had founded the AI Intelligent Assistant Association.

The reason I suddenly thought of him was that he had once used several robots to confess his feelings to me. Unfortunately, the person I liked back then was Xu Yihe, so I politely turned him down.

After I told Siri all this, though, I felt that something didn’t quite add up.

“But after I turned him down, he never contacted me again. So many years have passed. Could it really be him?”

“I just searched the internet for information related to Xiao Chengyu.

“There are a total of ten people nationwide named Xiao Chengyu. Information can be found on nine of them. The only one whose information cannot be found is the college senior you mentioned.

“Therefore, I reasonably suspect that his information has either been blocked by him, or that he has revoked my access to view it.

“In conclusion, he is very likely the mastermind behind all this.”

Although Siri couldn’t use online loopholes to find any information related to Xiao Chengyu, it did use the phone of the man in black who had come here before to track down a specific location: a residential compound.

“If that man in black is Xiao Chengyu, then this location is probably his residence. Do we need to go there directly?”

I was stunned for a moment, because Siri had suddenly handed the decision over to me. Up until now, it had clearly been the one coming up with all the plans.

After all, it was much more capable than I was.

“No, we can’t go there directly.” I gave Siri a firm answer. “If we show up at his door out of nowhere, it’ll be too strange. We might expose our purpose right away.”

“Humans really are complicated. Then what should we do?”

“How about we lure him into the trap instead?” I opened WeChat on my phone, found Xiao Chengyu’s account, and tried tapping the transfer button. I discovered that he hadn’t blocked me.

Good thing I’d added Xiao Chengyu as a friend back then because I wanted to join the AI Intelligent Assistant Association.

So I posted a new update on my Moments, complete with text and pictures. The general idea was that I had been deceived by a scumbag, was now heartbroken, and needed comfort.

To avoid unnecessary trouble, I blocked a few important people from seeing it.

“If Xiao Chengyu’s next target is me, then he must be thinking about how to contact me. By doing this, I’m merely following along with his plan. He should think this is the perfect opportunity.”

“You’re very smart,” Siri praised me in its icy voice.