Chapter 43 Who Am I? 42

After walking halfway through the room and passing through a curtain that served as a door, the scene before her eyes suddenly opened up.

The space here was very small, about ten square meters, containing a small single bed, a nightstand, a wardrobe used as a partition, and a small table. On the floor were mineral water and instant noodles, and there was an electric kettle on the table.

It was crowded and cramped, and the smell from outside still lingered, but it was at least a place where a living person could inhabit.

Lin Xiangjun flexed her wrists. Without wasting any words, she immediately began searching through this partitioned small room.

Her home at 104 was right upstairs. While the layout wasn't large, it at least had decent lighting and could have squeezed a family of four without issue, yet Fang Ping was arranged to live in this place—a storage room masquerading as a basement.

It seemed the Cleaner couple didn't value this daughter very much.

Besides, judging by their ages... Sun Tao must have been conceived by the Cleaner couple when Fang Ping was in college, right?

At that time, Fang Ping was only in her early twenties, and she was forced to take on a younger brother who was young enough to be her son. If she were a fool, it would be fine, but if she was of sound mind...

Lin Xiangjun's hand stopped on a hard, round bump under the bedsheet.

She slowly reached out and pulled the object from under the bedsheet.

It was a small human skull.

Have you ever heard of ancient Indian witchcraft?

They would decapitate their slain enemies, remove the skull, eyeballs, and other tissues, leaving only the skin. They would sew the eyes and mouth shut to prevent the enemy's soul from escaping, boil the scalp in medicinal water, and then fill it with hot sand and stones to set the shape before drying it.

Using this method, a human head could be shrunk to the size of a fist, and the Indians would wear it on their bodies as proof of their courage.

Lin Xiangjun looked at the fist-sized head in her hands.

Although it had been boiled and the eyelids and mouth were sewn shut, the texture of the skin and the distribution of the facial features clearly indicated this was the head of a middle-aged man!

This was Sun Tao's head!

Lin Xiangjun's hand shook, and the head with tightly closed eyes landed on the small double bed with a thud.

It rolled a couple of times before bumping into the wall and coming to a stop.

Whether intentional or not, the face of the head was directly facing Lin Xiangjun. Even though his eyes were sewn shut with thread, Lin Xiangjun could still feel it staring fixedly at her.

The gaze was sorrowful, painful, and carried a hint of pleading, as if...

As if begging Lin Xiangjun to give him a quick end.

Lin Xiangjun held her head; her thoughts were in chaos, like a tangled, knotted mess of weeds.

That's right, that's right. When she left, she had looked back once. The security guard had torn off both of Sun Tao's arms and devoured them, but the remaining limbs—the torso, head, and legs—she had never personally seen the security guard consume. How could she be so certain that Sun Tao had died at the hands of the security guard?

Sun Tao died at the hands of Fang Ping.

This made sense, Lin Xiangjun reasoned.

If Fang Ping was a girl from a family that favored boys over girls, the person she hated most would be her father, Fang Shan, followed by her mother, Wang Lixia, and then this younger brother who was born when she was twenty.

She could have left this home through work, but then this younger brother, old enough to be her own son, was born.

Legally, if parents are unable to support their children, an older sister or brother who is already working has an obligation to raise the child.

If Fang Ping refused, her mother could easily spread a few rumors—just a little bit—that would ruin her daughter's reputation in this old residential complex where there was almost no privacy.

Therefore, it was not hard to understand why Fang Ping hated this younger brother and wanted to kill him.

But the problem was, the body parts lying here should have been Qin Jianyuan's!

The "I" that the rules instructed them to find was Qin Jianyuan's body, not Sun Tao's!

She searched the entire room, even opening and checking inside every shoe, but other than making her own hands stink, Lin Xiangjun only found a box containing a skull, eyeballs, and dried body tissues. Aside from that, there was nothing.

This was not what Lin Xiangjun had expected.

She suddenly thought of something and pulled the arms, which were wrapped in the sleeves of a tracksuit, out of her inventory.

At the time, she had confirmed that the skin and weight of these hands were that of a child, but under Lin Xiangjun's gaze, they slowly turned black and grew larger. The bones thickened, and the finger joints became covered with a thick layer of calluses, as if they had been doing heavy manual labor for a long time.

Lin Xiangjun placed the arms and the skull together.

Clearly, these body parts all belonged to Sun Tao.

They were not Qin Jianyuan's.

No wonder the system didn't give a clearance notification when she found the arms. She had thought it was because she wanted to find all the body parts, so the system didn't broadcast it; she had even thought the system was quite intelligent.

Now that she thought about it, this wasn't intelligence at all! It was clearly because she hadn't found the right things!

Lin Xiangjun sat by the bed in deep thought for a while, then suddenly slammed her fist against the bed, causing it to creak.

"This is absolutely not a two-star instance!" she said through gritted teeth.

This difficulty is definitely not that of a two-star instance!

It was already the third day, and the answer that all the clues pointed to was actually wrong—if this were truly a two-star instance, the number of people clearing it would be one in ten thousand!

Lin Xiangjun stood up abruptly. Her expression was grim, and she knew she could no longer sit around and wait for death.

"Now that I can confirm there is nothing at these two locations from the nursery rhyme, then at least one of the remaining three places—'the dry and hard withered grass,' 'the cat's warm embrace,' and 'the dark and damp soil'—must have two sets of clues buried in it, otherwise there wouldn't be enough for three people..."

"Or maybe it's not necessarily three people? Perhaps, without me knowing, someone among the remaining three has already been heavily contaminated and consumed by the anomaly... These things are hard to say, but to be safe, I still have to investigate all three places."

"I should stay calm. Just because two of these five locations are fake doesn't mean all of them are."

Having mentally prepared herself, Lin Xiangjun took a deep breath.

"But I must be prepared for the possibility that all five locations are fake..."

If all five locations were fake, what should she do?

Lin Xiangjun did not want to use that method; she only wanted it as a backup—after all, Qin Jianyuan did not look like the kind of peaceful anomaly that could be negotiated or cooperated with. She did not want to work herself to the bone completing an agreement, only to have the other party stab her in the back.

Whether or not she got any benefits was secondary; she just didn't want to end up losing her life to a backstab at the end.

Lin Xiangjun, who had been working all day since early morning, smiled bitterly as she packed up the skull, the head, the dried tissues and eyeballs, as well as those two arms, and put them into her pouch.

She would take them with her for now; she could worry about whether they would be useful later.

She had to return the keys first, then go to the Garden to dig a hole and try her luck.

She could only hope that there would be no more fake clues in the remaining three locations.