Chapter 3

The first time I entered the police station three years ago, I was the one who had been beaten, with my head split open and blood all over me.

I was also the only student among the two groups of thugs present.

After finishing the statement, Captain Li looked at my file and frowned deeply. “Why aren’t you studying properly? Why are you fooling around with people like this? Stay away from them from now on.”

As he spoke, Captain Li called my mother according to the phone number in my file and asked her to come pick me up.

On the other end, my mother seemed to be playing mahjong, and she said impatiently, “He and I have had nothing to do with each other for a long time.”

Indeed, custody of me had been awarded to my father.

Before my father died, he left behind a mountain of gambling debt.

But my life was better than when my father was still alive.

At least I no longer had to be beaten.

I knocked my head raw borrowing money from relatives, and finally got a chance to continue going to school.

Everyone told me that only studying could change my fate, but I could not get into a university program, so I could only attend a junior college.

I thought the hardest days were already behind me, and as long as I worked a little harder, there would always be a way out...

After I rambled on about my past, Captain Li led me out and asked why I still fooled around with those people when I clearly knew what I should be doing.

At the time, I blinked blankly and said, “I didn’t know what they did. I heard I could make a bit of money working with them, so I followed them in a daze.”

When he heard my stomach still growling, Captain Li bought me a boxed meal.

Back then, I still knew gratitude, fear, and restraint.

Several years passed.

I had completely become a shameless piece of trash, and I had become a hopeless regular at the police station in Captain Li’s eyes.

Over the next forty-plus hours, I was interrogated more than a dozen times without pause.

My casual, arrogant, and self-destructive attitude left them with no progress at all.

During the final interrogation, Captain Li sat across from me alone.

“Zhang Mingyuan, whether you admit it now or not is no longer important.”

“Surveillance footage shows that in the past week, apart from the three victims, only you entered and exited that dorm room. On the victims’ water cups, we also extracted traces of residue that had not been wiped clean, so the killer can only be you.”

I was so sleepy that I could barely stand it, and my mind was a mess.

But I still forced myself to raise the corner of my mouth. “Water cups? So they were poisoned to death, and you suspect that I drugged them?”

“Fine, I admit it. I gave them the most poisonous poison, crane-top red, so you can close the case and report back.”

Captain Li suddenly barked coldly, “Where did the poison come from?”

“I don’t know, picked it up off the ground?”

“Anyway, I can’t make something like crane-top red, so you should go investigate the people from the Tang Sect!”

Captain Li did not respond again, and after rubbing his bloodshot eyes, he got up and left.

A few minutes later, I was released.

I learned that those three roommates had indeed all been poisoned to death.

The police checked my phone, as well as everyone connected to me, wanting to find the source of the poison, but they found nothing.

So they could only hold me for forty-eight hours.

I cleared myself of the murder suspicion, but I was still expelled from school.

The sun was glaringly bright, shining so hard that I could not open my eyes, and I stood outside the school gate with a bag of luggage, not knowing where to go.

Countless pairs of eyes behind me looked at me, pointing and whispering.

A motorcycle suddenly stopped in front of me, and two gangsters waved machetes at me. “Come work with us tonight, you hear?”

I sneered and spat viciously at them.

The price was that I was ambushed with a club that night and beaten until my head was covered in blood.

Cheap motels did not dare take me in, and I could not afford to go to the hospital, so I could only force myself to go to an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city.

I was already cautious enough, but I never expected that Captain Li still followed me.

When I was about to pass out, Captain Li’s figure appeared in my field of vision.

“Is this your secret base?”

“Zhang Mingyuan, and you still say you’re not the killer?”