At the same time, Lu Yizhan and his colleagues were also investigating the missing children at the welfare home.
“I’m telling you, this should be a case for the Criminal Police Brigade, or some special department, right?” Lu Yizhan’s colleague looked rather pale. “Have you seen the surveillance footage of those children disappearing? This isn’t the kind of thing we should be handling!”
“Four children heard a burst of flute music in the early hours of yesterday morning, then lined up and walked out to play in the children’s playground in the courtyard. The creepiest part is, those kids didn’t look hypnotized or like they were sleepwalking at all. They even deliberately avoided the surveillance cameras. That means all four of them were completely conscious. They played on the swings in that crappy little playground for an hour, and then, just like that, they vanished from the footage!”
As he spoke, Lu Yizhan’s colleague couldn’t help cursing. “Damn it. The children were gone, but the equipment kept moving. I watched that surveillance footage yesterday and couldn’t sleep afterward...”
He rubbed his arms, goosebumps rising all over him. “Now there are only five children left. Originally, they were supposed to be transferred to other welfare homes, but then the mushroom poisoning deaths happened at the hospital. The case level was upgraded, so everyone has to stay here for questioning and investigation. This is too damn weird.”
Lu Yizhan frowned. “Let’s speak to the director first.”
“The director? I doubt she’ll say anything.” His colleague curled his lip. “That old woman didn’t report the missing children at all. If the hospital incident hadn’t escalated the case, and if we hadn’t done a strict headcount afterward, we wouldn’t even have known four children were missing. No one would’ve known kids had disappeared from this place!”
“Even so, we still need to see her,” Lu Yizhan said steadily. “She must know something.”
In the director’s office, Mu Ke’s father had already finished discussing the donation details and left to speak with someone else. Only the old director remained.
She sat in her chair, eyelids drooping as she looked at Lu Yizhan. “You’re here to ask why I didn’t report the children missing?”
Lu Yizhan nodded.
The old director suddenly laughed. Trembling, she opened a drawer, took out a stack of police report receipts, and handed them to him. “Young man, you must be new, aren’t you? I reported it every time they went missing. But in all these years, have you people ever found my children and brought them back? So this time, I simply didn’t bother. In any case, this welfare home is about to go bankrupt.”
Lu Yizhan frowned as he looked through the receipts.
The oldest dated back ten years. Every single one concerned missing children, yet the follow-up opinions all read: [Child ran away from home voluntarily.]
There was nothing further.
“Every year, this private welfare home holds a Children’s Day performance for the kindhearted people who invest in us, so those wealthy bosses can see how the children they sponsor are doing. But every year, after the Children’s Day report performance, children go missing from our welfare home. And every year, the investigation concludes that the children found some way to run off on their own.”
The old director spoke slowly. “Back then, your police even suspected our welfare home of abusing the children, which was why they were ‘running away.’ But the investigation found no abuse here. It was simply those children themselves who wanted to run. We didn’t do anything improper to them—no organ trafficking, no pedophilic sex trade. You already investigated this place inside and out, didn’t you? And found nothing.”
The old director lifted her eyelids. “Just very common, very ordinary cases of children running away and then going missing.”
“Missing children are hard to find. Once these little beans run out, they’re like grains of rice dropped into a sea of people. Finding children who are deliberately avoiding you is no different from searching for a needle in a haystack. So every year, the matter simply ended unresolved.”
Lu Yizhan’s colleague couldn’t help cutting in. “But this time, according to the surveillance, the children were sitting on the swings in the playground, and then they disappeared! This isn’t running away!”
“What you’re describing is too strange. How could something like that happen?” the old director said dismissively. “Our surveillance system has been in use for a long time. It’s old and outdated. Perhaps it malfunctioned, or the footage broke somehow.”
Lu Yizhan’s colleague choked with frustration. Just as he was about to question her more sternly, Lu Yizhan stopped him.
Lu Yizhan asked calmly, “Director, it is our fault that we failed to find the children. But you still should have reported it. Besides, this shouldn’t be the only year you failed to report, correct? I just looked through your receipts. Some years are missing, yet you said children disappear every year. So what exactly is the truth?”
The old director fell silent for several minutes.
Then she turned and reached deep into a dust-covered bookshelf, pulling out a large file folder. She blew the dust from its surface, untied the string around it, and took out something thick and book-like, resembling a photo album.
She opened it.
The first page read: [200X Children’s Welfare Home Arts Performance Group Photo].
Clearly, this was an archive album for the private welfare home.
In the photograph, dozens of children stood stiffly and awkwardly beside a group of successful people in suits and leather shoes. The children wore obedient, artificial smiles they had obviously practiced countless times. Red lipstick dots marked their foreheads, and their lips had been painted bright red, making them look both gaudy and old-fashioned.
“Children go missing every year, but it’s true that I didn’t report every case.” The old director looked at the children in the photo, her voice long and slow. “Even if another year or two of investment came in, this welfare home wouldn’t last much longer. It’s going to close. There’s no harm in telling you these old stories directly.”
“Many of the children here were never easy to discipline. To put it nicely, they had ‘personality.’ To put it bluntly, they were wild by nature and liked running outside.”
“Some of them didn’t ‘run away from home.’ They fled because they’d committed wrongs.”
As she spoke, the old director turned another page.
This page resembled a child development record. Written on it was:
[The orphans Bai Liu, Xiao Ke, and three others beat the investors who came to watch the performance after the Children’s Day show, robbing them of their property and mobile phones. Punishment: cleaning the entire welfare home and fasting for one day. Follow-up punishment to be determined based on their reform.]
“For example, this group of children beat up the investors after the performance, then ran away that night. I didn’t report it. I turned a blind eye and let them run.”
The old director tapped her finger against the punishment record, her words heavy with implication. “Because if they hadn’t run, then in a welfare home funded by those people, their ending would not have been good.”
“At the very least, the punishment would not have stopped at fasting for one day.”
“Director, may I see that group photo?” Lu Yizhan’s attention, however, had shifted elsewhere. His expression was more solemn than ever.
The director handed him the archive album.
Lu Yizhan flipped back to the page labeled [200X Children’s Welfare Home Arts Performance Group Photo]. His gaze swept rapidly over the children in the picture before finally locking onto one child near the edge.
Even with lipstick and a large red dot painted on his forehead, the child did not look ridiculous. Instead, he possessed a faint, delicate beauty almost like that of a young girl. But that beauty was fractured by his emotionless eyes, revealing a precociousness far beyond his age.
Beside his cold gaze, the other children looked like a pack of fools.
He was impossible to miss.
No one was more familiar with this face at this age than Lu Yizhan.
His eyes remained fixed on the child in the photo. He pointed at him and looked up at the old director. “Who is this child? What’s his name?”
“This child?” The old director looked for a moment, as though recalling something. “He was the one who led the others to beat the investors and run away, so I remember him very clearly. When he first arrived at the welfare home, he only said his surname was Bai. He said his name was Bai Six.”
“That’s impossible.”
With a sharp pah, Lu Yizhan slammed both hands onto the desk and stared at the old director. “His name is Bai Liu. He was indeed called Bai Six ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) before, but he changed his name when he was fourteen and never used that name again. He and I grew up together in a public welfare home. It’s impossible for him to have appeared in this private welfare home at the same time!”
“But...” The old director looked at Lu Yizhan in confusion. “Could you be mistaking him for someone else? This child, Bai Six—not long after he escaped, the investors used their connections to find him and bring him back. He never managed to leave this place. Not long after Bai Six was brought back, he died.”
“Died?” Lu Yizhan’s voice sounded strange. “What was... the cause of death?”
The old director sighed. “A very strange death. He accidentally swallowed an odd coin. The coin had a hole through the center, and it got lodged in his trachea. Within minutes, he was gone. Because he suffered some terrible things in this welfare home before he left and after he was brought back... we all suspected Bai Six had committed suicide.”
Lu Yizhan stiffly lowered his gaze back to the black-and-white photograph.
Bai Six’s expressionless face stared back at him. His eyelids drooped lazily, and he was looking off to the side as though somewhat tired. Strands of hair had fallen across his forehead, damp as if soaked with sweat from the performance.
These eerie events pressed down on Lu Yizhan’s chest, invisible yet heavy. He stared at the slightly thin boy in the photograph, feeling as though he could no longer breathe.
That was Bai Liu from ten years ago.
——————
Bai Liu stepped forward and picked up the rag doll beside the seesaw.
It was handmade, and the reference model was clearly him.
However, the workmanship was very old. There were faint traces of ribbon threads left around the doll’s leg. It felt like a handmade gift doll; generally, dolls like this would have the date of gifting or production marked somewhere on them.
Bai Liu turned the rag doll over, searching for a date.
Finally, inside the twisted-off head, he found a handwritten line.
This was indeed a doll from ten years ago.
But Bai Liu had only been working for two or three years. He had only started wearing this corporate-slave outfit of shirt and suit trousers after entering the workforce.
And the coin hanging around his neck was something he had obtained only recently, after entering the game.
It was the physical manifestation of the system.
Yet someone had used his current appearance ten years ago to order a custom rag doll, then torn off its head and limbs and discarded it here.
Bai Liu narrowed his eyes.
