The Quartet  

Forums like these, where seasoned enthusiasts gather, have their own complex registration procedures. There were as many as eight layers of professional questionnaires alone. Wenjay was simultaneously looking up answers on his phone and filling out the forms on his laptop. After struggling with three of them, he surrendered – at this rate, he wouldn't finish registering until next week.

However, no obstacle could deter a curious mind. After a brief three-second slump, Wenjay rallied and turned to the all-powerful Taobao.

Thanks to Jack Ma, there's almost nothing you can't buy on Taobao. After a few searches, Wenjay found a seller who specialized in selling VIP accounts for this forum. He bit the bullet and paid 800 yuan. The seller sent him the account details and, fearing he might not be able to log in due to IP tracking, even kindly set up an IP proxy for him.

At half-past five in the morning, Wenjay, eyes gleaming with mischief, poured himself a cup of coffee and opened the "hot" post – the Xiyuan City Serial Murder Case Thread.

The seasoned forum was different. It revealed many details of the case, and some experienced users had detailed discussions about these details.

There were a few close-up photos of the victims in the thread, seemingly cropped from previous news photos. They had been enhanced for clarity. Thanks to the cooling oil, Wenjay didn't feel nauseous this time – or perhaps it was because he had digested his chicken noodle soup – and he bravely clicked on the high-resolution images.

One of the images was a close-up of a wound. The stitches made by the killer had been removed, revealing the details inside. Wenjay couldn't make heads or tails of it, but naturally, there were people in the thread who could: the wounds had been cut and restitched several days after the victims' deaths.

A super user named "Alpha" suggested that the wounds had been gnawed on by wild animals. The suspect, fearing detection, had cut away the gnawed areas and then stitched the cuts with fishing line. This way, even if the body was dug up, it would be hard to tell what animal had bitten it.

The cause of death and the process of handling the bodies of the four victims seemed similar, but there were subtle differences. For example, the first victim was found in a forest near the Xiyuan River, buried in the shallow soil layer. When he was dug up, his body was slightly more decomposed, suggesting he had been dead for over a month. The second victim was found at an abandoned construction site outside the city, buried among construction waste. Because the area was relatively busy, he was discovered less than a month after his death, and his body was less decomposed.

The third victim was discovered even sooner after death. The killer might have been in a hurry and dumped him at a garbage disposal station behind a farmers' market, hastily covering him with a worn-out woven cover found nearby. According to a leak in the thread, the body was discovered the day after it was dumped. The coroner determined that he had been dead for no more than a week, but his body had been gnawed on the most severely of the four victims, with half his organs missing and several bones broken.

The last victim was the most unique of the four. He had not been gnawed on by wild animals, his body was very clean, tightly wrapped in white cotton cloth, and buried by a secluded lake in a suburban park. He was discovered only three days after his death – it was as if the suspect had intentionally wanted him to be found early and hadn't bothered to disguise the burial site much.

Wenjay spent nearly an hour reading before he managed to finish the thread. Despite his efforts, he still couldn't connect the polite and gentle Zeeshow with the brutal killer.

Closing the hot post, Wenjay specifically searched for the user "Alpha." As expected, this user was very interested in the case. Besides replying several times in the main thread, Alpha had also started a separate thread to analyze the case from a behavioral perspective.

In Alpha's view, the case clearly exhibited two behavioral patterns: all four victims were healthy adult males, all beaten to death, suggesting the killer was physically strong and violent. Considering the victims' injuries, the killer might also have a mental disorder or intellectual disability.

The victims were gnawed on by wild animals after death, suggesting the killer was very casual in disposing of the bodies, likely just tossing them into the wilderness. This further indicated that he was not a person with a complete mind or meticulous thinking.

However, the victims' bodies were later processed a second time. The gnawed wounds were carefully cut away, then stitched, wrapped, and buried, leaving no traces at the scene. All of this suggested that the killer was highly intelligent, meticulous in planning, and delicate in execution.

In the end, Alpha asserted that the case was likely the work of two people: one killer was physically strong but intellectually deficient, while the other was logically rigorous and highly intelligent.

In addition to this, Alpha also analyzed the possible criminal psychology of the two killers, especially the one who processed the victims a second time.

He believed that this person felt varying degrees of guilt towards the four victims – cutting the wounds might have been just to erase the traces of animal gnawing, but stitching the wounds was likely driven by personal emotional needs. This was an entirely unnecessary activity, the only purpose of which was to make the bodies look more complete, more aesthetically pleasing.

As for what kind of personal emotions drove this, it could be obsession, it could be a cleanliness fetish, but most likely it was guilt, because he later wrapped the bodies in white cotton cloth, a typical manifestation of guilt.

Among the four victims, the third and fourth victims were probably more special to this killer, representing more hatred and more guilt respectively – the third victim's body was the most damaged, and the cloth used to wrap the body was a cover picked up at the scene, not the standard white cotton cloth; the fourth victim's body was the most intact, even the traces of violent beating were less than the others.

Closing the thread, dawn was breaking. Wenjay had never studied a murder case so deeply before. He washed his face in the bathroom, leaning against the sink, looking at the red-eyed, excited person in the mirror, he couldn't help but secretly wonder if he had the potential to be a detective. Otherwise, why wasn't he tired at all, and even felt particularly excited?

Of course, he had felt this way before, like when he got his driver's license at eighteen, he thought he could be an excavator driver. Or in high school, when one of his essays won a district award, he thought he might grow up to be a writer.

He had also dreamed of being a Michelin chef, but in the end, he became a stay-at-home dad.

Back in bed, Wenjay thought he would continue to be excited, so he opened a game to play for a while, hoping to induce sleep. But for some reason, as soon as he leaned back on his pillow, an indescribable tremor suddenly attacked his brain, and a powerful wave of sleepiness swept over him...

He yawned, his head tilted, and he fell asleep instantly.