You in my eyes

"Didn't you tell us to be careful of Gu Yunqing before?" Ye Miaozhu said coldly, "He's dead."

Zhang Yangxu looked around and indeed did not see Gu Yunqing: "Did he die by the river too?"

Ye Miaozhu didn't say anything, just lowered her head.

"I understand." Zhang Yangxu turned his head to look at Ning Zhe: "Can you tell me the details? The cause and effect of Gu Yunqing's death, and why it is said that their deaths have no direct relationship with the river?"

Ning Zhe had no objection to this: "But first I want to know what happened between you and the thing that pretended to be Xie Si Ning after the phone call ended, and how did you get rid of it?"

Still very wary... Zhang Yangxu nodded slightly with self-awareness and continued:

"After Feng Yushu hung up the phone, I tried to call back several times, but none of them went through. During the time I was calling back, Xie Si Ning did nothing but looked at me silently. I didn't know she was dead at the time. She had been replaced by the river. All the clues were Feng Yushu's incoherent words, 'Be careful of Xie Si Ning.'"

"To be honest, Ning Zhe, I don't trust you, so I didn't believe all of Feng Yushu's calls and reminders. I even seriously thought about whether you were deliberately making things mysterious to alienate Si Ning and me. After all, you are alone here."

"I pretended to be calm and continued to go to the ancestral hall with Xie Si Ning, but the doubts in my heart were still there, so I decided to test her."

At this point, Zhang Yangxu paused and said, "On the way back to the ancestral hall, I deliberately talked to Xie Si Ning about the New World Group's real estate bidding for Gubei Town. The conversation involved many relevant laws and regulations in this field. Her reaction... was very strange."

Ning Zhe immediately became interested: "Finally we've come to the point. How is it so strange?"

Regarding commercial secrets, Zhang Yangxu was a little hesitant, but still said:

"Si Ning is a very experienced professional lawyer with first-class professional skills recognized by her peers in the industry. I have some knowledge reserves in the field of law, but I am still far inferior to her. Before I make a decision, I often consult her on relevant issues, and I can basically get quick and clear answers. Si Ning has always been very reliable."

"But during this chat, she didn't seem that reliable to me."

"She was able to answer some of the professional legal questions I asked about real estate, and she answered them very quickly, and the answers she gave were exactly what I had in mind. For other questions, she couldn't answer a single word, and couldn't give an accurate answer. However, with Si Ning's ability, it was impossible for her to fail to answer questions of this level, which made me feel very strange."

"I continued to ask some other questions with doubts. As the communication deepened, I gradually summed up a pattern:"

"Most of the questions she was able to answer, I already knew the answers to. And the ones she couldn't answer were mostly ambiguous questions that I didn't know the answers to."

"In other words, she only knows what I already know, but not what I don't know."

Listening to Zhang Yangxu's description, Ning Zhe frowned slightly: "You mean, the thing pretending to be Xie Si Ning can read minds, or read memories or something?"

Relying on reading the other person's memory and pretending to be someone the other person knows?

"No, I don't think so."

Zhang Yangxu continued, "Because in addition to professional questions about the law, I also asked her some more personal questions that only I knew, such as whether the passwords of several of my bank cards were the same, how much money I put into my lover's card every month... and so on, and she couldn't answer them."

If that fake thing could really read minds, there was no way it couldn't answer these questions.

"Maybe it's just pretending?" Ye Miaozhu said. Lying wouldn't be that difficult if that thing could really read minds.

Ning Zhe waved his hand and said, "Let Mr. Zhang continue and give more details."

Zhang Yangxu nodded slightly and described in detail the communication process between himself and the fake Xie Si Ning.

Based on his narration, Ning Zhe roughly sorted out a clear thread.

When Zhang Yangxu asked the fake Xie Si Ning a question, there were three situations:

1: A legal question that is not very professional. Zhang Yangxu knows the answer to the question and thinks Xie Sining also knows it.

In this case, Xie Si Ning was able to give the correct answer accurately and quickly.

2: Zhang Yangxu knew the answers to personal questions such as bank card passwords, but he thought Xie Sining probably didn't know them.

In this case, Xie Sining would directly answer that she didn't know.

3: A highly professional legal question. Zhang Yangxu didn't know the answer, but he thought Xie Sining should know.

"This situation was the most special. At first, Xie Sining confidently said that she was fully capable of answering the question, but after she said 'I know,' she stood still completely, without blinking, breathing, or even a heartbeat… The rustling sound coming from her throat was like a computer program that had encountered a bug and could not run normally, and she kept repeating the last sentence she said before she got stuck."

At this point, Zhang Yangxu's expression became strange: "It's just like... a game NPC whose plot was triggered by mistake."

"Or a rule that is stuck with a bug and cannot run properly."

Ning Zhe sighed and said, "Hejia Village is a place that sticks to the old ways. All the people, things, and possessions we see here...even the entire world, all follow certain established rules."

The so-called rules are rigid and absolute, without ambiguity or hypocrisy. 1 is 1, 0 is 0, there is no 0.5 which is a little bit of both. If you can't do something taboo, you can't do it. If you break the rules of the snake god, you break it. There is no such thing as "burying half a person today doesn't count as a burial."

If you know, you know; if you don't know, you don't know. The rules will remain silent, but they will not lie.

Zhang Yangxu nodded in agreement: "That thing wearing Si Ning's skin...her every move is exactly the same as my impression of Xie Si Ning, but she is not like the real Xie Si Ning. That is her in my memory, not the real her. Do you understand what I mean?"

The one who was replaced by the ghost was not 'Xie Si Ning', but 'Xie Si Ning as Zhang Yangxu thought of her'... Is that right?

Ning Zhe frowned. He felt as if he had grasped some crucial clues, but he couldn't tell what the clue looked like.

"After I had gone through all kinds of tests and inquiries and was finally completely sure from the bottom of my heart that the 'ghost' in front of me was definitely not Xie Si Ning, it disappeared." Zhang Yangxu said: "It was like a wisp of drifting smoke, completely disappearing. I got rid of it just like that."

"So why do you ask us to be careful of Gu Yunqing?" Ning Zhe asked again.

"Because after getting rid of Xie Si Ning, I quickly returned to the ancestral hall. In the ancestral hall, I met a person."

Zhang Yangxu said: "I saw Gu Yunqing standing alone in front of the lotus platform, reaching out to open the almanac hanging on the snake god statue and turning it to tomorrow."

Then he died.