Analysis

Fan Li's expression suddenly turned strange, as if realizing something. He picked up the sneakers and walked towards the door. Following the hallway, he seemed to be heading downstairs. Everyone followed, with Fatty and Jiang Cheng at the back of the group. When passing the boy's bedroom, Jiang Cheng pulled Fatty inside. "What are you doing?" Fatty asked in terror, covering his body. "Checking something." "Why do you need me for that?" Jiang Cheng pulled open each drawer in the bedroom, then crouched beside the bed, pulling out a pair of slippers from underneath. He held up the slippers and looked at Fatty, calmly answering: "Because I'm scared." Fatty: "..."

A while later, Jiang Cheng and Fatty came downstairs to the living room, where they found Sister Nuan and the others gathered around the shoe cabinet. All the shoes had been taken out and arranged neatly on the floor. Hearing Jiang Cheng coming downstairs, Fan Li put down the women's casual shoes he was holding. Fatty noticed all three of them had grim expressions. Just as Chen Xiaomeng opened her mouth to speak, Jiang Cheng said: "Did you discover that this villa had not just two boys, but two girls as well?" Fan Li's eyes trembled, as if he wanted to say something immediately, but he held back. After a while, he said quietly: "Newcomer, what's your background really?" "Don't say useless things, tell me what you found first," Jiang Cheng put down what he was holding, looking at him very calmly.

Fan Li held up two pairs of shoes for Jiang Cheng to see. They were women's casual shoes, identical in size. Based on their earlier assessment, they had assumed they belonged to the same girl.

With a grim expression, Fan Li turned both shoes over to reveal the soles. "The left pair shows heavy wear on the outer edge, while the right pair is worn mainly on the inner side."

He raised his head, staring into Jiang Cheng's eyes. "Sole wear patterns are related to walking habits, and once formed, these habits are almost impossible to change. So these shoes belonged to two different people - there were two girls in this villa."

"But why is there only one girl's bedroom on the second floor?" Chen Xiaomeng asked. "And only one single bed?"

Jiang Cheng shook his head. "Both small bedrooms upstairs belonged to girls, each with their own single bed."

"What do you mean?"

"I found these in the bedroom with military posters," Jiang Cheng held out the slippers he'd found under the bed. "The size is small - you can compare them with the casual shoes."

Though comparison wasn't really necessary, Fan Li still took them and placed them next to the casual shoes. Now everyone could clearly see that the slippers' owner must have been female.

"Isn't it a stretch to conclude it was a girl's room just from one pair of slippers? Maybe the girl just left them in the boy's room by accident."

"And looking at how the room was decorated, it really seems like a boy's room."

"But men's bedrooms don't typically need these," Jiang Cheng reached into his pocket and pulled out something, handing it to the questioning Chen Xiaomeng.

Her eyebrows rose as she took it - it was an opened package of sanitary pads.

"I found several packages in the bedroom drawer," Jiang Cheng continued.

Sister Nuan looked at Jiang Cheng. "So both upstairs bedrooms belonged to girls, and one of them had habits and preferences more typically masculine."

Jiang Cheng nodded. "That's right."

Chen Xiaomeng seemed to just come back to her senses, her eyes showing confusion. "Then where did the two boys live? We only found three bedrooms in this villa."

One master bedroom for the husband and wife.

Based on their deductions, the other two small bedrooms belonged to the two girls in the villa.

"Could they be on the third floor?" Fatty suggested quietly. "We haven't been up there yet."

Before he finished speaking, Sister Nuan shook her head: "Unlikely. When we arrived, I noticed only the first and second floors had windows. The third floor is a darkroom."

Logically, no one would put bedrooms in a windowless darkroom, especially not a wealthy family like the villa's owners.

Chen Xiaomeng's expression turned tense as if realizing something. "So... these two boys weren't part of the family at all - they were outsiders!"

Fan Li gave her a cold glance. "More like intruders."

"And they weren't boys - they were grown men," Jiang Cheng added.

Upon hearing this, Chen Xiaomeng's body trembled violently.

Indeed, now that the assumption about them being the couple's children had been disproven, just looking at the two pairs of shoes - one was close to Jiang Cheng's size, while the other was even larger than Fan Li's.

Jiang Cheng stared at the two pairs of sneakers arranged on the floor. "When I first saw these shoes, something felt off. They were too cheap and worn out, completely different from the other shoes in the cabinet. The people living in this villa didn't seem like the type to settle for such things."

The living room fell into silence. Their previous theory had been overturned, and the story had transformed from a straightforward family tragedy into an invasion by criminals.

After a while, Fatty looked around and whispered, "So two men broke into this villa, dealt with the parents first, then imprisoned their two daughters before killing them."

"Remember the water trails the female ghost left? And the women's hair in the first-floor bathroom tub," Sister Nuan said darkly. "That ghost was probably drowned in the bathtub."

"As for Xie Yu being scared to death and then dragged away to be mutilated - that was the ghost's revenge. It also explains why the ghost put the intruder's shoes on him."

"Because she was projecting her torturer onto him."

During their analysis of the case, daylight had already arrived. This time, no one urged Fatty to cook - they just made do with some bread and snacks. It wasn't out of concern for the agile Fatty, but because they were running out of time. Jiang Cheng had noticed that the daylight in this world was growing increasingly shorter, while the nights became progressively longer. By his calculations, after no more than two more nights, daylight would disappear from this world completely. "What happens when the daylight disappears?" Fatty asked, his eyes wide as saucers, his throat visibly bobbing.

Jiang Cheng turned around and patted Fatty's shoulder reassuringly: "Don't worry..." A bit of color returned to Fatty's pale cheeks. Then Jiang Cheng continued: "At worst, the ghosts will just appear and kill people without restraint." Fatty: "???"

The group walked along the second-floor corridor. They needed to complete a second search of the villa during these relatively safe daylight hours