Once the final search round wrapped up, every player gathered back around Di Renjie, expressions tight with anticipation. Clearly there’d been new developments.

Zhou Sheng and Chunlan, the fake married couple, had pulled the most votes.

Determined to clear his name, Zhou Sheng spoke first. “Something’s wrong with the latch on Boss Chen’s door.”

He turned to Boss Yu. “Yesterday morning, when we got to his room, you said the door was locked. That’s why I went and kicked it. Even then, something felt off. It gave way far too easily.”

Zhou Sheng’s voice sharpened. “That door was already open. The latch shows clear signs of being pried apart by hand. You lied, didn’t you? Not only did you mislead all of us, you turned around and pinned the blame on me and Chunlan, claiming we worked together. If anyone here is the actual killer, it’s you.”

Boss Yu’s face went cold. “What nonsense is this? I was nervous, I gave the door a light push, it didn’t budge, so I assumed it was locked. As for you rushing in to kick it down so eagerly, maybe you’d already broken the latch yourself, staging the whole thing for us to find.”

Zhou Sheng’s laugh had no humor in it. “That’s rich, coming from you. You’re the one who lied. I only stepped up because of what you said.”

The two of them went back and forth, neither giving ground.

Di Renjie cut in, brow furrowed. “Enough. Anyone else have something new?”

Cute Rabbit stepped forward. “I saw the same thing in Boss Chen’s room. The latch was broken beforehand. That means it was never a sealed room at all. The killer could have come and gone freely. Boss Yu was the first to claim the door was locked, and he was staying right next door. That’s enough to make him deeply suspicious.”

Di Renjie nodded and turned to the others.

Chief Escort Xu spoke up unexpectedly. “I found something inside Boss Liu’s pillow.”

He produced a pillow from behind him, dug into it, and pulled out a tangled wad of fake hair.

Black hair, well over two meters of it, balled up and stuffed inside the pillowcase. No one had caught it during the earlier searches.

Xu’s voice went flat. “Remember the ghost from that night. White robe, hair loose and trailing. Roughly this length, wouldn’t you say?”

Every eye in the room turned to Boss Liu.

Her composure cracked for a moment before she recovered. “This isn’t mine. Someone planted it to frame me. Chief Escort Xu, did you put this here yourself?”

Cute Rabbit suddenly remembered something. On their first night at the villa, Boss Liu’s hair had been done up beautifully, pinned in an elegant style. But the morning Boss Chen was found, her hair had been a little disheveled, loose strands escaping, like she hadn’t had time to fix it properly.

She’d noticed it at the time and wondered about it. Looking at it now, it fit a theory: had she worn a wig to play the ghost in the night, and disturbed her own hair doing it?

Or was the disheveled hair simply a coincidence?

Chunlan asked quietly, “Sister Liu, was it really you, playing the ghost?”

Boss Liu’s voice stayed level. “I told you, it wasn’t. I don’t own a white robe. Pinning this on me from a strand of hair alone seems like quite a reach, doesn’t it?”

Zhou Sheng frowned, thinking it through aloud. “It was Sister Liu who explained the difference between hanging and strangulation in the first place. That’s the only reason we knew Chen Dafu was murdered, not a suicide. If she were the killer, why would she be the one to point that out?”

Chief Escort Xu shot back, “She did it on purpose. Putting on a show for all of you.”

Boss Liu raised an eyebrow, her tone cooling further. “Chief Escort Xu, that chest of yours was packed with the Ye family’s gold and jewels. Stolen from them, wasn’t it, all those years ago? For all we know, you’re the one who carried out the massacre yourself.”

Xu’s eyes went wide. “Don’t you dare. I was greedy, yes, I took money while fleeing, but the massacre had nothing to do with me.”

Boss Liu turned to Chunlan. “I found a white robe in your room. If a strand of hair is enough to make me the ghost, what’s your explanation for the robe hidden under your blanket?”

Chunlan looked utterly lost. “What? I, I don’t know anything about that!”

Listening to the accusations fly, Cute Rabbit suddenly connected the dots. Right, Di Renjie had said there were two killers in this case. The two of them would have been covering for each other the entire time.

Hair and a robe that hadn’t turned up in yesterday’s search but had appeared today, out of nowhere. Could the real killer have planted both, deliberately, to scatter suspicion?

Things were only getting murkier.

Boss Yu and Zhou Sheng, one of them had to be lying about the locked door, possibly both. Chief Escort Xu and Boss Liu, one with a chest of unexplained gold, the other with a wig hidden in her pillow, both deeply suspicious. A white robe had turned up in Chunlan’s room too.

The least suspicious person at this point, somehow, was Cute Rabbit’s own character, Qiuyue.

With the final search complete, the suspect list had only grown, and no one could convince anyone else of anything.

Di Renjie stepped forward. “The incense has burned out. Time to name your killer. Each of you will receive a slip of paper. Write down the name, or names, you believe responsible. Two at most.”

Everyone took their slip and bent to write.

Cute Rabbit thought it over carefully before casting her first vote for Boss Yu. Something about that character had never sat right with her.

Her second vote went to Boss Liu.

That woman had been far too composed from the start. When most of the room had recoiled at the sight of Boss Chen’s body, she alone had stayed calm enough to walk through the forensic differences between hanging and strangulation, mentioning offhand that her husband was a coroner.

Either her nerves were genuinely that strong, unbothered by a corpse, or she’d seen something like it before.

Once she’d voted, Cute Rabbit handed her slip to Di Renjie, a little nervous about it.

The others finished soon after.

Di Renjie tallied the results. “Boss Yu, five votes. Boss Liu, three. Zhou Sheng, two. Chief Escort Xu, two. Chunlan and Qiuyue, one each.”

Cute Rabbit blinked. That math didn’t add up.

There were only six players in the room. How had fourteen votes been cast?

Di Renjie raised a hand. “Take Boss Yu, Chief Escort Xu, and Grandmother Sun into custody.”

The guards stepped forward at once and led all three away.

The remaining players stood frozen.

Zhou Sheng said, stunned, “Wait, what? The old woman? Isn’t she just the guide NPC? She, she voted too?”

Chunlan looked equally confused. “Why did Di Renjie take three people?”

Cute Rabbit did the math out loud. “Count the votes again. Fourteen total. That means seven people voted.”

Silence.

So what did that mean? Both Chief Escort Xu and Boss Yu were killers, and the old woman had simply been brought in as a witness? Or was the old woman the actual killer?

A memory surfaced. Cute Rabbit thought back to the very start of the game, knocking on the door, the old woman answering, that startling scar on her face.

She’d asked for a room, and the old woman had smiled and said yes, of course, plenty of rooms sat empty, though there’d been a death here ten years back and the place got haunted after dark, but she was welcome to come in if she wasn’t afraid.

A chill ran down Cute Rabbit’s spine.

Haunted after dark.

That rumor had come from the old woman herself, from the very first moment.

The instant everyone stepped through the gate, she’d planted that suggestion in their heads. The players had assumed she was simply the guide NPC and accepted the horror framing without question.

Everyone had been hunting for “whoever was playing ghost,” entirely missing the obvious candidate, the one person who’d been living at the villa the whole time.

For two days, she’d served tea, arranged sleeping quarters, played the part of a helpful guide perfectly.

But had anyone ever actually confirmed she was an NPC?

The system had never said all the players were simply guests seeking shelter for the night.

It was entirely possible the old woman had been a player herself, assigned the killer’s script, planted at the villa in advance. Waiting for everyone else to walk in.

Once it clicked, Cute Rabbit didn’t know whether to laugh or groan.

A murder mystery like this genuinely punished anyone who didn’t think it through. And even sharp players could get tangled up against a skilled opponent.

The immersion in this game ran deep. After finishing Red Maple Villa, Cute Rabbit half expected to have nightmares about it that night.

---

SYSTEM: Session complete. Calculating points.

SYSTEM: Killer faction: Grandmother Sun survived to the end without being voted out, +20. Investigator faction: surviving players who correctly named a killer, +10. Incorrect identification, consolation +5.

Cute Rabbit’s vote for Boss Yu had landed correctly. Ten points for the session.

SYSTEM: View story replay?

She opened it immediately.

At the very start of the session, the player behind Grandmother Sun had been dropped into Red Maple Villa first, well ahead of everyone else.

As part of the killer faction, she’d received not just a detailed map of the estate but full background files on every other player at the table, including the fact that Chunlan and Zhou Sheng were a fake couple, and that Boss Chen’s real name was Chen Dafu, once the family’s cook.

The system had handed her everything.

Because she was the one who’d sent the letters. The summons that had drawn everyone back to Red Maple Villa had come from her.

Grandmother Sun had once been wet nurse to the Ye family’s second son and third daughter, raising them from infancy, loving them as her own. After the massacre, she’d disfigured her own face, which was why no one had recognized her since.

Once the killer faction had familiarized themselves with the layout, the remaining players had been placed outside the gate to arrive in sequence, requesting shelter one by one.

Of the eight people gathered at the villa that night, five had been players, three NPCs. Boss Chen, hanged early on, and Lin Zhirou, stabbed later, were almost certainly NPCs. Casting actual players as the first two bodies would have ruined the experience for them.

Who the third NPC was remained unclear for now.

Cute Rabbit kept watching.

On the first night, Boss Yu had quietly slipped out of bed and met with Grandmother Sun. They’d exchanged information, and she’d handed him a length of white silk cord.

Chen Dafu’s door had been locked, but the window hadn’t.

Boss Yu climbed through while Chen Dafu lay deep in drugged sleep, strangled him with the cloth cord, and strung the body from the beam.

Afterward, he’d locked the window from inside, pried the latch apart by hand, hung it loosely back in place, and slipped out.

Once he was safely back in his own room, Grandmother Sun waited a long while before setting loose a kite, rigged up to look like a ghost, creating enough commotion to jolt everyone awake.

Cute Rabbit sat with that for a second.

The haunting and the murder hadn’t happened at the same time at all.

The time gap had been the cover, the ghost-player and the killer working in staggered shifts so neither implicated the other. Everyone had guessed at the mechanism. No one had guessed the old woman was the one playing ghost.

The next morning’s events played out exactly as everyone remembered: the old woman serving breakfast like nothing was wrong, the group noticing Boss Chen’s absence, going to check his room, and Boss Yu planting the false claim that the door was locked.

The second night, the same routine repeated.

Lin Zhirou had been moved to the woodshed and locked in from the outside, by Grandmother Sun, who naturally held the key.

Boss Yu had let himself in deep in the night, stabbed her in her sleep, and staged it as a suicide.

Both “confession” letters had been written and planted by Grandmother Sun in advance.

By the third day, with Di Renjie’s arrival, the pair had been forced to stop.

Boss Yu, real name Yu Shaopeng, was the nephew of old Master Ye. Orphaned young, raised at the villa, treated as a true son by the family, and he’d loved them the same way in return.

The gold in his pack really had been a gift from his uncle by marriage. That part hadn’t been a lie.

Old Master Ye had given him money and sent him off to start a business elsewhere. That single act of generosity had been the reason he wasn’t at the estate the night of the massacre.

He’d built a trading house in another city, grown it steadily over the years. But the massacre had never stopped eating at him.

Eventually he crossed paths with the disfigured Grandmother Sun, recognized her, and together they’d dug into the case quietly until they uncovered the truth.

The first killer, Chen Dafu, the villa’s cook, had been seduced by money and conspired with an outside party to raid the family’s treasury, drugging everyone’s food the night of the third daughter’s birthday celebration.

The second killer was the villa’s former guard, now Chief Escort Xu, who had committed an act of pure betrayal, killing for wealth so he could run off with Lin Zhirou.

Right. The fake couple at the table had been Zhou Sheng and Chunlan. The real couple had been Chief Escort Xu and the murdered Lin Zhirou.

To avoid exposing themselves, the two had pretended to be strangers the entire session. Only after her death did Xu finally admit he’d once served as a guard at the villa.

He’d been the one who eloped with Lin Zhirou, all those years ago.

When Di Renjie had questioned him, he’d claimed he saw someone cutting people down with a blade that night and survived only by hiding in the stables.

That had been a lie.

There’d been no blade that night, no violence visible to the eye.

Every soul at Red Maple Villa had been drugged. The killers had weighted their bodies with stones and sunk them, one by one, into the pond behind the estate, drowning the entire household in silence.

An entire family, gone in a single night, with nothing left behind but an unsolved mystery.

Cute Rabbit stared at the screen, stunned.

No wonder that pond had unsettled her the moment she saw it, the water thick and dark, choked with weeds. She’d assumed neglect. In truth, dozens of the Ye family’s dead lay buried beneath that water the entire time.

---

The session was over, but Cute Rabbit’s mind wouldn’t settle.

It wasn’t just the final twist that stuck with her. It was how real the whole thing had felt, the immersion so complete it was like she’d witnessed the massacre firsthand and lived through the family’s decade-later revenge alongside them.

The pacing had built in careful layers.

Day one, no one knew anyone’s true identity. Day two, a death, and the group scrambling to search and reason it out. Day three, a second death, the investigation stalling completely, until Di Renjie arrived to push the search forward again.

In real time, maybe two or three hours had passed.

It had felt like far longer. Every second had carried weight, every moment spent wondering if she’d be the killer’s next target.

And this was only the beginner tier.

Yangfan Studio, are you trying to make this thing too hardcore?

If a beginner script had this many twists packed into it, what would the intermediate and advanced tiers look like? A full theater of award-worthy performances?

Two sessions had eaten her whole afternoon. Physically exhausted, but her mind was buzzing with more energy than when she’d started.

This game was genuinely incredible.

Two scripts in, and she already wanted more.

She was already looking forward to whatever came next.

---

Cute Rabbit climbed out of the game pod at six that evening.

She’d gone in at noon sharp, played two full sessions, and emerged just in time for dinner.

She found a nearby restaurant and ordered a set meal.

While waiting for her food, she messaged Liu-ge: “Have you tried the new game from the little sailboat studio yet? The Cases of Di Renjie?”

He’d just wrapped his stream and ordered delivery for himself.

His reply came fast. “Haven’t gotten to it yet, ran a dungeon run this afternoon, was planning to try it tonight. You’ve played it already?”

She fired back a rapid burst of text: “Played it! Two sessions! It’s SO good!! Strongly recommend!!”

Reading all the exclamation points, he laughed. “That dramatic? This might be the first time you’ve ever recommended a game to me first.”

Usually it went the other way around, him pointing her toward something new. Having it flipped piqued his curiosity.

“How does it compare to Palace Storm?” he asked.

She thought it over. “Same general type, both holographic role-play. But the gameplay’s nothing alike. This one’s closer to Werewolf, mystery and deduction with a horror edge. It’s incredible, genuinely.”

That was enough to get him hooked. He kept eating while typing back. “Alright, I’ll jump in as soon as I’m done eating. Anything I should know going in?”

She left him with one cryptic line: “Just remember one thing. Don’t trust anyone.”

He stared at that for a second. Ominous.

He finished his food fast, wiped his mouth, headed for the pod in his study, and replied as he lay down: “Going in now. Wish me luck.”

“Have fun~” she sent back.

Her own dinner arrived right after.

She ate quickly, then took a cab to the holographic pod retailer downtown, stopping in front of the newest model on display. “Hi, are Qihang pods on any kind of discount right now?”

Liu-ge had bought a pod of his own back when Palace Storm launched.

It occurred to her that if she was going to keep playing holographic games long-term, owning a pod outright just made sense.

The salesperson hurried over, all enthusiasm. “Hi there! Qihang pods are at twenty percent off right now, and if you’re interested in the new release, The Cases of Di Renjie, you can also pick any three scripts to try free of charge.”

Her eyes lit up. “Free scripts too?”

The two beginner scripts she’d played today, The Fortune Inn and Red Maple Villa, were both one-time purchases, fifteen yuan per player, six players per session.

A full session ran two to three hours minimum. Worked out roughly to the same rate as other holographic games charging by the hour, around five yuan an hour.

The intermediate scripts ran twenty yuan each. Advanced scripts were thirty, presumably longer and more elaborate.

She considered it for a moment. “I’ll take three intermediate scripts, please.”

Advanced scripts required a hundred points to unlock, and she only had fifteen so far, nowhere close. Intermediate scripts would let her get comfortable with the mechanics before she eventually paid her own way into the advanced tier.

The salesperson handed her a script list to choose from herself.

It mirrored the poster wall in her personal space exactly, each entry with its own poster and a brief synopsis.

Only two beginner scripts existed.

The intermediate tier had twelve, split into Mystery, Horror, and Heartfelt categories. She skimmed the posters and summaries and picked one from each category.

The salesperson logged her account information, smiling. “Once your pod purchase goes through, your account will automatically unlock free access to these three scripts. We’ll have the pod delivered to your home today.”

She blinked, surprised. “Same-day delivery?”

“That’s right. We keep plenty in stock, same-day delivery standard, full return or exchange within a month for non-user damage, and three years of free in-home repair service.”

She gave a thumbs up. “Perfect. I’ll take the newest model.”

As she finalized everything, a couple walked in nearby, asking, “Hi, are Qihang pods on sale right now?”

Another salesperson moved to assist them.

She caught fragments of their conversation. “We’ll take turns once it’s home, you play a round, I play a round.”

“Sure, have you unlocked the intermediate scripts yet?”

“Ha, just finished a session, actually, there was this reasoning genius on my team who basically carried us to a win. I’m at fifteen points now, intermediate’s open for me.”

Their voices faded as they wandered further into the store.

Watching them go, Cute Rabbit couldn’t help thinking that Qihang’s pod sales were clearly climbing fast.

The downtown holographic pod retailers used to be dominated by people shopping for Coolplay or Dream Wings hardware. Qihang barely got a glance.

Now it was the complete opposite.

It was the weekend, and in the fifteen minutes she’d spent picking out her own pod, at least five separate groups had come in specifically asking about Qihang.

Clearly, The Cases of Di Renjie launching had given pod sales another serious push. Owning one at home meant being able to queue into a murder mystery session whenever the mood struck, infinitely more convenient than booking time at an external venue.

And thanks to Director Luo’s pricing push, Qihang pods had dropped considerably from where they’d been a few years back.

Under fifteen thousand now. Well within reach for anyone with a steady paycheck.

She pulled her attention back, filled in her delivery address, scanned to pay, and headed home to clear out a corner of her study.

An hour later, the pod she’d chosen arrived, and a technician helped her get it installed.

She plugged it in and watched blue light ripple across the sleek, futuristic shell, feeling thoroughly pleased with herself.

No more booking ahead. A holographic murder mystery session, anytime she wanted one.

Games weren’t just daily grinds and combat anymore. A story-driven experience like this one could offer players something genuinely novel, an immersive thrill all its own.

Here’s hoping Qihang and Yangfan Studio kept teaming up to build more games like it, for the benefit of players everywhere.

The pod had already paid for itself, as far as she was concerned.