S.C.I Mystery Series Volume 6 Chapter 162

The Wisteria Murderer 06 – Survivor

---

Bai Yutang and Zhan Zhao had Xiao Yang take them to the abandoned area, the two of them wanted to see the original site of the Wisteria Hotel.

The moment Xiao Yang heard that, he shook his head like a rattle. “That place is really cursed! It’s practically a ghost town now...”

Bai Yutang looked him up and down, thoroughly amused by him. Mia was curious too, and she gestured animatedly to Gui Jiali, asking her a question.

Xiao Yang actually understood her. Mia was asking, “He’s afraid of ghosts, yet he works at a crematorium? And he’s even responsible for moving corpses?”

“A ghost and a corpse, well, there's a bit of a difference.” Xiao Yang analysed it for everyone. “These corpses either died naturally or were killed. When I’m responsible for collecting a corpse, I’m helping it out. If it wants to cause trouble, it won’t come after me, I didn’t do anything to it. But haunted places are different. Going into their territory means you’re actively provoking them, and you’ll be retaliated against.”

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang turned to Gui Jiali.

Gui Jiali spread her hands, indicating that there was nothing she could do about it.

“Then what would it take for you to be willing to go?” Bai Yutang had no choice but to negotiate with him.

Xiao Yang folded his arms and looked at Zhan Zhao, then Bai Yutang, and asked, “You two look pretty tall, and you seem like you’ve trained before...”

Mia gave Bai Yutang a thumbs-up, then gave Zhan Zhao a thumbs-down.

Xiao Yang leaned closer to Bai Yutang and asked him, “You... are you good at badminton?”

Bai Yutang was momentarily taken aback. “Badminton?”

Xiao Yang put his hands behind his back. “Our crematorium’s badminton team and the cemetery next door’s badminton team are technically sister organisations, but even between siblings, accounts have to be settled clearly. We have a badminton match every year, and this tradition has been going on for twenty years... At the moment, the score is ten to ten!”

Zhan Zhao silently exchanged a glance with Bai Yutang – There’s nothing wrong with the competition itself, but that team name... So when they start playing, how is the cheerleading squad supposed to cheer? "Crematorium, go!" "Cemetery, go!"

As he spoke, Xiao Yang shook his head. “Ai, as a match carrying on the tradition and ushering in the future, this year’s result is particularly important! Each match requires three players, two singles games and one doubles game, with the first team to win two out of three games taking the match. Originally, we were evenly matched with the cemetery, but... this year, one of our key players is on maternity leave, and another has put on twenty pounds...”

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang both looked at him in confusion – What on earth is going on here...

Gui Jiali chimed in, “That's a couple for you, the wife is about to give birth, and the husband is gaining twenty pounds by eating the pregnancy diet with her.”

Xiao Yang looked helpless. “This year, I’m the only one left from our main team, while the other side has the strongest line-up they’ve ever had... So...”

Before Xiao Yang could finish, Zhan Zhao instantly understood. He reached out and slapped Bai Yutang’s chest.

The slap had been so sudden that it even made Bai Yutang cough twice.

Bai Yutang rubbed his chest as he looked at Zhan Zhao.

Zhan Zhao had now switched into full-on salesman mode. Pointing at Bai Yutang, he said, “This one! Number one badminton player in the police force! Take us there and you get a two-for-one deal. I’ll even bring you the number one badminton player from the SWAT team. You’ll have two top players competing alongside you!”

Xiao Yang immediately rubbed his hands together. “Then what about the cheerleaders...?”

“A police beauty will personally show up to cheer you on...”

Zhan Zhao held out his hand, and Xiao Yang immediately slapped his palm against it. “Deal!”

As Xiao Yang cheered, Bai Yutang quietly asked Zhan Zhao, “Who’s the police beauty?”

Zhan Zhao waved a hand. “Get Hu Zi to cross-dress!”

Bai Yutang actually thought about it seriously for a moment and decided that it wasn’t entirely impossible. Speaking of Zhao Hu...

Zhan Zhao picked up his phone and called Zhao Hu, Ma Han, Qin Ou and Luo Tian. Zhao Hu was more familiar with those sorts of lawless areas, while Qin Ou could take a look at the abandoned building that had been damaged by the fire.

Xiao Yang said that if they were going to the abandoned area, he needed to go back to the office to get a few things. Before long, he came back carrying a black bag.

Curious, Zhan Zhao opened the bag and took a look, only to discover a statue of Guan Yu inside.

Mia stared at it for a while, then took out her phone, opened a shopping website and searched to see whether there were any Guan Yu plushies for sale...

———

Soon, Ma Han, Zhao Hu, Qin Ou and Luo Tian arrived at the crematorium in two cars.

Everyone took Xiao Yang and Mia with them and headed for the abandoned area.

In the car, Zhan Zhao asked Jiang Ping to find some maps of the abandoned area along with some news reports. He read through them while chatting with the others in the other car through his earpiece.

As a native of S City, as well as someone who had previously spent some time undercover, Zhao Hu was quite familiar with this sort of area.

“Actually, none of S City’s several areas where all sorts of people and forces mix together is quite like this abandoned area.” Hu Zi was also looking at the map of the area. “The place is pretty small. The reason it was abandoned was because of that building and that fire. Because property prices crashed and people considered the place unlucky, a lot of them moved away. So that area is merely desolate rather than chaotic. Recently, though, quite a few influencers have been following Laughing Bird’s horror route before going there. Especially after his crimes were exposed following his arrest, more and more people have been jumping on the bandwagon. Places with legends about being haunted have all become popular influencer check-in spots.”

Bai Yutang asked Qin Ou if he knew about the fire.

Qin Ou naturally knew about it. “I was still with the fire department five years ago. Although I wasn’t assigned to this area, the fire was so serious that we were sent over to provide support. By the time we arrived, the fire had already been extinguished. Fortunately, there weren’t many buildings around that tower, and the fire engines arrived very quickly, so putting out the fire went smoothly. Besides, most of the serious casualties had occurred in the same area.”

“You mean the Yanggao Hotel where the wedding was being held?”

“That’s right.” Qin Ou recalled the incident. “The first team of firefighters to go inside discovered a large number of bodies in the hotel, so they called the police. I knew the captain of that fire hall quite well. He said there were signs of an explosion inside and asked me to go and take a look. So I went upstairs to take a look, and I thought it was a bit strange at the time...”

“What was strange?” Bai Yutang remembered that the news reports hadn’t mentioned an explosion...

“There were indeed traces at the scene that looked like an explosion, but all the bodies were intact and scattered throughout the entire main hall.”

“Scattered throughout the entire main hall?” Luo Tian didn’t quite understand. “What do you mean by scattered?”

“Normally, wouldn’t there be tables of guests at a wedding banquet...?” Qin Ou explained. “If a fire breaks out, the scene would obviously become chaotic, right? The guests would get up and try to escape, and most of them would crowd towards the exits. If they then collapsed from the smoke, the bodies would be concentrated in one area.”

Everyone nodded.

“But the bodies at the scene had collapsed around their respective tables, one table at a time. Some of them had even been lying face-down on the tables...”

After hearing Qin Ou explain it that way, Bai Yutang also found it rather strange. “Most victims of fires die from smoke inhalation, and that takes time. During that period, people would instinctively try to find a way to escape... For so many people to have died exactly where they were, it’s indeed very strange.”

“What were the results of the subsequent autopsies?” Zhan Zhao asked, although if it hadn’t been an accident but a criminal case, such a major case should have been handed directly to SCI for investigation. But it hadn’t been classified as a criminal case at all, which meant that the investigation had apparently found nothing wrong.

Qin Ou opened his mouth, seeming as though he wanted to say something, but ultimately said nothing.

Zhan Zhao wasn’t in the same car as him, and he had no idea how he had sensed it, but he still asked, “What’s wrong?”

Qin Ou hesitated for a moment before saying, “I heard that because there were suspected signs of an explosion at the scene, they had the explosives team conduct an assessment. Chen Mi was leading the team at the time. Later, Chen Mi was reprimanded because of that assessment. Apparently, he even got into an argument with the members of the investigation team at the scene.”

“That happened?” Zhan Zhao immediately perked up and called Chen Mi.

Zhan Zhao put the call on speakerphone. The moment he mentioned the Yanggao Hotel fire case, Chen Mi scoffed on the other end.

Everyone exchanged a knowing look.

Zhan Zhao nodded in satisfaction. “Go ahead and spill it! What was going on behind the scenes?”

“Because there were spray-like burn marks at the scene, they brought me in to assess them. All the bodies were intact and lying all over the floor, with no injuries caused by an explosive blast, so there shouldn’t have been an explosion. The autopsy results showed that all the victims had died from inhaling thick smoke, so it was classified as accidental death. But that made no sense! Why didn’t they run? There was a fire and they just waited there to die? There were even people who had hidden under the tables. This was a fire, not an earthquake. Obviously something was wrong. The forensic pathologist responsible for the autopsies was incredibly arrogant. He insisted there were no signs of poisoning or homicide on any of the bodies and that they had simply died from smoke inhalation. Do you know what the strangest part was?”

“What?”

“There were three survivors from that wedding banquet, two of whom had left partway through. One was a middle-aged man who was called in to work overtime at the last minute. The other was an elderly man who said he wasn’t feeling well and went home to rest. As for those two, the middle-aged man’s wife and child were both killed, and he had a mental breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The elderly man also lost several relatives. He was so overcome with grief that he died of illness just a few days later. There was one other woman. She had left the building just before the fire broke out, and as a result, she survived. She was the only person from that wedding banquet who actually survived.”

“What was the name of the only surviving woman?”

“Xu Wei.” Chen Mi had probably been unable to let the case go for all these years, so the name came out without hesitation.

“What was her name?” Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang both froze. “Xu Wei?”

“Yeah.”

“Xu as in the character with the double-person radical, and Wei as in Ziwei?”

“That’s right.”

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang could hardly believe it – We actually followed the clues from the wisteria and found a lead on Xu Wei... It feels like a dream! Why does it all seem so unreal?

“Have you looked into that Xu Wei?” Qin Ou knew Chen Mi fairly well. Although he wasn’t the sort of person who meddled in other people’s business, that was only if no one provoked him. Once someone got on his wrong side, he would pursue the matter to the bitter end. Since he had been reprimanded over it, he had probably gone and investigated it himself after their argument...

Sure enough, Chen Mi said that he had looked into it and found two different versions.

Zhan Zhao was rather puzzled. “Two versions?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t find Xu Wei herself, so I got two informants to go to Yanggao Village and make some enquiries. One of them found out that Xu Wei was in her twenties and was the daughter of the couple who ran the restaurant. Not only had she failed to receive any insurance payout, but because the accident was related to illegal alterations made to her family’s restaurant, many relatives and friends had demanded compensation from her, so she fled to escape her debts. The other version was that Xu Wei was in her forties and was an aunt of the deceased bride. She had pressured the investigation team to issue a certificate confirming the accident, then taken a large sum in compensation and insurance money before going abroad.”

Zhan Zhao scratched his head, feeling that neither version matched the Xu Wei they had been looking for...

“However, it’s not necessarily accurate.” There was another twist from Chen Mi's side. “There were a lot of details I couldn’t find out. I’d only just sent informants to investigate Xu Wei when I was told to stop, and Bao Sir gave me a good dressing-down.”

“What?” Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang said in unison. “Bao Sir knew you were investigating Xu Wei?”

“He did.”

The SCI team fell silent. They had been investigating Xu Wei for so long, and Bao Sir hadn’t said a word... Normally, he was the one with the best memory, so why had he conveniently developed amnesia at such a crucial moment?

“That Yanggao Hotel was originally called the Wisteria Hotel, did you know that?” Zhan Zhao paused to think. He had been going crazy in the police station’s main group chat these past few days. Chen Mi probably wasn’t in the group.

Chen Mi paused for a moment. “I think... At the time, Bao Sir gave me a good scolding. When he chased me out of the office, he said, ‘Don’t get involved with the Wisteria Hotel matter, don’t make things worse.’”

Zhan Zhao and Bai Yutang responded with one grinding his teeth and the other laughing in exasperation, but both of them nodded – Well, well! After all that, the enemy is right inside our own ranks!

Zhan Zhao was especially furious. He had been going crazy over the Wisteria Hotel for a whole week, sliding around the police station corridors on an office chair every day, to the point that people from upstairs and downstairs had gone to Bao Sir’s office to complain, and Bao Sir had actually pretended not to know!

Frustrated and out of options, Zhan Zhao grabbed his phone and sent a long, rambling rant to Zhao Jue.

Zhao Jue, who was sampling new desserts at a dessert shop, held his coffee as he read Zhan Zhao’s complaint, then curled his lip.

When the car reached the entrance to the abandoned area, Zhan Zhao received Zhao Jue’s reply, it contained only one message – Only you two fools would take Bao Xiao Hei for an honest man! Know why he’s called Xiaohei? It’s not just because he’s black on the outside! Cut him open and he’s black on the inside too, and he’s even got an ink sac, with an ink sac that squirts ink when you step on it!

‿︵‿︵ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ・❉・ ʚ˚̣̣̣͙ɞ‿︵‿︵

Previous Chapter | TOC |

Translator Notes

Please feel free to comment any mistakes I made so I can improve and do better as I go through the book.

Translated: August 20, 2026 by Angel

Edited: August 20, 2026 by Angel