Day 3 of the live broadcast, 16:45.
Inside the small cabin—Camera 1 at Xitulan Ya Restaurant:
Lin Xu held a broken key up to the light, examining it over and over. After a long moment, he could only toss it onto the table in frustration.
“The hint is so vague. How are we supposed to find anything? We can’t even test for fingerprints right now. There’s no way to figure out who’s the kidnapper.”
At that moment, Ke Jiujiu and Zhao Yunzhi had finished searching the four locations and returned to Xitulan Ya Restaurant. They sat down at the long table.
Ke Jiujiu was unusually quiet. She gripped a pen and kept scribbling out reconstructions of the crime, muttering under her breath now and then. Zhao Yunzhi, meanwhile, kept stealing glances at Shen Li.
Under the camera’s gaze, Shen Li remained perfectly calm. He hadn’t spoken for a full ten minutes.
With his arms crossed, his expression blank, he simply stared at the photos captured on the iPad.
His face might have been cold, but he didn’t seem anxious at all. He just sat there quietly, waiting for the other two groups to return.
After a moment’s thought, Zhao Yunzhi moved to sit beside Shen Li.
“Brother Shen, have you reached a conclusion?” she asked nervously.
After spending the past two days together, she could sense the steady confidence that came naturally to someone as capable as him. Whenever she felt lost, she wanted to turn to Shen Li for guidance.
Shen Li didn’t mind her sitting close. He replied, “Just about.”
“Ah…”
Zhao Yunzhi frowned dejectedly. She wanted to ask what he meant exactly. Had he identified the kidnapper? Or did he know where the butler was now?
Shen Li really did seem experienced.
Was it because he’d played a lot of murder mystery games before?
Her mind was full of questions, but when it came time to voice them, not a single one made it past her lips.
The task had her completely stumped, and her anxiety was mounting. When she felt this helpless, she started thinking about throwing in the towel. She only wanted to push a little further because she hoped Shen Li might have answers.
But now that he was right there in front of her, and his response wasn’t exactly overflowing with enthusiasm, she wondered if she’d said the wrong thing. Maybe she should just go back to her old seat.
Shen Li’s voice broke the silence again. “I’ve looked at what you and Ke Jiujiu brought back. Her notes are incredibly thorough, and most of the items you found are valuable clues.”
“Ah, no, no, they’re not.”
Whenever someone complimented her, Zhao Yunzhi reflexively denied it.
But then Shen Li, whom she’d thought was wrapping up the topic, tapped open a photo on the iPad and explained, “For example, the scratches in the warehouse and the footprints in the strawberry garden—those take real attention to detail to spot.”
Shen Li wasn’t exaggerating to be polite. He genuinely thought Ke Jiujiu and Zhao Yunzhi had done an excellent job.
He had been considering whether to visit those locations himself, but with the clues they’d brought back, there was hardly any need for a second search.
The deduction clues on a variety show were worlds apart from real life.
In reality, a forensic team might sift through dozens—even hundreds or thousands—of misleading traces at a crime scene. On a show like this, distracting evidence amounted to maybe half a percent of that.
From the four sites Shen Li had already checked, even a key spot like the gold vault had only two bits of interference. The other scenes wouldn’t have much more, which indirectly confirmed for Shen Li just how different variety show puzzles were from actual cases.
After all, in all the cases he’d handled, he’d never seen a real victim leave behind something like Morse code as a verifiable clue.
But in a variety show or a mystery novel? That was fair game.
“Whoa, holy crap, I got it!”
Lin Xu suddenly shouted. He snatched the key back up and rushed over to Shen Li, as if eager to test a theory.
“Shen Li, listen to this and tell me if I’m right!”
It was like a struggling student who’d finally cracked the last tough problem on an exam and couldn’t wait to have the class top student check the answer.
Shen Li said, “Mm.”
“Perfect! Let me walk through the timeline. First off, we found the water-damaged phone inside the fence at the strawberry garden, so the kidnapper and the butler must have passed through there. None of us in the cabin can use phones—only the butler has one—so this is his clue! He’s telling us the phone got water in it. Uh, so maybe he was at the abandoned swimming pool… or no, the fish pond?”
Ke Jiujiu had been listening with some hope at first, but by the end, her expression soured in disappointment.
“Oh man, it’s full of holes.”
“Huh? Where’d I go wrong?”
The two of them started arguing back and forth over the glaring flaws in Lin Xu’s logic.
Shen Li had been about to offer a nudge in the right direction, but after listening for a bit, he realized their ideas were miles off base—not even close.
So he let out a yawn and glanced at the clock, which was nearing five in the afternoon. His only thought now was: Would Qian Xingzhi be able to join tomorrow?
If so, they should let him handle pushing things forward from here on out. Shen Li had zero interest in continuing.
Listening to these two bicker with zero points between them just made him want to turn into a mushroom and tune out…
Especially someone like Lin Xu…
It was seriously tough to lead.
Compared to the days he’d spent guiding Zhao Rong and Lin Jie—which, added up over a hundred days, still hadn’t dragged on as much as these two hours of evidence hunting with Lin Xu this afternoon.
Then Lin Xu yelled over, “Shen Li, what do you think?”
Without even looking up, Shen Li cut straight to it and gave the model answer. “If you trust me, the kidnapper is Jiang Nan. The location is the cold storage room in the strawberry garden.”
Lin Xu blurted out in surprise, “What? Why?”
Shen Li waved him off dismissively, as if pondering how to explain, then gave up.
He just uttered two words.
“…Intuition.”
The butler system had made it crystal clear earlier. They only needed to nail two things: identifying the kidnapper and—most crucially—finding “Lord Butler.”
The system had just announced that finding the butler would net them a massive bonus.
It was like having two questions in front of them.
One was an optional multiple-choice with eight options.
The other was a mandatory fill-in-the-blank.
Whether it was Zhao Yunzhi with no clue at all, or Lin Xu whose reasoning was totally off, what they needed most right now was the answer—not a full explanation of why A or why B.
According to the butler system, the ones who got the prize money would be whoever rescued the butler today.
So the most self-serving move would be to take the answer, bolt to the target spot alone, find the butler first, and beat everyone else to the rescue.
But Shen Li had long been accustomed to teamwork, so he decided to stick around at Xitulan Ya Restaurant for a bit. He’d share the right answer with those who needed it, then they could all go together.
“—Phew, finally back. I’m beat!”
Yang Zhiqi’s booming voice echoed before he’d even stepped through the door.
The small group trailing behind him all looked grim-faced, as if they’d argued the whole way back over some disagreement.
Sure enough, the moment he entered, he started pointing fingers loudly. “The kidnapper is Li Weiwei. It’s Li Weiwei.”
Li Weiwei rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “I’ve told you a million times on the way here—you’ve got no evidence. You’re just being ridiculous. I’m done.”
As the group seemed poised to erupt into chaos, Shen Li said nothing. He simply stood up from his seat.
Mimicking Yang Zhiqi’s phrasing, he said flatly, “—The kidnapper is Jiang Nan. It’s Jiang Nan.”
The camera swung in tight on Shen Li’s handsome face, but he betrayed no emotion.
The next second, Jiang Nan’s voice came from off-screen. “Why me?”
Shen Li’s cool gaze shifted to Jiang Nan, and he replied in the same tone.
“Then why do you say it’s Li Weiwei?”
Yang Zhiqi said, “Let me explain my logic…”
Shen Li’s wooden expression somehow still looked striking. “Save your logic for the audience at home. The butler’s in the cold storage. Anyone who wants to find him, come with me now.”
As soon as the words left Shen Li’s mouth, he caught the slight change in Jiang Nan’s expression.
Jiang Nan let out a cold laugh. “The strawberry garden cold storage? We just checked there. No key—you can’t get in. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Is that so? I figured you hid the key under a potted plant.”
Jiang Nan’s face changed in an instant!
“You’re just throwing accusations around! I was asleep at 5:13—I have an alibi! Yang always saw me. He got up to pee this morning and came to my room to use the bathroom!”
It was true—Yang Zhiqi’s room didn’t have its own bathroom.
“Oh, so at 5:13, he knocked on your door to use your bathroom?” Shen Li gave a faint smile. That aloof, elegant face of his sharpened with intensity. “People who didn’t know better might think you two were a married couple who’ve never spent a night apart.”
“Pfft!” Lin Xu couldn’t hold it in and burst out laughing, hand over his mouth.
Even Yang Zhiqi cracked, slapping his thigh. “Little Shen, I have to clear this up. I did get up in the night, heading for the public restroom, but I saw his light on, so I knocked. Ended up using his instead. I don’t know why he was still awake, but we chatted a bit. Around 5:13, he was definitely there.”
Shen Li nodded. “And what does that prove? The actual crime didn’t happen at 5:13.”
His words upended everyone’s assumptions completely.
Even the live chat scrolled with scattered question marks.
Shen Li continued. “This morning, I woke from the latter half of a dream at 5:31. Dreaming usually happens in NREM stage 2, and the second cycle lasts 30 to 38 minutes—light sleep.
“If the gold vault alarm really went off at 5:13, the vault’s right by my room. I would’ve heard it.”
“So you’re saying the gold vault alarm never sounded?” Lin Xu asked, baffled.
“The system was tampered with by the kidnapper,” Shen Li said.
“Impossible!” Jiang Nan sounded panicked. “How could an ordinary person hack the system? Only the butler has access!”
“Oh.” Shen Li said coolly, “You seem to know a lot about it. Care to explain why the clothes you wore yesterday are torn? Or show us the scratches on your titanium alloy watch?”
Jiang Nan went silent.
