Liang Wan asked him, “Can’t you come out and talk to me?”

The other party replied, “It’s already quite dangerous for you to come to Hangzhou to find us and engage with us. What I need to do now is to separate the incident from myself, so I will avoid contacting you as much as possible. Moreover, the fewer connections I have with the truly important person, the safer that person will be. So your most important task right now is to be my liaison with Li Cu, everything else is not important. The items in that package might help you understand the ins and outs of this incident better.”

Liang Wan hung up the phone, contemplating all the information this person had shared. She felt that, on the surface, the logic seemed coherent. But if things were that dangerous and secretive, wouldn’t it also be risky for him to discuss these matters over the phone? If the person he was wary of had the power to control who he could meet, then why was he able to frequently make phone calls? In TV dramas, aren’t phone calls easier to monitor than face-to-face meetings?

Perhaps every line of work has its own habits; she couldn’t worry about that too much.

One more thing bothered her: she felt she understood the background of Li Cu very well, so why had he suddenly become so important? Why was she being made the liaison?

She glanced at the neon lights across the street; it was almost dawn. The Chongqing hotpot restaurant wouldn’t open for another four to five hours. It would be better to get some sleep, but her heart was racing, and she knew that at this critical moment, she wouldn’t be able to sleep even if she wanted to.

So she opened her suitcase, pulled out a pair of form-fitting pants that looked decent—her only pair of pants—and found a pair of flat shoes. Wrapping herself in a coat, she made her way to the hotpot restaurant downstairs.

She peeked inside; it was pitch black, and the door was locked with a large padlock. The frosted glass door was covered in grease, making it clear that getting in early was unlikely.

Liang Wan looked around and noticed a fire escape nearby, made of iron, which seemed to be an illegal structure in this location. The iron door of the staircase wasn’t locked very tightly, and her petite frame seemed small enough to squeeze through.

Following the staircase, she figured she could reach the second floor. The door leading inside on the second floor was tightly locked, but since the staircase was on the outside of the building, she could climb up to the neon light frame and walk along it to reach the outer wall of the building. While this was quite dangerous, it was the only option.

Liang Wan thought for a moment; it was just the third window on that side, it shouldn’t be too difficult. She squeezed through the iron door to the second floor and began counting—one, two, three—to see how far the third window was. After counting, she felt a hint of doubt, counted again, and realized she was mistaken. There were only two windows on the second floor of the Chongqing hotpot restaurant, there was no third window at all.

What a strange occurrence; there are always odd things happening every year, but this year seems especially full of them. This person spoke like he was just making things up—didn’t he say there were three windows? How could there only be two?

Liang Wan’s anger flared, and she thought to herself how unreliable he was. Had they been in this line of work for so long that they couldn’t even count?

This Chongqing hot pot restaurant is also a converted farmer’s house, facing two buildings. One side is a transformed small hotel, while the other side consists of various dining establishments converted from farmer’s houses. The result is quite clear—there are no ventilation windows or exhaust fan openings, just two square windows.

“Could it be that I’m just being played?” Liang Wan thought to herself, occasionally glancing up to see if that person had made a mistake and was actually referring to the second window. But the exterior wall was clean, with nothing on it. She couldn’t understand it, leaning on the railing, looking around while pondering, hoping that there were other Chongqing hot pot restaurants nearby.

As she looked around, she glanced back across to see that the light in her room was still on, while some of the neon lights at the hotel had already gone out. She saw her room, and under the light, she noticed a figure standing at her window.

That person was also looking at her. They locked eyes for half a minute, and she suddenly realized that someone was in her room.

“You bastard, trying to lure me away?!” Liang Wan shouted angrily, unable to hold back a curse. She pulled out her phone to call the police while desperately climbing back and running downstairs. In the chaos, she didn’t manage to dial 110. She banged on the front desk and said, “There’s a thief in my room.”

The front desk called the old security guard who was still asleep, and the three of them rushed to the second floor, opened Liang Wan’s room door, and found that there was no one inside; the lock was intact.

The three of them exchanged glances, and the old security guard muttered a few curses in the local dialect. Liang Wan was baffled. She walked over to the window and looked outside, her heart sinking.

She noticed a very strange phenomenon: the angle from which she looked out of the window was different from the angle from which the person in the hot pot restaurant looked in. In other words, she thought that person was standing in her room, but in fact, they should have been in the room next to hers.

The window she saw was from the neighboring room, and she had made a mistake. However, another question arose in her mind: each room only had one window, and her room was the third one. This meant that when she counted her room number, she saw the figure from the window of the third room.

But now, looking out from her room’s window, she realized that her room was not directly facing the second floor across the street. This meant that the third room window she counted from the outside was not her room.

In other words, one of the two rooms next to hers likely had two windows. She turned to ask the attendant about this, but he shook his head and said, “That’s impossible; all our room types are the same, and each room only has one window.”

Just as Liang Wan was about to argue with him, wanting to take him across to take a look, she suddenly recalled what the person on the phone had said earlier: the third window on the west side across the street.

Suddenly, she grasped the intricacies of the situation. After the attendant left, she found some hotel stationery, laid it out on the table, and began to draw a diagram.

She first sketched the order of the farmer’s houses on both sides of the street and the order of the hotel, then gradually reasoned out the dimensions step by step.

She soon confirmed that if things were indeed as the staff at the store said, and if all the rooms in this hotel had the same layout, then the third window facing the Chongqing hotpot restaurant across the street definitely wasn’t what she referred to as the third room; it was likely the fourth room. That’s right, there must be a hidden space between her room and the second room next door!