The last room on the third floor was a movie-related exhibit hall. Inside were displayed many movie-related objects, such as storyboards, movie costumes and props, movie posters and photos, books and magazines, movie tickets, and so on.
Xu the screenwriter was fascinated for a moment, leaning over the glass cabinet to admire the contents: "The stuff here is pretty comprehensive."
Kang Mu Cheng didn't respond. He casually threw his coat onto the display cabinet, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and moved the display cases around, trying to find a way out. The result was unsurprising—nothing.
He couldn't help but murmur: "That can't be right. There should be something."
"What?" Jian Jing asked curiously.
"The third floor of the villa was originally the bedroom and study. If there really is a secret room preserved from the past, the probability is highest here," Kang Mu Cheng wasn't as adept at decoding passwords as Jian Jing, but he reacted quickly, boldly guessing and reasonably suspecting based on Madam Qin's earlier introduction. "We haven't come across the theater or bathroom yet. I feel like it should be in this place."
Xu the screenwriter immediately became excited: "That's right, the secret room must have been built in a place the servants didn't go often. Otherwise, with so many people coming and going, what if it got discovered? The bedroom and study are the most concealed places."
He rubbed his fists in eagerness, going to touch and twist the displayed exhibits, shaking them to check for mechanisms.
But Jian Jing felt it wasn't so simple.
From the password in the bathroom, to the hidden key in the private theater, they all had a strong puzzle-solving consciousness. Stumbling upon a mechanism by chance might work, but finding the mechanism didn't mean they could open it.
But she didn't have any other ideas, so she followed along to search.
Half an hour later, the three gathered in front of an old-fashioned telephone.
Xu the screenwriter smugly explained: "All the exhibits have a source, but this phone doesn't match any movie—it's the real thing."
As a movie person, he inevitably had some professional bias too. "It's incredible that Mr. Qin was able to collect it. He must have gone to great lengths."
He couldn't help feeling itchy. He wanted to flip through and thoroughly read the materials, but controlled himself to focus on checking the numbers in the newspaper clippings.
The thick scrapbook had handwritten numbers on about every other page. The handwriting seemed to be from the same person, the ink half new and half old. There were 7 sets of numbers total, some with corrections.
They were as follows (with # and ≡ representing scribbles):
01#022#3333#517141#35690
111121133114641
78680#987512
01123581321
689#014≡≡≡947824
#098≡≡≡1528#
≡≡≡68294
The air was deathly still.
The numbers didn't seem like numbers, the sequences didn't seem like sequences. What was this stuff?
*
Mr. Qin and Editor-in-Chief Guo left the small storage room and entered the kitchen hallway. The short ten-meter corridor connected two doors, one leading to the kitchen, the other leading to the cafe.
The two of them felt like thieves, afraid of someone catching them in their affair. Of course they wanted to return to the cafe as soon as possible.
Once back in a public setting, they could say they happened to get trapped after having coffee together.
But the door into the cafe was locked. No matter how they searched, they couldn't find the key to open the door.
Without lights, without having eaten dinner, the pitch black and enclosed environment made their emotions even more fragile than usual.
After fruitlessly trying for a full hour, Mr. Qin's usual cultured and refined mask slipped off as he cursed and swore: "What the hell, why hasn't the power been fixed yet? What time is it already?"
"The weather forecast I saw before leaving said there would be heavy rainstorms tonight." Although they say women have greater endurance than men, Editor-in-Chief Guo was still calm. "Maybe the repair crew can't make it over."
Mr. Qin spat out a few dirty words: "Are we really going to be locked in here overnight?"
"You'll be spending a night with me, one more doesn't matter." Exhausted, Editor-in-Chief Guo carried a chair out from the storage room and sat down elegantly, crossing her smooth legs into an attractive pose. "Let's take a break."
Mr. Qin sneered to himself. He had seen through her—this woman was hoping their relationship would be exposed, so she could transition it from underground to aboveboard.
But he didn't want to let her get what she wished. Men, you see, may talk about getting divorced, but those who truly want to divorce won't take mistresses, and those who don't want to divorce are the ones who do.
Liu Baofeng had countless faults, but she was genuinely a top-notch architect, with who knew how many connections. How could Editor-in-Chief Guo compare? He just wanted to string Baofeng along, play with her for free. After all, when a mature, charming woman delivers herself to your door, it would be foolish not to take advantage.
He wouldn't do anything to expose them.
As Mr. Qin paced back and forth along the corridor, thinking these thoughts, he suddenly noticed the electric meter box on the side and lifted the cover to take a closer look.
Inside the meter, in addition to the switch for the circuit breaker, there was also a red button labeled "Emergency Call for Help."
Delighted, he pressed it without a second thought.
The ceiling overhead immediately opened up, dropping down a veil of gloom. He jumped in fright. Waving his phone flashlight around, in the circle of light, a dense wire mesh net fell down, completely enveloping him.
He instinctively struggled to break free, but was zapped by the current above and jerked back his hand sharply: "Damn it!"
"What's going on?" Editor-in-Chief Guo called out in surprise.
"Help me get this thing off." He was fully vexed.
Editor-in-Chief Guo had just started to get up when she caught a whiff of a pungent odor that brought tears streaming from her eyes: "Cough cough, ugh, why did you use tear gas...I'll come help you in a second."
As she spoke, she swiftly retreated into the storage room and firmly shut the door.
"Bitch." Mr. Qin was furious, but for the time being couldn't break free. He was firmly trapped by the wire netting while the noxious gas kept forcing its way up his nose. His nasal cavity and trachea felt like they were on fire, as if choked by countless hot peppers.
How unlucky. He didn't know what Baofeng was thinking, using tear gas here. Who would come to the kitchen to steal things, that it required such an overreaction? Mr. Qin complained inwardly about his wife's design as his head grew increasingly groggy.
Can't let anyone see me with Guo... This was his last thought.
Then, darkness closed in and he lost all consciousness.
On the other side of the door, Editor-in-Chief Guo glanced at her Cartier watch—only five minutes had passed.
Of course she didn't want anything to happen to Mr. Qin. If he had any mishap, all the energy and time she had invested in him would go up in smoke, and her ambition to enter high society through marriage would be utterly shattered.
You have to understand, men nowadays are very shrewd. At most they'll spend a little on hotels and meals, and you're lucky if they'll gift you a designer handbag. Giving counterfeits isn't unheard of either.
But Editor-in-Chief Guo didn't care for Hermès anyway. Bags costing tens of thousands, she could buy herself. All she, Guo Lin, wanted was a stepping stone, a ticket into high society.
This was something she couldn't achieve by working herself to death as an editor-in-chief. As an editor, even with an annual salary reaching a million, there was nowhere to advance. It wasn't like Kang Mu Cheng—for him, being editor-in-chief was just a stepping stone before eventually becoming the boss.
It was time to go help out. Mr. Qin put on an open-minded, cultured front in public, but he was actually petty. If she was slow, who knows if he would hold it against her.
Yet for some reason, although her brain commanded her to open the door, her hands simply wouldn't move.
An extremely subtle, almost intuitive sense of crisis loomed over her.
Her body was obeying instinct rather than logical analysis, unable to take action.
Editor-in-Chief Guo struggled with indecision, hesitating for another ten minutes or so before finally plastering on a smile and cautiously pushing the door open.
The smoke in the corridor still hadn't dispersed. Mr. Qin was collapsed below the electric meter box, not moving a muscle.
"Dear," Editor-in-Chief Guo stifled her breathing and leaned over to give him a gentle push, all pretense.
Still no reaction.
Dead? Her brain thought this, yet her fingers seemed to develop a mind of their own as they reached under his nose to check.
No breathing?
Utterly shocked and afraid, Editor-in-Chief Guo hurriedly covered her mouth as she sank down to the floor.
A few seconds later, she seemed to realize something. Stumbling, she crawled up and raced back into the storage room, slamming the door shut behind her and bracing against it with her back.
My god, he's dead.
He's dead!
51361, I'll kill you.
Who, who wanted to kill him?
Editor-in-Chief Guo was scared out of her wits. Her legs couldn't support her and she softly collapsed to the ground.
*
On the third floor, oblivious to what was happening downstairs, Jian Jing was still studying the numbers.
01#022#3333#517141#35690
111121133114641
78680#987512
01123581321
689#014≡≡≡947824
#098≡≡≡1528#
≡≡≡68294
What on earth did these numbers mean?
"The 111, that's Pascal's triangle," said the college student, who had just taken calculus. He pointed at the fourth line of numbers and continued, "This is a sequence, each number is the sum of the previous two."
"What about the rest?" Xu the screenwriter was hopeless with math, drawing a complete blank.
"Can't figure them out," Jian Jing was also very troubled. "They don't seem like sequences, there's no pattern. And they're not like the brush stroke counts from the nine cell puzzle..."
She ran through the few types of ciphers she knew, but none fit.
Had she gotten the clues wrong?
Jian Jing's confidence plummeted. She picked up another album of posters, which had old movie tickets tucked inside, also containing numbers and letters.
She tried combining them.
Her mind responded: %@¥......*#¥%
"Jian Jing," Kang Mu Cheng's steady voice came through the fog, "Isn't this Morse code?"
Jian Jing: "Where?"
Kang Mu Cheng held the ledger away: "Don't look at the numbers, look at the scribbles above, aren't they dots and dashes?" He was very sensitive to money but not so much to numbers. He glanced at it briefly then gave up. Who would have thought that after walking away for a bit, when he glanced back, the numbers in his vision had all become blurred, but the scribbles above them stood out prominently.
The novel White Cat Detective mentioned Morse code. When the female protagonist responded to the police, she tapped out the code for CAT. Back then he was the editor-in-chief, so it left a very deep impression. He was quite certain the "." and "-" were A and T.
And in these few groups of scribbles, there were two that matched.
"Ah!" As soon as he said it, Jian Jing suddenly realized it. She had been too focused on the numbers, overlooking the patterns outside of the numbers. Actually, both rows of numbers were a red herring. "Yes, it's Morse code."
As a mystery writer, even without a code sheet, she could recite this classic code.
She translated in real time:
···· is H
· is E
·- is A
·-· is R
- is T
Put together, it spells out the word "heart."
"In English numbers, that's 8511820," Jian Jing reported the answer. "Try this."
Brimming with excitement, she picked up the receiver and dialed the numbers on the rotary phone.
Kang Mu Cheng and Screenwriter Xu also crowded around.
Ka-cha, ka-cha, the old rotary phone made a slightly dry sound.