NOVEL NEXT 011 The You I See
“You told us to be wary of Gu Yunqing before, didn’t you?” Ye Miaozhu said coldly, “He’s dead.”
Zhang Yangxu glanced around and indeed did not see Gu Yunqing. “Did he also die by the river?”
Ye Miaozhu didn’t respond but lowered her head in silence.
“I understand.” Zhang Yangxu turned his head to look at Ning Zhe. “Can you tell me the specifics? The circumstances leading to Gu Yunqing’s death and why you say their deaths have no direct connection to the river?”
Ning Zhe had no objections to this. “But first, I need to know what happened between you and the thing impersonating Xie Sining after that call was cut off. How did you manage to escape it?”
Still cautious… Zhang Yangxu acknowledged with a slight nod and continued his story:
“After Feng Yushu’s warning call was disconnected, I tried calling back several times but couldn’t get through. During that time, Xie Sining did nothing—she just stared at me in silence. I didn’t know at the time that she was already dead, replaced back at the river. The only clue I had was Feng Yushu’s cryptic warning: ‘Beware of Xie Sining.’”
“To be honest, Ning Zhe, I didn’t trust you. So I didn’t fully believe Feng Yushu’s warning either. I even seriously considered the possibility that you were deliberately sowing discord between Sining and me. After all, here, you are alone and isolated.”
“I forced myself to remain calm and continued on with Xie Sining toward the ancestral hall. But the doubts in my heart didn’t go away. I decided to test her.”
At this point, Zhang Yangxu paused. “On the way to the hall, I intentionally brought up the New World Group’s real estate bidding in Gubei Town. The conversation delved into various legal and regulatory matters in that domain, and her reaction… was strange.”
Ning Zhe immediately perked up. “Finally getting to the main point. What was strange about it?”
Zhang Yangxu hesitated for a moment, clearly concerned about business confidentiality, but eventually said:
“Sining is a highly qualified professional lawyer, recognized within the industry for her top-notch expertise. Although I have some knowledge of the law, I’m far from her level. Before making decisions, I would often consult her and always receive clear and concise answers. She’s been extremely reliable.”
“But this time, she didn’t feel as ‘reliable.’”
“For the professional legal questions I raised regarding the real estate field, some she answered quickly and accurately, providing answers identical to what I had in mind. But for others, she couldn’t say a single word—she couldn’t give me a definitive answer. Given Sining’s capabilities, such questions shouldn’t have stumped her. It felt very off.”
“Growing increasingly suspicious, I pressed her on other topics. As the conversation deepened, I started to notice a pattern.”
“The questions she could answer were ones where I already knew the answer. The ones she couldn’t answer were ambiguous questions where I didn’t know the answer.”
“In other words, she only knew what I already knew and didn’t know what I didn’t.”
Listening to Zhang Yangxu’s explanation, Ning Zhe frowned. “You’re saying the thing impersonating Xie Sining could read minds or access memories?”
Relying on memory extraction to disguise itself as someone familiar?
“No, I don’t think so,” Zhang Yangxu replied. “Because aside from professional legal questions, I also asked her some very personal ones—things only I would know. For instance, whether my various bank card passwords were the same, how much money I transfer monthly to my lover’s account… things like that. She couldn’t answer any of them.”
If the impostor could truly read minds, these questions shouldn’t have been unanswerable.
“Maybe it was faking ignorance?” Ye Miaozhu interjected. Lying isn’t particularly difficult if the thing really could read minds.
Ning Zhe waved a hand dismissively. “Let’s hear the rest from Zhang Yangxu—details matter.”
Zhang Yangxu nodded slightly and recounted his interactions with the fake Xie Sining in detail.
From his account, Ning Zhe pieced together a clear pattern:
1. Non-specialized legal questions where Zhang Yangxu knew the answers and believed Xie Sining did too.
2. Private questions like bank passwords, where Zhang Yangxu knew the answers but didn’t expect Xie Sining to know.
Here, Xie Sining directly admitted she didn’t know.
3. Highly specialized legal questions where Zhang Yangxu didn’t know the answers but assumed Xie Sining would.
“This was the most unusual. Initially, Xie Sining would confidently claim she could answer, but after saying, ‘I know,’ she would completely freeze—no blinking, no breathing, not even a heartbeat. The raspy sound from her throat was like a computer encountering a bug, repeatedly crashing and looping on the last phrase she had spoken before freezing.”
At this point, Zhang Yangxu’s expression turned peculiar. “It was like… a game NPC triggered by an incorrect sequence.”
“Or a rule-breaking anomaly stuck in an error loop.”
Ning Zhe sighed. “Hejia Village is a place bound by rigid rules. Everything we see here—people, events, objects, and even this entire world—operates under predefined rules.”
Rules are inflexible, absolute, devoid of ambiguity or hypocrisy. 1 is 1, and 0 is 0; there’s no 0.5. Forbidden acts are strictly forbidden. If you break the rules of the Serpent god, there’s no such thing as partial violations—only violations.
What’s known is known; what’s unknown remains unknown. The rules are silent but truthful.
Zhang Yangxu nodded in agreement. “That thing wearing Sining’s face… everything it did was exactly how I remembered her, but it wasn’t her. It was the Sining in my memories, not the real Sining. Do you understand what I mean?”
What was replaced by the ghost wasn’t “Xie Sining” but Zhang Yangxu’s perception of Xie Sining… was that it?
Ning Zhe frowned deeply. He felt like he was grasping at some crucial thread, but the full picture eluded him.
“Once I had fully convinced myself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the ‘ghost’ before me wasn’t Xie Sining, it vanished,” Zhang Yangxu said. “Like a wisp of smoke dispersing into nothingness. That’s how I got rid of it.”
“So why did you warn us about Gu Yunqing?” Ning Zhe pressed.
“Because after shaking off Xie Sining, I immediately returned to the ancestral hall. There, I encountered someone.”
Zhang Yangxu continued, “I saw Gu Yunqing standing alone before the lotus platform, flipping through the yellow almanac hanging from the Serpent god statue. He turned it to tomorrow’s date.”
Then he died.