Chapter 119: The Ominous Night

On the night the first murder occurred, Lin Ya and Liang Zhichao returned to the hotel. Lin Ya claimed to be feeling unwell and retreated to her room to rest. Finding the room empty, she called Lü Zuzhi, asking him to come over to receive his medication. As she had done for the past few days, she prepared to feed the medicine to Lü Zuzhi from the windowsill.

However, the process did not go as planned. Lin Ya noticed something was wrong: Lü Zuzhi was not wearing his insect-face mask and was staring at her with a fierce, savage expression. It turned out that Lü Zuzhi had lost the struggle against the will of the parasite within him, and he had descended into a state of raving madness. In this frenzy, he attacked Lin Ya and abducted her.

At 9:55 PM, Su Wei and Bai Ruixue returned to the room and found it empty. At that moment, Lin Ya was being held captive by Lü Zuzhi, both of them hanging on the wall outside the window. Around 11:00 PM, Liang Zhichao heard someone leave the room. In reality, due to the poor soundproofing of the earthen building, the faint cries for help and the sounds of struggling he heard were coming from the wall of his own room, not the hallway.

At 11:05 PM, Lin Ya was still struggling with Lü Zuzhi. When their overlapping shadows were cast upon the women's dormitory, they appeared elongated, resembling the silhouette of a lizard. Bai Ruixue saw the strange shadow and ran to the window to check, but saw nothing. She opened the window to get a better look, a move that startled Lü Zuzhi, who immediately fled the hotel while holding Lin Ya captive.

At 11:20 PM, Lin Ya sent a text message to Liang Zhichao. According to their previous agreement, she was to send the name of the killer if she ever found herself in danger. However, because she sent the message blindly in her emergency, and because she often used the term "Professor Lü" in her daily life, her predictive text input defaulted the abbreviation "lzz" to "Old Clan Leader" instead of "Lü Zuzhi."

This stroke of fate meant the message was sent to the wrong person, inadvertently preventing the fact that Lü Zuzhi had been parasitized from being exposed prematurely. At 11:22 PM, Lü Zuzhi took Lin Ya to the scene of the crime. The Motuo wingless insect, now controlling Lü Zuzhi’s mind, used an anatomy needle to torture Lin Ya and pried out her teeth one by one, demanding to know how she had managed to trap him. (At this point, the insect did not yet know about the Xuelanke powder; it only knew it could not transfer out of Lü Zuzhi’s body. It was precisely because of the mutations in Lü Zuzhi’s body that he was strong enough to break Lin Ya’s teeth.)

Because Lin Ya enjoyed the sensation of being abused, she felt an unprecedented excitement and let out a terrifying laugh, mocking herself by saying, "A woman who loves to laugh will have good luck." When Li Tianque arrived at the scene, the killer had his back to him, leading Li to mistakenly assume the sinister laughter and those words came from the killer. In reality, they came from Lin Ya. The line Li Tianque overheard—"Hehe, are you thinking that I’m dead for sure this time?"—was also spoken by Lin Ya, directed at Lü Zuzhi to mock the parasite inside him. She had already conceived a plan for escape.

Lin Ya had once argued with Bai Ruixue over a collaborative research project. The reason she refused to compromise was that she had already largely completed the research on her own. The project was titled "Stress Defense Reactions in Coleoptera," and the most important experiment involved studying a common insect reflex: "feigned death." (Li Tianque, having overheard this clue via Tudeng Nima, further verified the possibility that Lin Ya was faking her death.)

Through her experiments, Lin Ya had mastered a method to apply this "feigned death" reflex to the human body. This required taking a specific drug beforehand and then experiencing the terror of near-death, which would spike adrenaline levels, trigger the drug, and induce a state of suspended animation lasting up to 72 hours. Although Lin Ya could endure pain, she had never experienced the horror of parasites erupting from within. Thus, she had implanted a large number of prairie toxic moth eggs into her face, neck, and shoulders, some of which had already hatched into larvae.

During her recent observations of Lü Zuzhi and the process of feeding him medication, she had noticed signs of his impending breakdown. She had taken the drug to induce a state of suspended animation in advance, implanted the eggs, and carried a pouch of grass-seed powder to induce the larvae. She had planned to use this dramatic method to frighten herself into a massive adrenaline spike, triggering the drug and forcing herself into a state of feigned death if an emergency arose. When she was about to scatter the powder she carried, Lü Zuzhi snatched it away, thinking it was a defensive substance, and used it during his fight with Li Tianque. Once the powder was scattered, the insects inside Lin Ya burst through her skin, and in her terror, the drug was triggered, successfully inducing her feigned death.

After his fight with Li Tianque, Lü Zuzhi fled. To avoid being recognized, he donned the insect-face mask, climbed over walls, and returned to the laboratory through a window. Coincidentally, the Old Clan Leader saw this from a distance and, misled by the mask, assumed Zhuoma was the culprit. Out of good intentions, he shouted for help and called the police. Fearing Zhuoma’s witchcraft and potential retaliation, he mimicked her voice while calling for aid. Having been her neighbor for years, he was intimately familiar with her voice and mimicked it so perfectly that the team members and local residents all believed it was Zhuoma calling for help. Later, the auxiliary police arrived, followed by Ma Baoguo, who, without much thought, identified Li Tianque as the primary suspect.

Two days later, Li Tianque was temporarily released and followed Ma Baoguo to the morgue. There, Forensic Doctor Xia was about to perform an autopsy when she was unexpectedly called away, leaving the room in disarray. Before leaving with Ma Baoguo, Li Tianque had done something to Lin Ya’s body: he had quietly implanted a portion of overflowing cancer cells. These cells would be killed by high heat, leaving behind black marks that Li Tianque could use to judge the state of the corpse. It was because of this that when he later inspected the body, he knew that the person who died in the fire was not Lin Ya.

As it turned out, Forensic Doctor Xia was murdered in the autopsy room. She had never expected that the killer was the very woman she was about to dissect. Lin Ya killed and dismembered her. Because the morgue was highly secluded and no one was coming or going, no one would have suspected that it was Lin Ya, not Dr. Xia, performing the dissection in the locked room. After Lin Ya killed Dr. Xia, Zhuoma arrived at the morgue. She had intended to use the power of the Insect God to resurrect Lin Ya, but she never expected that she, too, would meet her end there.