Zhang Xiaowai crouched at the far end of the night market, next to a roadside skewer stall, gripping the latest red-ink note left by the masked man. His brain was a steaming pot of chaos—like spicy hotpot tossed with all the wrong ingredients, bubbling into something too hot, too messy, and way too dangerous to consume.
"To Zhang Xiaowai: The closer you get to the truth, the higher the price.You think this is just a coincidence in Ulong City?Wrong. You're only the beginning.— The Night Dweller"
Each word on the page felt like it was carved into his spine—cold, damp, and lingering, like the condensation seeping from the corners of an abandoned subway station.
The parking garage fiasco from earlier had been a total bust. They hadn't caught the masked man—instead, they'd traumatized poor Xiao Liu, the night janitor, who now refused to enter the basement floor and took a two-kilometer detour just to avoid it. Meanwhile, Zhang Xiaowai felt like a sausage skewered on a conspiracy stick, slowly roasting over a flame of anxiety.
Across the folding table, Liu Piaopiao sat on a flimsy plastic stool, her signature deer-antler hat tilted like a drunken Christmas elf. She chewed grilled lamb tendons with the solemn expression of a detective in deep thought.
"This letter's tone is clearly performative," she declared between bites, her voice muffled by meat. "Which means we're close. The masked man is panicking."
Next to her, Wang Dazhuang gnawed on a chicken wing like a caveman in a food coma. He snapped the bone into a bin with a flick. "That guy's just a paper tiger. I saw through him from day one! We're the chosen ones—he's just some guy with a cheap mask."
Zhang Xiaowai rolled his eyes. He slapped the threatening note onto the table, hard enough to shake the cumin off his skewers. "Can you two stop celebrating like we just won the World Cup? The guy knows my phone number! He might be watching us right now!"
As if summoned, a gust of night wind blew past the stall. A crumpled plastic bag fluttered with a loud rustle from the shadows.
Zhang nearly leapt off his stool. He slipped and landed hard on his butt, right onto a fallen skewer stick. "Ow! Son of a—!"
Liu Piaopiao was nearly in tears from laughter. She slapped his back and hiccuped. "Xiaowai, you've got the nerve of tofu skin."
Then, without warning, she shoved her magnifying glass in his face. "Actually, I've been thinking—there's something different about you."
"Let me guess," he groaned, pushing her hand away, "I've got 'Target' written across my forehead?"
"No," she said, eyes glinting. "You've got… the Investigation Aura."
"The what now?"
"I'm serious!" she leaned in, conspiratorial. "Every time something absurd or unlucky happens to you, we somehow uncover a new clue. You're like a living GPS for plot twists."
"That's not an aura," Zhang muttered, rubbing his bruised tailbone. "That's a curse."
But as he tried to dismiss the idea, his mind drifted. The elevator incident. The phone found in a garbage bin. The key uncovered after falling off a carousel. The threatening note that flew to his feet during the parking lot chase. Every clue had shown up at his most embarrassing or inconvenient moments.
"Wait a second…" he whispered. "Am I really just… a magnet for this crap?"
"Wrong!" Piaopiao slapped the table so hard, more cumin flew into the air and landed on Wang Dazhuang's forehead.
"This is no ordinary bad luck," she announced. "You've got the Ulong Aura!"
Zhang blinked. "The what aura?"
"The Ulong Aura!" she shouted, standing up like she was delivering a TED Talk. "Wherever you go, misfortune follows—but that misfortune always leads us to clues! It's like a passive skill! An invisible buff!"
Dazhuang chimed in immediately. "Dude, that's epic. You've got built-in plot armor… and I've got fists! With my muscle and your aura, we're an unbeatable duo! Ulong City won't know what hit it!"
Zhang stared at them in disbelief. "You two have completely gamified crime-solving…"
Still, he couldn't ignore the facts. His so-called "aura" was behaving less like coincidence and more like a weird narrative magnet. Like he was the world's most unlucky protagonist, whose screw-ups somehow kept unlocking new chapters.
Piaopiao was already in full detective mode. She tossed her skewer stick aside, narrowed her eyes, and said, "To test this theory, I propose a new mission—we scour the night market again for more clues!"
"You can't be serious," Zhang said weakly.
"Dead serious," she replied, hands on hips. "Based on the masked man's previous patterns, he operates around this area. That means we're sitting on a crime hotspot!"
"Wait—hang on—" Zhang tried to protest, but before he knew it, they'd yanked him to his feet.
The team split up—or more accurately, the duo dragged their third wheel behind them. Piaopiao and Dazhuang took to questioning vendors while Zhang was assigned a "critical task": combing through the alley's trash heap. According to Piaopiao, his aura was "best calibrated for treasure retrieval."
"How did I go from office worker to trash digger?" he grumbled, donning disposable gloves like he was preparing for surgery.
He tiptoed into the alley, stepping over beer bottles and cardboard like a bomb squad. On his third trash bag, the Ulong Aura kicked in.
With perfect comedic timing, his foot caught on a loose can. He slipped—again—and crashed into a stack of beer crates. Bottles rattled and flew everywhere. A six-pack of "Brave Snowman" beer twirled mid-air before thudding against the wall.
Underneath the toppled beer rack lay a moldy, black notebook.
Rubbing his bruised knee, Zhang sat up and picked up the dusty journal. The cover read:"Secrets of Ulong City"
The handwritten symbols on the cover matched the ones from the masked man's notes.
His eye twitched. "Please don't let this be another clue…"
But he already knew.
He called Piaopiao and Dazhuang back. The three of them huddled on crates behind the skewer stall like it was their private war room. Piaopiao, now wearing white gloves, carefully flipped through the tattered notebook.
"'The Eye of Ulong,' 'City Curse,' 'Destiny Control'…" she read, her brows furrowing deeper with each page. "There's even a map… and look! These symbols match the ones on the museum's stone tablet!"
Dazhuang slapped his thigh. "Well, duh! Let's go back to the museum right now and dig up that 'Eye' thing!"
Zhang paled. "Can we not break into government buildings again? The guy who nearly called the cops last time was my colleague's brother-in-law!"
Piaopiao, unbothered, opened her phone. "Relax. This time, we'll plan better. Operation 'Night Museum 2.0'—in progress. Also, I'm ordering lamb ribs for morale."
To "reactivate the aura," she insisted that Zhang take another lap around the alleys.
Like a man walking to his own funeral, Zhang trudged off, muttering curses. Sure enough, as soon as he turned a corner, he tripped over a rock and kicked a grill stand's charcoal bucket.
Sparks exploded like fireworks.
The skewer vendor leapt to his feet. "Who the hell just kicked my stove?!"
Chaos erupted. The entire street turned into a battlefield of smoke, confusion, and flying napkins. In the frenzy, a black-clad figure sprinted away from the edge of the crowd, something slipping from his pocket.
A crumpled business card fluttered to the ground—right at Zhang's feet.
Piaopiao snatched it up. Her eyes lit up like Christmas.
"Ulong City Society for Ancient Artifact Research"Room 3F, Cultural Preservation Wing, Ulong Museum
"I knew it!" she crowed. "The aura never fails!"
Zhang stared into the middle distance, numb. "At this rate, the aura's going to get me blown up…"
The neon lights of the night market continued to flicker, bathing the crowd in flashes of red, green, and blue. Somewhere in the smoke of barbecue skewers and arguments, the night settled again—but Zhang Xiaowai's heart remained restless.
What was the Eye of Ulong? Why was the masked man obsessed with him? And why did this weird aura feel less like a joke now, and more like fate tightening its grip?
Across the alley, from the shadows at the far end of the market, a hooded figure watched them silently. When the lights flickered again, he vanished—like he'd never been there.
Zhang Xiaowai shivered and clutched the old notebook.
Somehow, deep down, he knew—
The storm was only just beginning.