My ‘Healing’ Game
Chapter 210 Spider and Butterfly

Chapter 210: Chapter 210 Spider and Butterfly

"I’ve told you everything I know. Getting involved with the Spider, you’ll inevitably get caught up in it," the old man coughed drily, having blocked the doorway the entire time, never once allowing Han Fei to enter. "Making a film about his story is seeking death. If you don’t stop, sooner or later, someone in your crew will meet with an accident."

His cloudy eyes slowly moved as if he had already foreseen someone dying a terrible death: "I know you don’t believe what I’m saying, but you should soon realize that nights and days in this building are completely different."

Seeing that Han Fei remained unmoved, the old man stopped trying to persuade him. However, his gaze at Han Fei was different from before, as though he were looking at a dead man.

"Old man, apart from you, how many other families live in this building?" Han Fei wanted to visit others as well.

"Anyone who could move out, has moved out. Only the solitary elderly and the sick are left. Half a step into the coffin, they are too frail to bother with anything, and there’s no contact between them. I guess even if someone dies at home, the neighbors won’t know until the smell spreads."

Compared with the bustling Xinhu City District, the remote areas of the North Suburb were desolate and neglected. The elderly who lived in the building seemed to have been completely forgotten by the outside world, utterly disconnected from it.

"With no family to care for them, dying alone in solitude is indeed quite frightening," mused Han Fei as he found a newspaper inside the house and left his phone number on it: "Old man, this is my number. If you encounter any trouble in this building, or if you need help, you can call me."

Unable to extract any further clues, Han Fei prepared to leave. But as he reached the door, the old man, holding the newspaper, suddenly spoke again.

"A few days before the writer’s death, he received some letters. No one knows who sent them, and it’s possible he sent them to himself."

"Letters?" Han Fei was unfamiliar with correspondence, as even in the most remote places nowadays, very few people wrote letters.

"My son once opened a letter. It was filled with strange text, all jumbled up. Beyond that, it contained several butterfly wings," the old man murmured as if talking to himself; "I’ve shared this information with others before, but all who knew are now dead. I hope you’ll be the exception."

The frail old man walked into the living room, lifting the black cloth from a shrine, muttering about sins and karmic obstacles, endlessly repenting something.

Han Fei didn’t see what was inside the shrine; he just noticed that the black cloth covering it had faint bloodstains and bird feathers on it.

It seemed the birds in the cage had been offered to the deity inside the building by the old man.

Leaving the room, Han Fei returned to the fourth floor with the script in hand.

In the brief minutes since he had left, the door to the writer’s room on the fourth floor had been opened again.

"Wasn’t it locked just now? Was someone hiding in a room on the fourth floor?"

This slightly supernatural incident caught Han Fei’s attention. He slowly opened the door, not missing any detail.

"Based on the information at hand, there must be some connection between the Spider and the Butterfly. The Spider might know who the Butterfly is, and it is because of this secret that anyone who gets close to the Spider gets killed by the Butterfly."

Han Fei wasn’t sure if ghosts really existed in reality, but he knew that the Butterfly’s method of killing, just as the old man had described, was to disguise all deaths as suicides, creating fear through a variety of accidents.

"Investigating from the Human-body Puzzle case to now, I’m getting closer and closer to that Butterfly."

He pushed open the door and entered room 401, where the Spider once lived.

From the arrangement of the furniture and various settings, it didn’t at all resemble a writer’s room. The floor, tables, opened drawers, and on top of the television, were strewn with boxes and bottles of medicine.

Director Zhang was also surprised the first time he entered the Spider’s home, but he didn’t disturb the room, just conducted a basic dusting. He wanted to preserve the original state of the house.

The Spider hadn’t always lived in the Meat Factory Courtyard for Family; he had come here specifically to write his book.

In other words, this place was the graveyard he chose for his other eight personalities; he planned to document here the process of killing the other eight selves.

To outsiders, Spider was a madman, and to doctors, Spider was also a madman. He truly did suffer from an illness, but he never thought so himself. He believed there was a reason for the existence of the other eight personalities; he never considered them a disease but treated them as living people.

Upon entering Spider’s study, the messy desk was piled high with various medicine bottles.

Three large locks hung on the desk drawer, clearly showing that Spider was unwilling to share the secrets within with anyone, though the locks had been picked open long ago.

Pulling open the drawer, it was stuffed full of letters.

The letters had no sender or recipient listed; they seemed to be letters Spider wrote to himself.

Han Fei opened and read a few letters. The correspondence was all written in the voice of a reader, mainly engaging with Spider about the plot and discussing various doubts about life.

Knowing Spider had no real readers, Han Fei initially thought these letters were Spider’s way of asking and answering himself. He just kept reading one after another, not wanting to overlook any clue.

When he reached the thirty-fourth letter, he suddenly realized the letter in his hand was different from the others.

The worn envelope contained a fragment of a dessicated butterfly wing, seemingly accidentally shattered by someone.

Han Fei carefully extracted the letter. The handwriting was identical to other letters, but the content was completely unique; it contained just three words—"Who are you?"

Seeing these three words, Han Fei turned his head and looked around, suddenly feeling very strange, as if these words were intended for him.

After securing the envelope, Han Fei continued reading and soon found another odd letter.

This time, the question on it was—"Do you believe in ghosts in this world?"

"It feels like he’s having a conversation with me," Han Fei said, standing alone in a room where someone had died, not feeling afraid at all. He examined the letters closely and then found a third letter hiding a butterfly wing.

Upon opening it, the question on the letter was yet again a question—"Guess where I am hiding?"

"Did Butterfly receive these three letters? Was it one of his personalities that sent them to him? Or is Butterfly imitating one of his personalities?"

Three eerie letters, three peculiar questions; from these alone, Han Fei couldn’t infer the relationship between Butterfly and Spider. However, he recorded the contents of all the letters with his exceptional memory.

"Spider and Butterfly must have confronted each other in some way; it seems Spider might have won, having found the true identity of Butterfly, but he paid a huge price for it," Han Fei deduced.

While Director Zhang and the others believed that Spider’s enemy were his eight other personalities, Han Fei thought differently; he always felt that everything happening to Spider was connected to Butterfly.

Putting all the letters back in their place, Han Fei turned his attention to the bookshelf nearby, where one book seemed to have been recently moved.

He opened that book, and right where the bookmark was placed, a sentence was highlighted—"I know your name, I know what you look like, I have been watching you all along, this building will be your graveyard."

The sentence in the book seemed intentionally left for Han Fei. He slowly turned around, scenes flashing through his mind: "The first time I came to the fourth floor, the door of room 401 wouldn’t open; there must have been someone else in that room then, and this sentence in the book was probably left for me."

The film crew had booked the entire building; the person who could sneak in at this time was most likely an actor or a crew member.

"The filming location for ’Mystery Novelist’ is situated in the secluded Xinhu North Suburb, far from the city district, and the nearest police station is also two kilometers away. This indeed provides Butterfly with a good opportunity to do the deed." Han Fei mused.