Chapter 3 — What are you, Shen Yue?

His third wedding was unshockingly identical to his first two.

Green qipao and windows. Handshakes and registrars.

Lin Che went through the motions and ate the green curry and walked home and moved his boxes in, and this time he did all of it with the particular efficiency of someone who was simply trying to get through the agenda.

He also bought a notebook.

He’d bought it that afternoon just before the wedding. It had a small, brown cover, and fit in his inside jacket pocket. Using the notes app just wouldn’t cut it anymore if he wanted to draw diagrams and images to speed up the process of rewriting everything. Even more so if he had to use his own cipher to make his notes readable only to him.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t clever enough to come up with a code. Fortunately, his drawings were so crude that only he would be able to interpret them.

He was careful not to reach for it immediately, since reaching for a notebook whilst your new wife is asking about your career would, reasonably, raise questions. But, if Shen Yue saw that he always kept a notebook on him, she would, ideally, chalk it up as one of her husband’s character quirks and not some new development.

He started to use it on day two.

Once his wife left the house and he was left to his own devices, Lin Che decided to investigate. He had called in sick for work and decided to do a full sweep through the entire building — both external and internal to the apartment.

The first point of interest was the staircase that killed him in life one. This time, it was bright enough to not trip, and also bright enough to discover that he indeed had not remembered wrong: he did not trip on the stair itself.

That is to say, the stairs were evenly spaced so he should not have tripped, and he wasn’t high enough to die from where he fell. Assumption 2 seemed more plausible now.

Next, he wandered around the complex in an attempt to be better acquainted with his neighbours. He felt uncomfortable ringing their doorbells, however, and only chanced upon a janitor complaining about boilers and pressure and leaks. Still, he made sure to memorise the face, just in case.

Now that the external apartment had been combed through, Lin Che went back into his own home and started to look through things as carefully as he could.

He started the search in his bedroom, where he died in his second life. He crouched down to his knees and crawled along the floor, face buried in the planks like a sniffer dog. He tapped each plank as he went, trying to listen for any hidden compartments.

There were none such compartments, and, instead, his downstairs neighbour hit back upwards.

His desk and wardrobe were fine, too, as they were mostly empty following the move. The only other things in the room were his bed and his air conditioning unit.

He checked for monsters under his bed and saw, as expected, nothing there. He even stuck his hand in the gap and felt his way upwards, and all he could feel was mattress.

Lin Che then walked towards the air conditioning unit, recalling that he had used it the day of his second death. In the days prior, he had no use for it, as the weather was rather cold. The night he died was a sudden hot day so he left it running overnight.

He gave it a good thud and the front cover fell off.

There was a suspicious red dust shoved inside, fine enough that turning on the air conditioner would scatter near invisible particles across his room. Just one sniff was enough to make Lin Che run to the toilet to throw up.

He grabbed a vacuum cleaner from the storage cupboard and sucked up the poison.

Assumption 2: someone is trying to kill me: confirmed

If they managed to poison his air conditioning unit, they must have had access to the building.

Lin Che opened his phone to check the security footage from his doorbell. He scrolled through the last week of footage it had recorded, going backwards.

After he and Shen Yue moved in, they were the only ones to enter the building. Before that, no one had entered through the door. Therefore, it stood to reason that either Shen Yue was the killer, or that this was prepared much earlier in advance.

Note for next loop: check cameras earlier. Memorise linking code and install app before wedding.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Someone had accessed his bedroom before he moved in, which narrowed things considerably. It was prepared, and, whoever this was, had known he was coming, known which room he’d sleep in, and had enough access to the building to set something up in advance and walk away clean.

He sat on the floor of his bedroom with his back against the bedframe and thought about Shen Bowen, who had turned up at his door in under two hours when he’d skipped the wedding. Shen Bowen, who had known his address despite him never giving it. Shen Bowen, who had described the arrangement as something with consequences for non-compliance.

He thought about the two men who had come through his locked door that same evening.

He scribbled in his notebook:

Shen Bowen: access to building? Possible.

Unclear motive.

He wants the marriage to happen. Why kill me after??

He stared at the last section.

***

The days that followed went much more smoothly than in his previous loops, because he already knew what he was avoiding and could avoid it without being obvious. He followed his set routine of working and going home and avoiding his wife where possible whilst watching his step.

He ate whatever Shen Yue had made extra of, as he now knew it was not poisoned, and he consistently ate it at the counter without sitting at her table.

On day four, he bought groceries and plums once more, this time careful to not alert her that he was back at home, so as to not give away his forbidden plum knowledge.