I was just telling a story, why is the whole internet urging me to turn myself in?

"Impossible! Absolutely impossible!"

Inside the main conference room of the Bingcheng City Defense Bureau, Han Lie's eyes were bloodshot. He slammed his hand on the solid wood conference table, making the teacups clang loudly.

"The forensic pathologist conducted extremely detailed analyses of the stomach contents and body temperature, concluding that the time of death was definitely between 2 and 3 a.m.! At that time, everyone, including the suspect, was keeping watch in the lobby on the first floor!"

Han Lie stared at the young man holding a thermos on the screen, veins throbbing on his forehead: "He knows everything about top-secret causes of death, such as locked doors and windows, extremely fine ligature marks, and no trace in the snow. And now he dares to overturn our forensic doctors' time of death estimation?!"

"Investigate! Investigate immediately!" Han Lie grabbed Xiao Zhao, a technician from the Internet Surveillance Section, by the collar. "Was the Jiangzhou Defense Bureau's internal archive system breached by foreign hackers?! Or is there a mole in our provincial department's top-secret database?! How could a mere internet streamer from the south describe the crime scene from five years ago so accurately, down to the exact location of a single drop of blood?!"

Xiao Zhao trembled with fear, his ten fingers flashing across the advanced military-grade terminal he carried, frantically sending retrieval commands to the data centers of Jiangzhou and the provincial department.

The entire conference room was deathly silent, with only the sound of keyboards clicking and the heavy breathing of the veteran detectives.

Three full minutes passed before Xiao Zhao suddenly looked up, cold sweat dripping from his chin onto the keyboard.

"Captain Han..." Xiao Zhao swallowed hard. "They checked...the whole thing! The Jiangzhou Defense Bureau's internal network has absolutely no access to the 'Red Plum Manor' files! Our provincial department's firewall is also intact; there's no trace of any Trojan intrusion or data leaks!"

Pointing at the young, handsome face on the screen, Xiao Zhao's voice trembled: "This...this really is something he 'said' out of thin air! It's like...like he was standing in that room himself, watching the murderer kill!"

"boom!"

These words struck like a thunderclap in the minds of all the veteran detectives in Harbin.

No hacking? No insider leaks?

How did this man, located 3,000 kilometers away, manage to have such a clear view of the crime scene?! Could he really be the mastermind behind the Harbin Defense Bureau's elaborate schemes back then?!

Just as everyone at the Ice City Defense Bureau was gripped by extreme self-doubt and horror, Shen Feng calmly screwed the lid of his thermos onto the live stream screen.

"I saw many clever viewers in the live chat guessing whether the killer was hiding under the bed or using some high-tech time-delay device."

"Everyone is overcomplicating the issue. As I just said, the essence of an escape room has never been about how to pass through walls or go underground."

"The key lies in how to manipulate the misalignment between 'time' and 'physical state'."

Shen Feng leaned forward slightly, his deep eyes staring directly at the camera, as if he were looking at Han Lie, who was three thousand kilometers away.

"What's the one thing this snow-covered mountain lodge has in abundance? Extreme cold. And inside the rooms, what's the most indispensable thing to combat the cold?"

Shen Feng held up one finger and softly uttered two words: "Heating."

The five million viewers in the live stream were silent for a second, and then the chat started scrolling wildly.

"Heating? What does that have to do with murder?"

"Holy crap, is the Grandmaster trying to say the killer scalded someone to death by pinning them to a radiator?"

"Those in front should use their brains! The victim was strangled with an extremely thin steel wire!"

"Actually, the murderer didn't enter that room on the night of the incident." Ignoring the joking comments in the live chat, Shen Feng began to calmly dismantle the perfect trick that had troubled the Harbin police for five years.

"On the afternoon of the day of the incident, the murderer went to the wealthy businessman's room under a pretext. He used the cast iron heating pipes, which are unique to the north and have extremely high temperatures, to complete an extremely simple physical device."

"He had prepared a huge ice pillar weighing several tens of kilograms in advance. Inside the ice pillar, there was a specially made, extremely thin steel wire frozen."

Shen Feng traced an outline in the air with his slender fingers: "The murderer hung this huge icicle directly above the radiator in the wealthy businessman's room. The other end of the wire was cleverly positioned in the shadow of the corner of the wall, on the headrest of the rocking chair where the businessman usually lay down, and tied with a slipknot."

"After doing all this, the murderer left the room and even warmly invited everyone to go to the lobby on the first floor for coffee and to keep watch."

Upon hearing this, the breathing in the conference room of the Ice City Defense Bureau instantly became heavy.

Han Lie stared intently at the screen, his pupils contracting sharply, as if a bolt of lightning had cleaved through the fog in his mind!

On the screen, Shen Feng's voice gradually lowered, carrying a chilling visual quality.

"Late at night, the wealthy businessman returned to his room. As usual, he bolted the door from the inside and locked the windows, creating an absolutely sealed room."

"Then, he lay down wearily on the rocking chair, his head fitting perfectly into the wire slipknot hidden in the headrest."

"Meanwhile, as night deepened, the villa's boiler room increased the heating output. The temperature inside the rooms rose rapidly, and the huge icicle hanging above the radiators began to melt at an accelerated pace."

Shen Feng snapped his fingers suddenly, the crisp sound echoing like a death knell in the silent conference room.

"At 2:30 AM! When the icicles melted to the critical point, their structure completely collapsed!"

"A chunk of residual ice, weighing dozens of kilograms, plummeted from a great height!"

"An extremely terrifying gravitational acceleration instantly pulled on that specially made steel wire! The slipknot on the rocking chair tightened abruptly, and with a 'hiss,' it severed his carotid artery and trachea before the wealthy businessman could even utter a scream!"

The live stream chat experienced a three-second gap in the comments section, which then exploded like a volcanic eruption, flooding the screen!

Holy crap!!!

"Ice cubes strangling someone by gravity?! What kind of ingenious idea is this?!"

"Incredible! Absolutely incredible! They used the time difference of the ice melting to create an alibi. The killer was even downstairs having coffee with everyone!"

"Where's the murder weapon?! Where did the ice that fell go?!"

"Where did the ice go?" Shen Feng chuckled as he looked at the comments. "Everyone, don't forget that was a heated room with temperatures over 20 degrees Celsius."

"The remaining ice that fell on the carpet near the radiator melted into a puddle of water over the next few hours. And under the high temperature, most of the water was even evaporated."

"When the group broke down the door the next morning, all they found was a corpse locked inside, a steel wire around its neck, and half a meter of snow outside the window without any footprints."

Shen Feng picked up the thermos, blew on the steam, and delivered his final verdict:

"Time was out of sync, and the murder weapon turned into invisible water vapor. This is... the perfect snow-covered secret chamber."

"Clatter".

Inside the conference room of the Harbin City Defense Bureau.

An elderly forensic doctor with gray hair and a chest full of medals dropped his thermos straight to the ground, splashing scalding tea onto his trousers, but he was completely unaware.

This industry giant, who has dissected thousands of corpses, was trembling violently at that moment, his eyes instantly reddened, and two streams of turbid tears welled up in his eyes.

"That explains it all...that fucking explains it all!"