After re-adding each other on WeChat, the female streamer gave Russell the middle finger behind his back and slammed the door shut with a bang. Tonight’s livestream finally had some material: the pure and reserved beauty tenant bullied by the tyrant landlord, almost losing both her money and herself, desperately in need of a wave of simp donations to comfort her wounded, innocent heart.

……

Russell, male, twenty-five years old, single, with no bad habits…

To be able to own a three-story apartment building in the city at such a young age—even though the building was a bit old—it was still a considerable fortune, so there was no way it was earned through hard work.

It happened one afternoon more than half a year ago. At the time, Russell was still a junior police officer. After work, he had a strange feeling and bought a lottery ticket. Then he received a phone call: his parents had been in a car accident… and were gone.

They passed away cleanly and decisively. This apartment building was the inheritance they left to Russell.

The driver at fault was a somewhat well-known entrepreneur in the city, who had even won an outstanding entrepreneurship award—barely a local celebrity. The cause was that he had closed a business deal with a client over drinks, then drove off with his female secretary. Halfway there, his body suddenly trembled, his eyes glazed over, his limbs went weak, and he lost control of the steering wheel, driving into oncoming traffic and crashing into Russell’s parents’ car, resulting in this tragedy.

Just like that, Russell’s parents were gone, and so were the entrepreneur and his secretary. The accident was handled quickly, and according to the investigation, the entrepreneur was fully responsible. There was no abuse of power during the process; the entrepreneur’s family proactively took full responsibility and paid a large sum in compensation, just to keep Russell quiet and not reveal the truth of the investigation, so the entrepreneur could retain a shred of dignity in death.

Of course, the reason the entrepreneur’s family was so straightforward might have had something to do with Russell wearing a police uniform.

Looking at the entrepreneur’s father, an elderly man with graying hair, kneeling and weeping for his son’s reputation, Russell could only choose silence. The people were gone—what was the point of saying anything more?

While cleaning out his parents’ room, Russell found a diary hidden in a secret compartment of the bookshelf. Inside were incoherent gibberish, words cut out from newspapers, and a jumble of Arabic numerals.

An ordinary person might have just found it odd, but Russell was a cop—he immediately recognized that this wasn’t a diary, but a codebook.

This left Russell extremely puzzled. His father, The Harrison Hall, was a middle-aged man with a receding hairline, a beer belly, and a penchant for scratching his feet. Besides collecting rent, he played mahjong. His mother, Grace Bennett, was a woman whose figure had long since gone out of shape; her daily routine was much the same—collecting rent and playing mahjong. Just two ordinary city folks—what secrets could they possibly have, and why would they go to the trouble of keeping a codebook?

Russell spent three days deciphering the codebook, using the first book from the left on each shelf and matching the Arabic numerals letter by letter. The conclusion left him dumbfounded: his parents were assassins!

What the hell—having such a mysterious identity, yet spending their days collecting rent and playing mahjong?

Masters hiding among the people? Hermits in the city?

Even if they didn’t care about the mystique of being assassins and deliberately kept a low profile, at the very least they should have dressed the part. But Russell’s parents didn’t even own a suit, leather shoes, or sunglasses—let alone hair gel.

Thinking of his father’s beer belly that jiggled with every pat, and his mother’s barrel waist, Russell felt they had hidden themselves extremely well—no one would ever connect them to assassins. Especially his father, The Harrison Hall, whose first task every morning was to carefully comb his receding hair, brushing the hair on both sides toward the center as much as possible.

A greasy middle-aged man who fought a daily battle with his hair follicles—who would believe he was an assassin!

And why would assassin parents raise their son to be a police officer? What kind of mindset was that?

Life is stranger than fiction. While deciphering the codebook, Russell discovered even more headache-inducing information. For example, more than half of the blind dates his mother, Grace Bennett, had arranged for him were actually people in the business. Even his ex-girlfriend, who had to be transferred abroad for work and broke up with him amicably, was one of them—he’d even been heartbroken over it for a while.

“I hate assassins!”

Russell covered his face with his hand. It seemed that, apart from him, almost everyone in his family was an assassin.

After a period of depression, Russell resigned from the police force. He couldn’t expose his parents, nor could he bear to wear the uniform again, so he transferred the ownership of the three-story apartment building to himself and became a landlord. Lately, he’d even started learning to play mahjong.

Russell thought that would be the end of it, but he underestimated his own self-destructive curiosity. Driven by interest in his parents and ex-girlfriend, he hacked into his father’s chat account and lurked in the assassin group chat every day.

The account was on the computer, and Russell guessed the password in just two tries: his mother Grace Bennett’s name in pinyin, plus the numbers 520. Based on what he knew about his parents, his father must have set the password passively.

The assassin group chat was lively, often showing 99+ unread messages in the blink of an eye. Besides using code words to discuss work, the rest was just bragging and banter. Their identities were all over the place: comic artists, film critics, photographers, script editors, even people on welfare—all highly flexible professions.

The most outrageous part: out of ten assassins, six were full-time online writers.