…and the case was closed. The true culprit was caught, with much too ease at that. Yet, it was a mystery Detective Choi Minhyuk could not solve. Circumstances did not allow his curiosity to be satiated. Time has passed. He must have forgotten that a mystery had existed, unsolved by him. The identity of the one who had trapped the murderer in it for them.

Unbeknownst to him, all that individual had ever wanted was for him to uncover his identity. To seek him out. To ask him, “How did you do it?”

“How did I do it?”

Song Shiwon asked himself in the confines of his room where he weaved tales of blood and ingenuity. All it took was that question he yearned to hear…to reminisce that night.

He still remembered how peculiar it was to receive a text message from Jinhyun, asking not to be disturbed. He had headed upstairs as soon as he could. The door was left ajar. Something felt terribly off now. Jinhyun was strict about his privacy, about his doors staying shut when he had company. More so, when he was alone. Shiwon took a deep breath and entered, passing through the hallway. He had to stop short at the threshold of the room, the unsettling feeling he harbored had now culminated to its peak. He stood there, transfixed. As his eyes scoured the surroundings, the details, a terrifying realization dawned on him. Whatever this was, it had been committed with him in mind.

Horror had passed through him, and so had anger. He came to his senses and hurried to Jinhyun, but the man was gone. He was cold. Rigid. He knew much from his research. This man had been gone for long. Help could not bring him back.

Drowning in his thoughts, Shiwon sat there crouched for a while, the dread and rage lingering still, yet…as reason overcame emotion, he saw the situation for what it was…and strangely, it made him feel flattered. He humored himself then. Roamed and inspected the scene. Down to every detail and his heart’s content.

What lay before him was a mimicry of his art. A man murdered with a weapon his antagonist wielded confidently in all his books. But instead of concealing the weapon, it was left behind in plain sight. The wound had been marked with a cigarette burn, like an X on a map—an idea he had written in his very first draft for The Empty Portrait, but omitted in the second, and for a very simple reason: it made the wound more conspicuous than he wanted it to be. But he knew why it had been mimicked here. To relate the cigarette wound on the body to the twisted cigarette stub that was conveniently placed in the ashtray. Shiwon remembered from the branding on it that it was from a week ago. He had smoked it with Jinhyun, who now lay dead, and here he stood, awaiting an unfortunate fate himself.

Ah, that was what the murderer had intended to make happen at least.

The murderer, Shiwon repeated in his mind. The word now belonged to Park Insoo, as unfitting as it was for him. Crime required flair. And self-restraint. A good balance between the two. But either of those were things Insoo fundamentally lacked. No matter how witty he thought himself to be, at best, he could only mimic. Marking the wound with a cigarette burn could have indeed been a touch of flair; maybe, it was Insoo's way to taunt Shiwon. But given how Shiwon had found the body before it was intended to, all it was going to be was Insoo's undoing. Because this one detail had given his identity away. There was no one else in the world, apart from this dead man on the floor, who had read his first draft of The Empty Portrait. No one but Insoo. And even with all the obvious evidence Insoo had littered the room with, there was no saving him. Shiwon could see his lack of imagination, his lack of analysis blare through the crime scene. Shiwon could just leave this place as is, and let himself be framed, yet Insoo would be the one eventually convicted. But it wouldn't happen without the police processing the obvious evidence first. It wouldn't happen if the police were in a rush to close the case. Or without Shiwon having to come forward and lay out his secrets. His secrets weren't worth holding if he could save a man from suspicion and