Upon returning to the Weird Investigation Bureau, Ning Xu first stopped by the restroom. She shed her gray jacket and black jeans, changing back into the standard all-black uniform of an investigator.
She entered the "Archives Room" and settled into her workstation. Opening a file labeled "High-Risk, Recruitment Possible," she typed in a new name: Qi Si.
After reviewing some of the newer entries in the database, she turned and left, heading in the direction of her office.
She had just rounded a corner when a clamor from the main entrance reached her ears, still some distance away.
Her interest piqued, Ning Xu altered her course and headed toward the commotion.
A dozen or so investigators had formed a circle, most of them simply watching the spectacle. Two men were holding up a long banner, preparing to hang it from the ceiling.
Ning Xu drew closer and read the words on the banner: "Welcoming Fu Jue from Headquarters for His Guidance." A faint smile touched her lips.
Fu Jue was the top player in the Weird Game and the operations captain at the Bureau's headquarters. It was routine for him to travel to the various district branches throughout the year, either to handle supernatural incidents or to conduct inspections.
He was scheduled to inspect the Jiang City branch in June, but for some unknown reason, his visit had been moved up by two months this year.
The banner was finally hoisted, hanging askew from the ceiling, its lower edge drifting gently in the air.
A few investigators began to murmur amongst themselves.
"He could have come anytime, but he shows up now," one muttered. "He must've seen we wiped out the Sila Guild's forces and got results. Now he's here to reap the rewards."
"That Fu Jue... always putting on that selfless act, pretending he's thinking of the greater good for all humanity. Doesn't he ever get tired of the facade?"
"Everyone at headquarters is rotten to the core. That 'Fate Dice' they had in containment went missing a while back. I'll bet it was an inside job..."
Ning Xu overheard their whispers but pretended not to. With a nonchalant smile, she turned and disappeared down the long corridor.
...
After leaving Jin Yusheng, Qi Si went straight home. He immediately swapped the SIM card in his phone for a new one, then dragged a suitcase from his closet. He began packing some daily necessities, planning to move back to his old family home in the next day or two.
The blue clothes Jin Yusheng had worn to their meeting were a prearranged signal. The message was clear: someone was being watched by the authorities, but the situation wasn't critical. They weren't planning to make a move just yet.
Qi Si had always been indifferent to the anti-Federation movement, lacking the fervent conviction of groups like the Balance Church. Since the authorities hadn't come knocking, he saw no reason to stick around and wait for the situation to escalate into a direct confrontation.
Of course, he wasn't naive enough to think a simple change of address would throw a government agency off his trail. Surveillance was too widespread these days; no matter how careful he was, leaving some kind of trace was unavoidable.
What Qi Si wanted was to negotiate on his own terms, in a place where his safety was guaranteed. If he could leverage the situation for some benefit, all the better—he wasn't entirely opposed to some form of cooperation with Kyushu. And if negotiations failed... well, the complete package of murder, dismemberment, and pig feed wasn't too much trouble for him.
For him, the government's presence was a Sword of Damocles hanging over his head, destined to come crashing down one day.
Rather than let the conflict fester until it became irreconcilable, it was better to face it sooner. That way, he could counter their moves as they came and carve out some space for himself to survive.
As for Jin Yusheng, who was likely already a pawn in the Federation's hands... what was to be done? Who cared?
As he cooked himself a bowl of instant noodles, Qi Si made the decision to sacrifice the pawn to save the king, feeling not a shred of guilt.
He finished his simple dinner quickly and went into his bedroom. From a drawer, he pulled out a stack of foil paper he'd bought recently. Sitting at his desk, he began folding it into the shape of traditional ingots.
Qi Si's dexterity was exceptional. At seven, he had mounted a centipede specimen in arts and crafts and presented it to his teacher. At twelve, he single-handedly disposed of a human corpse. Years of hands-on work had only sharpened his skills.
Folding joss paper was a far cry from his usual work, but it still demanded nimble fingers. After folding a single ingot, the motions came back to him from the year before. His fingers became a blur, folding the paper with increasing speed and precision.
He finished folding the entire stack of foil paper in less than two hours. Crossing the living room to the balcony, he retrieved a metal bucket from a neglected corner.
He returned to the bedroom and swept all the neatly stacked paper ingots from his desk into the bucket.
Suddenly, the task didn't seem so troublesome. He diligently carried the bucket back to the living room and set it down before the door to the master bedroom. Then, he rummaged under the coffee table for incense, candles, and a lighter, laying them out in preparation.
Only after everything was prepared did he belatedly recall that it was April 1st. The Qingming Festival was still three days away.
It was still early, not yet eight o'clock. Qi Si tilted his head, thinking for a moment, before pulling a medical kit from a cabinet beneath his bookshelf. Then, he pushed open the door to the master bedroom.
The room, which had been sealed for a long time, was surprisingly free of dust. All that greeted him was the musty, decaying scent of old wooden furniture, an odor that relentlessly suffused the air with an atmosphere of death.
Qi Si carried the medical kit to the bed. He took out some alcohol-soaked cotton and began to meticulously wipe down the skeletal specimens lying there, his movements slow and gentle as he cleaned every surface and crevice.
Two human skeletons lay side by side on the bed. They had been professionally treated, making them so light that the mattress beneath them showed no sign of an indentation.
From a distance, the perfectly smooth sheets and the bone-white skeletons looked like a fantasy image rendered on a computer, a scene so pristine it felt divorced from reality, more like a synthetic dream.
Qi Si pressed gently, his fingers tracing the seams of the bones through the cotton. Years of preparing specimens had made his fingertips exquisitely sensitive; he could feel the texture of the bone beneath, a tactile confirmation that, despite the dreamlike quality of the scene, it was profoundly real.
By the time he finished wiping down both skeletons, the night had grown deep. The master bedroom window faced away from the street, offering a view of nothing but an inky sky and a few scattered, distant lights. Qi Si backed out of the room on tiptoe and gently pulled the door shut.
The fatigue he had been holding back washed over him in a dense wave. He put the medical kit away, collapsed onto his own bed, and fell into a profound sleep.
...
Six years ago. March 12th. Rain fell in torrents as evening descended.
Qi Si was curled up in his bedroom, reading, when a knock came at the door. It was his parents.
Their faces were etched with a clear sadness and worry. They spoke to him in disjointed sentences, offering scattered words of advice before bidding him a solemn goodbye.
At the time, Qi Si had sensed a note of finality in their words, a hint of "farewell," but he dismissed it as a strange feeling. He clutched his book—*Murder on a Rainy Night*—and silently watched them go downstairs, walk out the door, and drive away.
The rain intensified, sheets of it pouring from the heavens, splashing against the pavement and kicking up a fine, smoke-like mist.
Qi Si leaned against the window, staring at the pooling water on the ground below. In his mind, he pictured the killer from his book, a murderer cloaked in the rainy night. He waited impatiently for his parents to return so he could tell them the gruesome story and watch their familiar expressions of horrified helplessness.
But his parents never came home that night. Instead, he got a call from the police.
A voice on the other end of the line explained that a large truck had overturned on an overpass, crushing a small sedan beneath it. The couple killed inside, they said, were his parents.
In the moment he heard the news, Qi Si felt no sorrow. Later, when he arrived at the scene and saw the ground strewn with scattered flesh and blood, he felt the same familiar thrill he always did at the sight of gore—his face flushed, and his breathing grew shallow and quick.
In his sixteen years of life, he had come to believe that death was not the end. People had souls. After death, they could become ghosts...
He had always gotten along so well with ghosts, he thought. His parents were simply going to be with him in a different form.
That night, against the advice of the police and paramedics, Qi Si took his parents' bodies home with him.
He laid the two corpses in the middle of the living room floor. Patiently, he wiped them clean with a towel, repositioning torn skin and displaced flesh, trying to piece them back together as they should have been.
Humming a tuneless little melody, he cleaned the house. When he noticed how late it had gotten, he prepared three bowls of instant noodles.
Then he remembered: his parents were dead. They were ghosts now. If they were to eat, they would need offerings of incense. He went downstairs, bought stacks of incense and candles, and lit them one by one with his lighter.
With all the preparations made, Qi Si sat quietly beside the corpses, inhaling the clean, fragrant smoke of the ritual offerings that now filled the house.
To pass the time, he arranged the candles into different shapes—a triangle, a square, a heart. He had never possessed much in the way of creativity or imagination.
He waited and waited, through the dead of night and into the day, and then through the next night as well. But his parents' souls never came.
For the first time in his life, Qi Si felt truly lost. He stared blankly at the corpses, which had begun to decompose, clumsily trying to staunch the fluids that seeped from their bloated skin. He was utterly adrift.
For a fleeting moment, he even suspected his parents had died on purpose—that they had sensed how strange he was and chosen death itself as a way to escape the monster they had raised.
Fortunately, Qi Si had always possessed a composure far beyond his years, and he was not one to give up until all hope was lost.
He forged income statements, pretending to be a legal adult to delay any intervention from relatives. At the same time, he tried every method he could find, from books and from rumors, in a desperate attempt to locate his parents' spirits.
To better preserve their remains, he looked up information online and taught himself how to prepare skeletal specimens. He clumsily scraped the putrefying flesh from their bodies, wiped the bones clean with alcohol, and then articulated the skeletons, pinning them together with iron nails.
It was the first time Qi Si had ever prepared a human specimen. And as he worked, a profound sense of peace settled over him. It was as if he had found his life's purpose, a true calling that aligned perfectly with his talents and his future.
If he couldn't have their ghosts to keep him company, then their bodies, preserved as a memorial, seemed like the next best thing.
And so, sixteen-year-old Qi Si smiled.
He changed into clean clothes and, for the first time in many days, left the house.
He saw the empty streets and the lonely figures of the living, but the familiar shadows he had always seen were gone. He searched, but couldn't find them—not the disemboweled ones, not the hanged ones, not the ones with severed limbs...
Qi Si realized with a jolt that there were no ghosts in the world anymore. Everyone he saw, coming and going, was just a person.
Or more precisely, for reasons he couldn't fathom, he could no longer see them. He had become an ordinary person.
And so, he thought, his parents were still with him after all. He just couldn't see them anymore.