Chapter Seventy-Five: False Accusations and Human Nature

Before he even stepped inside, a pungent stench assaulted him, a foreboding presence that reached him before his eyes fell upon the blood spattered along the wall—an arc stretching nearly six or seven meters in length.

Chen Qing stepped through the blood, leaving a trail of footprints in his wake as he entered the living room. The scene inside was one of utter chaos. Every item looked rifled through—clothes, tools, even old toys that had long gathered dust at the back of the storage cabinet lay strewn across the floor.

On the dining table to the left, food had attracted a swarm of insects. In this season, with so much blood in the air, the pests were overwhelming. He frowned at the sight; the fruits and vegetables were crawling with fruit flies, perhaps tens of thousands of them, so thick that the original colors of the produce could no longer be seen beneath their writhing mass.

He turned his head. In the center of the living room, the sofa, coffee table, and television formed a line, and the scattered, rummaged objects seemed to have been pulled from these very spots. The cabinet beneath the television stood open, the sofa cushions were nowhere to be seen, and the coffee table was riddled with cracks, as if it had received a heavy blow.

“What in the world happened here?”

He murmured, switching off the EMP device in his pocket. His gaze grew grave as he searched the room. Such a volume of blood would require draining at least two people dry.

His frown deepened as his attention settled on the far end of the living room.

This was a three-bedroom apartment, more than a hundred square meters in size. If the victims were not in the living room… then they must be in the bedrooms.

But if they were in the rooms, who had moved them?

A sense of unease gnawed at Chen Qing. His gaze lingered on the spotless hallway. After a moment’s hesitation, he approached the edge of the blood, removed the shoe covers, and replaced them with a clean plastic bag.

He was out of shoe covers—at least, he hadn’t brought two.

He shuffled forward. In the first room, he found a life—barely—her chest faintly rising and falling.

His eyes narrowed. The girl lay tied to the bed, her limbs bound to each corner. Her fists clenched so tightly her fingertips had turned white. Tape sealed her mouth, and thin streaks of blood stained the pillow beneath her head. Her eyes, red at the corners—either from dryness or from being struck—slowly leaked fresh blood.

She tried to move, mumbling, heedless of the gaping, fist-sized wound in her abdomen.

Her muffled cries grew weaker and weaker.

“Who are you?”

He stepped closer, feeling a knot of dread at the sight of her wound. The edges were too smooth, the hole in her belly avoided the internal organs and the bones of her back, as if two corresponding holes had appeared in her flesh out of thin air—nothing more.

But when Chen Qing pulled the tape from her mouth, she spoke no words. She stared at him, panic in her eyes, gesturing frantically at the chains binding her arms. Puzzled, he nonetheless unfastened her left hand.

Just saving an ordinary person, nothing more—wasn’t that right?

In the very next moment, her hand plunged into her own wound. Her face turned deathly pale; the pain of her arm scraping the flesh was already unbearable, but the humiliation of her fingers churning among her own viscera was even worse.

Blood began to drip from the corners of her eyes. She struggled for a long time, her gaze both terrifying and lucid as she stopped Chen Qing from interfering.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked sternly, watching her intestines writhe beneath her fingers.

She searched frantically, managing only an “ah, ah” from her mouth—perhaps a sign of affirmation.

Only then did Chen Qing realize her tongue had been cut out, the entire thing.

She opened her mouth, gestured toward another chain, and without thinking, he undid it as well.

Now free, she struggled upright, but the movement only worsened her abdominal injury. Blood, mixed with some clear fluid, soaked the bedding.

Sweat beaded on her brow, but her hands kept searching inside her belly. As she grew paler and her features sharper, just as Chen Qing was about to restrain her, she pulled a blood-smeared cassette tape from her abdomen.

She stared at it, her terror plain to see, then tossed it directly to Chen Qing.

She pointed at the tape, uttering a couple of guttural cries.

The meaning was clear: she was giving it to him.

But why, he did not know.

Once she had stabilized, Jiang Wan arrived on the scene as well. It seemed that Mr. Xu outside had contacted the police.

When the officers entered, their eyes followed the trail of bloody footprints straight to Chen Qing. They saw the blood-soaked cassette in his hands and visibly blanched.

“What are you doing here!” Chen Qing demanded, pointing at him.

“I just arrived—I wanted to check things out…”

…

Once Chen Qing and Jiang Wan had retreated to a corner, the medical team came to take the girl away.

He weighed the cassette in his hand, carefully wiping it clean with a handkerchief. Only after it was dry could it be played in a machine.

The other two rooms—still unexplored—held nothing of particular note, at least not to Chen Qing. In the master bedroom, a man’s corpse lay on the bed, dead for over a day by the look of it—presumably the man of the house.

The third room was badly damaged, but a search revealed nothing of significance.

With all this understood, Chen Qing climbed into Jiang Wan’s car, bid farewell to Mr. Su, and together they made their way to the police station.

In the interrogation room, Chen Qing’s expression betrayed a keen curiosity.

He fingered the cassette, the surface still slick with bodily fluids from someone’s abdominal cavity—sticky, with a lingering stench.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a cassette. Must be years now.”

Jiang Wan took a seat beside him.

“Many years. I think the last time I saw one was back in elementary school,” Chen Qing said, a note of nostalgia in his eyes as he looked at the tape in his hand.

“Shall we listen to it here?” Jiang Wan asked, glancing uncertainly at the machine set on the table.