Mystery

I met a girl at a bar while I was away on business and ended up sleeping with her.

I thought it was just a one-night stand.

Little did I know, it was the beginning of a nightmare.

A serial killer targeting young women had appeared in our small town.

He even had a following of brainless sycophants who helped spread his message: “Women are better off staying in their place.”

As I was about to head out, my neighbor cautioned me, “Are you wearing a skirt? It’s not safe lately.”

I smiled. “You’re right. He isn’t safe.”

It is a little-known fact that criminals are even more vulnerable than women or children.

After all, whether they end up dead or maimed, they can never step into the light.

Why couldn’t he just stay in his place?

He just had to go and catch the eye of a lunatic like me.

I spent ten years in the imperial harem testing rouge, and not once did I fail to detect a single trace of poison.

That was until Consort Hua dropped dead after applying the “Drunken Beauty Red” I had personally verified.

It was then that a newly arrived talented lady told me: what truly kills isn’t the rouge, but the intent to murder.

I had been kidnapped. Me-a burly man nearly two meters tall, with a face that made me look like Zhang Fei-had somehow been abducted and dragged deep into the mountains! I woke up briefly during transport. My hands and feet were bound in iron chains as thick as a forearm, and the slightest movement made a tremendous racket. I didn’t stay conscious for long. Soon, I passed out again. When I woke up the next time, I was lying inside a dilapidated wooden hut. The moment my senses began to return, I caught a thick, overwhelming stench.

On the day the Ghost Gate Opens, those of us who drove long-haul trucks knew better than to travel at night.

But that night, I was driving alone down the road to an old public cemetery.

Halfway there, I pulled into a gas station.

After the attendant finished filling my tank, he seemed to work up every ounce of courage he had before asking in a trembling voice, “Sir… why is your windshield covered in little kids’ handprints?”

I shook my head at him.

I knew it wasn’t just the windshield.

By then, my entire truck was already crawling with them.

It was the first time I had ever encountered something so bizarre.

A murder had taken place inside a residential home.

The suspect had more or less been identified, but there were still plenty of questions left unanswered.

As usual, I visited the residents nearby and started with the victim’s neighbor across the hall.

The man of the household was very cooperative.

I questioned him for twenty minutes, and he answered calmly and methodically.

Finally, I asked, “When was the last time you saw the victim?”

He said, “Last weekend. He invited me to go fishing.”

“Was there anything unusual about him at the time?”

“All I remember is that halfway there, he brought up something from the past…”

Then he told me about it: a story from when he was a child on classroom duty, wiping down the tiles at school. It had nothing to do with the case.

Just some trivial little incident that barely mattered.

But halfway through, he suddenly froze.

A moment later, his face went deathly pale.

“I understand now…” he muttered dazedly to himself.

“It’s out of control…”

“What did you say?”

“I’m sorry, Officer Lu. I’m tired. Let’s stop here for today.”

Without another word, he ordered me to leave.

No matter how many times I knocked, he refused to respond.

My colleague and I had no choice but to leave for the time being.

We went down to the first floor, walked out of the apartment building, and reached the car.

Just then, a gust of wind swept past, followed by a thunderous crash- Someone had fallen from the building and slammed hard onto the windshield in front of the car.

His half-open eyes met mine for a brief moment.

Then he died. It was the very witness who had been speaking to me five minutes earlier, the same man who had been so composed ten minutes ago.

There had to be something wrong here.

Now I needed to go back and sort through everything that had just happened from the beginning.

Mom had a Leather Handbook that recorded every woman Dad kept on the side.

One of them, Aunt Wei, was marked in particular.

In Mom’s delicate handwriting, she had written: This is the little toy I’m leaving you. Enjoy this life to your heart’s content, my daughter.

After Mom died, that woman buzzed into my life like a fly.

And I swatted her straight down into hell.

My dad was a “Yin Guest”-or, in plain terms, a grave tester.

When rich people picked out a burial plot, they would hire someone to spend a night there and see whether the gravesite was clean.

My dad had been in that line of work for years.

Until his last job. When he came home, his body was covered in livor mortis.

During an intimate moment, I accidentally scratched the tattoo on my boyfriend’s back, and he suddenly flew into a rage.

Feeling deeply wronged, I went to an emotional support livestream that night to talk about what happened.

The audience chimed in one after another to defend me, suspecting that my boyfriend’s feelings for me had changed.

Only the Host asked with a dead-serious expression:

“That tattoo on your boyfriend’s back-is it a bottle?”