Murders

A bloody, brutal murder had shaken the city.

The prostitute Yuanyang was found dead and naked on her embroidered bed, her body slashed again and again, drenched in blood.

The authorities proved utterly useless at catching the killer. They could not find so much as a single suspect.

Just as rumors were flying everywhere, a young victim came to my stall.

With the only five copper coins she had, she begged me to find Yuanyang’s murderer.

Me: “?”

But I was only a fortune-teller.

The Marquis of Ningyuan’s favored concubine had been brutally murdered.

She had been arrogant, domineering, and spoiled by his favor, making countless enemies in the marquis’s mansion.

For a time, the authorities had no idea where to begin.

So Yuan Nanshan, the Vice Minister of Dali Temple, tossed this hot potato to me.

“The Marquis of Ningyuan’s concubine came from an official family, bore him children, and held a status no lower than the Marchioness.”

“You’re a woman, so it will be more convenient for you to investigate. You must find the murderer and give the deceased justice!”

“…”

But I was only a fortune-teller.

I was a Little Blind One, and I met an Old Swindler.

To keep ourselves fed, the two of us pretended to be Daoist priests, making a living by conning our way into wealthy households.

That day, the General’s Mansion put up a notice seeking someone with profound magical power to enter the estate and catch a ghost.

The two of us gritted our teeth and immediately decided to go big or go home!

Who would have thought that, inside the General’s Mansion, more people died with each passing day?

Oh my god. There really was a ghost.

The Old Swindler trembled as he shielded me behind him.

The malicious ghost’s shriek pierced our eardrums.

Silently, I formed a hand seal. “Gather the baleful qi of heaven and earth, thunder descend!!”

Old Swindler: “??? Wait, you actually know how?!”

My father was famous throughout the surrounding villages for being a good man.

One freezing winter during a famine, he gave the last of our rice to a mother and child passing by.

After they left, they told everyone they met that my family still had grain.

The starving refugees, driven mad by hunger, came to our door to steal it, only to find an empty rice jar.

Humiliated and enraged, they forced my three-year-old sister into their arms and carried her away.

“If there’s no rice, then your daughter will do!”

I ran after them. In the end, all I found in the ruined temple was my sister’s mangled remains.

When I returned home, my father wailed through his tears, “I was trying to save people! It’s not my fault… That was just her fate!”

He saved someone else. In the end, my sister died, and I died too, in the bitter winter when I was fifteen.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw my father handing the freshly cooked rice to that mother and child.

I picked up the flower hoe beside me and stepped up behind him.

On the day my stepsister was murdered.

I told my dad and the police that I had gone to school to do homework, that I hadn’t been home, and that I really didn’t know what had happened.

But the truth was, I lied.

Three months after marrying into the Marquis Manor, I became pregnant.

A maid brought me a bowl of medicinal soup, claiming it was a gift from the Empress Dowager to help stabilize my pregnancy.

I took the bowl but didn’t dare to drink it.

In my previous life, not long after I drank it, I fell into a coma.

When I finally woke, I was trapped in a sea of flames, and both mother and child perished.

At that moment, the maid urged me, “Please drink it quickly, Madam. Refusing a gift from the Empress Dowager is a punishable offense.”

I used brutal methods to murder ten innocent residents, then found a blind man with an unbearably tragic past to take the fall.

In the interrogation room, the police officer asked me, “Are you even human?” Human? Of course I wasn’t human. I was a god.

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.

A beautiful woman came into my shop one night to have her phone repaired.

With practiced ease, I installed screen-spying software on her phone.

After she left, I opened the monitoring terminal.

Everything happening on the woman’s phone appeared before my eyes in real time.

That thrill of peeping into someone else’s screen had me completely hooked.

Until late that night…

I saw something that made my blood run cold.

I was about to hide my boyfriend’s body in the refrigerator.

Then Siri on his phone suddenly spoke.

“The refrigerator is not the optimal location for concealing a corpse.”

I stared at the phone on the floor in terror, a chill running through my entire body.

“A better location for corpse concealment has been detected. Would you like to proceed?”

Siri continued. As if possessed, I asked, “Where?” “The basement. The entrance is inside the wardrobe in the master bedroom.”

Half-doubting it, I followed Siri’s instructions and actually found the basement.

It really was the perfect place to hide a body. Because inside, I found several more corpses…