Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Reader’s Letter-

Mr. Chen Song:

Hello!

I was very happy to receive your reply. It proves that you are indeed interested in the story I’m telling.

Regarding what follows, I have deliberated repeatedly on how to word it, and have ultimately decided to simply narrate it straightforwardly.

In 2003, after Qin Yue died, I thought I could let go of the past, but reality would not allow it.

I still suffered through nightmare after nightmare, dreaming of that door left ajar.

I also dreamed of Qin Yue’s funeral.

Speaking of that funeral in 2003, I actually sensed something was wrong at the time.

After three days of mourning, the funeral was held. It wasn’t until the final viewing that I saw Qin Yue’s body.

To be honest, the moment I saw her, I felt more than just shock; I felt a sense of unfamiliarity.

Even though five years had passed, and even though the body was bloated from the water-her features tragic and difficult to distinguish-I instinctively felt she was a stranger. I felt that the person lying in the coffin wasn’t Qin Yue at all.

It was a bold thought, certainly, but it grew heavier and heavier in my heart.

I looked around at the mourners. Everyone was grieving, and it seemed no one but me doubted it. On the stage, Qin Yue’s father was reading the eulogy; my absurd thoughts felt utterly out of place.

But I couldn’t immerse myself in the sorrow. I lifted my head and looked around.

At one point, I froze.

I thought I saw Qin Yue in the crowd.

My heart rate spiked instantly. I quickly focused my gaze, only to realize I was mistaken. It was a strange woman.

After the funeral ended, I hid in the shadows to observe her.

Like Qin Yue, she had fair skin, straight black hair, a round face, and a slender build. Her neck, in particular, was long and elegant, giving her a distinguished air.

She wasn’t a local. I asked my parents, but neither of them knew who she was. Doubt began to take root in my mind.

The body was cremated and buried. The funeral concluded, and the crowd dispersed.

I kept following that woman.

That night, she drove out of town. Judging by the license plate, she was from a big city-and not the one where Qin Yue had gone to university.

In those days, not many people owned cars, and the woman’s car wasn’t cheap. I truly couldn’t understand why a wealthy person from a big city would travel thousands of miles to a small town to attend the funeral of a small-town girl.

It wasn’t until six months later that I found the answer.

…

After the funeral, I set aside my internal grievances and found myself liking Chen Song again-purely from a reader’s perspective, of course.

I spent six months catching up on his previous works, including some short stories I had read back in high school. Chen Song’s early works already displayed startling talent; back then, we had a premonition that he would eventually become famous, and it seems that has indeed come true.

Six months later, looking forward to Chen Song’s new work, I began following his recent activities.

Then, during a writer’s interview, I saw that mysterious woman from the funeral again.

It turned out she was Chen Song’s wife, and also a psychiatrist.

Such a connection forces one to think deeply.

After the college entrance exams back then, Chen Song and Qin Yue had a secret history. By now, I have come to terms with it; a man of letters being sentimental is understandable. It was merely a brief interlude during Chen Song’s time living here, and once it passed, it was over. The two of them shouldn’t have had any further contact.

Yet five years later, when Qin Yue died unexpectedly, Chen Song’s wife appeared at her funeral.

Could there really be such a coincidence in this world? Who would have notified her?

Could Qin Yue’s death be related to Chen Song?

This point baffled me.

It happened to be the National Day holiday, so I returned to my hometown once more to seek answers.

I stayed in my hometown for a week and met many old classmates. Between those who had stayed local and those visiting family for the holidays, more than half the class was there.

Our old class monitor took the opportunity to organize a reunion so we could reminisce together.

My classmates recalled the past and drank to their hearts’ content. During the meal, I steered the conversation toward Qin Yue. Everyone chimed in for a while, but since she was dead, the discussion didn’t get too out of hand.

However, the more I listened, the more alarmed I became; the more I drank, the more sober I felt.

When talking about Qin Yue, we all knew which city she had gone to, which university she attended, and what her major was. But all this information had come from Qin Yue’s parents. Over the years, it seemed no one had maintained direct contact with her.

Qin Yue loved beauty; she once said she wanted to have professional portraits taken once she got to university. Logically, she should have had more recent photos. Why, then, was her funeral portrait still the one taken in high school five years ago?

With these doubts, I continued to subtly pump my old classmates for information.

Time wound back to five years prior.

From the mouths of the crowd, through different perspectives, I gained a broader view and pieced together the scandal that had circulated through the town after the college entrance exams.

And then, I gradually discovered a terrifying fact.

It seemed that after that incident occurred, no one had ever seen Qin Yue again.
Everyone assumed she was too ashamed to show her face and was hiding away; I harbored resentment toward her and had no desire to seek her out.

Shortly after the incident, the Qin Family moved. They quietly descended the mountain in the early hours of a morning when no one was paying attention.

During the summer break, everyone was busy with their own lives, and classmates didn’t gather again. Once the break ended, everyone headed off to university or left to find work.

After that incident, no one ever saw Qin Yue again.

Even for me, my final memory was nothing more than that ajar door.

Could Qin Yue have truly vanished without a trace for these five years?

There had to be something wrong here.

I wanted to know the truth. Suddenly, it became an obsession.

Otherwise, I would never escape the nightmare of that door.

Half a year ago, after the funeral, the Qin Family left again. They had been living elsewhere all these years, only returning occasionally.

I obtained the Qin Family’s current address from a neighbor and immediately packed my bags to find them.

I sought out Qin Yue’s mother alone, invited her to a meal, and naturally brought up Qin Yue.

When I asked about Qin Yue’s university life, her mother could talk about it at first, but she couldn’t handle detailed questioning. Eventually, she began to speak evasively, shifting the topic several times, her eyes growing increasingly restless.

It is actually quite easy to trick the truth out of most people, provided they have a guilty conscience.

Under my increasingly sharp interrogation, she finally broke down and told me the truth.

On the first day after the college entrance exams ended, Qin Yue told her mother she was going to do something very brave.

She said she had always been with friends before and felt too embarrassed to do it, so this time she was going to do it behind her friends’ backs. It turned out she had the exact same thought as I did.

Qin Yue’s mother didn’t think much of it and simply told her to come back early.

But once she left, she never returned.

Back in high school, we were still too naive. Based on only two months of knowing someone, we dared to plunge headfirst into love.

We were attracted by Chen Song’s facade of erudition and talent, ignoring the fact that he was an outsider of unknown origins.

You can know a person’s face but not their heart. Chen Song appeared refined and cultured, but in reality, he was a psychopath. When the dating location shifted to his own home, he revealed his true colors.

On that day after the exams, after Qin Yue finished playing “adult games” with Chen Song, he silenced her forever.

As early as 1998, Qin Yue was already dead.

Upon learning the truth, I was so stunned I couldn’t speak for a long time, my heart a whirlwind of conflicting emotions.

If I had pushed that door open back then, would Qin Yue have survived?

Or would I have died at Chen Song’s hands along with her?

I don’t know the answer.

I only know that the version of me sitting here now is still alive and well. Because of my tact and cowardice, I didn’t push that door open, thereby escaping the horror of uncertainty. I brushed past the Reaper and reclaimed my life.

The events on that timeline passed me by in parallel; I had no way of knowing them.

On the day after the exams, Chen Song murdered Qin Yue.

He could have disposed of the body without anyone knowing. After all, Qin Yue had gone to his house in secret; although she had informed her mother, she hadn’t been specific.

However, I had accidentally discovered the affair and spread the news until everyone knew about it.

By doing so, I tied Chen Song and Qin Yue together, drawing everyone’s focus toward them.

Qin Yue’s father and brother stormed to his door, demanding an explanation.

Chen Song had no way to argue, so he simply laid everything out on the table and offered a price that, to the residents of a small town in 1998, was an astronomical sum.

Qin Yue was dead. No matter what, she wasn’t coming back; what could come back was a massive amount of money.

Qin Yue’s father and brother went in aggressively and came out in silence.

Ultimately, they accepted Chen Song’s proposal and used the rumors to their advantage. They claimed they were too ashamed to stay any longer and quietly moved the entire family away from the town to cover up the fact of Qin Yue’s disappearance.

When the morning mist dissipated and the townspeople woke up, the Qin Family home was already empty. Who would stop to think about how many family members were actually in the truck moving down the mountain?

The Qin Family left, and after Chen Song disposed of the body, he left the town as well. This scandal, which had been the talk of the town for several days, finally came to an end.

Around the year 2000, the national household registration system was not yet networked. After moving to a different city, it wasn’t difficult to tamper with the records. Thus, Qin Yue’s name vanished from the world entirely.

The Qin Family started a new life in a new place. Others didn’t know their background; they only knew the family had an only son.

Everything seemed to be resolved properly, yet hidden dangers remained.

The connections in the human world are intricate and numerous; they aren’t so easily severed.

Over these years, the Qin Family had left the town, yet it was impossible to leave completely.

Their ancestral roots were here, and they occasionally had to return to their hometown. In their new city, it was also inevitable that relatives or fellow villagers would come to visit.

When fellow villagers met, they would always ask a few questions-how is the son doing, how is the daughter?

In the beginning, they made up stories to brush it off, saying their daughter had gotten into a university somewhere and rarely had the chance to come home.
These things had to be whispered in secret; if they saw a new neighbor passing by, they had to fall silent immediately.

But lies always have an expiration date. Every time they returned to their hometown, there were only three of them. With Qin Yue consistently missing, people were bound to get suspicious sooner or later.

The crux of the problem was that while Qin Yue was biologically dead, she wasn’t yet socially dead-especially not in that small town.

Only by resolving this issue once and for all could they find permanent peace.

So, in 2003, the Qin Family specifically sought out a mentally unstable homeless woman. They dressed her up and brought her back to the small town with them.

That was the year SARS was rampant, so wearing a mask didn’t seem strange. The homeless woman followed the Qin Family through the streets, and the townspeople naturally assumed that this masked woman was their daughter.

Shortly after returning home, they drowned the woman in a water vat. Then, they tossed her shoes into a fast-moving river and claimed their daughter had accidentally fallen in.

The neighbors helped search the river for three days and three nights, while the woman’s body soaked in that water vat for the same amount of time.

They waited until the body was so bloated with gas that it exhibited a ‘giant’s look,’ making her features completely unrecognizable. Only then did they wait for nightfall to dump the body into a bend in the river where trash collected, ensuring it would be discovered by the public the following day.

What followed was a funeral to announce Qin Yue’s social death.

The Qin Family didn’t accomplish this alone. They had negotiated with Chen Song beforehand, using his reputation as a famous horror novelist as leverage. Chen Song’s wife was also in on it.

That was exactly why Chen Song’s wife had appeared at the funeral.

From the discovery of the fake corpse to the funeral and the eventual cremation and burial, she had to ensure that the entire process went off without a hitch.

With the second transaction complete, the problem was thoroughly solved. There was no need to worry about a third time, because Qin Yue was now truly dead.

The body was cremated and buried; everything was settled. The ashes in the grave were ‘Qin Yue,’ and everyone who came to offer their condolences could testify to it.

The matter was so perfectly concluded that there wasn’t a single crack to exploit. Even if the Qin Family wanted to recant their story in the future, there would be no evidence. After all, ashes are just ashes-a box of inorganic matter that holds no secrets of the living.

It didn’t matter that Qin Yue’s mother was telling me the truth now. I had no way to prove it, nor any way to disprove it.

I had simply been given a cruel truth, with no way of knowing if it was even real.

“We failed Yueyue,” her mother said, “and we failed that homeless woman. But we had no choice. Once we chose that path back then, we had no choice but to grit our teeth and see it through.”

Watching the grieving expression on her face, my stomach churned.

Before I left, she even tried to comfort me. “Forget about this. It happened so long ago, and it has nothing to do with you. We all need to move on.”

But after that, I didn’t escape the nightmare; instead, I sank into an even deeper, heavier one.

I repeatedly returned to that day after the college entrance exams, dragged by an invisible hand to that slightly ajar door.

On the day after the exams-the day Qin Yue died-I was the only person who had been at the scene.

If I had done something then instead of leaving quietly, would Qin Yue have had a slim chance of survival?

I spent every day trapped in these hypotheticals, tossed and turned by the nightmare. Of course I wanted it to have nothing to do with me. I wanted it to just pass.

But whether it was day or night, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining, from regretting, and then living in a state of endless self-reproach and pain.

One morning, I woke up and went to the bathroom to wash up, only to suddenly see Qin Yue’s face in the mirror. I screamed and smashed the glass, sending shards flying everywhere. My life, like that mirror, was shattered into pieces.

I knew Qin Yue could not find peace in the afterlife. All these years, she had been blaming me-blaming me for not saving her.

And now, there was nothing I could do. I didn’t even know where her real body was, so I couldn’t even stand before her and say I was sorry.

Wait… what did I just think?

Qin Yue’s real body.

I suddenly realized that the matter wasn’t so perfect that there were no cracks to exploit.

The ashes in the grave were a settled matter; everyone believed they belonged to Qin Yue.

But looking at it from another angle-if I could find Qin Yue’s real body and prove that it was also her, then a contradiction would arise.

Setting aside how to prove it for a moment, the police’s forensic technology should be able to support it. The key was: where was Qin Yue’s real body?

The two-story house Chen Song had rented back then had already been demolished and rebuilt. No news of a body being unearthed had surfaced during the reconstruction.

The town wasn’t large, but it wasn’t small either. It was surrounded by mountains and water; finding her would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Only Chen Song knew where the body was.

I finally understood what I could still do. My life was a mess right now, and I desperately needed to do something.

Once, I had participated in the murder of my best friend as a bystander, and then inadvertently became a variable in the equation, causing things to develop in a more complex way that still radiated influence today.

Now that I knew part of the truth, I couldn’t just ignore it as a matter of course. I had to strive for the complete truth, or else Qin Yue would never let me go.
Getting the location of the body out of Chen Song was going to be difficult. After all, it wasn’t the kind of thing one could just bring up in polite conversation. But I could only take it one step at a time.

In 2004, I quit my job and moved to Chen Song’s city.

Since graduating from university, I had been drifting through life-rootless, without friends, and without a lover. I could go anywhere.

Fortunately, there was a high demand for my profession. I quickly found a job in the new city with flexible hours, giving me plenty of time to focus on my own affairs.

I spent half a month tracking down Chen Song’s whereabouts. First, I used public information to find the publishing house he frequently collaborated with. Then, I staked out the building until I spotted him. I followed him and eventually discovered his address: a unit in a high-rise building.

I rented a studio apartment in the building directly opposite his. I bought high-powered binoculars and set them up by the window, aimed straight at his home.

All my spare time was spent observing Chen Song, looking for a breakthrough. I even went as far as collecting the trash his family threw out every day to study it.

After two months of surveillance, I discovered that Chen Song suffered from a severe psychological disorder. His relationship with his wife wasn’t just marital; it was also a doctor-patient relationship.

Logically, if a psychiatrist falls in love with their patient, they shouldn’t continue the treatment. To keep up appearances, they conducted their sessions at home.

Every few days, they would sit face-to-face for a heart-to-heart, or rather, a therapy session. These sessions often involved revisiting the past.

This proved that Chen Song trusted his wife implicitly. She knew his secrets and was completely on his side; otherwise, she wouldn’t have helped him clean up the mess with Qin Yue.

I had a feeling that the information I wanted would surface during these therapy sessions. The key was: how could I find out what was being said?

Observing from the shadows forever wouldn’t work. I needed to get close to them.

I’d had a brief encounter with Chen Song before. I wasn’t sure if he still remembered me, so I couldn’t take any risks. I decided to start with his wife.

Chen Song’s wife was named Zhong Wan. After two months of observation, I had a basic understanding of her habits and preferences.

Zhong Wan went to a yoga studio three days a week, without fail. She also enjoyed visiting museums to see exhibitions, the frequency of which depended on how often the exhibits were updated.

She was particularly fond of embroidery exhibitions. Once, when a month-long exhibition of Random Stitch Embroidery came to town, she went to see it several times.

Yoga and art exhibitions were hobbies she pursued independently, without Chen Song or any friends. They were the perfect entry points.

I spent some time studying yoga and followed exhibition announcements for nearly half a year, learning the relevant knowledge in advance. I made sure I was fully prepared.

Then, I packaged myself as a middle-class woman similar to Zhong Wan-a persona my respectable job could certainly support-to approach her.

I signed up for the same yoga class she attended and successfully became a casual acquaintance. Later, I “ran into” her at an exhibition. Using the knowledge I had prepared, I managed to impress her.

During our subsequent yoga classes, she took the initiative to talk to me, bringing up the previous exhibition. Through this, we became more familiar.

Gradually, Zhong Wan began inviting me to see exhibitions with her. Before every outing, I did extensive research so that I could speak eloquently the next day.

Zhong Wan felt as though we were kindred spirits who had met too late. Just like that, we became close friends who shared everything.

Of course, she never mentioned much about Chen Song. She protected him well and never introduced us. However, her attitude had softened recently, and she had even invited me to her home for dinner.

On the whole, spending time with Zhong Wan was actually quite pleasant. Like most friends in the world, we did many things together-visiting exhibitions, going shopping, trying out good food… Everything I had once planned to do with Qin Yue, I did with Zhong Wan instead.

Sometimes I would even forget my true purpose and truly immerse myself in the friendship. This was because Zhong Wan’s temperament was very similar to Qin Yue’s. Perhaps this was the type of woman Chen Song liked, and it was also the type of person I liked as a friend.

A year after meeting Zhong Wan, I gave her an exquisite Random Stitch Embroidery wall hanging. When plugged in, it could also serve as a wall lamp.

Zhong Wan loved embroidery and accepted it joyfully, hanging the piece in her home that very day.

Just like the beautiful wooden Great Seal given to the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union by the Soviet Young Pioneers in 1945, this embroidery represented a false friendship.

I had tampered with the piece so that the battery didn’t just power the wall lamp, but also a tiny hidden component inside the frame.

I wanted to know the whole truth.