Chapter 21
Chapter 21
As Yu Lingling repeated, “You must really love your grandson,” over and over, the Gaunt Old Man stuck his arm into the Flesh Mountain’s mouth.
The Flesh Mountain immediately began gnawing on the Gaunt Old Man.
The Gaunt Old Man screamed, the pain snapping him back to his senses. He struggled to escape. “No, no! Stop, my precious grandson! I’ll die! I’ll disappear! I’ll-”
Sensing the Gaunt Old Man’s resistance, the Flesh Mountain began to writhe, its rolls of fat engulfing him completely.
The Gaunt Old Man’s pleas for help came out in broken fragments. By the end, all that remained were curses aimed at his precious grandson.
Listening to him, Yu Lingling took her teddy bear out of the Dollhouse and carefully straightened the bow around its neck. “See? You still don’t love your grandson enough.”
The Gaunt Old Man could still hear Yu Lingling, and he began cursing her too.
Yu Lingling watched the writhing Flesh Mountain. “You loved your grandson more than life itself when you were feeding other people to him, but now that it’s your turn, has all that love vanished?”
The Gaunt Old Man’s voice grew weaker and weaker. “Everyone’s the same. We’re all the same. Don’t get smug. In the end, everyone will be the same. Everyone…”
His voice vanished completely beneath the sounds of chewing.
“What was that old man saying?”
“I couldn’t make it out either. All I heard was static.”
“The newcomer’s expression didn’t change, so it probably wasn’t anything useful.”
“Has her expression ever changed?”
After straightening her teddy bear’s bow, Yu Lingling looked at the Flesh Mountain. Having finished the Gaunt Old Man, it had resumed eating its own flesh.
“It seems my theory was wrong. So it can’t be stopped after all. Sorry, Grandpa.”
Her voice remained utterly flat as she spoke, without the slightest trace of actual remorse.
“Why would an anomaly like that old man listen to her?”
“Don’t you think this newcomer acts more like an anomaly than he did?”
Yu Lingling discovered that whenever the Flesh Mountain ate its own flesh, the missing flesh would regrow. However, as time passed – or rather, as it consumed more and more – the flesh regenerated more slowly while it ate faster.
The difference was subtle, but the Flesh Mountain was, in fact, gradually disappearing.
Yu Lingling made a rough calculation. If surviving for three days was all it took to clear the instance, then at the Flesh Mountain’s current rate, some of it would probably still remain by then.
In Yu Lingling’s gaming experience, instances generally reset after they ended.
She recalled the Gaunt Old Man’s final reaction. Being eaten would cause him to disappear, meaning his end was truly final.
Even when the instance opened again, he would not reappear.
But if any of the Flesh Mountain remained, would it recover the next time the instance reset?
Yu Lingling could not tolerate the continued existence of any creature that wanted to eat her or harbored malice toward her.
Still, there was no rush.
Yu Lingling managed to find a spot the Flesh Mountain had not occupied. She took a chair out of the Dollhouse, sat down to recover her strength, and began organizing all the information she had gathered.
A data schematic of the entire building appeared in Yu Lingling’s mind.
While she was downstairs, Yu Lingling had estimated that each floor was approximately 2.8 meters high.
A floor-to-floor height of 2.8 meters was very common when the Red-Brick Building was constructed.
The stairwell was narrow and dark, and the stairs were divided into two flights.
The first flight had nine steps leading to a small landing. After turning the corner, there was another flight of ten steps, making nineteen steps per floor in total.
With a floor height of 2.8 meters and nineteen steps, each step was approximately fifteen centimeters high. That complied with the GBJ96-86 Residential Building Design Code and also matched the stair dimensions commonly found in old corridor-style apartment buildings.
However, that standard had long since been abandoned.
When Yu Lingling fled from the second floor to the first, she had noticed that the staircase had the correct number of steps, but one of the risers was the wrong height.
The staircase was already narrow and dark, with clutter piled along the side. The discrepancy was only about two centimeters – almost impossible to notice while running for her life – but Yu Lingling’s body had remembered it.
Yu Lingling closed her eyes and began recalling the contents of the newspapers she had seen plastered across the walls of the Westernmost Unit by the floor drain.
The newspapers had been put up haphazardly. Many were damaged, and quite a few were stained.
Yu Lingling sorted the snippets that had flashed past her eyes and grouped them by content. Some articles appeared in multiple newspapers, allowing her to reconstruct the text by comparing the different copies.
One newspaper pasted near the head of the bed caught her attention. There had been three copies containing the same article. The other two were on the ceiling above the pillow and beneath the human-skin mattress.
The male resident had a habit of cutting a patch from each victim’s clothing and stitching the pieces into a quilt. He also flayed their skin and used it as bedding beneath his bed. Judging by those habits, the bed held special significance for him. It was where he kept his trophies.
He also enjoyed collecting his victims’ belongings and revisiting them often. It was the same impulse that drove some criminals to repeatedly return to the scenes of their crimes, satisfying their need for control and their sense of accomplishment.
Most importantly, the stains on that particular newspaper were different from those on the others. They were the grime and wear left by frequent handling.
Judging by the dates of the newspapers layered throughout the room, that copy should have been buried near the bottom. Instead, it had been placed on top and preserved in relatively good condition. Clearly, that was deliberate.
Yu Lingling sifted through her memories of the reports, case analyses, and other articles on that newspaper.
A disorderly conduct case?
No.
A robbery?
No.
A serial murder case?
Possibly.
A notice seeking identification of a body.
Yu Lingling tugged on the teddy bear’s ear. She thought she had found it.
At 5:00 p.m. on June 12, XXX7, the body of an unidentified male was discovered in XX District, XX City. The deceased was estimated to be between thirteen and fifteen years old, approximately 160 centimeters tall, and was wearing X Middle School’s blue-and-white uniform…
The notice that corresponded to it had to be a missing-person notice from four years earlier.
The missing-person notice had initially run for seven consecutive days. After that, it ran intermittently for a cumulative total of 231 days.
Judging by the era in which the Red-Brick Building had been constructed, missing-person notices in newspapers were charged by the word at the time. As time went on, the intervals between each publication had grown longer, while the notice itself had become shorter.
That meant the family had already drained their savings at the beginning of the search. Their circumstances must have grown increasingly difficult afterward.
The person they had been searching for was their fourteen-year-old son, who stood 161 centimeters tall and had disappeared after school while wearing his school uniform. The first contact address the family had provided was this very building.
Every scrap of newspaper text flashed through Yu Lingling’s mind.
Why had the missing-person notices stopped? Perhaps the parents had given up the search. Or perhaps they were no longer around either.
Yu Lingling pieced the clues together one by one. As for the person at the center of both the missing-person notice and the body identification notice, she had met him before – the Wheelchair-Bound Boy.
That meant the key to this instance lay with that boy.
If the killer was the male resident from the West Unit on the Fourth Floor – the one she had already dealt with – then how was this mass of flesh inside the West Unit on the First Floor connected to the entire affair?
A coincidence?
Unfortunately, Yu Lingling had never believed in coincidences.