Chapter 6

Chapter 6

My first thought was that it had to be a prank. Or maybe a coincidence.

But I had bought the cabinet myself. The dream was my own. How could anyone else control that?

Panicking, I swallowed hard, followed “Si Ma Nan Zhui” back, and quickly sent him a message:

“Do you happen to have a photo of Bai Yanmei?”

“How did Bai Yanmei die?”

The messages sank like stones into the sea. He never replied again.

There had been supernatural stories online before, about people seeing Qing dynasty palace maids walking around the Forbidden City.

Later, I even looked up the “explanations” on purpose.

Some said it might have been a visual error, a hallucination.

Others claimed the paint on the Forbidden City’s walls contained ferroferric oxide, and under certain weather conditions, the walls could act like a video recorder, preserving the images of the palace maids from back then.

So could the cabinet I bought be the same as that palace-maid incident? Could it have some kind of special magnetic field that was affecting my dreams?

I lay on the sofa, irritably scrolling through my phone.

On a whim, I searched “Bai Yanmei.” The instant the results popped up, a chill ran down my spine.

“1993: Beautiful Cang City Student Bai Yanmei Brutally Dismembered”

“The Most Horrifying Unsolved Case Since the Founding of the Nation: Killer Unknown, Still at Large”

“After Bai Yanmei’s Murder, Everyone in the Building Heard Miserable Weeping at Midnight; All Moved Out Within a Month”

…

My hands trembling, I opened one of the entries.

What appeared before my eyes was an old, low-resolution photo, but even so, the girl in it was still strikingly beautiful.

She wore a pale pink short-sleeved dress and stood in front of a rosewood cabinet, one hand on her hip, her head tilted slightly. When she smiled, two faint dimples appeared at the corners of her mouth.

It was her!

She looked exactly like the girl from my dream! Even the color and style of her clothes were the same!

I hurriedly scrolled down, my heart pounding harder the more I read.

In 1993, eighteen-year-old nursing school student Bai Yanmei was brutally murdered.

The crime scene was her own home. Her head had been chopped off and thrown into a pressure cooker.

Even more horrifying, the killer had sliced open her abdomen and removed all of her internal organs.

Finally, the killer placed a bouquet of white fabric roses inside her empty abdominal cavity.

The blood had dyed the fabric completely red. Back then, some news outlets even ran the headline: Elegy of the Rose.

According to the reports’ analysis, the killer had an extremely strong psychological constitution and had made precise cuts. They clearly understood the structure of the human body and might have worked in a specific profession, such as a doctor or butcher.

The case shocked the entire country at the time. The police practically sealed off the whole city for their investigation, but found nothing.

As time passed, public attention gradually faded, until today, it had become a complete cold case.