Chapter 5

Chapter 5

At 7:25 a.m. on March 11, while I was on my way to visit my father at the municipal psychiatric hospital, Officer Zhang called.

The investigation into everyone connected to Lion Mountain on the day my sister disappeared was complete.

“He Tian, given the unusual nature of this case, my superiors and Professor Xu agreed that we should keep you informed for your own safety. We can’t leave you defenseless if the killer makes a move. I’ve emailed you the findings and the suspects’ files…”

When I finished reading them, I laughed.

It was a broken, heart-rending sound.

The surveillance footage from the last few days, my return to the crime scene, the new investigation, and all the small details of my family’s life over the years had finally come together.

I had touched the edge of a truth so horrifying that it overturned everything I believed.

At eight o’clock, I entered a place I had visited countless times over the past five years.

After my mother died, my father gradually lost his mind. Whenever he saw me, he flew at me as if he wanted to strangle me to death.

I assumed he resented and hated me, that he couldn’t bear the sight of me, so I hired someone to look after him. As his mind deteriorated, I had no choice but to commit him to a psychiatric hospital.

Even there, every glimpse of me sent him into a frenzy. To avoid agitating him, I came once every two months and looked at him only from a distance.

That was all.

This was the first time since his “illness” began that I had come to examine his condition closely and seriously.

No one knew that my father, a middle-school teacher, had always wanted to become a psychiatrist. For years, he had studied the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and taught himself from monographs on clinical psychiatry, neurophysiology, and behavioral psychology.

Living permanently in a psychiatric hospital was almost a fulfillment of his old ambition.

His attending physician, Wang Yu, was the only one among all his former students to enter clinical psychiatric practice. Before my sister’s death, teacher and student had also been close friends, and Wang Yu had visited our home often.

After my sister died, he was the only person who never blamed me. He had even comforted me.

When I explained why I had come, Wang Yu handed me my father’s medical file and sighed.

“Tian, your teacher’s condition is getting worse. You need to be prepared.”

My chest tightened. “What has he done now?”

“A few days ago, he slipped out and tortured a stray cat to death.”

“How do you know?” The surveillance image had been blurry, and I clung to one last shred of hope.

“He recorded it and sent me the video.” Wang Yu gave a bitter smile and held out a phone.

In the video, a remote-controlled training collar encircled Jingjing’s neck as she bent over a bowl of cat food. Each time she began to swallow, my father pressed the remote.

The custom collar snapped tight. Jingjing convulsed, her mouth yawning open as she gasped in agony.

“He used an extremely cruel form of aversive conditioning—a positive-punishment mechanism from behavioral psychology,” I said, staring rigidly at the screen. “Every time the cat swallowed, the collar choked her. He forced her to associate eating with suffocating to death.”

Farther into the video, the collar was removed. Yet whenever Jingjing approached the food and took it into her mouth, the trauma response activated at once. The smooth muscles in her throat spasmed so violently that she could neither eat nor swallow. All she could do was hold the food in her mouth and tremble in despair.

I lasted less than two minutes before my stomach heaved. I rushed to the sink in Wang Yu’s office and vomited.

It really was him.

Why?

Why would he refuse to spare even a stray cat that was close to me?

I remembered the day my sister’s body was found—my father’s eyes blazing with righteous fury as he slapped me three times.

Bent over the sink, I retched again, but nothing came up. Tears and mucus streamed down my face.

Ten years.

What had my sister ever done to deserve this?

And what had I done to deserve the ruins he had left me?

What could he possibly gain by destroying his own family?

Even if it killed me, I would have the truth.