Chapter 161: The Skeletons

After Ning Xu returned to the Eerie Investigation Bureau, she first went to the restroom to take off her grey coat and black jeans, changing back into the investigator’s all-black uniform.

She walked into the “Archives Room,” sat at her workstation, and entered the name “Qi Si” into a list labeled “Relatively Dangerous, but Recruitment Possible.”

She spent a little more time looking at the newly added entries in the database before turning to leave and heading toward the office area.

Just as she turned the corner, she heard a clamor from a distance, coming from the direction of the main entrance.

Ning Xu changed her route with interest, walking toward the commotion.

A dozen or so investigators were gathered in a circle there, most of them watching the excitement. Two people were holding a banner, about to hang it from the ceiling.

Ning Xu leaned in to take a look and saw the words “Welcome Fu Jue from Headquarters for Guidance” written on the banner, and she couldn’t help but smile.

As the top player of the Eerie Game and the operational captain of the Eerie Investigation Bureau headquarters, it was common for Fu Jue to travel to branch offices in various administrative regions year-round, either to handle eerie incidents or to inspect work.

Reasonably speaking, his inspection of the Jiangcheng Branch should have been in June, but for some reason, it was two months early this year.

The banner was finally hung crookedly from the ceiling, its drooping edges swaying slightly.

Several investigators began to discuss in low voices.

“He didn’t come earlier or later. He’s probably seen that we’ve eradicated Sera’s influence and achieved results, so he wants to come and pick the fruits of our labor.”

“Fu Jue, with that face of his that always looks selfless and concerned for the interests of all mankind, doesn’t he get tired?”

“The people at headquarters are rotten to the core. That ‘Die of Fate’ they contained before went missing; I bet they stole it themselves…”

Ning Xu heard it all but acted as if she hadn’t heard a thing, smiling indifferently as she turned and vanished into the depths of the corridor… After parting with Jin Yusheng, Qi Si returned home and decisively changed to a new SIM card, checking the anti-tracking designs while he was at it.

Once he was sure there were no hidden dangers, he dragged a suitcase out of the closet, packed some daily necessities, and prepared to move back to the old house tomorrow or the day after.

The blue clothes Jin Yusheng wore during their meeting was a pre-arranged signal, essentially meaning: someone has been targeted by official personnel, but the situation isn’t urgent, and the other party doesn’t plan to take action immediately.

Qi Si had always held a passive attitude toward the anti-federal movement and lacked the sense of conviction found in the Balance Church. Since the other party hadn’t come knocking, there was no need for him to stay put and wait for things to get serious before a head-on confrontation.

Of course, he wasn’t naive enough to expect to escape the tracking of official agencies through a simple relocation. After all, the prevalence of surveillance these days wasn’t low; no matter how careful one was, it was hard to avoid leaving traces.

What Qi Si wanted was to negotiate on a home turf where he could fully guarantee his personal safety. If he could secure some benefits, all the better; he might not be unwilling to reach some kind of cooperation with Kyushu. If negotiations failed, then a one-stop service of killing, dismembering, and feeding the remains to pigs wouldn’t be much trouble either.

To him, the existence of the authorities was like a Sword of Damocles hanging over his head, destined to fall heavily one day.

Rather than waiting for the conflict to escalate to an irreconcilable point, it was better to face it early, counter their moves, and fight for survival space.

As for what to do with Jin Yusheng, who was suspected of being a hostage held by the Federation… he probably wouldn’t die for the time being, and the rest would depend on whether his luck was as good as always.

While boiling instant noodles for himself, Qi Si made the plan to sacrifice the pawn to save the rook without any psychological burden.

He hastily finished dinner, went into the bedroom, fished out some tinfoil he had bought not long ago from a drawer, and sat at the desk. His fingers moved like shadows as he folded paper ingots.

The tinfoil he bought was all folded in less than two hours. Qi Si walked through the living room to the balcony, pulled an iron bucket out of a corner, and went back to the bedroom, throwing all the neatly stacked paper ingots from the table into it.

At this time, he didn’t mind the trouble. He quite diligently carried the bucket back to the living room, placed it at the door of the master bedroom, then rummaged under the coffee table for incense, candles, and a lighter, setting them out on the table in preparation.

Having done all this, he belatedly remembered that today was only April 1st, three days away from the Qingming Festival.

It was still early, not yet eight o’clock. Qi Si tilted his head and thought for a while, then pulled a medical kit out of the storage cabinet under the bookshelf and pushed open the door to the master bedroom.

The room, which hadn’t been opened for a long time, surprisingly hadn’t collected much dust. Only a decayed scent from wooden furniture left for a long time wafted toward him, tirelessly rendering an atmosphere no different from death.

Qi Si carried the medical kit to the bedside, took out alcohol cotton from it, and carefully and seriously wiped the skeleton specimens lying on the bed. He slowly and gently wiped every corner, cherishing them as if they were lovers.

Two human skeletons lay side by side. Because they had been processed, they were light; the mattress underneath wasn’t even pressed into a hollow.

Looking from a distance, the bed without a single wrinkle combined with the clean, white skulls looked very much like a fantasy scene rendered by a computer, stripped of all reality and approaching a false illusion.

Qi Si touched the gaps in the bones through the alcohol cotton with moderate pressure. His sensitive fingertips, trained by years of specimen making, could feel the texture beneath. Thus, he was not deceived by the sense of illusion and knew that this scene was absolute reality.

By the time he finished wiping the two skeletons, the night was deep. The master bedroom window was far from the street; looking out, one could only see the dark sky and a few scattered lights.

Qi Si tiptoed out of the master bedroom step by step and gently closed the door.

The previously suppressed fatigue surged up in waves. He put away the medical kit, lay down on the bed, and fell into a deep sleep.

Outside the window, a heavy rain began to fall… Six years ago, on March 12th, a night of torrential rain.

Qi Si was curled up in the second bedroom reading a book when his parents knocked on the door.

The couple’s expressions carried obvious sadness and worry. They told him many bits of advice and solemnly said their goodbyes to him.

At that time, Qi Si was holding a book titled “Rainy Night Murder Case,” silently watching them go downstairs, out the door, and get into the car to leave.

The rain fell harder and harder, falling from the high heavens to the ground across from him, splashing up a mist like smoke and haze.

The teenage Qi Si leaned against the window, gazing at the puddles all over the ground, sketching the image of a rainy night killer in his mind. He waited impatiently for his parents to return so he could share the bloody story with them.

But that night, he never did wait for his parents; he only received a call from the police.

The voice on the phone said that a large truck had overturned on an overpass, crushing a small car. The couple crushed to death in the car were his parents.

The moment he heard the news, Qi Si didn’t feel much sadness. After rushing to the scene and looking at the scattered flesh and blood, he was as excited as any other time he saw a bloody scene, his face flushed and his breathing rapid.

From the perspective of his short sixteen years of life, death didn’t mean the end of everything. People still had souls, and there were ghosts to be after death… He thought that since he had always played well with ghosts, his parents were just staying with him in another form.

That night, Qi Si ignored the advice of the police and doctors and brought his parents’ bodies directly home.

He laid the two bodies flat in the center of the living room, patiently wiping away the bloodstains with a towel and piecing the displaced flesh back where it belonged.

He hummed a tuneless little song as he cleaned the house. Seeing that it was already late, he made three cups of instant noodles.

Then he remembered that his parents were dead and had become ghosts. Even if they were to eat, it should be incense. So he went downstairs, bought a lot of incense and candles, and lit them one by one with a lighter.

With everything prepared, Qi Si sniffed the fragrance of sacrifice permeating the room. He sat quietly beside the bodies, arranging the incense and candles into various patterns—triangles, squares, hearts… He waited boredly, from late at night until daytime, and then until the next night, but he never did wait for his parents’ souls.

Qi Si stared blankly at the already decaying bodies, haphazardly plugging the corpse fluid gushing from the bursting skin. For the first time in his life, he felt lost.

Fortunately, he had always possessed a calmness far beyond his peers and wouldn’t give up until he saw the coffin.

On one hand, he forged income documents, pretending to be a person with full capacity for civil conduct to delay the intervention of relatives. On the other hand, he tried every method—those recorded in books and those heard from rumors—to find his parents’ ghosts.

To better preserve the bodies, he self-taught specimen making through some materials on the internet, clumsily removing the rotting flesh from the bodies, then wiping the bones clean with alcohol, and assembling them with iron nails according to the form of a human skeleton.

That was Qi Si’s first time making human specimens. In the process of handling the bodies, his mind became more peaceful than ever before, as if he had found a lifelong pursuit, knowing that this was where his talent lay and where his future was headed.

If there were no ghosts to accompany him, then keeping the bodies as mementos seemed like a good choice too.

The sixteen-year-old Qi Si showed a smile.

He changed into clean clothes and went downstairs again after many days. He saw the empty streets and the lonely crowds, but he could not find those figures he had grown so familiar with—the disemboweled, the hanged, those with severed limbs… Qi Si suddenly realized that there were no ghosts in the world; everyone coming and going was human.

To be precise, for some reason, he suddenly couldn’t see ghosts anymore and had become an ordinary person.

So he thought, it turned out his parents were still with him, he just couldn’t see them anymore…