The conversation sounded polite, but for some reason, Mu Anqi felt a bit flushed. She turned her face aside, the cloak wrapping her completely. She didn't know whether the sudden warmth was from the cloak or rising from her own heart.
The rain gradually eased, the pitter-patter on the umbrella fading, and Mu Anqi slowly calmed down. Leaving the alley, there was an empty street, with no way out. The only thing relatively noticeable was this old residential building.
The old building wasn't tall, about seven stories. Mu Anqi observed its outline; in the rainy night, it appeared entirely black, very much like a large black cocoon. Countless resentments and malevolent energies twisted into black threads around it, giving off an eerie, terrifying feeling that made the spine chill.
"Let's go." Ji Huaichu closed the umbrella, and in the next moment, the black umbrella in her hand dissipated into Yin energy.
Only then did Mu Anqi realize that the rain had stopped.
She looked at the still dark and oppressive sky and followed General Ji into the building.
On the first floor, there were only two households, rooms 101 and 102 facing each other. The stairs were made of concrete, with no elevator, leading straight up to the seventh floor, and there were no other stairs for use.
The pitch-dark corridor had no lights, only a motion-sensor bulb in front of each door, either installed by the community or by the residents themselves, which would light up when someone stomped their foot, casting a pale, dim glow.
"Do you know how to get through these exploration-type Black Mirror vortices?" Ji Huaichu seemed in a good mood. She walked to the door of 101 and gently knocked, several rhythmic taps, but no sound came from inside. Ji Huaichu moved her wrist slightly and smiled at Mu Anqi. "Very simple."
Mu Anqi stared at her in a daze. After smiling, Ji Huaichu gathered a mass of black Yin energy in her hand. Wrapped in the Yin energy, she smashed the door lock with a punch and kicked the door open in one move.
"..." It wasn't until Ji Huaichu stepped into the room that Mu Anqi came back to her senses and hurried to follow. Should she even bother noting down this piece of knowledge?
The room was empty, furnishings very simple, and Mu Anqi even saw some undelivered takeout bags. However… the room was permeated with a faint, lingering scent of blood.
Mu Anqi looked at Ji Huaichu. The general slightly raised her chin, and Mu Anqi quickly began inspecting the strange aspects of the room.
She started with the bathroom. The sink was normal, but the shower… the shower drain was clogged with hair? Mu Anqi recalled certain "cases" and her expression changed slightly. She hurried to the kitchen, grabbed a pair of chopsticks, and carefully pulled out the hair clogging the drain. The hair was long, clearly female. Judging by the room's furnishings, the shoe rack by the door, and the bathroom setup, the owner of this apartment should have been a single male. Mu Anqi pulled out a large clump of hair, placing it on the bathroom floor, which tinted the nearby standing water a faint red.
Suddenly, Mu Anqi remembered the black garbage bag in the trash can. She quickly moved to the kitchen and noticed a pressure cooker and a broken blender. There were many bone-cutting knives in the kitchen, and a large chainsaw in the bedroom. On closer inspection, the chainsaw's teeth were even smeared with uncleared chunks of bloody flesh.
No, no, no—the ceiling! She had overlooked the ceiling. There were dried bloodstains all over it. Some parts of the walls had obviously been repainted.
Mu Anqi searched the wardrobe, storage cabinets, and refrigerator but found no dismembered limbs there. However, when she opened the bedside drawer, she unexpectedly discovered a thick stack of photographs.
All the photographs were of women—middle-aged women, young women, some appearing to be only in their teens, and others in their thirties or forties. The backgrounds were very uniform, all in the front passenger seat of a taxi at night. The women were all bound; some clearly showed injuries on their faces and bodies. Their expressions ranged from fear to despair, and some showed resentment and anger. Each photo had a string of date numbers on the back, clearly indicating when the perpetrator committed the crimes.
Besides this set, there was another set showing these women strangled with electric wires, the background still in the taxi.
Mu Anqi couldn't bear to look for long and quickly skimmed through them. After a dozen or so of these photos, she was suddenly confronted with images of the victims being dismembered.
The bodies had been cut apart, blood staining the floor tiles, with some prominent organs removed and placed aside. Almost every photo showed the bodies arranged in this way. From this pattern, Mu Anqi discerned the killer's perverse tastes. She couldn't help thinking of the giant lizard, feeling nauseated. She put the photos away, roughly understanding what that driver at the alley had done.
Why was this house empty? Because the driver had gone out.
Mu Anqi suddenly felt that she should have fired more shots, that she shouldn't have let that kind of person die so easily. But she quickly thought of the countless hands clinging to the driver; in the end, the driver had been torn apart, strangled, and dismembered by those hands. The owners of those hands… were probably the victims themselves. In that sense, they had avenged themselves with their own hands.
Mu Anqi closed her eyes and exhaled. At that moment, she caught a glimpse of a black shadow approaching and almost instinctively blurted out, "Good fortune be with you." Looking closely, she realized it was the hair she had just pulled from the drain! It was even smeared with blood and scalp. The hair hovered in the air for a second, as if caught in some random motion—perhaps it simply stopped. Mu Anqi had no time to think and raised her hand, firing two shots at the hair. Her special anti-ghost bullets struck it, releasing a swirl of black mist, and she seemed to hear a woman's scream in her ear.
…The hair vanished.
Mu Anqi pressed her lips together and quickly went to the bathroom to check; indeed, the clump of hair was gone. She returned to the living room, handed the stack of photos to General Ji, and explained her thoughts.
Ji Huaichu took the photos and examined them one by one. Each time she put one down, black smoke rose from the photo and it disappeared. By the time the last photo vanished in Ji Huaichu's hand, she walked toward the door. "Time for the second household."
As they reached the door of the second house, Mu Anqi heard a weak cry for help. Ji Huaichu knocked on the door with her usual calm expression. This time she didn't use any violence; after knocking, she simply waited. About two or three minutes later, the door opened.
A man clutching his abdomen, his face pale, trembled as he looked at them. "Help… please help me…"
Ji Huaichu neither spoke nor moved. Mu Anqi, seeing the man's expression, couldn't help asking, "What happened?"
"That… that wretch, that wretch went mad. She wanted to kill me, kill the children… I—I resisted, but I couldn't save my daughters, and she stabbed them… I…" The man let out a choking cry of pain, beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. He looked at the two at the door and weakly reached out for help. "Help me… call the police… 120…"
Mu Anqi never expected to hear phrases like "call the police, 120" inside a Black Mirror vortex. She looked up at Ji Huaichu. "General?"
"Go in and you'll see." Ji Huaichu was calculating the time. If it were before, she would have already stormed up to the fourth floor, not lingering here listening to a malice-possessed ghost making excuses, listening to what these people had done. But now…
Ji Huaichu watched Mu Anqi cautiously draw her handgun and step inside, her expression relaxing slightly. In this slow-paced exploration vortex, the feeling of progressing step by step wasn't bad at all.
Little Money Tree was a complex girl. Sometimes she was soft-hearted and kind, but that didn't mean she lacked principles. She clearly had boundaries and her own understanding; once those boundaries were crossed, she became firm and decisive, never indecisive or sentimental. That was good.
However, seeing Mu Anqi stand up for the victims and feel anger stirred a faint, hidden thought in Ji Huaichu. Occasionally, she wondered: if Little Money Tree saw her past, what would happen?
If Little Money Tree entered the game before her Black Mirror vortex dissipated, entering the Black Mirror vortex that belonged to her…
How would she react?
Ji Huaichu wanted to know.
Unfortunately, there was no "if."
A heavy stench of blood invaded Mu Anqi's nose. As soon as she stepped into the living room, she was shocked by this human tragedy. One little daughter lay on the sofa, the other by the window on the floor. Blood poured from their necks, dyeing their clothes crimson. Their arms and bodies also bore knife wounds, likely from trying to escape or resist. As for the man's "mad woman," she now lay against the wall by the master bedroom door, tightly clutching a kitchen knife. Her abdomen was stabbed multiple times, and her arms, elbows, and back were stained with blood—her entire body a bloodied figure, already deceased.
A human tragedy.
Mu Anqi opened her mouth, but no words came out. Was it this already-dead woman who had killed the two daughters and stabbed the man?
"The wound on the man's abdomen… it was from a sharp knife."
Mu Anqi suddenly thought of the knife by the man's feet at the door. It was a cleaver used for chopping bones and meat, pointed at the tip, the kind commonly seen at street vendors—a typical butcher's knife.
"This… this vortex…" Mu Anqi pressed her lips together. She seemed to… have heard of these, these cases? She looked at Ji Huaichu. "I… the case in room 101, I think I saw it in my lifetime—it was the 'Rainy Night Butcher.' And this… seems like another case, where the husband killed his wife and daughters, then stabbed himself, trying to frame his wife, but he ultimately died from his injuries… and in the end, it was discovered that he was the killer."
Why? How could she be seeing cases she had heard of in her lifetime inside the vortex? These cases had once caused a sensation; Mu Anqi had come across them while surfing the internet.
Mu Anqi was somewhat shocked. Of course, she knew that Black Mirror vortices were formed from malice, that everything within them was something that had happened before. But actually seeing cases she had heard of in her lifetime still left her stunned.
"What do you think should be done?"
"I think…" Mu Anqi tightened her grip on the gun and hurried to the door. She saw the man barely clinging to life on the ground. When he saw her approaching, a glimmer of hope lit up in his eyes, and he reached out toward her. "Help—"
Bang.
A gunshot to the head.
"I think… this is what should be done," Mu Anqi said quietly. "Before he fully dies, finish him off."