Chapter 54

Li Bo still remembered that day, long after Li Chen had left, sitting behind his desk for a very, very long time.

So long that night had fallen, and the city's neon lights filtered through the massive glass wall into his office, yet he still could not muster the courage to stand up.

Then he made another call, instructing those people to investigate his bloodless, nominal "younger brother" through a different method.

And the results he received once again sent a chill deep into Li Bo's bones.

Without a doubt, Li Chen had already sensed the prying eyes of others by that time, and after confessing everything, he grew increasingly reckless in his actions.

This led to a consequence—Li Chen's subsequent behaviors were far more perverted, twisted, and sickening than he had admitted.

Li Bo knew that Li Chen had installed wiretaps on the vast majority of Yang Siguang's personal belongings, and he knew that on many occasions, Li Chen personally took to stealth photography and stalking the innocent young man. Without Yang Siguang's knowledge, his intimate items were replaced at regular intervals, and the discarded objects were all meticulously collected and stored by Li Chen himself in a carefully crafted "exhibition hall." Even Yang Siguang's household trash was carefully inspected, sorted, and preserved by Li Chen... That madman was like a completely deranged, pathological dragon, greedily and frantically hoarding everything belonging to Yang Siguang.

Once aware of these actions, upon discovering that Li Chen had used his amateur investment gains to purchase an entire old building near Yang Siguang's home solely for voyeurism, he felt no surprise whatsoever.

This was Li Chen.

Li Chen the madman.

What genuinely surprised him, conversely, was the performance of the Li family elders.

He had assumed that people so obsessed with family reputation would undoubtedly discipline Li Chen's conduct, yet he never expected that the old man would accept Li Chen's various behaviors with absolute calm.

It was as if, so long as Li Chen could barely maintain a basic facade of respectability in public, the old man cared not at all what kind of existence he harbored in private.

Li Bo felt confused, and even harbored a nameless, unsettling dread.

As a so-called "adopted son," he had long known that the Li family was merely a seemingly clear yet actually foul and rotten abyss of stagnant water.

Yet he still could not comprehend how those people could face all of this with such serenity.

Not long afterward, he accidentally overheard some rumors from an old servant of the Li family.

It seemed that since ancient times, the Li family had always been this way.

This was a thoroughly and utterly mad family...

["...Hiss... Heh heh... The Li family... The Li family... From top to bottom, not a single one of them is any good."]

The old man, already admitted to a psychiatric hospital, clutched Li Bo's hand and muttered in a low voice. The pupils enveloped by wrinkles were long since as murky as the man's sanity, yet when mentioning his former masters, the old man's eyes were still filled with intense terror.

And resentment.

["They raised a ghost."]

The old man mumbled, repeatedly whispering those words.

["They raised a ghost, heh heh heh heh... People who raise ghosts are always like this... The evil ghost granted them glory and wealth... and naturally must collect a sufficient amount of sacrifices in return..."]

["They are all madmen. Every single one of them..."]

...An evil ghost?

Li Bo had to admit that when the old man mentioned the evil ghost, he indeed recalled certain things he had once seen in the basement.

Though he had once thought those were nothing more than sheer hallucinations...

That basement was completely empty and pitch black.

Except for one wall inlaid with a massive bronze mirror.

The bronze mirror had long grown mottled and indistinct with the passage of years, and even when viewed under bright lights, one could only make out hazy shadows.

Yet when there was no one around and absolute silence reigned, that mirror would instead become exceptionally clear.

That mirror could reflect the person standing outside it in pure darkness down to the finest detail.

The more one looked, however, the more one would feel that the person inside the mirror was subtly inconsistent with "oneself."

Clearly it was merely a reflection in a glass, yet "their" every smile, every frown, and every movement seemed like some deliberate, clumsy imitation.

He himself had once been frightened almost to the point of paralysis by the shadow in that mirror...

Then what about Li Chen?

During the long year Li Chen spent locked in that basement, had he ever thought of speaking to the "thing" inside the mirror?

*

["Heh..."]

*

In a trance, Li Bo felt as though he had heard a cold, mocking sneer.

He shivered violently, instantly snapping back from his memories.

He was still sitting in the secret room meticulously crafted by his younger brother before his death, rather than in that long-abandoned basement.

Yet his heartbeat was far faster than usual, and a thin layer of cold sweat coated his back.

"Damn it—"

The man ran a hand through his hair, forcing himself to calm down.

The most urgent task was to quickly clean up the mess left behind by the deceased Li Chen.

At that moment, Li Bo's movements paused.

He clenched his teeth, forcing himself not to be overly neurotic, but his gaze involuntarily locked onto the projection screen.

The image there had changed.

Now, the blurred and lustful photographs of the young man had been replaced, through the automatic image rotation, with a formal, smiling frontal photograph of someone else.

The young man in the photo possessed handsome features, the corners of his lips curved slightly upward as if smiling, yet there was not the slightest trace of amusement in his eyes—only an ultimate, chilling indifference.

Within those golden-brown pupils, there was a prominent patch of pigmentation.

Li Bo felt his blood running backward in rivulets; he felt somewhat cold.

Without a doubt, he was exceptionally familiar with this photograph. Because it was none other than Li Chen's... memorial portrait.

As the person who handled Li Chen's funeral arrangements from start to finish, Li Bo no longer knew how many times he had stared into this photograph.

Yet never before had he felt so creeped out by it.

Leaving aside the question of why Li Chen would leave such a memorial portrait in the projection system he used for his DIY fetishes, the photograph itself possessed numerous subtle anomalies.

That face, which should have been exceptionally symmetrical (and thus exceptionally handsome), was subtly misaligned, as if his skull had somehow deformed. The shadow at the corners of his mouth in the photo was also overly heavy... resembling a small clump of unwipeable dried blood.

Below his ear ran a thin line, which looked like hair, but could also be interpreted as a trickle of blood oozing out from the ear canal.

When selecting the memorial portrait, Li Bo had intentionally chosen and cropped a photo of Li Chen at his most high-spirited, yet now the eye sockets in the picture were deeply sunken, and his pupils had grown unusually dark and hollow.

Even his left eye was directly swallowed by a shadow. At first glance, it appeared as though there was only a pitch-black void in that spot.

Yet it was precisely such a pair of eyes that were now staring straight at Li Bo.

That sharp gaze was filled with virulent malice.

A few seconds later, the photograph flickered abruptly.

For reasons unknown, the photo rotation program suddenly glitched, causing the two adjacent photographs occupying the entire wall-sized screen to continuously flash back and forth.

Yang Siguang's body seemed almost to come alive on the screen; his pale, restrained form bound tightly by ropes twisted under the dim yellow light, while Li Chen's deep black pupils and ferocious face seemed already to have sunken into the other's abdominal cavity. Vaguely, the long-dead young man had actually begun to smile—the black bondage strap around Yang Siguang's hips happened to overlap perfectly with the corners of Li Chen's mouth—even though he knew this was merely an illusion left on his retina by the afterimages of the two overlapping photos, Li Bo still felt as though, in that single instant, Li Chen's gigantic face had bitten down upon the ropes binding Yang Siguang.

["Creak—Creak—"]

In his trance, Li Bo once again heard the tiny, chewing sounds Li Chen used to make in his childhood as he swallowed rotten bird carcasses bite by bite.

*

"Damn it—"

Li Bo let out a low curse.

It was probably just a prank left behind by Li Chen during his lifetime.

He told himself.

After all, prior to this, Li Chen had never deliberately concealed his intense malice toward Li Bo.

Such a clever person would naturally anticipate that once something happened to him, the only one coming to clean up the mess would be Li Bo.

Given that fellow's rotten nature, no matter what he pulled off, he shouldn't be this surprised... Li Bo continuously comforted himself, then roughly yanked the power cord of the projector.

The projection on the screen jerked to a halt, flashed rapidly once, and then slowly faded away.

The next second, the motor hummed, and the screen, following its automated program, slowly retracted back into the ceiling, once again exposing the wall behind it.

That wall was still covered entirely in photographs of Yang Siguang... Wait, hold on, was it an illusion?

Li Bo's eyes widened, and uncontrollably, he began to examine the photo wall he had previously only glanced at.

Why were there now suddenly so many photographs belonging to Li Chen mixed in among them?

Had he simply failed to notice them earlier?

Li Bo thought uncertainly.

Li Chen's photographs had all been individually cut out and then forcefully pasted over Yang Siguang's pictures.

Whether due to the cropping or the printing, Li Chen's silhouettes pasted onto Yang Siguang's photos all appeared covered in a thin layer of gray, and even the colors looked terribly, terribly faint.

This made his radiant smile look exceedingly stiff, rigid, and even somewhat ferocious.

Li Bo took only a single glance, and his hair stood on end.

He quickly averted his gaze, refusing to dwell on it further, and strode forward, violently ripping those photographs off the wall.

Before long, he had torn down a full armful of pictures.

Following that, Li Bo clutched the photographs, kicked open the door of the secret room, and entered the area at the other end of the house, which was decorated to look warm and full of life.

Li Bo dumped all the photographs directly into the stainless steel bathroom sink.

Immediately afterward, he pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket.

Li Bo lit a cigarette for himself first, and as the nicotine flooded his nose and lungs, he felt himself gradually grow a bit calmer.

However, the smiling "group photo" of Yang Siguang and Li Chen still lay in the sink before him, their hollow eyes staring relentlessly at him through the photographic paper.

Li Bo shivered once more.

Then, he reignited the lighter, pulled a photograph from the basin, and brought its corner against the tiny flame.

In Li Bo's original plan, he was supposed to take everything in this room away and destroy it completely.

Yet now, he instinctively changed his mind.