Chapter 3
Edward Quan ·
12.
Perhaps it was because Meng Wei had mentioned the past that day.
That night, I dreamed of my first murder.
An ordinary afternoon. The sunset was blood-red.
On a rooftop, several children played, jumping across a raised section of concrete.
A boy patted my head.
“Good thing you found somewhere this fun. We won't call you a bastard anymore.”
What followed was blurred in the dream. I couldn't remember clearly.
I remembered only that, as we were leaving, I pushed him off while the others weren't looking.
His terror and despair.
The exhilaration and satisfaction that surged through me after the crash.
I never forgot any of it.
Everyone thought it was an accident.
Even his parents.
For me, killing opened Pandora's box.
A second accident followed.
Then a third.
Until Shen An found out.
13.
After waking, I got up and poured some water.
The past came back to me.
I was still Shen An's child then.
They said my mother died of an amniotic fluid embolism while giving birth to me.
Shen An had been at the station working on a case. He didn't even see her one last time.
Naturally, I couldn't hate him over a woman I'd never met.
In fact, until I was seven, he and I were practically strangers.
Nothing but solving cases seemed capable of stirring him.
What finally drew his attention to me was the series of “accidents.”
All mine, of course.
He investigated and learned that I often played with the three dead children. We had visited the places where they died together many times.
He suspected me.
He had no solid evidence.
Who would imagine a seven-year-old deliberately killing?
He shut me in the house and questioned me.
I pretended to know nothing and cried miserably.
Only then did he think to ask my teacher about unusual behavior.
But after I squeezed a goldfish to death in front of everyone and saw the teacher's fear and disgust, I had stopped doing such things where people could see.
Shen An, however, was a born hound for crime.
He took me to a psychologist. I was young. My disguise wasn't good enough.
I was soon diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.
A genius at catching criminals had fathered a born killer.
Funny, wasn't it?
Afraid to let anyone know, he secretly spent a year helping me through treatment.
The result was obvious. Antisocial personality disorder couldn't be cured.
A year later, he lost patience.
And put me in a cage.
14.
Shen An loved his work with something close to obsession. He couldn't watch me all the time.
At first, he only locked me in my room.
But I was like a sharpened knife. Too long without blood, and I grew restless.
I could only hurt myself.
Unable to think of anything else, and afraid to hire someone to care for me, he made a cage and shut me inside like a prisoner.
Every day, he forced me to watch uplifting television.
Every day was worse than death.
Eventually, I learned to pretend to behave.
Six months of pretending earned my release from the cage.
I still wasn't allowed outside.
Even now, I don't understand him. Why not let me harm myself and die? Wouldn't that have saved him a great deal of trouble?
Then one day, while he worked overtime, I took some money and escaped.
Sometimes I think fate is miraculous.
As if everything has already been arranged out of sight.
How could a nine-year-old escape a police search?
Standing amid the street crowds, imagining what awaited me if I was caught, I felt countless vicious ideas rising.
That was when traffickers noticed me.
They thought I was lost.
They abducted me.
15.
I was young and knew little.
I neither cried nor struggled. They thought I was a sensible, obedient child.
Unlike Shen An, who knew my secrets, the fake married couple had no defenses against me.
Pretending to behave, I easily drove a sharpened disposable chopstick into the woman's neck.
When the blood sprayed, I felt alive again.
The other trafficker had never encountered anything like it.
He couldn't call the police.
He didn't dare dispose of me either. He could only report to his superiors.
Looking back, I had opened that gate to hell myself.
A murder at nine drew the attention of the organization's leaders.
They brought me before a senior figure.
A middle-aged man, a little older than Shen An.
He praised my extraordinary gift. A natural seed of evil.
I was born a vicious wolf.
He wanted to own it.
For the next two years, he used kindness and cruelty, every means he could, to tame me.
He allowed me to kill. He even taught me to clean up a crime scene.
The punishment for disobedience went far beyond beatings.
Looking back, the first thing my father taught me was disguise.
Only by pretending to be good could I have freedom.
I did the same in the organization.
16.
The turning point came in the third year.
I was twelve.
Someone appeared to be targeting the only daughter of a senior leader.
My handler told me to conceal my identity and protect her.
That was when I first met Zhuang Xinyue.
She was fourteen, lovely as a flower.
As clear and pure as a handful of snow.
“So you're the little brother coming to stay with us? You're adorable.”
She pinched my cheek.
No one had ever touched me with such affection.
For a moment, something seemed to break through the soil inside me.
She knew nothing about her father's filthy business.
Innocently, she believed the family ran ordinary businesses.
Like me, she had no mother. To protect her, the organization's leader rarely visited. Servants looked after her daily needs.
She was delighted to have me there.
Because of her, I returned to ordinary human society.
Not that I needed it.
After living together for a while, I found her rather strange.
She was always enthusiastic about meaningless things.
Buying cat food especially for strays.
Fresh flowers for the vase every week.
A lavish meal to celebrate every holiday.
Doing those things with her stirred nothing in me.
If anything, I felt a little disgust.
Later, when I became Zhuang Xinyue and copied those habits, Meng Wei praised my kindness and love of life.
Time passed.
Apart from quietly removing occasional problems for her, or going out to kill someone, I began to seem like an ordinary person.
It was a very comfortable period.
Then depression broke everything.
When I was sixteen, Zhuang Xinyue died.
A year later, I was forced to become her.