Chapter 1

I was taking my daughter to play on the slide when a boy ran over.

“Sir, can you give me your daughter?”

Children said things without thinking. I laughed.

“She’s my treasure. How could I just give her away?”

He asked:

“Then would you be very sad if she died?”

I immediately grew wary.

I had never seen him before. The playground had been funded jointly by the nearby businesses, and I knew almost every child who regularly played there.

Suspecting he might be working with traffickers, I took my daughter home at once.

“Stay away from the playground for now,” I told her. “And don’t go near that boy. Don’t eat any snacks he gives you, and absolutely don’t follow him.”

She nodded obediently.

A few days later, she suddenly told me she had seen him taking the daughter of the baker opposite somewhere. She had wanted to follow, but remembered my warning.

The bakery was run by a divorced mother who lived alone with her daughter.

The mother was Hàn Vũ. Little Tiểu Kỳ was only four.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew how hard it was for her to raise a child alone. We all helped where we could.

I called her immediately.

She didn’t answer. Perhaps she was out delivering bread.

About an hour and a half later, she rushed into my shop like a madwoman, seized my daughter, and demanded:

“Where’s Tiểu Kỳ? Tell me!”

My daughter was so frightened she stammered.

I told Hàn Vũ to call the police, then went searching with her.

But beyond the intersection, the trail vanished.

The police worked fast.

With my account and nearby surveillance footage, they found the boy that very night.

His name was Lưu Khải.

He insisted he hadn’t taken Tiểu Kỳ anywhere.

His parents lied for him too, saying he had been home all day.

Only when the police confronted them with the footage did the lie collapse.

Then he stammered:

“I’m not twelve yet… I won’t have to go to prison, will I?”

He led us to a nearby abandoned construction site.

Pointing at a small pit, he said:

“She’s down there.”

The police dug away the soil.

Beneath it was a polystyrene shipping box.

When they opened it, they found Tiểu Kỳ curled inside.

Her eyes were still open.

Her mouth slightly parted.

The terror before death remained in those large, round eyes.

Hàn Vũ broke down.

She charged at Lưu Khải, ready to kill him, but the police restrained her.

Then they made him recount the crime.

What he said chilled me.

After discovering the pit, he had suddenly thought:

“I want to bury something alive in it.”

At first, he chose a stray cat.

But it ran away as soon as he put it down.

That failed.

So he changed his target to… children.

The pit was small, so he tied two shoelaces together to measure it.

Whenever he found a suitable child, he secretly measured her with the laces before deciding whether to act.

He said he chose only girls.

They resisted less.

Their bodies were softer, easier to fold.

Someone asked:

“Did you kill her before burying her?”

He shook his head.

“No. I told her to lie down herself.”

He invented a game.

First, he found two large cardboard boxes and told Tiểu Kỳ to climb inside.

He gave her chocolate, making her think they were playing something fun.

Then he told her to climb into the polystyrene box already waiting in the pit.

She suspected nothing.

“After she lay down, I covered it with a board, put bricks on top, and filled it with soil…”

She kept struggling.

So he jumped onto the board and stamped several times.

Then she stopped moving.

Before he finished, Hàn Vũ fainted.

The police rushed her to hospital.

I heard a few veteran officers beside me say through clenched teeth:

“All these years on the force, and I’ve never seen anything like it. If his parents weren’t here, I’d want to beat him to death.”

When Tiểu Kỳ’s death became known, many people asked me for Lưu Khải’s address.

Everyone wanted justice for mother and daughter.

But the law protected juvenile offenders’ privacy.

The police warned me not to reveal any of his personal information.

If I did, I would also be held accountable.

A few days later, Hàn Vũ came crying to my shop. The police were preparing to discontinue the case.

Because Lưu Khải was under twelve and below the age of criminal responsibility, she said, they could only close it under the criminal law.

I was stunned.

He had clearly killed someone.

Yet he wouldn’t spend a day in prison. He wouldn’t even stand trial.

How was that right?

“The police said even if I brought a case myself, the procuratorate wouldn’t accept it. At most, I could sue his parents for compensation… But who will give my daughter justice?”

She cried until the corners of her eyes bled.

Worse, his parents neither apologized nor offered compensation.

They stopped answering her calls.

Even when the police contacted them, they only said they were busy. No time for her.

My wife couldn’t bear it and made her some soup.

“We’re both mothers. Some tragedies can’t be changed once they’ve happened. You’re still young. Find someone else and have another child. Think of it as Tiểu Kỳ being reborn.”

“I can’t get past it,” Hàn Vũ said hoarsely.

“Whenever I close my eyes, I hear her crying in front of me, saying she can’t rest. My heart feels as though it’s been stabbed seventeen or eighteen times…”

As parents ourselves, we understood her pain.

We urged her to bring her daughter’s body home, arrange a proper funeral, and worry about the lawsuit afterward.

The mourning hall was set up inside her bakery.

All the neighbors came.

But everyone repeated the same familiar words of comfort.

After crying herself into exhaustion, Hàn Vũ gradually became numb.

At the funeral meal, Old Trương, who sold roast duck, blurted out that Hàn Vũ’s carelessness was partly to blame.

Several women immediately rounded on him.

“You men try watching a child for a day!”

“Are we supposed to keep our eyes on them twenty-four hours a day? Never even eat?”

Fat Vương, the butcher, took a hard drag on his cigarette.

“If it were me, I’d skin that beast even if it meant prison.”

“Such a good woman, and not one man to stand up for her.”

Hàn Vũ had few relatives.

When she couldn’t manage everything, my wife and I helped receive the visitors.

My daughter played alone outside.

I called her over and told her not to wander.

She nodded without a word.

That surprised me.

Usually, she always had something to say back. Why so obedient today?

She grinned and opened her mouth.

Chocolate clung to her teeth.

Her cavities were bad, so my wife and I had strictly forbidden sweets.

“Did Auntie Hàn give you that?”

She shook her head.

“The big boy.”

“Which boy?”

“The one who took Tiểu Kỳ away.”

“He said Tiểu Kỳ couldn’t finish the chocolate, so I could have it.”

04

Cold sweat broke over me.

I handed her to my wife and told her to watch her closely. Not to let her out of sight for even a second.

I took several people to search the neighborhood.

No trace of Lưu Khải.

He had apparently run away.

The more I thought, the more frightened I became.

What if he had taken my daughter and found some little pit to bury her alive?

I would never allow that.

That evening, I quietly told Hàn Vũ he had approached my daughter.

Her eyes widened. She gripped my arm.

“Tell me sooner next time!”

“I’ll kill him myself!”

I looked at Tiểu Kỳ’s black-and-white portrait, her smile showing a small crooked tooth.

Silently, I made a decision.

“Do you really want revenge?”

“I have a way.”

“One that won’t put you in prison.”

She agreed without hesitation.

I told my daughter to carry on normally, playing outside each day.

Meanwhile, I watched for Lưu Khải.

Hàn Vũ and I took turns.

After almost a month, I finally saw him lurking near the playground.

I called my daughter and told her to come home immediately.

As expected, he followed.

I trailed him in my small truck.

On a road without surveillance cameras, I abducted him.

I took him to Hàn Vũ’s storeroom.

She set out Tiểu Kỳ’s photograph and lit an incense stick.

“Good girl, Kỳ Kỳ.”

“Today, Mommy will let you rest.”

Lưu Khải cried and struggled.

“Sir! Auntie!”

“I’m only a child!”

“How could you hurt a child?”

Without hesitation, Hàn Vũ seized him and forced him into the bread mixer.

He weighed about fifty kilograms.

The mixer’s maximum capacity was sixty-five.

Even so, fitting an entire person inside was almost impossible.

One leg caught outside.

She took a large wooden mallet used for dough and struck his joint wildly, breaking the leg before forcing it in.

Honestly, I hadn’t known how she intended to deal with him.

Our agreement was that I would abduct him. She would take revenge herself.

She switched it on.

The turning paddle immediately scraped a large piece of flesh from him.

He screamed.

“I won’t kill anyone again! I’ll be good! Sir! Auntie! Please forgive me!”

I couldn’t stand it and turned off the machine.

“Enough. Make it quick.”

Red-eyed, she threw something at my feet.

Brand-new shoelaces.

Two tied together, exactly the height of my daughter.

I could only step aside and let her turn the mixer to its highest setting.

His screams gradually vanished beneath the roar.

Half an hour later, we put a mass that could no longer be called a body into her oven.

She added a few lumps of dough to mask the smell of burning fat.

It was her usual baking time. Even heavy smoke wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

After burning his remains, she swept all the bone ash from the oven.

Then filled the shelves with bread bought elsewhere.

I handed her the statement and script I had prepared.

“The real battle starts now. The police will question you repeatedly. Are you ready?”

Her voice was frighteningly calm.

“Don’t worry. I won’t pay with my life for a beast.”

The day after Lưu Khải disappeared, the police arrived.

Five or six of them.

Everyone sympathized with Hàn Vũ. Within moments, dozens of neighbors gathered, unsettling the officers.

“What are you doing? Obstructing the police is a serious offense!”

Fat Vương raised his voice.

“Officer, we’re not here to cause trouble. We only want to know why you’re investigating a victim instead of catching a killer.”

An older officer with two bars and two stars on his epaulets stepped forward.

“I understand how you feel. But the earlier case was discontinued according to legal procedure. We have to follow the rules.”

Old Trương protested.

“An old man fell outside my shop and demanded twenty thousand yuan. Your officers said he was vulnerable and made me pay fifteen thousand. Why didn’t you follow the rules then?”

The older officer had no answer.