Chapter 1

A bus transporting psychiatric patients crashed on the highway.

In the confusion, all thirty-two patients escaped into a crowded urban village where law and order were already shaky.

Three days later, doctors brought all thirty-two back.

But every person they returned with insisted they were not ill.

I took on the case as a private investigator and followed it from beginning to end.

I never expected to fall into a trap of my own making—and almost lose my life.

On Monday morning, I was sitting at my desk in the detective agency, touching up my makeup, when a young woman burst through the door in a panic.

Her first words startled me.

“My father’s a fake.”

Intrigued, I lit a cigarette and invited her to sit down and tell me about it.

“Someone’s replaced my dad! I went home to see him this Lunar New Year, but he’d changed completely.

“The man who calls himself my father doesn’t look like him, sound like him or act like him. He’s an impostor! My real father’s gone!”

Panic contorted her face and tangled her words. After talking to her for a while, I pieced together the essentials.

Her father, Yang Xinghua, was a factory worker in his fifties. He lived in Yangjia Village, an old village swallowed up by the expanding city, out near its edge.

Ten years ago, he had divorced his wife. Their daughter, Lily, then in junior high, had gone to live with her mother.

Mother and daughter had spent the past decade elsewhere. Once a year, at Lunar New Year, Lily returned to visit her father.

She had done the same this year.

Only the “father” who greeted her was a complete stranger.

“So you hadn’t seen him for a year. Could he have been through a lot in that time? A difficult year can age someone very quickly. Perhaps he no longer looks quite the way you remember.”

“Impossible!” Lily rejected the suggestion at once.

“This isn’t about looking older. How could I fail to recognize my own father?

“Dad’s skin is dark as coal. He’s short and stout, built like a post. When he smiles, his whole face lights up like a flower.

“But this fake? He’s pale as a vampire, tall and thin as a bamboo pole. He always has this awful half-smile. Just looking at him is frightening. How could he possibly be my dad?”

“I see…”

I studied her through the drifting cigarette smoke.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Find my real father and work out what on earth happened!”

I accepted her deposit and agreed to investigate.

After she left, I switched on my computer and searched for Yangjia Village.

Something turned up immediately.

One large headline caught my eye:

“ALL 32 PSYCHIATRIC PATIENTS WHO FLED INTO YANGJIA VILLAGE RETURNED TO HOSPITAL.”

Not long before, a bus transporting psychiatric patients had been traveling along the highway.

The tired driver lost concentration. The bus veered out of control and hit the roadside barrier. Its front end crumpled, and there was even a risk of fire.

To keep the patients safe, the two accompanying doctors had them get off and wait.

But all thirty-two ignored their instructions. Like horses breaking free of their reins, they bolted for the trees beside the highway and fled without looking back.

The doctors couldn’t catch them. Panicked and furious, they beat their chests, stamped their feet and swore until they were cursing the patients’ ancestors back eighteen generations.

A passenger in a passing car filmed the scene, edited it into a short clip and posted it online.

The caption read:

[LOL I’m dying. A whole busload of loonies just ran off. The staff are about to lose it too.]

The bright red words on the side of the bus—HANSHAN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL—struck a nerve.

Within moments, panic spread.

[The people who ran away are all psychiatric patients???]

[They won’t hurt anyone, will they?]

[What the hell is that hospital doing? How could they let this happen? It won’t be funny if some lunatic starts attacking people with a knife.]

[Am I the only one worried about the patients? What conditions do they have? Are they all right?]

Before long, someone claiming inside knowledge posted:

[My aunt’s coworker’s son works at that hospital. Apparently the escapees have schizophrenia, multiple personalities, mania, antisocial personalities… None of them are straightforward cases. The whole bus was full of seriously ill patients. Our local hospital couldn’t treat them, so they were being transferred to a bigger hospital in the provincial capital.]

[Holy shit. This is going to be a mess…]

[What do we do? I’m getting scared. Is it even safe to go outside?]

[Just a reminder: mentally ill people don’t bear criminal responsibility for murder~]

…

Under intense public pressure, the hospital director agreed to a news interview and tried to reassure everyone.

“Please don’t worry. Our hospital will do everything in its power to bring all thirty-two patients back as soon as possible!”

The escapees had vanished into the sea of people like thirty-two stones dropped into a lake.

Where were they hiding?

Fear gripped the city. Rumors flew.

Two days later, concerned residents began posting possible leads.

[Around midnight last night, someone with long, messy hair was digging up graves in the cemetery behind Yangjia Village! No idea whose ancestors are buried there. Better keep an eye on your family plots!]

[Grave-robbing? Is that the new nightlife?]

[No idea. But I saw him building a castle out of the dirt he dug up.]

[There’s a naked man running around the Yangjia Village bus stop. Not a stitch on him. I saw him while I was waiting for the bus this morning.]

[Shit, I ran into a creep too. At the Yangjia Youth Apartments. A woman knocked on my door in the middle of the night saying she’d left her arm at my place. Then she started screaming that I’d stolen it. Scared me half to death.]

…

More and more people claimed to have encountered “lunatics.” Each retelling made the stories stranger.

Every lead pointed to the same place: Yangjia Village.

Less than a kilometer from the crash site, it was a densely populated urban village on the city’s outskirts, notorious for its disorder.

Factories surrounded it. Logistics warehouses, shared rentals, workers’ dormitories, residential blocks, cheap guesthouses, wholesale markets and bus stops crowded into the village and its surroundings.

All kinds of places stood cheek by jowl. People came and went constantly, a bewildering mix of every sort.

After fleeing through the trees beside the highway, the thirty-two patients would most likely have reached this village first.

And judging by the online reports, some of them really had.

Hospital staff launched a large-scale search at once.

Armed with photographs and a list of names, they entered Yangjia Village after dark and went from door to door.

On the third night after the accident, the doctors delivered the result everyone had been waiting for. They dragged thirty-two people out of the residential area, loaded them into hospital vehicles and took them back to Hanshan Psychiatric Hospital.

At last, the public could breathe again.

Yet something about that apparently perfect ending seemed terribly wrong…