13 Sketches

Jin Ze left the police officers behind, with He Ping leading the team to continue processing the scene, and then took only Miaomiao and me as we set off for the address of Liu Yang noted in file number 61.

Originally, I’d wanted to sit in the back with Miaomiao, to breathe in her fragrance and feel the allure of her figure—I thought that would give me some spirit. But she was clearly uninterested, even a little repulsed, and went straight to sit in the front passenger seat.

After more than half an hour, we arrived in a rather remote suburb. There weren’t many people around; it wasn’t an apartment complex but single-family homes, and the place we were headed to was a dilapidated small building.

We knocked on the door for ages with no response. In the end, Jin Ze forced the lock open, and only then did we enter.

It was the middle of the night, and the place was shrouded in darkness; theoretically, we should have been met with pitch blackness as we pushed the door open.

But reality was different. The moment the door swung in, I saw five or six pairs of eyes glowing an eerie green.

Those green eyes floated in the air like ghostly orbs, instantly raising goosebumps all over me. I could feel them staring at us, and at that moment, a sense of danger filled the air.

Then, Miaomiao turned on her flashlight. In the beam, I finally saw that three large, muscular wolfdogs stood before us. In fact, they looked more like wolves, their fur a dark, shadowy blue-black that made them seem all the more menacing.

The three wolfdogs were chained to a pillar inside the room, some distance from us—far enough that they couldn’t reach us. I let out a breath of relief.

But they thrashed furiously against their chains, snapping and lunging in our direction. If not for those chains, they’d have brought a man down in seconds and torn him apart.

In front of the wolfdogs sat a large stone trough, stained with dried blood and scattered with broken bone fragments. This was clearly the dogs’ feeding trough. Given the look of it, the wolfdogs hadn’t eaten in some time and were especially ferocious. I guessed these were the very dogs Liu Yang kept, likely to help him deal with corpses—disposing of the bodies left over after he used human flesh to make cosmetics.

One thing puzzled me, though. As savage and frenzied as they were, the three wolfdogs never barked—not a single sound.

Miaomiao shone her flashlight on their necks and said, “Their vocal cords have been cut. They can’t make any noise. Their owner must have done this to avoid drawing attention. There must be other secrets hidden here.”

Hearing this, I couldn’t help but shudder. To cut a dog’s vocal cords—how cruel could a person be? I wondered if it was Liu Yang who’d done it.

We skirted the wolfdogs and started searching the building. But things didn’t go as smoothly as I’d hoped. The place felt empty, almost deserted, and yielded next to no clues. We searched from the first floor to the second, but apart from a few dusty tables, chairs, and a bed, there was nothing. The layer of dust suggested no one had lived here for some time.

We returned downstairs, and just as I was about to give up, Jin Ze glanced again at the three wolfdogs. He tried to approach them, and the dogs went wild, hurling themselves at him with renewed frenzy.

Jin Ze stepped back and said, “It’s as if they’re guarding something.”

Without hesitation, he drew his gun and shot the three beasts. As they convulsed in their own blood, I felt no pity for them. Such vicious animals couldn’t be spared, especially if they’d been fed on human flesh. If Jin Ze hadn’t killed them, the forensics team would have had to, eventually, to dissect their bodies in the lab.

The moment the dogs were dead, Jin Ze went straight to the pillar where they’d been chained and tapped around on the floor. Soon enough, he pried up a section of floorboards, revealing a hidden cellar below.

Impressed by his sharpness, I hurried over. At the entrance to the cellar, a strange stench hit me—a foul, bloody odor mingled with an oddly sweet scent. It immediately reminded me of the perfume bottle at Zheng Wei’s house.

After Jin Ze and Miaomiao descended, I followed. The moment I reached the bottom, my scalp prickled and every pore on my body seemed to exude cold air. The scene before us was simply too gruesome and shocking.

The cellar, about twenty square meters, had several human skins hanging from its walls, and on the floor lay several skinned human heads. Strangely, even though the heads were skinned and rotting, I could still vaguely recognize them—they seemed to be the very corpses that had been stolen in the videos we’d seen.

In that instant, it all clicked. Jin Ze’s deduction was right: Liu Yang was a madman who made cosmetics from human flesh. But he didn’t seem to kill people himself; his raw materials—the corpses—were stolen from the funeral home using corpse-walking methods.

As I mulled this over, I suddenly felt a chill—a sensation as if something had fallen on my head. Instinctively, I looked up.

The sight nearly made my soul leave my body. Suspended above me was an iron plate, and on it, a human head severed at the neck. The head rested atop the plate, and beneath its jaw, a half-burned candle. The face was burned beyond recognition. This, I realized, was how corpse oil was extracted—from the burning of the lower jaw, the purest oil would drip out.

Sure enough, we soon found a small vat nearby, filled with corpse oil.

It was a major discovery. Even though we didn’t find the finished cosmetics here, it was clear this was a small workshop where Liu Yang processed bodies, turning them into raw materials for cosmetics.

That meant, aside from this bloody cellar, Liu Yang must have another workshop for actually manufacturing the cosmetics.

Miaomiao immediately began filming the scene—this was vital firsthand evidence. Jin Ze started searching around for any other possible clues.

I wanted to look around as well, but the poor lighting tripped me up. After taking a couple of steps, I got kicked in the head by a dangling corpse overhead, and I dared not move any further. It was too damned scary.

I stood rooted to the spot, watching Miaomiao and Jin Ze carefully investigate. Suddenly, a sense of danger stiffened my body—a primal, chilling instinct.

I felt as if someone was behind me, watching us from a hidden corner. The sensation was exactly like the time at home when someone peeped at me through a hole in the ceiling.

Without thinking, I turned around. What I saw nearly made my bladder burst—I couldn’t hold it in.

There, at the entrance to the cellar, stood a white figure. Looking closely, it was a girl, about ten years old, dressed in white, standing there silently and expressionless, staring at us...

I let out a scream, startling both Jin Ze and Miaomiao, who immediately turned to look.

By the time Jin Ze and Miaomiao turned around, the girl in white had vanished.

Fortunately, they’d seen her too. Jin Ze immediately gave chase, and although I was terrified, I couldn’t bear to stay alone among the corpses, so I ran after him.

We rushed out of the cellar, and Jin Ze headed straight upstairs. It seemed the girl had fled that way. We quickly reached the room we’d searched before—but found no trace of her. We searched the other room as well, but again, she was nowhere to be found.

My heart tightened. How could a person simply disappear like that? Was she not human at all?

I shook my head forcefully, trying to dispel the thought. Jin Ze always said ghosts don’t exist—they’re just the evil in men’s hearts.

I told myself the girl must have slipped out somewhere, maybe climbed out a window.

Suddenly, I noticed something new on the table.

Jin Ze saw it too. He walked over and picked it up—it was a drawing, probably left by the girl in white.

Unfolding it, I saw it was a pencil sketch, incredibly lifelike, almost like a photograph.

The sketch depicted three people—one man and two women.

The man was Liu Yang. His body stood there without a head, and his head lay beside his body.

The woman in the center was also headless, her head beside her body. But hers was even more terrifying: her head had no face, the facial skin appeared to have been stripped away, and next to the faceless skull lay a sketch of a face. Though merely drawn, the face was strikingly beautiful—and somehow, oddly familiar.

The third woman, unlike the other two, stood intact, her body and head whole. She simply watched Liu Yang and the other woman.

What shocked me most was that this third woman was Fang Lin—and in the sketch, she wore a strange, unsettling smile...