A Good-for-Nothing

197. Images (I)

Translator: Dragon Rider

It was a windless and starless night.

Tourists sauntering on the lakeside promenade were getting fewer. A man quietly walked to the entrance of an alley. The darkness of the night was his best camouflage. There was a large pile of black figures overlapping each other, and nobody would be able to notice anything out of the ordinary from the distance.

But if someone walked closer, they would discern that that large pile of black figures were three girls lying together.

They had lost their lives, their eyes popping, which was a horrifying sight.

A man stepped out of the shadows, totally unbothered by the three corpses.

He walked to a certain spot and came to a halt. As he stooped down, his shirt provided a perfect foil for the graceful curves of his waist. When he straightened himself, there was a smartphone in his hand, the camera of which was still on filming mode. He pressed the PAUSE button and then sent the finished video to an email address.

His movements were very smooth, without a single moment’s hesitation. After doing all this, the man looked down at the cellphone in his hand and gave a somewhat self-deprecating smile. “I must have been crazy.”

His voice was a trifle husky, his face etched with a certain kind of misery.

The next second, the man’s slightly bitter smile had vanished completely, and an anguished look appeared in his gray eyes and with that his whole body started shaking violently, black gas billowing out of his trunk and hands, as though trying to envelop him.

Heart beating madly, the man clapped his hands over his chest and sank to the ground, groans of pain escaping from his throat despite his efforts to stop himself from making any sounds.

After about a minute – or maybe ten minutes, the man was drenched with sweat, looking as though he’d just been pulled out of a river.

But all of a sudden, the man convulsing on the ground went motionless. After quite a while, he gathered enough strength and crawled to his feet like a dying dog.

He adjusted his disheveled clothes, his handsome face giving little away. In that pair of dark gray eyes was an icy look that had never been there before. He did not look like a normal human being. He looked like some kind of emotionless creature.

…

Normally, Zhao Fei never checked the emails people sent him, but oddly enough, this time around, as though controlled by some paranormal force, he opened the email after hearing the tone from his cellphone.

There was no title or text, only the name of the sender and a video as an attachment.

Zhao Fei had a hunch that he’d find something in that video, so he tapped the icon to play it.

Voices of two girls were heard.

“Xiao Lü, the camera is rolling. Don’t worry. I’ll film everything.”

After the first glimpse of it, Zhao Fei thought that this was from one of his female fans, but the surroundings struck him as somewhat strange. The place in the video was near the promenade beside the West Lake. In the normal course of events, his female fans wouldn’t send him videos filmed in that area.

The sender’s singular choice of location piqued Zhao Fei’s curiosity and he kept watching.

One of the girls ran into the dark, and the other one holding the cellphone quickly followed in her wake. Before long, two girls appeared in the video, one of them being Xiao Lü, the other one lying on the ground.

Xiao Lü rushed to the girl lying on the ground, asking her whether she needed any help.

Seeing this, Zhao Fei was baffled as to why someone had sent a video of a good deed to his email address.

The camera was shaky for a while and Zhao Fei patiently watched. Suddenly, he narrowed his eyes. Xiao Lü was trying to support that girl to her feet when some accident seemed to happen. A scream came from the loudspeaker of the cellphone, closely followed by a second one.

“Xiao Lü! What’s wrong!”

“Ru–Run…” The voice sounded as though its owner’s throat was being squeezed by someone.

Xiao Li, holding her cellphone, rushed up to her, the camera tossing from side to side. “LET GO OF MY FRIEND, YOU FREAK!”

The images went terribly jerky, screeches emanating from the loudspeaker of Zhao Fei’s cellphone one after another.

In the end, the girl’s smartphone dropped to the ground, and the night sky cloaked by layers of dark clouds was the only thing that could be seen in the video, accompanied by the sounds of Xiao Li and Xiao Lü struggling.

After approximately five minutes, both the shrieks and the struggling stopped. The camera had been facing the moon behind dark clouds all along. Gusts of wind could be heard in the video.

Three minutes later, Zhao Fei’s cellphone rang. The call was from one of his colleagues, who told him that a murder case had just happened near the West Lake.

Li Zong and the trainees were also among those who had been informed immediately. He Zheng saw that Li Zong was sitting on the sofa reading something on his smartphone, a frown on his face.

“What happened?”

“Two girls died near a lakeside promenade last night.”

He Zheng stepped over to take a look. On the phone screen were a couple of pictures of some girls who were lying on the ground and had no visible wounds whatsoever, but whose faces were deadly pale and struck people as ominous.

Originally He Zheng had been casually leaning against the back of the sofa, but as his eyes fell on one of the pictures, he suddenly sat bolt upright, his pupils abruptly contracting. “Wait. Zoom in on this picture.”

Li Zong did what he was told.

“What seems to be the matter, Cutie?” asked Zu Zhichong curiously.

Ashen-faced, He Zheng fixed them with a gaze. After quite a while, he said, “I met this woman yesterday…”

A deathly hush descended in the room after He Zheng finished this remark.

Li Zong was the most composed. After a few seconds, he said, “Tell us the details,” in a placid voice which quelled He Zheng’s shock considerably.

He Zheng took a deep breath and bobbed his head.