Chapter 371: The Victim from Eighteen Years Ago

Alarms blared. The iron door behind the cabinet rattled from the constant pounding, the relentless thudding filling everyone at the table with panic.

"Number Six, it's your turn." I leaned back in my chair, looking completely relaxed.

"You're the last one, so of course you're not in a hurry," Number Six said through gritted teeth. He struggled to his feet, staring at the Electric Chair. "The first accusation phase just ended. What if the machine hasn't recalibrated yet? If it executes me right away by mistaking me for the killer, wouldn't I die for nothing? No, I'm waiting another three minutes."

His words drew impatient looks from the rest of the round table. They could afford to wait, but who knew if the unknown entity outside the door could?

The pounding grew louder. Even more terrifying, the uniform thudding was soon joined by other noises, as though something new had arrived outside.

"The alarms might attract more unknown things here. Are you trying to get us all killed, Number Six?" Number One Wang Shi sat closest to the cabinet. If the iron door opened, he would be the first to suffer.

"Maybe he is," I told Number One casually. "The killer's objective is to break the rules, wipe everyone out, and take the reward for himself. Besides, we only find the thing outside terrifying because it's unknown. If someone already knew what it really was, they probably wouldn't panic at all."

"Number Twelve, I'll tear your mouth off!" Number Six glared at me viciously. He had caught my implication—I was accusing him of being the killer or the hider.

"I'm sitting right here. If you have the guts, come do it," I said, turning to shoot him a flat glance.

"Don't get cocky. I won't let you die so easily tonight." With a flick of his wrist, the Skinny Monkey made a sharp blade vanish into his palm, hiding it God knows where.

"You're awfully confident. Could it be you know the secret of this place?" I asked, feigning surprise as I looked at him.

He didn't answer, knowing that the more he spoke, the more mistakes he would make. He simply walked over to the Electric Chair and put on the helmet.

"My name is Zhang Bei. I'm thirty-four. I can't compare to you writers and celebrities; I'm just an ordinary feed factory worker from Qianlian Village."

"My first time killing someone was eighteen years ago. I didn't do the math wrong—I was only sixteen at the time."

"The reason I killed her was ridiculous, too. Since it's impossible to lie here, I'll tell you all this secret I've kept hidden for years."

"The first person I murdered was a student from my school. I didn't even know her name, and we had no grudge against each other. Killing her that day was a complete accident."

"Eighteen years ago, Jiangcheng didn't look the way it does now. The suburbs were desolate and sparsely populated, with huge swaths of fish ponds and vegetable fields separating the villages."

"It was drizzling the night I killed her, and the sky had grown dark earlier than usual. The girl was from Houlian Village. She was riding her bike home from school, passing through our Qianlian Village."

"I was young and mischievous back then, so I flashed my flashlight in her eyes a few times. Because of that, when she rode past me, she spat right in my face."

"There was no way I was going to swallow that insult. I sprinted after her and finally caught the bitch as we passed a fish pond."

"She fought back, hitting and cursing at me. Blinded by rage, I grabbed her by the hair, held her head down in the pond, and blindly grabbed a dead branch, stabbing it into her body."

"At first, I only wanted revenge. Who knew she'd be so fragile? Only when she stopped breathing and her body turned cold did I realize I was in deep trouble."

"I left the corpse behind and bolted home. After drinking two bowls of hot porridge, my panic faded, but when I lay in bed that night, I tossed and turned, completely unable to sleep."

"The area around the fish pond was desolate. It was raining, and there were no streetlights. I figured no one had found the body yet, but once the sun came up, her family would definitely go to the police. Knowing there was no stopping halfway, I simply stole a cleaver and a flashlight from my house and crept back to the pond in the dark."

"I'd never killed anyone before, but I'd helped slaughter pigs in the village plenty of times. If you butchered a pig and deboned it for a family, you'd get an extra half-catty of meat. Slaughtering pigs was my favorite thing to do back then."

"Once I got there, I chopped the girl into several pieces. I originally wanted to carve her up more thoroughly, but the rain kept getting heavier. Left with no choice, I had to hurry up and flee."

"I sneaked back home. Bright and early the next morning, her body was discovered. The police found everything—her raincoat, her schoolbag, and her bicycle."

"I ran to the scene to check it out. Over a dozen officers and several police cars had cordoned off a stretch of several hundred meters. A massive crowd was gathered around, and even the village chief was there."

"Seeing that spectacle, I pissed my pants in terror. I was just about to turn myself in when an expert walked out from the center of it all. He was discussing my M.O. with the local police, saying the culprit had intended to dismember the victim and that his technique was highly skilled. He claimed that even he couldn't have sectioned the body in the dark without damaging the internal organs."

"Hearing that, I actually felt strangely proud. I came this close to confessing right to their faces."

"Later on, the adults in the village shooed me away. The police station issued a cooperative investigation notice to the surrounding villages. They suspected the culprit was between twenty-five and forty years old, had medical training with a mastery of surgical techniques, and was a psychopath."

"How could they possibly find me with a profile like that? In a flash, four years went by. If I had been caught back then, none of what happened later would have occurred. Unfortunately, not only did no one catch me, but no one ever even suspected me."

"Do you know what that feels like? It was like doing something incredible enough to shock the whole city, only for no one to appreciate it."

"My heart began to itch. Everyone knows murder is wrong, but by then, I was already addicted."

"I'm not sure what kind of psychological state I was in. I didn't kill for profit. It was purely to vent. Yeah, I was angry! I was sick and tired of everything around me!"

"The second person I killed had absolutely no connection to me either. I didn't even know her name. All I knew was that she was a female worker at a nearby factory who worked the night shift and had to pass through several desolate stretches of road."

"Four years had passed, and the village had changed a lot. The appearance of surveillance cameras meant I didn't dare strike recklessly."

"After confirming the route that woman took to and from work every day, I staggered my timing with hers, secretly noting down the location of every camera before settling on a place to make my move."

"I brought my prepared blades to the scene beforehand, buried them in the vegetable field, and lay in ambush a few hours in advance."

"Around eleven o'clock at night, the woman got off her shift and walked past where I was hiding. I tackled her straight to the ground and drove a knife right into her vitals."

"Killing isn't hard. What's hard is hiding the corpse and destroying the evidence."

"With my experience from four years prior, I made ample preparations this time. I brought an axe, a razor, a carving knife, and more."

"The whole process took three hours. Looking back on it now, it still leaves me wanting more."

"Where did I start again? Right! The spine and the pelvis. The bones are packed tight there, and the joints are complex. Trying to get through that with just a small knife would take too much time and effort, so I just used the axe to hack them apart. An axe isn't about sharpness; it's about using the weight to split the joints. I did a beautiful job. I undid the joints of the limbs with just the small knife. To detach the ribs from the spine, I used the tip of the blade to pry the joints open, picking apart the ligaments from the bottom up. The easiest flesh to carve off is the tenderloin, followed by the limbs. The ribcage has a simple structure, so it's easy to work with. The muscle tissue on the neck is really annoying and takes more time..."

After the Skinny Monkey finished, the faces of several people around the round table looked rather pale. He had described it in far too much detail, explaining exactly how he dealt with every single bone.

"Once I finished breaking her down, I packed up my tools and strolled right out of there, leaving the corpse with only the most basic burial."

"Sure enough, the case sent shockwaves through the police force once again. But having gone through it before, I was no longer panicked. The worst that could happen was getting caught, that's all." A completely indifferent smile stretched across the Skinny Monkey's face. The devil probably wore a face just like his.

"Killing really is addictive. Two years later, I started plotting to murder my third victim. That person is my current wife."

"I planned it for a very long time but never made my move. The first reason was that I didn't have a one-hundred-percent guarantee I could get away with it again. The second reason was the birth of my daughter; I always felt she looked an awful lot like the schoolgirl I murdered. Regardless, my third killing has been delayed until now."

Having finished his story, Number Six took off the helmet. "No one else besides me knows any of this. I'm actually quite curious—how did the game organizers find me?"

He let out a self-deprecating laugh. "Unless the people I killed turned into ghosts and came back to tattle on me. But how could that be possible?"