Chapter 92: The Story in the Blood

The woman spoke in a bizarre manner, as though she were singing an elegant opera, yet neither her current posture nor the words coming out of her mouth had anything to do with elegance.

My palms ached and itched. I stood in the drainage ditch for over ten seconds, simply not daring to approach her.

It was hard to imagine I could be intimidated by a woman who had lost all mobility.

Frankly, the woman in the corner was quite pretty. She had delicate features and was surprisingly clean. She just reeked of blood, and her skin bore a sickly pallor.

Her skin looked incredibly thin—not a healthy suppleness, but so fragile it felt like a light poke with a finger would send blood spurting out.

I hesitated for a long time but stayed in the ditch. There was simply no place to set foot inside the cell.

Aside from the spot right beneath her, the floor, walls, and ceiling were entirely covered in drawings. Some of the hideous patterns still looked fresh; they had probably been painted not long ago.

"Can you understand me?" After pondering for a long time, I realized I had no idea what to ask upon seeing her. Or rather, there was so much to ask that I didn't know where to begin.

The woman just stared at me. Her expression was utterly bizarre; tear tracks stained her face, yet she sprawled across the blood-painted drawings in a posture of sheer enjoyment.

"Can you hear my voice?" Still receiving no response, I waded along the ditch toward the wall, doing my best to avoid ruining the bloody patterns as I approached her.

The closer I got, the more certain I became that she harbored a massive secret.

"I won't hurt you."

Sensing my approach, she had a highly unusual reaction. Her expression didn't overtly change, but a fawning smile crept onto her lips, like a nightclub dancer trying to please a patron.

Her physical reaction, however, completely contradicted her expression. She clamped her legs together and shrank backward until the iron chain snapped taut.

She maintained that fawning smile, yet tears streamed from her eyes.

I wasn't seeing things. Two entirely conflicting emotions were playing out on the same person.

She was obviously terrified. She was afraid of being violated, afraid of being hurt. So why force such a degrading smile?

Looking at her, I almost saw the shadow of another woman—Jiang Shihan.

"Sorry, I mean no harm." I backed away into the ditch. Leaving the woman alone for now, I began to study the drawings covering the cell.

These blood-drawn patterns were highly abstract. Some had already dried into dark red smudges on the wall, making it impossible to tell what they were.

"These drawings are similar to the ones in Jiang Shihan's hospital room, just too chaotic to make sense of." There was no telling how long the woman had been locked up in here. The walls were covered in overlapping layers of art. Painting with blood seemed to be the only thing she could do.

I walked over to the other side of the ditch. Just as I lifted my leg to dismantle the iron bars leading to the next room, the woman suddenly cried out, "Son!"

"What did you just say?"

She pointed at a drawing I had nearly stepped on and repeated, "Son!"

"Is this a drawing of your son?" I stopped what I was doing and crouched down, following her finger through the chaotic mess of patterns.

That patch of blood was extremely blurred. Without paying close attention, it was completely unnoticeable.

The drawing depicted a figure wearing a skirt, surrounded by three circles of varying sizes.

The circles were labeled in order: Oldest, Second, and Third.

The discovery of this drawing acted like an anchor point. Everything else in the room seemed to revolve around it.

"The three circles represent three children. That means the little figure in the skirt must be her."

Following the pattern further, I noticed another figure standing next to the family. This one was hideous, its body completely gouged and pitted by fingernail scratches.

"A mother with three kids... that means this figure next to them has to be the father."

In the woman's drawings, the father figure was always covered in gouges. They had been furiously scratched out by her fingernails or even bitten out with her teeth.

It was obvious her hatred for this man went straight to the bone.

"Just how deep does this grudge go?"

The subsequent drawings answered my question. The man frequently used violence against the rest of the family; neither the woman nor the children were spared from his brutality.

Further along, the man—for whatever reason—tied the woman up with ropes and locked her in the attic, forcibly separating the mother from her children.

The man depicted in the drawings seemed to be an extremely twisted pervert. He wasn't merely satisfied with physical torment; he preferred to mentally torture a person's soul.

For instance, he would restrict the mother's movements, then force her to watch her children get beaten and abused, committing all sorts of heinous acts in front of her.

His absolute favorite pastime was waiting until someone was in agony and despair, then forcing them to act according to his whims. He made them suffer even more torment and grief until their minds finally snapped under the pressure, reducing them to a senseless husk.

The vast majority of the drawings detailed the man's atrocities. The father depicted in the art used ruthless, sinister methods of torture. He simply didn't treat the woman and the three children as human beings.

Over time, the man's behavior escalated. He eventually began recording every single torture session in its entirety, rewatching the footage repeatedly whenever he was bored.

This continued until one day, the skirt-wearing figure in the drawings finally broke free of her ropes. She seemed to be trying to call the police, entirely unaware that the man had orchestrated the scenario. He had grown bored of purely submissive victims. He wanted to try something fresh—like giving his victim a false sense of hope, only to kick them back down into an even darker abyss.

Ignoring the woman's desperate pleas, the man murdered her youngest child right in front of her.

After that, the mentally shattered woman was locked inside a box, reduced to the man's private plaything.

After examining this sequence of drawings, I found myself unconsciously clenching my jaw.

That man was worse than an animal. If I ever got my hands on him, I would make sure he tasted every single ounce of the suffering he had inflicted on others, piece by piece.

A few minutes later, I calmed down and looked at the woman. "Are these drawings your own story?"

The woman still didn't give me a direct answer. She wore that fawning smile as tears streamed endlessly down her face. With bruised, purplish lips, she just kept repeating the same phrase: "I am a gift. I am a slut. I am Satan's woman."

The majority of the drawings on the floor and walls depicted her personal tragedy, but scattered among them were scenes of other people being murdered.

It seemed there were more than just one or two killers, and their motives were neither wealth nor lust. They killed purely to satisfy a psychological urge.

"A bunch of lunatics!"

Having surveyed everything, I stood in the center of the room. The woman was thoroughly unhinged, but her drawings revealed a massive amount of information. At the very least, she was the only adult in these holding cells who actually knew what was going on.

I slowly approached her. She was dressed in a filthy, tattered hospital gown, yet her skin was incredibly clean, radiating a sort of morbid beauty.

Crouching beside her, I gently reached out and touched the iron chains. There was no telling how long she had been imprisoned here. The rough metal links had completely worn through her flesh, and as her wounds healed, the skin had grown directly over the chains. It was a gruesome sight.

'To be locked up in such terrible conditions, yet her skin is surprisingly clean. Does someone wash her regularly? She said she was a gift, Satan's woman... could the "Satan" she mentioned be her own husband?'

In the drawings, she had three children. When I met Song Xiaofeng in the adjacent cell, he had mentioned that he was one of three brothers. Could there be a connection here?

I stood directly in front of her. Looking down at her shivering body, I stared deeply into her eyes. "I met two children in the cell next door. Their names are Song Xiaowang and Song Xiaofeng. They told me they also have a younger brother named Song Xiaoyao."

At the mention of those names, the fawning smile on her face froze.

Seeing the shift in her demeanor, I struck while the iron was hot. "I also heard their mother's name is Wang Fengyao."

The moment the name Wang Fengyao left my lips, the smile vanished entirely from her face. It was instantly replaced by sheer agony and ferocity, her eyes rapidly filling with bloodshot rage.

"Does that remind you of anything? Those three kids are waiting for their mother to come back. They all think she's already dead."

"Shut up!" A strange man's voice suddenly ripped from her throat. It made me jump. A split second later, the woman began violently slamming her head against the floor. She slammed it down with all her might, as if trying to physically knock the thoughts out of her brain. Within moments, bright red blood streamed down her forehead.

"What are you doing?!" Seeing this, I quickly grabbed her shoulders and shoved my hand between her forehead and the floor.

The commotion in the cell only grew louder. About twenty seconds later, the distinct sound of an iron door swinging open echoed from the corridor outside. Someone was rushing toward this cell!