“Through me you enter the city of endless suffering.
Through me you enter the pit of eternal woe.
Through me you enter the crowd of the lost for all eternity.
I am the creation of divine power, divine wisdom, and divine love.
Before me, nothing was created except eternal things,
And I shall endure as long as heaven and earth.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
— Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno
Inside the juvenile detention center.
Li Kang was currently attending an ideology and morality class along with other teenagers. He was among the youngest in this group; even though his height shot up like a budding willow sprout, it was still difficult to hide his childishness.
To verify this bizarre deduction, Xie Lin and Chi Qing had walked all the way inside carrying their entry passes, finally meeting Li Kang in the cafeteria of the juvenile detention center. The deep gloom he harbored when he was initially arrested was no longer visible on him. As long as his younger brother wasn’t mentioned, he was just like countless others his age.
It wasn’t mealtime, so the cafeteria was largely empty.
Above their heads, a ceiling fan spun slowly over the slightly greasy tabletops, bringing a swirl of cool breeze.
Li Kang sat across from them, silently observing them.
As their eyes met, he suddenly felt a strange sense of pressure emanating from the pupils of the two people opposite him. It felt like a deep black vortex, almost making him suspect that these two were of the “same kind” as him. However, when he looked again, the blackness in the eyes of the man with the slight smile on his lips receded entirely.
The man wore a black suit jacket paired with a white shirt underneath. Two of his shirt buttons were undone, dispelling some of the formal stiffness brought by the jacket. He rolled up his sleeves and asked with a beaming smile, “Are you getting used to staying here?”
The boy still remembered exactly who had sent him in here. He kept his face dark and remained silent.
Xie Lin said casually, “You don’t need to be nervous. We are just here for a follow-up visit. If you behave well, you might be able to go home very soon.”
Hearing this, Chi Qing raised his eyebrows slightly.
He hadn’t heard Ji Mingrui mention anything about this before they came.
Chi Qing wasn’t wearing gloves today, and both of his hands were tucked securely inside his pockets.
Xie Lin quietly brushed against the back of Chi Qing’s hand.
【I said “might,” I didn’t say “definitely.”】
Chi Qing: “……”
So he was just tricking a kid here.
Li Kang was still a child after all, and he didn’t want to stay in this place any longer. He asked, “Really?”
Xie Lin: “Really.”
“What do you want to ask?”
Xie Lin raised his hand. The silver ring resting on his knuckle was the exact same color as the object hanging around Li Kang’s neck. “Let’s ask about this cross necklace around your neck.”
Li Kang clearly hadn’t expected Xie Lin to ask about this.
Xie Lin asked, “Did you buy it yourself? I’ve been to your house. There isn’t a single thing related to religion in your home, and your parents don’t believe in this either.”
“……” Li Kang lowered his head to look at the necklace around his neck. The cross gleamed with a silver light. He said, “Someone gave it to me.”
“Who?”
Time rolled back to that initial rainy night. The cat had been disemboweled, and its crimson blood flowed down the entire street, mixing with the rainwater. The boy named Li Kang had stolen a serrated knife from a convenience store. He had come to the gathering place of stray cats, taking his anger out on them as if they were his younger brother.
Rain slammed against the concrete ground, diluting the sound of approaching footsteps from behind.
Li Kang was draped in an oversized raincoat that was completely drenched in bloody water. His movements were clumsy. His hand was still shaking before his first cut, and the tip of the blade got caught on the cat’s spine, preventing him from forcing it down for a moment.
For a split second, he had thought about giving up.
He didn’t know that a person was standing right behind him—a tall, thin man wearing a black poncho. The hood of the poncho was pointed, and the brim sagged down, concealing his face. He looked like a sorcerer stepping out from the darkness, mysterious and dangerous.
The rain boots on the man’s feet were also stained with the blood on the ground, and his footsteps sounded just like raindrops splashing into puddles.
“Little friend,” Li Kang heard a slightly raspy voice say from behind him, “killing a cat like this takes a lot of effort.”
Li Kang’s hand shook, and he was nearly cut by the serrated edge of the knife. “……”
The man continued, “You should stab its heart.”
Li Kang recalled up to this point: “He said he belonged to the church and just happened to be passing by. He asked me why I wanted to kill the cat, saying that as long as I spoke it aloud, the Lord would forgive me.”
When a young boy gets caught surrendering to his dark impulses, his psychological fortitude isn’t that strong. The knife fell to the ground, splashing bloody water.
For some unknown reason, he opened up about his younger brother to this stranger.
Perhaps it was due to the darkness, the rainy night, the slaughter, the flowing bloody water, the cat’s wide-open eyes that resembled brass bells, and the man’s enticing tone.
“I hate him,” Li Kang picked up the knife, holding it defensively against his own chest as he looked at the man whose features were blurred and indistinct. He said, “I hate him so much I want to strangle him to death. Every time he cries at night and I hear his voice, I really want to strangle him—”
“The Lord has heard your voice.”
“……”
As the man spoke, he slowly squatted down. Li Kang still couldn’t see his face.
The rain grew heavier, and the downpour falling like a screen blocked the front of the man, making his already indistinct features even harder to peer into.
Li Kang could only see the man’s eyes.
Those were a pair of eyes that seemed capable of seeing death itself.
“Did you know?” The man looked at him, pronouncing every single word clearly. “The position of your brother’s heart is actually very similar to the position of this cat’s heart.”
Rainwater snaked down the brim of the hood and onto Li Kang’s cheek, feeling as icy cold as a venomous serpent.
“—Instigating crimes?!”
Inside the local police station, Wu Zhibin spoke with a furrowed brow.
Since these few cases had concluded successfully, the team had originally granted Wu Zhibin a long vacation to let him rest properly, go to the hospital to follow the doctor’s orders, and do leg rehabilitation. However, just as the leave was approved, a sudden twist arose.
After returning from the juvenile detention center, Xie Lin and Chi Qing informed Wu Zhibin of the situation and requested to re-interrogate the other killers.
Wu Zhibin: “But… didn’t that manager believe in Buddhism? She even went to buy a Thai amulet.”
“She doesn’t necessarily believe only in Buddhism,” Chi Qing had more of a right to speak on this topic. “In that circle, they don’t have any genuine ‘faith’ at all.”
The female manager surnamed Li, who had already landed behind bars, was clearly a non-believer. She would “believe” in anything that could bring her good fortune.
Xie Lin and Chi Qing each took charge of one person.
Xie Lin sat opposite Yin Wanru’s manager.
Over this period, the woman had lost a lot of weight. Her cheeks were sunken, and her surgically altered double eyelids looked deeply hollowed out. Her hair used to be a very lustrous yellow, but now it resembled a head of dried straw. Sitting opposite him, she looked like an elderly Western woman.
Separated by a single wall in the adjacent interrogation room, Chi Qing faced the agent surnamed Zhou.
Both wore prison uniforms that looked somewhat faded, giving them the appearance of people who hadn’t seen the sun in a long time.
“Religious beliefs?” The woman hadn’t seen anyone in a long time. She habitually reached up to rummage through her dry hair, trying to make herself look more presentable at this moment. “Why are you asking about this?”
The woman offered a faint smile again and said, “Because I can’t believe in myself, I believe in everything.”
Xie Lin: “You believe in Christianity too?”
The woman: “Yes. Actually, I didn’t know much about this religion at first, but once when I went to a church, I met someone. He gave me a lot of guidance.”
Oppside the gray wall next to the woman.
The iron plate on the door of Chi Qing’s room was engraved with the number 13.
Zhou Zhiyi had clearly been ill at ease all over ever since entering this room. From time to time, he would look at the surrounding peeling wall, and occasionally he couldn’t help but scratch the tabletop with his hands. His entire being was deeply uncomfortable—this was identical to his reaction when he entered Room 13 upon being arrested that day.
Chi Qing asked him with a cold face, “Do you want to change rooms?”
Zhou Zhiyi raised his eyes and asked in return, “Can I?”
Chi Qing: “No.”
“……”
Chi Qing: “So I was just asking out of politeness.”
Zhou Zhiyi could only continue to sit as if on a bed of nails, a bit of cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.
Chi Qing: “You really dislike the number 13? Why?”
Zhou Zhiyi: “…Because someone told me before that 13 is a taboo.”
The manager said she “met someone,” and Zhou Zhiyi also said “someone told me.” These two accounts were essentially identical to what had been uttered from the mouths of Shen Xinghe and Li Kang.
The two rooms separated by that wall fell into the same silence. Because there were no windows in the rooms, the light source was limited, and darkness gradually enveloped them. Although the people sitting opposite them were different, the two of them asked the exact same question at the same time: “—Who?”
Faced with this question, just like Shen Xinghe and Li Kang, they couldn’t give a proper explanation. They only said, “He is the will of God.”
“……”
“He calls himself a priest.”
Back when the manager was handling Yin Wanru, the more popular Yin Wanru became, the more complicated her own mood grew.
That day, she was driving Yin Wanru to discuss an endorsement collaboration, negotiating a high price. Yin Wanru’s photograph would soon be projected onto the screen of the largest shopping mall in the entirety of Huanan City—this also represented the result of her negotiating worth.
But she wasn’t happy at all. Not at all.
On the way back, she dropped Yin Wanru off first, then drove to that shopping mall. She sat blankly in the open-air parking lot opposite the mall for a long time. Afterward, she got out of the car and walked forward along the street aimlessly. The sky gradually darkened, and colorful neon lights flared to life. But when she tilted her head back, her gaze pierced through the layers of vibrant neon and saw that high, holy spire.
The moment she walked to the entrance, she realized this church was incredibly strange. It didn’t have fixed opening hours, and there was no one inside the church either.
She found a row of empty pews and sat down, staring at the crucifix mural directly ahead for a long time.
The position she sat in was the second to last row. Just as she was caught in a daze, the faint sound of footsteps came from the very last row, and then someone sat down behind her.
She subconsciously wanted to turn her head back to look.
However, her neck was gently gripped to fix her movement in place, and then a voice behind her spoke softly into her ear, “Don’t look back.”
The raspy voice continued, “Is there something troubling you, beautiful lady?”
“Who are you?”
“Oh, I am sent by God to listen to what weighs on your mind.”
“____________”
Before the woman’s eyes were the flickering candles of the church.
The man’s fingertips were warm, yet they also felt as though they carried no temperature at all. Being gripped like this, she actually felt a strong urge to submit.
As if possessed, she said, “What, can you help me?”
The man behind her whose face could not be seen answered her, “Who knows?”
The way Zhou Zhiyi came to know that “priest” in the church was similar to her. His heart was filled with incomparable agony, with resentment and regret intertwined after being abandoned by the most important woman in his life.
Inside the church.
Several killers who seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with one another had all sat in roughly the same position.
Their backs were turned toward the “priest.” The candles burned down to their ends, allowing the dim light inside the church to swallow them up bit by bit.
If time and space could be sliced at will, then across different segments of time, three different silhouettes had appeared in this exact same spot.
These silhouettes were stretched out very long by the candlelight.
The woman’s long hair draped over her shoulders: “I want to get what I want. I want to become beautiful. I should be the big star.”
Zhou Zhiyi wore an ordinary real estate agent uniform: “I want the person I like to stay by my side forever.”
And Shen Xinghe had also sat there, the pad of his finger pressing gently against the cuff of his school uniform as he said, “I want revenge. I want the person who killed my brother to pay with their life.”
Though these silhouettes were different, the person behind them was the exact same.
That man sitting in the very last row remained hidden in the darkness. He wore a black hat on his head, the brim pressed down low to cover his face. Combined with the way his head was lowered, even if the lights were bright, one could only see a small section of his chin.
He said softly, “Why not follow your heart? Why not reach out your hand? The thing you want is right in front of your eyes.”
