Chi Qing had thrown away the pair of soiled gloves long ago. After cleaning his hands, Xie Lin helped him pull down his sleeves again, the overly long sweater cuffs just enough to cover his hands.
Chi Qing felt as if the sensation he’d experienced that day when resting his head in the conference room—the sudden rush of buzzing noises in his ears—had returned.
The surroundings became quieter, yet noisier.
Even the sound of a single drop of water falling from the faucet—drip, drop—was more pronounced than usual. His mind was in a mess. His gaze fell on Xie Lin’s distinct knuckles, and his thousands of words ultimately turned into one sentence: “…Have you washed your hands?”
Xie Lin: “…”
“I washed them,” Xie Lin opened his palms to show him. The areas that had touched the amulet earlier were perfectly clean. “I knew you would ask this. I washed them in their office just now.”
That actually wasn’t what Chi Qing had wanted to say.
He opened his mouth to explain, but he wasn’t sure what he would have said if he hadn’t said that.
…In short, it seemed imperative to go to the clinic and see Dr. Wu as soon as possible.
Xie Lin didn’t linger on this topic. His expectations were very low. As far as he was concerned, the fact that Chi Qing hadn’t shaken off his hand and told him to get out of an 800-meter radius was already pretty good. “You said just now, the human face might be related to corpse oil?”
Chi Qing’s fingers curled slightly. After leaving the cold water, his fingers were gradually warming up, as if still retaining the temperature from Xie Lin’s hand earlier. “Not only that, it might also be connected to the missing dead fetus.”
He then added, “Have you heard of Kuman Thong?”
The next day, the weather turned cloudy. Dark clouds loomed over the city, looking as if a heavy rain was approaching.
“Thai Pavilion” was as deserted as ever. An incomprehensible foreign folk song played in the shop, which, combined with the gloomy weather outside the window, made the interior look even more eerie and bizarre. The Buddha statue still faced the entrance with its half-smile.
Chi Qing and Xie Lin stepped into the shop again. After wandering around the shop for a while this time, Xie Lin beckoned the shop owner over with a finger. When the man got close, he lowered his voice and asked, “Do you sell any other things here, the kind that can change one’s fortune, for instance… made from a dead fetus?”
“—We definitely don’t sell that kind of stuff here!” the shop owner said with his strange accent, his tone sounding somewhat agitated.
Trying too hard to deny something often tells the other party that the truth is exactly the opposite of what they’re saying.
“You can name your price.”
The shop owner waved his hands repeatedly: “We really don’t have it, we don’t. Whatever we have is displayed in the shop. How about you try another store?”
Standing next to Xie Lin, Chi Qing had no patience to listen to their idle chatter. He asked in a low voice, “Can you do this or not?”
He tilted his head to glance at the street outside. They had reported this operation to the main bureau, and Ji Mingrui and the others were on their way. Soon, they would be staking out by the street, listening in real-time to what was happening on their end. “There are barely any people on the street now, and they haven’t arrived yet. If we’re going to make a move, we need to do it fast.”
Xie Lin truly admired Chi Qing’s simple and crude way of thinking.
Instead of responding directly to Chi Qing’s words, Xie Lin just said, “Hold out your hand.”
“?”
Chi Qing didn’t understand what he meant.
Xie Lin pulled a piece of candy from his coat pocket and placed it in his hand. “Assistant Chi, get your thinking straight. Not only will you not get any answers that way, but you’ll also have to go to the main bureau for criticism and education. We are good, law-abiding citizens. How can we disrupt the social order? Go sit on the side for a while. Before you finish this candy, I’ll have it sorted.”
Holding the candy, Chi Qing retreated to the doorway.
Before he even unwrapped the candy, he saw the good, law-abiding citizen who didn’t disrupt the social order “bribing” the shop owner.
Xie Lin knew that a gray-area industry like this couldn’t possibly spell everything out to the first person who walked in and asked, or the shop probably wouldn’t have survived until now. Pretending to be unobserved, he used one hand to take off the clearly expensive watch from his wrist, then casually slipped it into the shop owner’s hand. “Brother, to tell you the truth, I’m a businessman.”
Then Chi Qing watched the shop owner put the watch into his pocket while making gestures of refusal.
“A businessman?” the shop owner asked.
“The business world is unpredictable. Recently, I invested in a project and lost eighty million,” Xie Lin lied convincingly. “Now the company’s cash flow is broken, we can’t pay salaries, the employees are making a fuss, and I really have no other way out. I heard from a boss I’ve worked with that you have methods to change fortunes here, so I came to take a look. I bought an amulet from you last time, remember?”
“Oh, right, I remember,” the shop owner said. “You bought an amulet from my shop.”
In business, the first transaction leads to a second. Since nothing had happened after Xie Lin bought the amulet last time, the shop owner naturally raised his sense of security regarding their dealings.
“And he is?” the shop owner looked at Chi Qing again.
Xie Lin: “My company partner.”
This partner looked like he was in a rather bad mood, which made the probability of bankruptcy seem very high.
The shop owner mentally searched through the businessmen he usually worked with: “Was the person who introduced you here Boss Wang?”
“…”
Chi Qing’s temple twitched when he heard this.
He hadn’t expected Xie Lin’s blind guessing to actually hit the mark. There really was such a boss.
Why would Xie Lin care if the guy’s surname was Wang or Li? “Yes, him.”
The shop owner’s look toward Xie Lin changed. The way Xie Lin and Chi Qing presented themselves—claiming to be businessmen with good financial backgrounds—wouldn’t arouse suspicion. So, the shop owner, who just a moment ago firmly insisted he didn’t have the item, now said, “Wait a moment.”
The shop owner flipped the “Open” sign hanging on the door, walked over to the Buddha statue, and turned the bottle the statue was holding. A hidden door quickly appeared beside the statue, leading to a dark corridor. “Follow me inside.”
Chi Qing glanced at the door, then at Xie Lin. “Your bullshitting actually pulled someone out.”
However, Xie Lin hadn’t been making things up randomly. “The business circle emphasizes Feng Shui, no different from the entertainment circle Yin Wanru is in. Both are driven by profit—people bustled about for profit. If what Zhang Feng photographed was this shop, then this shop is definitely not simple.”
The shop’s ability to create such a hidden door was also due to the street being too deserted, with surrounding shops waiting to be sold. No one would expect one of the shops to be secretly opened up to create a “hidden room” inside.
The corridor walls were uneven, unrenovated, and still in their rough state. Several lights designed to look like red candles were installed on the walls. The shadows cast by the fake flames looked incredibly realistic.
A slow, eerie Buddhist chant echoed from the end of the corridor.
Since the corridor wasn’t designed for sound transmission, the music sounded very far away, only gradually becoming clear as they approached.
Chi Qing listened carefully for a few moments.
…He didn’t speak the language and had no idea what it was singing.
Meanwhile, inside a van parked on the side of the street, Ji Mingrui and the others, wearing listening headsets, also heard the music. “What is this singing? Underworld music?”
Su Xiaolan looked through the car window at the bizarre shop. “If it were me on this mission, I definitely couldn’t go in without changing my expression.”
Things involving eerie religious or supernatural elements always easily sparked people’s imaginations.
Jiang Yu: “Aren’t they scared?”
“I don’t know about Consultant Xie,” Ji Mingrui said, “but that guy surnamed Chi absolutely wouldn’t be. Even if the shop owner sells dead fetuses, and a dead fetus resurrected right in front of him, blinking at him and bearing its fangs to speak, he probably wouldn’t even blink.”
“…You’re right.”
The Buddhist chanting in the headset grew louder, followed by a rustling sound. Chi Qing and Xie Lin seemed to have sat down, and then the shop owner’s voice came through:
“We really don’t have that thing here. The controls here are very strict, and I can’t find a channel either. It’s not like back home where I could get it for you, but if you have connections, you can look for it yourself.”
At the end of the corridor was a very small hidden room. It wasn’t filled with bloody and terrifying things as they had imagined. The room only had a dark solid wood table, a few chairs, and several rows of dark porcelain jars.
The porcelain jars were very small, about the size of a fist.
“But if you can find one, I can teach you how to perform the ritual,” the shop owner pointed at the porcelain jars and said. “These are all corpse oil. I really don’t sell the thing you want, but I sell these.”
Those porcelain jars were sealed with corks like wine bottles, arranged row by row. It was hard to imagine how many corpses had been roasted to extract this much oil.
Although Chi Qing wasn’t afraid of these things, seeing these porcelain jars reminded him of what he had gotten on his hand yesterday.
Sitting here was a severe test for someone with germaphobia.
Chi Qing had just shrunk his hand back when Xie Lin, seemingly knowing what he was thinking, lightly touched him. “It’s fine. I’ll take it later, it won’t touch you.”
After saying that sentence, which only he and Chi Qing could hear, Xie Lin asked again, “I should have connections, but how do we perform the ritual? Are there any requirements for that thing? If I can’t just find any random one, it might take some effort.”
“Of course there are requirements,” the shop owner’s voice, due to his peculiar accent, sounded as if it were leaking air—low and deep. “This isn’t as simple as you think. You can’t do it without putting in some effort.”
Behind him, on the blank wall, hung a painting. It was also of a Buddha statue, but this Buddha had a child’s face and dark tones, giving off a very uncomfortable feeling.
The shop owner paused for a moment and said, “Did the painting scare you?”
He was just about to say that every customer who came in was frightened by the painting when he heard the two men sitting opposite him say in unison:
“No.”
“It’s quite nice.”
“The brushwork is master-class at a glance, vivid and with a unique style,” Xie Lin added. “Let’s not talk about the painting, please continue. My company is on the verge of bankruptcy, I’m quite anxious.”
The shop owner: “…”
Chi Qing: “…”
“You must have competitors, or friends around you who are doing quite well,” the shop owner returned to the main topic. “A dead fetus with a blood relation to them is best. You invite the dead fetus home and enshrine it using corpse oil.”
Chi Qing finally understood. “Is this the method to ‘change fortunes’?”
The shop owner smiled slightly. “Exactly. A fetus that dies before birth is considered a medium; it can accomplish those things you want to do.”
Chi Qing asked again, “And the corpse oil? Can I just buy it from you?”
The shop owner: “You can buy it from me, but the corpse oil I have here isn’t top-tier. It’s all imported from Thailand. I can’t say much more.”
Chi Qing and Xie Lin both immediately thought of Luo Yu’s missing facial skin.
So top-tier meant…
Corpse oil from someone blood-related to the dead fetus?
Xie Lin suddenly asked, “Using a human face, you’d get more oil from frying it, wouldn’t you?”
The shop owner looked at him in surprise.
Xie Lin: “I did my homework before coming. After all, if my fortune doesn’t change, I’ll have to jump off a building.”
The shop owner: “Jumping off a building? It hasn’t come to that, has it?”
“It has,” Xie Lin said. “It’s the norm in the industry. I’ve even picked out which building to jump off.”
The shop owner’s gaze slowly turned to Chi Qing. “You’re going to jump too?”
Chi Qing said expressionlessly, “Dying by jumping off a building doesn’t look very nice. I’d probably choose to swallow sleeping pills.”
“…”
Outside the shop. Inside the van.
“Holy crap, that’s too sick.” Ji Mingrui rubbed the goosebumps on his arms.
Su Xiaolan was also disgusted. “I’ve only read about raising little ghosts in books before. I didn’t expect it to actually be real.”
Jiang Yu, being the top student, immediately buried his head in searching for related information, acting as if he was going to research this thoroughly and write a thesis on it later, until a hand pulled open the van door.
Xie Lin had asked almost everything he wanted to find out. He and Chi Qing paid a “deposit,” and while doing so, Xie Lin put on a show of really being broke right now: “I only have a little money left in my WeChat account. I’ll give you the rest in a couple of days.”
After getting into the car, having been helped up by Chi Qing, Xie Lin pointed at the shop through the window and said, “Don’t arrest him yet. If something happens to this shop, it’s easy to alert the snake in the grass. Try to get him to cooperate with the investigation, and interrogate him carefully about who visited his business around the time of the incident.”
Xie Lin continued, “The killer has a competitive relationship with Yin Wanru or Luo Yu, knew Yin Wanru was pregnant, and also knew where her aborted child would be thrown. This person should be very close to us—you said earlier, the person who reported Luo Yu missing was from the same company?”
