On the other side, the team that remained at “Thai Pavilion” was auditing the owner’s sales records, flipping through a Thai ledger filled with dense pages of names that they couldn’t read at all.
“Are these all people who ‘sought fortune’ from you?”
The owner nodded: “They are all here.”
The detectives scanned the list line by line, unable to find anyone linked to the case. “Are you sure? If we find out later that you’ve withheld information, do you know the consequences?”
The owner made a pained expression, silently cursing the two men who had pretended to be clients on the verge of bankruptcy, while saying aloud: “…Oh, at this point, how would I dare hide anything?”
A detective flipped past the “fortune” page and glanced over the next one, unexpectedly spotting a familiar name.
“Isn’t that… who is that?” another detective noted, pointing at the crooked characters on the page. “That female celebrity’s manager?”
The detective pushed the paper over: “Didn’t you say everyone was on the list? Then what is this?!”
The owner said awkwardly: “This… but the people on this page aren’t here for fortune-telling.”
The detective thought to himself: If you’re raising ghost fetuses and skinning people, what else would it be for if not for fortune?
Aside from the names, which were written in exceptionally ugly Chinese, everything else on the page was in Thai, completely unreadable.
The detective widened his eyes: “Not for fortune? Then what are they seeking?”
“You should know that Luo Yu was very handsome, and Yin Wanru is also beautiful. The fame she has accumulated today is inseparable from that face,” Yin Wanru’s manager said, sitting in the chair. Her face was bare, without a drop of makeup. Looking closely, her facial features were pretty, but her brow bone looked somewhat strange. She added, “Actually, it’s different from what you think. What I sought wasn’t fortune.”
She smiled slightly.
She usually presented a stern face, but as she smiled, the corners of her mouth pulled into an unnatural and stiff curve.
She said: “What I sought—was beauty.”
Chi Qing didn’t know much about plastic surgery, and since Yin Wanru’s manager had had work done that looked relatively natural—not a “snake-face” in the traditional sense—he hadn’t paid much attention to this ordinary, unsuspicious woman before. But now, the more he looked, the stranger her features appeared.
Every part of her face was too standardized, as if the height of her nose and the size of her nostrils had been calculated with precision. Yet, it still didn’t look stunning, and her expressions were marred by an indescribable stiffness.
The woman pointed to her face. As she raised her hands, her handcuffs clinked against the chains. She spoke in a very soft voice, saying the most hair-raising things: “In the past five years, my face has gone under the knife a thousand times; I’ve had dozens of surgeries. I’ve had double-eyelid surgery, shaved my jawline, used ear cartilage for my nose, reduced my nostrils, widened the corners of my eyes, polished my cheekbones, injected hyaluronic acid… every procedure you can imagine, I’ve done.”
Her handcuffed hands traced every part of her face, inch by inch.
Every part represented several surgeries.
Finally, she lowered her hands, her gaze calm. Now that it had come to this, she stopped hiding it and said coolly: “You should have investigated this already, right? I was also an artist once.”
“Ten years ago, when I first started, this industry wasn’t as glamorous as it is now. Stars weren’t called stars; they were called ‘theatrical performers.’ After I signed with a company, things didn’t go well because they thought I wasn’t pretty enough.”
Even after all that surgery, she couldn’t be called a beauty at first glance. She must have had a truly plain face before.
“The company suggested I get plastic surgery, but even after that, there was no progress. Because of over-surgery, I suffered disfigurement; my nose was crooked for a long time.”
She laughed bitterly: “After that, as you can see, I changed careers and became a manager.”
Xie Lin heard this and could basically guess her motive and the whole sequence of events: “From the moment you took over Yin Wanru—no, that’s not right. You harbored hatred toward all the good-looking artists you managed. You appeared to be managing them, but you weren’t happy watching them get famous because of their faces.”
“I envied them,” the woman said. “I dreamt of tearing their faces off and swapping them onto my own.”
The story went back to the day she became Yin Wanru’s manager.
She had no talent as an artist, but as a manager, she was ruthless, climbing the corporate ladder from behind the scenes. One day, the company brought an unadorned, stunningly pretty girl to her: “Help her out; this girl has the looks, she’ll definitely make it.”
At that time, just as she had said, Yin Wanru’s family background was poor; even though she was pretty, her clothes were tacky.
“I had mixed feelings about Yin Wanru. I had to manage her; I wanted her to be famous, yet I didn’t want her to be famous. Her early resources were poor, and she didn’t know anything when she started. Later, when she achieved a little success, she became arrogant and offended a boss in the industry, leading to her being suppressed for a long time.”
“But she was lucky. These past few years, she picked up a script by chance and became an overnight sensation. The whole world knew the name Yin Wanru.”
A twisted, complex heart gnawed at her every moment.
“Even after becoming a manager, I kept getting plastic surgery. Beyond repairing previous work, as I aged, my face lost its fullness. So, I tried fat grafting. The doctor said autologous fat had the best results, but he didn’t tell me that the body couldn’t absorb all of it. Not long after the surgery, the areas where it was injected were covered in dense, hard lumps.”
“I had to undergo surgery again to remove the lumps from my chin and face. It was after that surgery that I went to a Buddhist amulet shop for the first time.”
Most people in the industry are superstitious. After her surgery failed, her mental state deteriorated; she would get up in the middle of the night to stare into the mirror and burst into tears. Someone recommended she buy an amulet: “That shop is very spiritual.”
At first, it was amulets, then the shopkeeper told her about using “corpse oil” to maintain youth.
So, getting up at night to look in the mirror became getting up at night to smear corpse oil on her face.
She felt herself becoming more and more pathological.
“Is there any magic stronger than this?” she typed out, asking like a madwoman.
The reply was three words:
“Raise a dead fetus.”
“My plan began the moment I learned Yin Wanru was pregnant.”
When Yin Wanru found out she was pregnant, she was at a loss. Her most trusted person was her manager; there was no one else who could help. “What do I do? I—I clearly took precautions. I can’t have this child. How do I contact a hospital? I don’t know how many weeks it’s been… can I abort it now?”
She hadn’t originally intended to use Yin Wanru’s child. She had been worrying about how to obtain a dead fetus when Yin Wanru unexpectedly got pregnant. She felt it was destiny—heaven was helping her.
“Don’t worry,” on the day of the phone call, her surgically stiffened mouth moved as she laughed while speaking, “I’ll help you contact the hospital.”
The child’s biological father, the hospital, the aborted fetus…
Step by step, she carried out her plan methodically.
She first called Luo Yu out: “Yin Wanru is pregnant. We need to talk.”
Luo Yu, looking good, threw on a jacket and rushed to the destination, only to find the meeting place in an abandoned warehouse. He looked around: “Why choose a place like this?”
“Did you want to discuss a child in public?”
“True. There isn’t even a ghost around here; it’s safe enough.”
Luo Yu smiled, wanting to say something else, but then he saw the woman pull a knife from behind her back. Before he could speak, she pressed the blade against his throat. Every time he opened his mouth, the blade bit deeper: “…Sister… you…”
The last thing he heard before he died was: “Don’t worry, I will take good care of the child you and Yin Wanru created.”
Yin Wanru’s child must be very beautiful.
After the surgery, she wore a raincoat late at night to dig up the black plastic bag the doctor had buried in the small woods out back.
Although you couldn’t tell anything from that bloody, mangled “meatball,” she still stared at it for a long time.
My child will be beautiful…
But the paparazzi were an accident.
Xie Lin guessed most of what happened next: “Zhang Feng photographed Yin Wanru going to the hospital. If he wanted to investigate why she went there in the middle of the night, he would definitely keep staking out the hospital.”
The paparazzi’s ability to stake out locations was second to none.
A single photo of Yin Wanru at the hospital couldn’t prove anything, and he couldn’t have been omnipotent enough to discover her pregnancy immediately. He must have continued to lurk, and it wouldn’t have been hard to discover the doctor secretly discarding the fetus and the manager sneaking into the woods behind the hospital at night.
Zhang Feng’s professional instincts allowed him to uncover half the truth: a top actress pregnant and aborting, suspected of wanting to raise a dead fetus.
That was why he went to the rooftop of the mall the day he fell to his death. He intended to camp out there to monitor every move at “Thai Pavilion.”
“Blame his own bad luck for knowing too much.” Regarding Zhang Feng, Yin Wanru’s manager said, “He thought Yin Wanru was the one doing this and called me, demanding ten million immediately. I couldn’t let him leak it, or you would have found me soon enough.”
So, hiring the hitman made sense. Zhang Feng was dead, but the SD card wasn’t on him. Yin Wanru didn’t know what kind of photos were on that card—whether there were pictures of her digging up the fetus—so she demanded the other party keep looking, find the person who had the card, and kill them.
But life is always full of accidents.
The biggest “bug” in her plan was the two “maniacs” who barged into it.
Two maniacs who knew perfectly well that the person holding the SD card was the next target, yet still kept the card in their hands, waiting for someone to come and kill them.
Chi Qing was still pondering the relationship between this woman and Lucas—why he would come out to take the fall for her—when he heard Xie Lin say: “You and Lucas… are you a couple? He loves you very much.”
“Lucas?” The woman laughed slightly. “He’s an idiot.”
“We’ve known each other for a long time. Back in school, he was my classmate’s younger brother. He said he liked me. He said the first time he saw me, I was squatting at the school side gate, sharing my breakfast with a passing stray dog, so he always thought I was incredibly beautiful… What kind of beauty is that? I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t expect he’d actually end up signed to our company later.”
“That apartment outside was rented in his name. One night, he suddenly came to find me. I was frying Luo Yu’s face at the time.”
That night, she stood in front of the oil pot, watching Luo Yu’s face sizzle in the oil. The fried skin quickly changed color and distorted. The doorbell rang, and Lucas stood at the door, greeting her: “Good evening.”
Lucas smelled the odor in the room: “Why is there a smell of burning? Are you cooking?”
The woman looked him up and down: “What do you want?”
The “matter” was just an excuse; he just wanted a chance to see her. He shyly scratched his head: “I wanted to borrow a pair of scissors.”
In the end, the woman stepped aside: “Come in. The house is a mess; I haven’t had time to clean it. Just stand in the living room and wait; don’t touch anything. I’ll go get them for you.”
As soon as Lucas entered, he smelled a stronger odor—he couldn’t describe it. It was like something burning, with a faint, oily scent.
He didn’t remember the woman ever cooking and, worried she’d burn down the kitchen, he didn’t wait in the living room as instructed, but walked straight into the kitchen. He lifted the pot lid, and a face that was still identifiable in its features, despite being scorched, greeted his eyes. He threw the lid down in terror.
The woman stood behind him holding the scissors, whispering like a ghost: “Didn’t I tell you not to touch anything?”
“This… what is this?” Lucas screamed.
“…”
“You killed someone?!” Lucas felt as if countless needles were pricking him, making his hair stand on end. “Do you know this is against the law?”
The woman held the scissors, tilting her head to ask: “So, are you planning to report me, or are you planning to help me?”
Yin Wanru’s manager: “Later, when you started tracing the photos, I couldn’t let you keep digging.”
Xie Lin: “So you had him report it?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I thought this would distract your attention. He cleaned up the apartment and just waited for you to find him. As for me, I locked myself in the General Bureau—the safest place is the most dangerous. I already had one crime on my record, and in your eyes, I was a ‘closed investigation.'”
“That move of yours was smart. After you took the fall for Yin Wanru, our attention truly didn’t stay on you. It’s just a pity you dropped one thing in the apartment.”
Everyone has secrets.
Although Chi Qing didn’t take off his gloves to touch the manager’s hands this time, he knew her secret: she wanted a more beautiful appearance.
She was pathologically and obsessively pursuing a “beautiful” skin.
