Li Bo still remembered that day after Li Chen left, he sat behind his desk for a very long time.
It was so long that night fell, and the city’s neon lights filtered through the huge glass wall into his office. He still hadn’t gathered the courage to stand up.
Then he made another call, asking those people to change their method of investigating his “younger brother,” who had no blood relation to him.
The result once again sent a chill down Li Bo’s spine.
There was no doubt that by then, Li Chen had already sensed the prying eyes of others. After confessing everything, he became even more reckless in his actions, showing no concern.
This led to a consequence—Li Chen’s subsequent behavior was even more perverse, twisted, and disgusting than what he had admitted.
Li Bo knew that Li Chen had placed listening devices on most of Yang Siguang’s personal belongings and that Li Chen often personally stalked and secretly photographed the innocent young man. Without Yang Siguang’s knowledge, his personal items were regularly replaced, and the items replaced were all carefully stored by Li Chen in a meticulously crafted “exhibition hall.” Even Yang Siguang’s trash was carefully examined, selected, and stored by Li Chen…
That madman was like a completely deranged, sick dragon, greedily and frantically collecting everything related to Yang Siguang.
Once he learned of these behaviors, when he discovered that Li Chen had used his investment earnings to purchase an entire old building near Yang Siguang’s home for the purpose of spying, he was not surprised at all.
This was Li Chen.
Crazy Li Chen.
What truly surprised him, however, was the attitude of the Li family couple.
He had thought that people who cared so much about the family’s reputation would have disciplined Li Chen for his actions, but he never expected that the old man would calmly accept everything Li Chen had done.
It was as if, as long as Li Chen could maintain a basic image in front of others, the old man wouldn’t care about what kind of person he was in private.
Li Bo felt confused and even a little uneasy in a way he couldn’t quite explain.
As the so-called “adopted son,” he had long known that the Li family was just a seemingly clear but actually filthy and rotten abyss.
But he still couldn’t understand why these people could face all of this so calmly.
Not long after, he unexpectedly heard some rumors from old members of the Li family.
It seemed that the Li family had always been like this.
It was a thoroughly insane family…
[…Hiss…Hehe…Li family…the Li family…from top to bottom, none of them are good people.]
The old man, who had already been admitted to a mental hospital, grabbed Li Bo’s hand and murmured in a low voice. His eyes, wrapped in wrinkles, were already as cloudy as his mind, but when mentioning the old master, the old man’s eyes were still filled with intense fear.
And also, resentment.
[They raised a ghost.]
The old man mumbled, repeating that phrase over and over.
[They raised a ghost, hehe… People who raise ghosts are like this… The evil ghost gave them wealth and glory… so naturally, they have to offer enough sacrifices…]
[They are all crazy. All of them…]
…An evil ghost?
Li Bo had to admit, when the old man mentioned the evil ghost, he indeed recalled some things he had seen in the basement.
Although he had once thought it was merely a complete hallucination…
That basement was empty, pitch black.
The only thing on one wall was a massive copper mirror.
The copper mirror had long since become worn and unclear due to the passing years. Even when the lights were bright, one could only see faint, blurry shadows.
However, when it was completely silent and nobody was around, that mirror became unusually clear.
In the pure darkness, the mirror could reflect every detail of those outside the mirror.
But the longer you looked, the more you felt that the person in the mirror was subtly different from “yourself.”
It was clearly just a reflection, but “they” seemed to be deliberately mimicking with clumsy movements and expressions.
Li Bo himself had almost been paralyzed by the shadow in the mirror…
So, what about Li Chen?
During the long year that Li Chen spent in the basement, did he ever talk to the “thing” in the mirror?
[Heh…]
In a daze, Li Bo thought he heard a cold, mocking laugh.
He shuddered, instantly snapping back to reality.
He was still sitting in the secret room that his late brother had carefully crafted, not in the basement he hadn’t set foot in for so long.
However, his heartbeat was much faster than usual, and a thin layer of cold sweat had covered his back.
“Damn—”
The man ran a hand through his hair, forcing himself to calm down.
The priority was to quickly clean up the mess left by the deceased Li Chen.
At that moment, Li Bo’s actions froze.
He clenched his teeth, forcing himself not to be too neurotic, but his gaze was involuntarily fixed on the projection screen.
The image there had changed.
Now, the blurry, lustful photo of the young man had been automatically replaced with another photo—a frontal shot of a man smiling politely.
The young man in the photo was handsome, with the corners of his mouth slightly curved, as if smiling, but there was no warmth in his eyes, only an extreme coldness.
In his golden-brown irises, there was a conspicuous pigment deposit.
Li Bo felt his blood run cold. He felt a chill.
There was no doubt he was very familiar with this photo. Because it wasn’t just any photo—it was Li Chen’s… funeral photo.
As the person who had handled Li Chen’s funeral arrangements, Li Bo had lost count of how many times he had looked at this photo.
But never had he felt so horrified.
Putting aside why Li Chen had left such a funeral photo in his DIY projection, there was already something subtly wrong with the photo itself.
The face, which should have been perfectly symmetrical (and thus especially handsome), seemed slightly misaligned, as though his skull had deformed. The shadow at the corner of his mouth was also unnaturally dark… like a small patch of smeared, unremovable blood.
There was a thin line beneath his ear that looked like hair but could also be seen as a trickle of blood flowing from his ear.
When selecting the funeral photo, Li Bo had deliberately chosen the one where Li Chen appeared most spirited, but now the eye sockets in the photo were deeply sunken, and his pupils were unusually dark and hollow.
Even his left eye seemed to be swallowed by a patch of shadow. At first glance, it looked as though there was only a black, empty hole there.
And it was precisely this pair of eyes that were now staring directly at Li Bo.
The sharp gaze was filled with resentment.
A few seconds later, the photo suddenly flickered.
The photo rotation program somehow froze, causing the two adjacent photos to continuously flash back and forth on the screen.
Yang Siguang’s body almost seemed to come alive on the screen. His pale, bound body, tightly held by ropes, twisted under the dim light, while Li Chen’s dark pupils and grim face seemed to have filled his abdomen. The dead young man even seemed to smile—Yang Siguang’s black hip band conveniently overlapped with the corner of Li Chen’s mouth—Li Bo knew that this was just an illusion caused by the afterimage of the two photos on his retina, but in that moment, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Li Chen’s enormous face had bitten into the ropes on Yang Siguang’s body.
[Creak—creak—]
In his daze, Li Bo once again heard the faint sound of Li Chen chewing on a rotten bird carcass when he was a child.
“Damn—”
Li Bo let out a low curse.
It was probably one of Li Chen’s pranks left behind after his death.
He told himself.
After all, Li Chen had never made any effort to conceal his strong hostility toward Li Bo.
A smart person like him would naturally anticipate that if anything happened to him, the one responsible for cleaning up the mess would only be Li Bo.
Given that guy’s nature, whatever he did, Li Bo shouldn’t have been so surprised… Li Bo kept reassuring himself, then roughly yanked the projector’s power supply out.
The projection on the screen suddenly halted, flickered briefly, and then slowly faded away.
The next second, the motor buzzed, and following the automatic settings, the screen slowly retracted into the ceiling, revealing the wall behind the screen once again.
It was still filled with photos of Yang Siguang… wait, wait a minute, was it an illusion?
Li Bo’s eyes widened, and he uncontrollably started scanning the photos he had glanced at earlier.
Why did it seem like there were suddenly many more photos of Li Chen among them?
Had he not noticed this earlier?
Li Bo wasn’t sure.
Li Chen’s photos had been cut out separately and then forcibly pasted onto Yang Siguang’s photos.
It wasn’t clear whether it was from cropping or printing, but the silhouettes of Li Chen pasted onto Yang Siguang’s pictures looked covered in a thin layer of grey; even the colors seemed faint, very faint.
This made his bright smile look incredibly stiff and unnatural, even a little grim.
Li Bo only glanced at it, and his hair stood on end.
He quickly turned away and stopped thinking about it, then walked straight up to the wall and ripped the photos off.
Before long, he had a whole handful of photos.
Then, holding the photos, Li Bo kicked open the door of the secret room and moved to the other side of the house, an area that looked cozy and full of life.
Li Bo immediately threw all the photos into the stainless steel washbasin.
Next, he took out a lighter from his pocket.
He lit a cigarette for himself, and as the nicotine filled his nose and lungs, he began to feel himself calm down a bit.
However, the “photograph” of Yang Siguang and Li Chen smiling together still lay in the sink before him, with the dark, hollow eyes staring at him through the photo paper, unblinking.
Li Bo shivered again.
He then lit the lighter once more, took a photo from the sink, and held one corner of the photo to the flame.
In Li Bo’s plan, he was supposed to take everything in the room and destroy it.
But now, he instinctively changed his mind.
The projector and the telescope could wait, but those photos… those photos were too wrong. Li Bo didn’t want to take them out and slowly find a shredder to deal with them.
His intuition told him he should finish this quickly.
So, Li Bo decided to burn all the photos.
However, the corner of the ordinary photo paper stayed in the flame for quite a while, only turning slightly yellow, but the flame would instantly disappear as soon as the paper was removed.
Even after burning for so long, the only part of the photo that blackened and twisted was the silhouette of Li Chen pasted onto the picture.
A chill ran up from his heels to the top of his head, and Li Bo felt his insides tighten.
He was getting more and more anxious, more and more irritated.
After several attempts, he still couldn’t get the photos to burn, and even his lighter became hot in his hand after several ignition attempts, eventually turning into a cheap disposable lighter with only sparks and no flame.
Li Bo’s breathing became frantic.
After a few seconds of silence, he picked up his phone and dialed his secretary’s number.
The phone was quickly answered.
“Mr. Li? Are you coming downstairs?”
The secretary confirmed.
“No, I’m not done here. I need you to bring me a few things: a shredder, some flammable alcohol or other accelerants, and preferably a large fire-resistant container.”
Li Bo spoke slowly, word by word.
There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, and the secretary did not immediately respond as usual, but instead asked hesitantly.
“Okay, I’ll prepare it right away, but… Mr. Li, may I ask what you intend to do with these things?”
Li Bo felt more flustered, but also impatient.
“Of course, I’m going to burn something. What else? Do you think I’m going to start a fire? Secretary Li, I remember you didn’t have this much nonsense before!”
“I understand…”
The voice of Secretary Li became a little muffled.
Some crackling noises gradually took over the line.
And just as Li Bo was about to hang up the phone, he heard a sigh from the receiver.
“But… will these things be useful? You’ve already tried so many times, right… And he looks so, so beautiful in those photos, so gorgeous. Don’t you think it’s a pity to just burn them…”
The voice on the other end gradually changed.
It became a voice Li Bo would never mistake.
But that person…
That person shouldn’t be able to speak now.
It was Li Chen’s voice.
