Chapter 42#
Those Who Listen to Stories (Part 9)#
Ye Sheng sat on the chair and subconsciously looked at the window next to him. Beyond the window was a balcony, with a few clothes hanging on it, swaying gently in the night breeze. The tree shadows outside the dormitory building swayed. It was already late at night, and the campus was pitch black.
The Story King’s postscript mentioned reuniting in a dream, so the female ghost of Lover’s Lake would definitely come looking for him tonight.
Ye Sheng put down his phone, took a shower in the bathroom, changed his clothes, and didn’t go straight to bed.
Ye Sheng rummaged through the closet and found things he thought he would never use: a corpse-sewing needle and that gun.
Under the desk lamp, he carefully re-examined the gun. The gun’s magazine structure was very strange, made of a metal he had never seen before, absolutely uncommon.
Touching it with his fingertips, he could feel a chilling coldness. It was light silver, with a faint blue glow around it.
The gun was heavy.
Its internal structure was different from all firearms on the market.
He didn’t know what ability the Story King’s second postscript granted the female ghost, but this time the female ghost was prepared, and his spirit summoning might not be very effective.
He needed a weapon, and the only anomaly-related weapons he could access were these two.
He placed them on the table and looked at them for a long time.
Ye Sheng lowered his eyes, his pale, slender hands playing with the muzzle, and a thought suddenly came to him.
He measured the length of the needle and finally put the corpse-sewing needle into the gun’s magazine.
Soon, a surprising scene appeared. A faint red light suddenly appeared on the corpse-sewing needle, as if the strange energy fluctuations hidden within were directly extracted by the gun’s magazine. Like flowing liquid, it filled the magazine little by little.
After Cheng Ze’s popular science explanation, Ye Sheng knew a crucial piece of information called “supernatural value.”
—So, the bullets of this gun are the supernatural value of anomalies?!
Ye Sheng was stunned for a moment, then quickly calmed down. After pressing the magazine back in, he saw an empty square appear on the back of the gun, with “+” and “-” signs on either side. He tentatively pressed “+”.
The square was filled a little. Pressing and holding it, the supernatural value in the magazine was depleted.
Soon the square disappeared, and a green letter “C” appeared.
Green represents C-rank. A C-rank bullet…
Ye Sheng tried to take out the magazine again, but this time he couldn’t open it no matter how hard he tried.
This gun could only hold one bullet at a time.
“…”
Ye Sheng put down the gun and took out the paper from the box again. He turned to the back and looked at the ornate and cold English words.
mercy of god.
Under the light, Ye Sheng’s eyes were too black and white, cold like a snow-covered lake.
He took the gun and climbed onto the bed.
After placing the gun by his pillow, he began to check the messages Ning Weichen sent him. These should be materials obtained from the Huaicheng police, and the investigation process of the case was very detailed.
The photos also came from the scene.
First was the refrigerator filled with body bags. The male protagonist was an adult male. After being dismembered, he was packed into more than a dozen black plastic bags. The refrigerator’s three upper and lower layers were so full that they couldn’t be closed, only left ajar.
The villa’s living room, kitchen, and everywhere else were covered with dragged bloodstains.
This was a social news story about a mentally ill wife brutally murdering her unfaithful husband.
However, when the Luohu area was first developed, the real estate developers feared that the incident would affect property prices, so many details of the case were concealed from the public.
For example, the male protagonist’s head was not actually put into the refrigerator. It was placed on a table by the window in the third-floor bedroom, next to the hostess’s open diary.
A pair of eyes widened in fear stared fixedly at a lake and a bridge in the garden outside the window.
Every person who turns into a vengeful ghost after death must have experienced unimaginable pain and torment in life.
But all the injustice, grievances, and suffering experienced in life are not reasons to harm innocent people after death.
Ye Sheng closed his phone and then closed his eyes to sleep.
His biological clock was very regular. As a child, he often couldn’t sleep due to hunger and illness. As an adult, his body had already come to accept that being able to sleep peacefully was a blessing.
After Ning Weichen returned to his apartment, he didn’t rush to reply to Andrew’s message. He sat on the sofa, his eyes casually lowered, his fingers gently scrolling through the photos in his album.
The photo showed Ye Sheng standing alone on the bridge, looking down. An abandoned old bridge, a red building hidden by bushes. Under the lights, summer insects swirled, and the wind billowed the light-colored jacket on the young man, revealing his tall and slender figure. His arms rested on the bridge, his waist thin. When he lowered his head, his expression was hidden in the light and shadow. His messy black hair brushed over a pair of eyes like smoke and frost.
Ripples spread in the center of the lake water under the bridge. Hidden by the dark water plants in the lake, someone seemed to be slowly raising their head to meet his gaze.
You stand on the bridge looking at the scenery.
Ning Weichen thought of this poem, but his fingers lightly and ambiguously traced Ye Sheng’s face, his gaze slowly moving upwards, his expression obscure.
After enlarging the photo, he saw what he found interesting when he first took the picture. In the legend of Lover’s Lake, where the male protagonist attended class, someone was also sitting there at that time.
All the lights in the teaching building were off, and the dim streetlights by the lake flickered. Only a dark figure could be seen standing by the window of the lecture hall.
Tall, thin, a man.
It turned out that in this painting, there really was another person looking at the scenery, but their aura was hidden by a powerful force.
After saving the photo, Ning Weichen went back. At this time, Andrew had already called.
“Young Master.”
If Ning Weichen stayed in Huaicheng and wanted to investigate the Story King, he wouldn’t go looking for anomalies one by one like Ye Sheng.
“Have you found out?”
Andrew took a deep breath and said: “I’ve found out. Recently in Huaicheng, the man who died in the cold storage, and the butcher who died in the farmers’ market, the murderer is the same person.”
Andrew was a doctor, an S-rank executor who was a doctor, and understood the human body better than anyone.
“The former’s eyes were stabbed blind with a syringe, and the latter’s tongue was cut off with a small knife. I am sure the perpetrator is the same person. Preliminary profiling analysis suggests that the murderer should have a very high social status, extremely strong psychological quality, and severe mysophobia.”
Andrew paused for a moment and said: “I also got some information from the Huaicheng police.”
“The first person who died in the cold storage was thirty-six years old this year, had no wife or children, and was a long-haul driver. But not long ago, he got into a lawsuit. He drove while fatigued on the highway, didn’t see the road conditions clearly, and crushed a child to death.”
“The situation of the second butcher who died in the farmers’ market was much simpler. His relationship with the people around him was not very good, especially with his neighbor. The butcher spread rumors that his neighbor’s son was a pervert who liked underage boys, branding him with the crime of pedophilia. This caused the neighbor’s son to be ostracized and hated by everyone, leading him to jump off a building and commit suicide. He couldn’t be saved at the Third Hospital.”
Ning Weichen’s tone showed no emotion as he softly asked: “Did these two people go to any common places?”
Andrew said: “No. One lived in the suburbs, and the other lived in Jiaohai District. Their living areas did not overlap at all.”
Ning Weichen said nothing more.
Andrew was slightly puzzled and frowned: “Young Master, why did you suddenly ask me to investigate these two matters?” As an executor, he rarely encountered such murder cases where no anomalies were involved.
These should be matters for the Huaicheng police to investigate and handle.
Ning Weichen’s apartment was on the top floor. Looking out from the floor-to-ceiling windows, he had an unobstructed view of the entire Huaicheng.
He suddenly chuckled softly: “Andrew, don’t you think that a mysterious person who upholds justice seems to have appeared in this city?”
Andrew: “What?”
“The tongue that spread rumors was cut off, and the blind eyes were pierced.” Ning Weichen took a sip of wine, his peach blossom eyes entangled with the night lights, and suddenly said with a half-smile: “Hmm, what kind of story do you think will always circulate in a city?”
Andrew hesitated for a moment and said: “Stories that always circulate? Popular and easy-to-understand myths, or thrilling and bizarre strange tales?”
Ning Weichen shook his head and said lightly: “No. Apart from textbooks and books, what can always circulate in a city is only the story of a ‘hero’.”
Andrew understood his meaning almost instantly and frowned.
“But, Young Master, I specifically went to the cold storage and the farmers’ market. The aura of anomalies was very faint. This murderer might have had contact with anomalies, but he is definitely just an ordinary person. It should be impossible to find the Story King through him.”
Ning Weichen said: “It’s okay, no rush.”
He thought of the mysterious person standing by the window in the photo.
Ning Weichen smiled lazily, his eyes filled with deep coldness, and said calmly: “We just need to listen to the story now.”
[Hello everyone, it’s 8:30 PM Huaicheng time. Welcome to Little Mouth Tells Stories. I’m your good friend, Little Mouth.]
[Do you all remember the child who called Little Mouth last time, saying they were afraid of a serial killer appearing in the city? This time, the child called again. A child’s imagination and innocence are indeed the most precious treasures in this world. The child said that they are suddenly not afraid anymore because they feel that the killer is not a bad person. They read a lot of news and didn’t expect that the comments under the news were all saying that the two deceased deserved to die.]
[It turns out the killer only kills evil people~ The child said that they think that person is so cool, like an urban vigilante who upholds justice and punishes evil.]
[Then the child’s father immediately snatched the phone and beat him up, hahahaha, so cute.]
Meanwhile, at Lingguang Temple in Huaicheng. Even staying in the pure land of Buddhism, with the lights on in the middle of the night, Li Guangyun still felt a chill.
He didn’t know why, but he was always uneasy.
“That female ghost won’t really come to take my life tonight, will she?”
Xia Wenshi added insult to injury: “Don’t worry, she’ll only take one of your legs at most.”
Li Guangyun hugged his legs, feeling even more sad.
At three o’clock in the morning.
Ye Sheng heard a knocking sound on the window.
Quietly, gently. With a not-too-heavy force, it woke him from his dream.
After waking up, he wasn’t too panicked. He picked up the gun next to his pillow. He climbed down from the upper bunk. He was the only one in the entire dormitory now, standing barefoot in the center of the room.
Ye Sheng’s gaze went straight to the window where the curtain was slightly moving.