Dong Fan tossed the communicator onto Ma Tuo, returned to the seventh floor, and reached his own door. He wanted to go inside, but in the end, he did not. He merely picked up the damp, foul-smelling shirt he had left outside the door.
Even in an absurd, twisted dream, Dong Fan knew that he was slowly undergoing Separation from the world he knew. The things he had once worried about and feared were certainly tearing apart, yet the things he had once hoped for and yearned after also seemed to be gradually losing their color and meaning.
After shutting the two iron doors, he walked back to the stairwell. Looking down at Ma Tuo's corpse, he did not pass by it again. Instead, he headed up the stairs, his footsteps gradually fading away.
About two or three minutes later, a small boat with its engine shut off arrived downstairs. The people aboard carried guns and clubs as they climbed through the garbage, feces, and urine littering the stairs. On the landing between the sixth and seventh floors, they spotted Ma Tuo's body.
Several of them immediately grew tense. The area outside the seventh-floor apartment door was only ten steps away, but they could not see clearly around the corner and had no idea what was going on. For a time, none of them dared move forward.
A few more minutes passed before the boss who could call the shots came upstairs, covering his nose. He had his men secure the seventh-floor entrance first and search the stairwell throughout the building. Only after confirming that the target had most likely fled did he arrange for someone to examine the wounds on Ma Tuo's body. Rolling the tiny communicator between his fingers, he made his judgment.
"Obviously, this idiot wasn't careful