In a dark, claustrophobic room, a girl in a thin shirt knelt before a man's corpse.
Beside the corpse, she looked especially small and frail, yet those slender hands held a knife.
The man's eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets, and the dense cluster of stab wounds across his chest revealed how shocked and terrified he had been before he died.
The girl's face, by contrast, held an almost numb composure. The red blood droplets spattered across her cold, pale skin made her look hauntingly beautiful.
There were twenty-seven wounds clustered together, but the first stab had gone through the man's heart.
This had not been a sudden crime of passion. The girl's knife hand had been steady, her aim precise.
The phone beside the corpse lit up, its harsh glow illuminating the girl's young face. The words on its screen were faintly visible:
"Corpse Disposal..."
And so the hand holding the knife sliced through the corpse's skin, dug out its flesh, and removed its organs...
The girl worked meticulously, her expression rigid.
Nine years had passed, but whenever Mei Sheng disposed of a corpse, she would see that scene again.
Now, just as when she was sixteen, Mei Sheng's knife hand had lost none of its skill. If anything, it had grown steadier.
The difference was that back then, she had faced a man's corpse. Today, it was a woman's.
The hotel proprietress's corpse was already severely corroded. She looked as though she had been doused in sulfuric acid, countless holes covering her entire body.
Those holes had nearly hollowed out the corpse, and its flesh and bones all showed signs of decay.
Cutting the body open was therefore easy. When its internal organs lay fully exposed before Mei Sheng, she saw a sight she would never