The Only Question and Answer

The freezer stood silently in place, reflecting the light from the lamps above.

The cool metallic sheen was magnified to its fullest here and now. It was not only cold, but sharp.

Yu Xing reached out and touched it. The box had no latch; all he had to do was slip his fingers into the groove beside the lid and give it a little lift—

Click.

A thin layer of ice chips shook loose. Yu Xing opened the lid all the way without changing expression, and a stench of decay—the unmistakable smell of a corpse—hit him in the face.

A person—or rather, an unfamiliar man—had been dismembered into many pieces and stored inside this special box.

His head rested atop the jumbled body parts. His blue-white cheeks were frozen stiff, and both eyeballs were long gone, leaving only two black holes where remnants of flesh and sinew could be seen.

Since entering the instance, this was the only human face Yu Xing had seen apart from those of the deducers.

And now, this human being was piled up like pork on display in a market, sorted into different cuts.

"..." Yu Xing looked at the limbs beneath the head, cut so unevenly, and couldn't help wondering who had done the dismembering.

Was the knife not sharp enough? The cuts were so ugly.

And why had they cut up the clothes, too?

The dismemberer lacks common sense. The thought flashed through his mind. Yu Xing lifted the head out with both hands and set it aside, then began rummaging through the pieces of flesh.

Naturally, he was looking for the clothes that had been cut apart along with the body.

The clothes had been reduced to scraps, soaked in blood and stained a red that would never fade. But the fabric,