The woman on the screen stayed silent.
Instead, Lei Dawei let out a startled, worried cry. "Yinyin!"
"I..." The woman's body trembled. She raised her head and looked toward the camera, tears spilling from her eyes again.
"It's time to end this, Miss Lei," Wu Ling said once more.
Hearing the same words repeated again and again, the woman lost her composure.
She covered her face, fell to her knees, and began to sob in pain.
She cried for a long time.
Lei Dawei tried to comfort her, stumbling over his words, but it did little good.
At last, the crying stopped.
The woman sat dejectedly on the floor, lowered her hands, and said numbly, "Okay..."
As she spoke, Master Huiyi's chanting changed.
It shifted from ethereal to solemn, its sound shaking the heart.
The woman shuddered and looked up at the camera, her lips moving as if she were saying, "Dad."
No sound came out, but her body began to tremble more violently.
The woman on the screen seemed to turn into a phantom. Her face blurred, and the image of a puppet appeared.
The chanting struck at the heart, echoing the woman's shuddering.
Suddenly, the woman's figure turned into a cloud of mist and slowly rose.
"Yinyin!" Lei Dawei shouted. Then the middle-aged man broke down in tears.
With a thud, the puppet collapsed face-first onto the ground, twisted into a strange shape.
February 15, 2007. Commission completed; investigation terminated.
When I saw the final line in the file, I felt dizzy.
The dizziness was both familiar and strange.
I realized the words before my eyes had become distorted.
The simple contents suddenly grew complicated, turning into a dense mass of text that I couldn't understand at all.
After a while, I made them out: they were