What he saw was a pair of feet, their insteps stretched taut as they swayed gently.
A pair of small women's feet.
Zhou Qing's mouth fell open, and his pupils trembled. He stared at the faint flame on the fire starter as a strange stench crept into his nostrils. And that flame... was an eerie shade of blue.
Rhino horn!
The fire starter had been mixed with rhino horn!!
Never before had Zhou Qing's mind worked as fast as it did now. In that instant, he figured out so many things—but it was too late. He instinctively turned to run. Though his chances of escaping were next to none, he still had to try!
The moment he turned, the sight before him crushed all hope. All the paper figures above him had vanished, leaving only empty nooses swaying gently in midair.
Zhou Qing looked toward the door. More than a dozen paper figures, perhaps even more, crowded in front of it. They smiled eerily, packed shoulder to shoulder and completely blocking the way out.
In the very middle of them stood a middle-aged woman, balanced on her tiptoes with her long tongue hanging down.
A bruised, dark-blue ligature mark circled the woman's exposed neck. She tilted her head and smiled at Zhou Qing, her eyes almost entirely white and so unnervingly empty they were terrifying.
Before Zhou Qing could react, the paper figures swarmed him. They grabbed his head, shoved it through an empty noose, and hanged him from the rafters.
The fire starter fell to the floor, still burning. Zhou Qing's shadow swayed with his corpse, and the rope creaked under the strain.
After waiting for a long time, dawn had begun to break, but no clapper sounded.
Du Moyu finally relaxed.
Everything before had been speculation, and