Just imagining the scene made the Fatty feel awful, as if ants were crawling all over him. Tortures like skinning and bone-scraping were about the limit of most people's imagination.
"Zhu Jie and I were examining the remains when we heard crying. It came from patients who'd been brought in to tour the place with us. They were wearing the same hospital gowns as us. Two women were sobbing uncontrollably, and the younger one nearly collapsed."
"Oh, right. There were ten of us who'd had the same experience. We had numbers, from 1 to 10. I was No. 4, Zhu Jie was No. 5. They split us up and put us in different wards," Tang Qisheng explained.
"The two women seemed too terrified to speak. No matter what we asked, they said nothing. I noticed they kept glancing at a specimen jar in front of them, as if they couldn't bear to look at it."
"The jar was huge, and fairly new. There wasn't even any dust on it. More importantly, the outside of the glass and the floor beneath it were both wet. When you got close, you could smell the formalin."
Tang Qisheng paused, his voice growing hoarse. "Inside the jar was half a corpse. A woman's body, without a head or lower half. Her remaining upper body was twisted, and the cut had been handled very roughly. Shreds of flesh floated in the solution, as if she'd been hacked in half with a giant saw."
Jiang Cheng could more or less guess. "Was it the person who went missing last night?"
"Yes, it was her." Tang Qisheng's voice turned grave, too. "We only confirmed it later. The woman was No. 9. The two women who'd been crying recognized the scar on her forearm. Oh, and all three