Using His Body as Bait

Shen Hui stood in the courtyard for a while, then turned and left, heading into the village.

The streets and alleys were empty, snow blanketed the ground, and every household's windows were dark.

He stopped at the second house and raised a hand to push the door open.

It was unbolted, creaking open with a squeak.

He stepped inside. The house was deathly silent. Lifting the curtain to the inner room, he found two people lying on the bed.

A man and a woman, their faces shriveled, long since dead.

He went to the third house, then the fourth...

Every household was the same.

The stove and heated bed were cold, corpses lay strewn about. Some had been stiff for days; others still held the posture they had taken at death.

Shen Hui emerged from one house and stood in the empty village street, raising his head to look at the sky.

At some point, the snow had begun falling again. The whole village was silent as a graveyard, without even the bark of a dog.

The people of this village had likely met with more danger than good fortune.

Shen Hui went through every household in the village. Only after a thin layer of snow had settled on him did he turn back.

Returning to the first house, he pushed open the courtyard gate and swept his gaze around.

The fire in the kitchen had gone out, and the girl's corpse had vanished as well.

Only a slashing mark remained on the ground, along with a chipped kitchen knife embedded crookedly in the frozen earth.

The man was not in the house.

Shen Hui walked over to the newly piled mounds of earth. Beside one of them was a string of crooked footprints, stretching all the way to the