A Body in Pieces

"Don't gather around here. Go home... all of you, go home. Why are you standing around here so early in the morning instead of sleeping?"

A young police officer patiently shooed away the onlookers, but the Red Star People had a deep-rooted love of watching a spectacle. They hadn't gotten the whole story yet, so no one was willing to leave.

After a few attempts, the officers gave up and decided to let them be.

"Forget it. There aren't that many people anyway. We just need to get the body out of here as soon as possible... You go with Brother Li in a bit..."

Zhou Kai blended into the sparse crowd and walked past the police with an expressionless face.

The word "body" caught his attention immediately.

"A murder? Did someone jump, or was it a homicide?"

Zhou Kai had never liked joining a crowd, but that was only as long as the spectacle wasn't happening right outside his home.

Frowning, he followed the crowd toward the vehicle with its lights flashing.

Lu Yan lived in this building, and Zhou Kai didn't want anything to happen to her.

If something was wrong, he'd better find out about it ahead of time.

When he got closer, he realized it wasn't an ambulance at all, but a forensic investigation vehicle—the coroner's van.

Inside the cordoned-off area, a coroner was holding a small square trowel and... scraping someone off the asphalt.

Again and again, as if scraping away a piece of gum stuck fast to the ground.

The grisly, bizarre sight made the few middle-aged women who had finally squeezed to the front cover their noses, retch, and back away. The crowd parted.

Zhou Kai stood at a moderate distance, watching coldly.

The low conversation between the coroner and a police officer drifted over to him.

"Fell from at least a hundred meters up. Which helicopter company had an accident?"

"If only it were that simple..."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean the surveillance footage shows he fell out of a second-floor window!"

The male coroner abruptly pulled off his mask, his face full of disbelief and absurdity.

"What kind of situation is this? Don't joke around like that!"

The young officer glanced awkwardly from side to side. When he saw no one paying attention, he grabbed the coroner's arm. "I'm not joking. Keep your voice down... Something's wrong with this case."

"Stop looking. Let's go, let's go."

An old police officer with stubble kicked the young officer for talking too much, then waved impatiently at Zhou Kai and the others.

Zhou Kai's gaze paused on the little trowel smeared with red-black matter. Then he turned and walked away as if nothing had happened.

But inside, his thoughts were in turmoil.

Someone had fallen from the second floor and been smashed into a puddle of meat?

What a ridiculous notion.

No one with an ounce of common sense would believe it, even if they saw it with their own eyes.

It defied all reason.

But Zhou Kai was different. The scene felt strangely familiar to him.

He had experienced it before.

In a Nightmare.

When he discovered the Nursery, the Paper Doll had dragged him into an illusion. He'd fallen down a staircase less than a meter high, yet it had felt like plunging from a height of more than ten meters.

"Are there monsters like Paper Dolls in the real world too? No, probably not."

"After I broke out of the illusion, I didn't have any additional injuries."

"There must be another reason."

Zhou Kai furrowed his brow. An inexplicable restlessness welled up inside him.

His Nightmare was saturated with an oppressive feeling that refused to lift. Darkness and rain churned together, thick as asphalt.

Anyone with claustrophobia wouldn't last a minute in his Nightmare.

But Zhou Kai had endured it. He was even slowly starting to feel at home there.

Still, that environment continued to wear down his mind.

So Zhou Kai had gradually begun to need open, brightly lit places to ease the tension.

That was why he'd gotten up early today.

He planned to take a walk in a nearby park, then head to the gym afterward. The timing was perfect.

But just then, Zhou Kai's phone began to vibrate.

Someone was calling. The contact name was... Landlord.

Zhou Kai was puzzled. It was still a while before rent was due. Why was this penny-pincher suddenly calling him?

He answered.

The landlord's voice was unusually soft, unlike his usual bluster.

"Hey, young man, where are you? Hurry back and take a look... Something's happened to your place."

"Something happened?"

"All right, I'll be right back."

Zhou Kai heard something peculiar in the landlord's voice. The man was afraid.

Afraid of him, and of something connected to him.

Before long, Zhou Kai had returned to the Pigeon Cage Residential Complex, where he'd been renting.

From a distance, he saw a pile of luggage downstairs, most of it packed up.

A chubby middle-aged man was pacing nervously in the shadows.

As soon as he saw Zhou Kai return, he hurried over at a jog.

He said hastily, "Young Mr. Zhou, how about this... The living conditions here are pretty ordinary. I really can't accommodate powerful people like you."

"I've already gotten someone to pack up your things. Why don't you... find somewhere else to rent?"

He shook his head vigorously, the fat on his face wobbling.

"Anyway, I definitely won't dare rent my place to you again."

Was this really the same landlord he remembered—the greedy, lecherous man with a violent temper? Today, he seemed like a completely different person.

Had he... been scared witless?

Zhou Kai's heart sank. "What exactly happened?"

The landlord's expression was stiff. "You can go up and see for yourself."

"I'll make this clear first. I have nothing to do with those people, and I don't want anything to do with them."

Those people.

Zhou Kai had a rough idea what this was about. His expression cold, he headed toward the familiar route home.

Everything looked much the same as usual, but there were subtle differences.

The disorder made the place feel inexplicably unsettling.

He went upstairs.

The hallway walls were covered in colorful graffiti, the words insulting him.

He went home.

The not-so-sturdy wooden door had been smashed to pieces, scattered all over the hallway. On some of the larger panels, there were clear shoeprints about size forty-five or forty-six—presumably from a man.

"Did they come here to pick a fight with me?"

Zhou Kai sneered.

"There aren't many people who might have a grudge against me lately. Just a few... I'll find you."

Just as the hardest murders to solve were random killings without a motive, the hardest acts to retaliate against were those driven by baseless malice.

But the names of him and his sister in the hallway, along with the fact that he was a student at Falcon Wing Boxing Gym—

They all pointed unmistakably to crucial information about who had done this.

It took Zhou Kai only two or three seconds to guess who was responsible.

"It wasn't Dreamless. They've gone quiet lately, so there's a good chance they've already given up watching me."

"And besides Dreamless, there's only one person who has a grudge big enough to pull a stunt like this just to piss me off."

Zhou Kai thought of Wang Jinquan, whom he'd beaten until he looked like a dead dog, then sent to the hospital with a single slap from Chen Ping.

"How interesting. He's lying in a hospital bed and still has time to resort to such underhanded tricks..."

A trace of menace flashed in Zhou Kai's eyes.

Just then, the landlord came puffing up the stairs behind him.

He was drenched in sweat.

He said awkwardly, "I wasn't the one who broke your laptop, so don't ask me to pay for it... And the cost of replacing the door and repainting the hallway will have to come out of your deposit."

Zhou Kai's expression was indifferent. "How much?"

The landlord's eyes lit up. He ventured, "Thirty thousand?"

Zhou Kai stared at him. "Three thousand at most."

The landlord froze. He had been about to protest, but then seemed to realize something and hunched his shoulders, choosing to give in.

To encourage residents to buy homes, Red Star had set the legally required rental deposit extremely high: one-sixth of the total value of the property.

For this apartment, for example, Zhou Qing had paid sixty thousand as a deposit.

Now, fifty-seven thousand was returned to Zhou Kai.

There was no way Zhou Kai would keep the money. He took three thousand from his advance pay to make up the difference, then transferred every cent of it to Zhou Qing.

He kept quiet about the trouble someone had caused and told her he didn't need to rent a place for the time being...

Until he found somewhere new to live, there was the question of where to put his luggage and where he should stay...

For now, he could only go to Lu Yan's place.

Zhou Qing asked if Zhou Kai was going to stay at Lu Yan's place for a while.

She replied, "That's fine," and didn't ask anything more.