Gao Ming spoke faster and faster, his gaze growing ever more frightening, lucid one moment and bewildered the next. He seemed to genuinely hear all kinds of voices.
Wansheng's driver stood rooted to the spot, his pupils twitching. He heard nothing but the quiet flow of sewage.
"Listen. Listen closely!"
Like a tightly wound toy, Gao Ming's emotions swung wildly. His body shook violently as the memories stirred by the photographs overlapped with the darkness before him. He felt as though he had been dragged into the photographs. The Underground Water Network was pitch-black, and he seemed to have been locked inside a dark box, forced to observe the world from a warped perspective.
"Why defend a death-row inmate? Father, you fought so hard to abolish the death penalty—wasn't it so I could take revenge on Mother's killer with my own hands? It was you! You planted the seeds of death in me when I was so young!" Gao Ming blurted out. These were not words his main will wanted to say, but the moment he opened his mouth, they poured straight from the depths of his heart.
Garbage in the sewage bumped against the moss-covered walls, like the notes of a soothing piano. A discarded doll's mouth hung half-open as it sang a lilting song.
Gao Ming waved his arms in the darkness, as though greeting someone, yet also as though rejecting something. Li Sansi's mind had forgotten many things, but his body still remembered—the pain he had suppressed from childhood until now.
"You made me kill him. Your repeated abandonment turned every terrible premonition into reality. You were the ones who turned me into a ghost."
Memories that constantly brought fear were ghosts. Ghosts lived in the past, never allowing anyone a moment's peace.
"The Cleaners will be