The provincial general hospital was built in the early days after the liberation. In recent years, it’s undergone rapid development and was now one of the best hospitals. The area of the hospital was more than 200 thousand square meters, and the equipment housed inside was state of the art. In addition, there were numerous well-known experts and professors currently residing at the hospital. Each day, there was an endless stream of patients, mostly from within the province, but some patients were attracted from outside the province as well. Although it appeared well and successful, there were many problems being hidden away, in particular, management issues.

I looked up the civil disputes filed against the general hospital and found records for (at least) three cases of corpses with missing hearts. Because the hospital reached a settlement with the diseased’s families in the end, the police didn’t intervene and there weren’t detailed records of the cases.

When I arrived at the seventh floor of the hospital, I finally understood the painstaking efforts that the government poured into the family planning policies. There were countless patients in the waiting room, crowding up the 300 sqm s.p.a.ce. Because there weren’t enough chairs, some patients were standing outside the examination rooms. However, a few of the examination rooms looked deserted.

We walked over to the rooms that didn’t have any patients. I stopped at one of the rooms and said to Zhenzhen, “The person we’re looking for is in this room.”

“Why? There are so many rooms. What makes you so sure that this is the right one?” Zhenzhen’s eyes were filled with suspicions.

I explained, “If you were a doctor with patients lined up outside your door, would you be able to go online to search through old school bulletin boards?”

“While that’s true, there are several rooms that don’t have patients!” She really had a lot of questions to ask.

“Take a look at the papers Wei ge gave you!” I couldn’t be bothered to explain more.

Zhenzhen pulled out the list of names and compared them to the placard on the door. She mumbled to herself, “Xiao Yixuan… Ah, didn’t you only look at the list once…”

I pointed to my head and laughed. “All the names are here.” Then I knocked on the door.

Inside the consultation room, there was a handsome 30-something year old man playing games on his computer. When he saw us enter, he immediately put on a friendly smile and stood up politely. “Have a seat. Where are you feeling uncomfortable?”

“h.e.l.lo, Dr. Xiao! I’m Mu, an officer from the CIB…” I sat down and explained our reason for visiting. “From what I’m aware of, you graduated from the medical university. You must have some recollection of the murder case in room 106 of the female dormitory ten years ago. Can you please tell me everything you know?”

“That’s a terrifying memory that would give a person recurring nightmares. Although it was a long time ago, recalling it still makes my hair stand on end. To be honest, even until now, I have a hard time believing that a girl as gentle and quiet as Xiaolou could actually use such a cruel method to kill her cla.s.smate.” Xiao Yixuan’s face paled and his body trembled unconsciously. Slowly, he retold this frightening, dust covered memory from ten years ago. Maybe because of fear, his account was a bit disorganized—

The four girls who lived in room 106 were Ye Xiaolou, Xia Yulan, Yue Yingqing, and Qin Qiongzhi. We were all in the same year, and Xiaolou and Qiongzhi were also my cla.s.smates. They were really good friends, at least, they were before the incident.

Xiaolou was the school flower. Of the four girls, she was the prettiest and she had a very nice temperament, so a lot of guys pursued her. But I never heard of anyone winning her over. She liked to stay in the library to read, and she always politely refused her pursuers.

She got along really well with Qiongzhi, and in fact, all four of the girls got along very well. But since the two of them were in the same cla.s.s, they were together more often. Since no one ever heard about either of them having boyfriends, the boys speculated that they might be h.o.m.os.e.xual.

Because Xiaolou was really pretty, every move she made caught everyone’s attentions. Sometime around a year before graduation, she started to gain weight. Someone joked and asked her if she was pregnant, and her answer back then was very strange, “I’m going to become Maria (or Mary) soon. You should be happy for me!”

Over the Spring Festival break, neither Xiaolou or her roommates went home. When the new semester was about to start, she’d obviously lost weight compared to before. And her complexion was always poor, a bit pale. Everyone suspected that she’d gotten rid of the baby. But she’d never had a boyfriend, so everyone was puzzled. They started to wonder if she was somehow like Maria, getting pregnant while still being a virgin.

What’s even weirder is that in the following semester, all four of the girls had gotten very pale, and they looked as if they had anemia. The only one who was a little better was Yingqing. But other than that, there was nothing strange about the four of them. Up until the incident, there was nothing unusual either. I never heard anything about Xiaolou or Qiongzhi having any arguments. They spent all their time together, inseparable.

The evening before our graduation, some of the guys and I brought two cases of beer up to the rooftop of our dorm. The moon was round and beautiful that night and we drank until we couldn’t anymore. Everyone was really excited, and other than some sadness at the inevitable parting, there weren’t any strange feelings. No one would have thought that such a horrifying thing had happened across the way at the girls’ dorm.

That night, none of the girls in the dorm heard any sounds of a fight or argument. No one had felt there was anything out of place at all. Everything was the same as usual, and the only thing different might have been the complicated feelings of the soon to be graduates.

The next morning, pandemonium hit the girls’ dorm. The school council all came and a lot of teachers were blocking the entrance. After asking around, we finally found out there had been a murder. I heard that that morning, room 106 was very quiet as the morning pa.s.sed. A few girls wanted to check to see if they hadn’t woken up yet, but when they opened the door, they were shocked and didn’t even scream out until awhile later. All the girls who saw the scene cried out in horror, and a few even fainted from fright.

According to the first girl who saw it, the scene of room 106 was basically like this– Open the door, and then all you see is red. Blood flooded out over everything. Covered in fresh blood, Xiaolou kneeled down in the center of the room, her messy hair covering her strange and smiling face. She kept staring at the cold corpse in front of her…

After Xiao Yixuan finished, his body was still trembling slightly. After a long while, he finally calmed down.

“Do you know what happened to Ye Xiaolou after that?” I asked. From what we knew so far, it was very possible that she was the female ghost with the baby.

He rubbed his face to wake himself up a bit. And then he said, “I heard that she was sent to a mental health hospice in the suburbs, but I’m not sure if she’s still there or not.”

“Do you have the addresses or phone numbers of the other two roommates?”

“I wasn’t in the same cla.s.s with them, and we weren’t very close. I never contacted them again after graduation.”

“This doesn’t help us!” Zhenzhen quipped with a frown.

“I heard that this hospital’s lost quite a few hearts from the morgue. Is that true?” I stared at him, and he unconsciously avoided my gaze. “I heard about it, but I’m not very sure. You know, that kind of thing affects the hospital’s image, so the guys in charge tried to keep news from leaking out. So I don’t know much either.”

“Oh, apologies for disturbing you then.” After some parting words, Zhenzhen and I left the consultation room.

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“This Xiao guy seems to know something else,” Zhenzhen said just as we stepped out.

“He’s not a suspect, and we can’t force him to say anything he doesn’t want to.” I spread out my hands helplessly.

“So how do we check about the missing hearts?”

“Let’s put it aside for now. It’s a matter concerning the hospital’s image, so I don’t suspect they’ll be very willing to cooperate. Moreover, if they hospital knew more about it, they probably wouldn’t have lost so many hearts in the first place.” I put a cigarette in my mouth but I didn’t light it. Then I said, “We’ll have to let the boss talk to some people before we can investigate this any further. Let’s take a walk in the suburbs first…”

We drove to the city limits, to the mental health hospice. It looked like a white prison, and each of the doors were made of solid, stainless steel. Only, instead of prison guards, you had white-clothed angels watching over the prisoners in hospital gowns. Visiting the place was just like visiting a prison, and perhaps the biggest difference was that those who visited this place also had to pay medical expenses.

I asked the information desk for the files on Ye Xiaolou. After searching through the database, the nurse gave me a shocking answer, “She’s dead.”

“Dead? How did she die? When?” I’d been suspecting Xiaolou to be the female ghost. If she’d been discharged from the hospital or had gone missing, that would have been fine. But if she’d already pa.s.sed away, then who was killing these people? Was it really a ghost making trouble?

“She’s been dead for eight or nine years now. It was suicide,” the nurse answered indifferently, as if it had just been a stray cat that had died.

“Are you positive she was really dead?” I couldn’t let it go and asked again to make sure.

“If she was dead, then she was dead. What else is there to check?!” The nurse grew impatient and her increasing tone drew the attention of others in the vicinity.

“Does the doctor who was in charge of her still work here? I’d like to understand Ye Xiaolou’s condition while she was alive.” The living saw people and the dead saw corpses. If our lead gets cut off right here, it would become significantly harder to solve the case in a few days.

“It’s already been ten years. A lot of doctors have come and gone. How am I supposed to find this out for you?!” Then the nurse went to do other things and left me on my own.

I was a slightly discouraged for a moment, but thankfully my mind was in good condition and my skin was thicker than most people’s. I quickly started working again and bothered the nurse for Ye Xiaolou’s files. She impatiently printed out a copy for me. In the files, there was a large photo. Although the eyes of the person in the photo were dull, they clearly attracted others’ pity. As Xiao Yixuan had said, she was really very beautiful.

As I was going through the contents of the files to find some helpful information, a head popped up beside me– She was a fifty year old cleaning lady. I noticed her staring at the photo in the files, and I felt that G.o.d wouldn’t leave me hanging like that. I asked the woman, “Do you know her?”

The cleaning lady nodded. “She stayed here in the past. I remember her a bit.” And slowly, she told me about Ye Xiaolu’s stay at the hospice—

Comparably, she was one of the calmer ones here, so calm that she barely spoke. She usually sat in the corner with a book. For us, patients like that were really the best you could hope for. We didn’t have to worry about them. Aside from meals and bathing, we didn’t have to watch out for them, unlike those troublesome patients who had to be tied to their beds.

Usually, patients like that wouldn’t leave much of an impression, especially since there were so many patients. The only reason I can still remember her after so many years, aside from her being very pretty, was that she made a big mess at the end.

Her doctor was a guy named Ou. He’d just gotten here at the time and he wasn’t married yet. I heard he didn’t have a girlfriend either. Maybe she was really too beautiful, so beautiful that trouble came to find her. Xiao Ou and her got along well and spent much of their time together. Over time, it may have turned into love… Or maybe I should say it bred ill will. He actually raped one of his patients.

Although she had some problems in the head, when faced with Xiao Ou’s a.s.sault, she still knew to fight back. She covered his body in bite marks. After that, she often sat in the corner sobbing. Truth be told, at that time, she was just like any other ordinary girl, and it made your heart ache for her.

The hospital director was very worried about this matter. After all, if news of the situation got out, the hospice would be in lots of trouble. Just as the director’s head felt like it was going to explode, she committed suicide with an empty syringe. When the nurse wasn’t paying attention, she stole a needle and then locked herself in the washroom. When the nurse found her, she was already dead.

She’d stolen a 5ml syringe. I heard the nurse say that using that kind of syringe, she would have had to inject herself (with air) twenty times to die, and she had to hit her vein each time. The nurse also said that you’d be in a lot of pain before dying this way.

After she died, something happened to Xiao Ou. All the places he’d been bitten turned black and he got a very high fever. It didn’t recede and then the next day, he died. Before he died, he kept calling out, “She’s coming for revenge, she wants to kill me,” and such words…

After the cleaning lady’s account, I asked the question I was most concerned about. “How was her body taken care of after her death?” I still suspected that Xiaolou was the ghost. Her body may have undergone some type of transformation after her death, and then she returned to the university to kill.

“She was cremated, of course! The director is terrified of dark and spooky things, so even without her family’s consent, he had the body burned. With Xiao Ou’s inexplicable death, who wouldn’t be scared? He quickly had both of their bodies cremated.” The cleaning lady’s response overthrew my hypothesis.

“After she was raped, was there any blood?” Although the question was rather embarra.s.sing, it was one that needed asking because it was related to Xiaolou’s previous pregnancy.

The aunt pondered over it and then answered firmly, “No.”

“You’re sure?”

“There definitely wasn’t any. I was the one who cleaned the rooms that day and her blankets didn’t have any traces of blood. There wasn’t any on the bed or the floor either. There was a little bit on her clothes, but that was from Xiao Ou’s wounds. That’s not what hymen blood looks like.” From her age, this woman was not likely to be inexperienced in this matter, so she probably wasn’t wrong.

After thanking her, we were about to leave, when she suddenly called us. “Hey, hey, let me tell you one more thing. I don’t know if it will be of any use to you. When she first came and I helped her bathe, I noticed some wounds on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, like she’d been bitten by a vampire. But the wounds were very small, so it might have also just been a bug bite…”

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As we left the hospice, I organized the information we’d received today. Yixuan said that all the girls in room 106 suddenly got very pale in their final semester, and the cleaning aunt said that Xiaolou’s b.r.e.a.s.t.s had bite wounds. With this, could we infer that the other three roommates also had the same wounds? But how was the wound formed? Did room 106 have bloodsucking bats or… vampires?

Aside from that, since Xiaolou didn’t bleed after she was raped, it could be presumed that she wasn’t a virgin and she’d likely experienced child birth or an abortion before. If during the rape, there was inadequate fluids secreted, the rough motion could potentially cause bleeding. However, if the woman had previously given birth, her body may have been more relaxed and the likelihood of bleeding was much smaller. Suppose she’d been pregnant before, then who was the other party involved? Xiao Yixuan said she didn’t have a boyfriend, but in actuality, she did. Did he really not know, or was he lying? She couldn’t have gotten pregnant and still been a virgin!

Xiaolou’s suicide method was also rather confusing. In her given situation, injection of air into the bloodstream was undoubtedly the suicide method with the highest success rate. It was different from hanging oneself, an attempt which someone may discover easily, or cutting, which left sufficient time where she could be saved. For a patient with mental illness, calmly a.s.sessing the knowledge they had was not an easy thing. Moreover, she couldn’t just p.r.i.c.k herself with a needle randomly. She had to pump air into her veins at least twenty times. One couldn’t help but wonder if she actual had a mental illness, or if she had faked it to be acquitted.

Whether she was truly mad or not, she was already dead, so the likelihood of her being the ghost was very slim. Although I still suspect that the female ghost is a living person or a zombie like creature, the facts left me considering the possibility of a mist-like ghost.

“Where are we going now?” Zhenzhen interrupted my thoughts.

“We’re going to the historic district to find someone,” I answered casually.

“Who?”

“Mei Qiaoying.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know.” I handed Xiaolou’s files to Zhenzhen. Under relatives, the name Mei Qiaoying was listed along with an address.

Within every bustling city, there exists a run down corner, and the people who live in that run down corner are often the ones who contribute the most.

When we got to the historic district, night had already fallen. From the address, we arrived in front of an old, run down house. Light leaked out from the windows, so there was likely someone inside. After I knocked on the door, the rusty iron door popped open a sliver. Behind the door was an old woman with a thin and haggard face. She asked very cautiously, “What is it?”

After I showed my ID and explained our reason for coming, she calmed down a bit and invited us in.

“Pardon me, but the security in the area isn’t good, so we have to be more wary at night. Please don’t take offense.” Mei Qiaoying brought over two cups of hot water.

I looked around at the inside of her house. It was very small and old fashioned. The building was probably more than three decades old, and any piece of furniture in the place wouldn’t be much younger than myself. Even the cups in front of us were chipped. The owned of the house seemed to be rather poor.

“Auntie Mei, can you tell us a bit about Xiaolou?” After a few courteous words, I got to the point.

“Ah… I’m not sure if I should say my life has been difficult or if Xiaolou’s life was difficult. After she was born, she lost her father, and then at such a young age, she…” Auntie Mei sighed as she started to tell her daughter’s story—

Xiaolou’s father died early, so I painstakinly raised her on my own. She was a very smart and obedient child. All the teachers and students at school liked her, and she was very diligent with her studies. I never had to worry much about her. But ever since she got into the medical university, I felt that she changed, and yet, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what about her changed. Anyway, after so many years as her mother, if she changed, of course I would feel it. At first, I thought she’d gotten a boyfriend so I didn’t get too concerned about it. But later on, I kept feeling it wasn’t right. I felt that something had happened to her.

Our house is small, so we always slept on one bed. After she got into university, she lived in the dorm and only came home over school breaks. When she stayed at home, I’d woken up several times in the night to realize that she wasn’t in bed. Instead, she was standing at the window, staring up at the moon in the sky. When I called her, she didn’t respond. And then when I asked her about it the next morning, she didn’t have any memory of it.

In the end, she rarely came home, but she would call home every week. I didn’t worry about it too much at the time. After all, the environment at home isn’t great, so if she didn’t want to come home, I couldn’t blame her. It was fine as long as she was living well and happily. Even when she didn’t come home for New Year’s, I didn’t say much about it. I thought she’d been spending the time with her boyfriend!

The day before the murder, she called me and said some odd things. She asked if I wanted to live in a bigger house, if I wanted to have more money than I could spend, if I wanted to live forever. I said yes, of course I want that, but as long as she was by my side, that would be enough. Nothing else mattered. She was silent for a long time and then finally said to me, “Mom, I’ll make sure to let you live the best life in the future!” I never expected that something would happen the next day.

After the incident, the school stepped up to control the situation. Although she didn’t have to go to jail, she was sent to a mental illness hospice. During those days, I used up all my tears, but that wasn’t the worst thing to happen. She stayed in the hospice for more than a year before she commited suicide for no reason…

When she got to that part, Auntie Mei couldn’t help her tears from falling. The hospice had apparently hidden the matter that Xiaolou had been raped, but seeing her in such a state of despair, we naturally couldn’t pour salt on that wound and tell her the truth. And since both parties involved in the incident were both dead now, there was no point in trying to lay the blame.

“Have you ever met Xiaolou’s boyfriend?” Although her expression was dim, I still had to ask the question.

“No. Actually I’m not certain whether she ever had a boyfriend. Every time I asked her, she would say she didn’t have one, but I kept feeling that she was dating someone.” A mother knows her daughter best. Although she couldn’t confirm it, but a mother’s instinct was more trustworthy. During Ye Xiaolou’s time at university, she likely had a boyfriend. If that was the case, that meant it was very possible she’d been pregnant before, and it also explained why the female ghost carried a baby when she attacked. Of course, this was entirely based on the conjecture that the killer was a ghost, although I had some reservations about that.

“What was Xiaolou’s father like?” Zhenzhen seemed to want to comfort Qiaoying, but she seemed unable to find he right words and unwittingly asked about her diseased husband.

“My husband was named Ye Ping’an. He didn’t have any particular abilities. Before he died, he worked in construction. Actually, it’s quite a coincidence. The dorm Xiaolou lived in at university was built by his engineering team. But not long after the dorm was built, he pa.s.sed away. He didn’t even have the chance to see Xiaolou once…” Qiaoying’s tears started streaming down again.

The father built the dorm and then died. The daughter lived in the dorm, and then went mad and killed someone. It was indeed a coincidence! I couldn’t understand her feeling towards it, so I asked, “Can you tell us how your husband died?”

“The doctor said he had stomach cancer. He was usually okay, but that day, his stomach hurt a lot. When he went to the doctor to get it checked, the doctor said that it was already too late and they couldn’t cure him. A few days later, he left us. That was when Xiaolou was nearly going to be born. If he’d been able to hold on for a few more days, he would have been able to carry his daughter in his arms…” After a moment of silence, she wiped the tears from her eyes. “Several of his colleagues also ended up with stomach cancer. I suspected the meals at the construction ground were too poor quality. Before he died, he often complained that their meals were like pig’s feed.”

Zhenzhen once again used her clumsy words to try to comfort Auntie Mei. Just as we were going to leave, Auntie Mei seemed to have recalled something else. She said to us, “I remember that when they were constructing the dorm, they seemed to have pulled out a large white snake as they were digging out the ground. They were very greedy at the time and immediately cooked it to eat. I’m not sure if maybe they offended something, and so calamity hit us…”

After we left Auntie Mei, I kept thinking about the same question– After the construction of the dorm, the father pa.s.sed away in a strange manner. After the daughter moved into the dorm, the daughter started to change, and in the end, she even turned mad and killed someone… Was the problem perhaps the dormitory, or rather room 106?

Perhaps Uncle Liu had some information about this.

Notes: The words ‘raped’ and ‘b.r.e.a.s.t.s’ were censored out as **, but contextually, the words fit, so I thought I ought to use them.