Chapter Fifty-Three: The Indecision in Killing

Moving quietly to the space behind the two beds, standing in the narrow gap between the beds and the door, Liu Chang stood motionless for a long time.

For reasons he could not explain, his hesitation brought to mind a phrase he’d often encountered in books before: “decisive in killing and slaughter.”

“If I were the protagonist in an online novel, I’d be utterly unqualified—can’t even bring myself to kill a few people,” Liu Chang mocked himself inwardly, then tried to harden his resolve by recalling all the evil these people had done, hoping it would make him more decisive.

From the initial act of taking his bed by force, to falsely accusing him of murder, to threatening him for his meat, and at last, the greedy way they devoured the meat...

Thinking of all this, Liu Chang’s mind grew calm, his nerves faded. Silently, he rose up on tiptoe and slid the hand clutching the scalpel into the gap at the head of the upper bunk, feeling for the pillow that marked Xiao Yong’s position. Then, with one hand clamped over Xiao Yong’s mouth, the other slashed the scalpel deep across his throat.

Killing a man is but a matter of lowering the head to the ground.

The process was simple.

In it, Liu Chang registered just four sensations, and a life was ended. The first, the warmth of Xiao Yong’s mouth beneath his palm; the second, the snap of sinew beneath the blade, like a string breaking—he’d felt the same sensation earlier when slicing through the giant frog’s tongue, though this time it required less effort. After these came the third feeling: Xiao Yong’s body twitching, a faint convulsion. The fourth was the warmth spreading over his palms and the backs of his hands—blood.

Four sensations, a handful of seconds, and a man’s life was over—less than a hundredth of the time he’d been counting off in his mind just moments before. In those few seconds, decades of life were ended.

Destruction will always be a hundred thousand times simpler than creation.

Perhaps the slight motion of the upper bunk disturbed the one below, for Xiao Yong’s mother stirred and opened her eyes in a daze.

But the instant her eyes opened, all she saw was a face contorted with savagery, and then a cold, sharp pain in her throat that left her gasping for breath.

As he drove the scalpel into the woman’s throat—this time on the lower bunk—Liu Chang was finally able to witness his own act firsthand. The blade slid in smoothly, meeting no resistance, piercing that fragile, fatal spot. He didn’t even need to look at his hand to know there would be no saving her. But he couldn’t look away from her eyes—he was transfixed by how quickly her expression changed.

With the thrust of the blade, in the first second, he saw confusion in her eyes; in the second, terror; in the third, an incomprehension he could almost read. And in the fourth, her gaze shifted most dramatically.

In a single second, terror returned, then abruptly vanished, replaced by a profound plea. Her mouth opened, her throat emitted a strangled, gurgling sound; her limbs jerked, her hands scratched desperately upward, as if she desperately wanted to convey something. But the blade and the gushing blood silenced her words. She looked deeply at Liu Chang, seeking to express her thoughts with her eyes and mouth alone.

Perhaps it was the intensity of her gaze, or the unnatural calm that followed his first act of killing, but Liu Chang found himself unconsciously trying to read her lips.

“Please... please... you...” he could make out the first three words, which stirred little in him. “Don’t... kill... me...” came the next, and still he was unmoved. “...my... son...” were the final two.

The full sentence was: “Please, don’t kill my son.” When the meaning coalesced in his mind, a sudden buzzing filled his head, his vision blurred, his stomach churned, and his hand began to tremble uncontrollably.

Just then, as his awareness wavered, a drop of blood from the upper bunk at last seeped through and fell onto the woman’s face.

A large drop.

It covered her face, staining her eyes red.

“Mmm!” As the blood fell into her eyes, her expression changed once more; she noticed the blood-soaked bunk above her. The pleading vanished, her pupils contracted to pinpricks, her body struggled violently, pouring every last ounce of strength into a final outburst of rage and despair. The blood in her throat was forced out by her last desperate breath, and she let out a cry—weak, hoarse, but heavy with emotion.

“Ah—!”

That short, feeble cry was soon drowned by the bubbling of blood in her throat, her pupils, after their final contraction, began to dilate and empty... but her hands, raised high, never fell.

“Uagh!” At the sound of her dying scream, Liu Chang could no longer suppress the upheaval in his stomach and vomited onto the floor.

Their commotion woke everyone in the dormitory, who now bore witness to this pitiful, horrifying scene.

But the first to react and climb down from his bunk was the one who had never truly slept. He approached Liu Chang, patted his shoulder, and glanced at the equally startled “Doctor Huang.”

“You woke her up. We—”

“Don’t touch me! Don’t ask me to kill for you ever again!” Liu Chang flung Li Qingshui’s arm away, and when his stomach was finally empty, he slumped to the floor, his mind haunted by the desperate plea in the woman’s eyes.

It struck him then that, for all her shrewishness and malice, she was only a woman, no different in age from his own mother, just a mother, after all. However hateful, she did not deserve death. And in her final moments, she had shone with the greatest human brilliance: faced with death, her foremost instinct was not survival, but motherly love.

...

Seeing Liu Chang seated in silence, Li Qingshui opened the door and checked the corridor. Finding that no one else had been disturbed, he returned and wrapped the two rapidly cooling bodies in the bedsheets, placed them in woven sacks, and called the little girl over.

“Come with me. Help me find a spot in the yard where no one will see us, so we can throw these away.”

“Okay.” The girl nodded blankly, glanced at Liu Chang on the floor, then at Dr. Huang, who sat trembling on his bed, and finally hopped down.

So, in the dead of night, Li Qingshui, carrying a sack in each hand, led the girl out the door.

(Two chapters in a night—if I push myself, I can write even more. I’m in a good mood, so next week I’ll hold an event for extra motivation. Today is Saturday—starting tomorrow, any day the recommendation votes exceed 600, I’ll do a double update the next day. I won’t break my word.)

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