Chapter Eighty-Two: An Unbelievable Death

The private room fell silent for several seconds, until one of the young thugs behind Lord Guan let out a scream.

“Someone’s been killed!”

After that shout, he was the first to bolt out of the room, and the other two followed close behind.

By then, all of us were sober. Even the Big Emperor, who had just been vomiting his guts out, had become utterly clearheaded.

“How can this be? How is this possible?” the Big Emperor said, panic all over his face, and Jiang Chao and the others had gone pale as paper.

I was utterly flustered too. Looking at Lord Guan’s bloodied head lying on the floor, while his neck still gushed blood, I honestly had no idea what to do.

Very soon, those young thugs came rushing back with the karaoke bar’s security guards. When they saw the scene, even the guards sucked in a cold breath; one of them even blurted out how deep the grudge must have been to cut a man’s head clean off with a knife.

If that head had truly been severed with a blade, it might still have made some kind of sense. But it had only been struck once by the beer bottle in Liu Dong’s hand, and the entire head had been smashed right off the neck.

Was that possible? Absolutely not.

I even wondered whether that bastard had secretly glued his head to his neck with adhesive, just so Liu Dong could smash it off for him. Otherwise, how could a single swing of a beer bottle possibly knock a person’s head clean off?

Then I looked again at that mangled head on the floor. At the temple, the entire skull had actually caved in with a hole about the size of a child’s fist. It looked as if the whole head had been made of paper.

A human skull is harder than stone. Even a knife would not be able to cut through it.

I instinctively reached out to touch the head, wanting to see what on earth had happened, but I was stopped at once by those security guards.

By then the Big Emperor and the others were already too terrified to do anything and did not dare come help me. In the end, I could not argue with the guards and could only stand there helplessly, not knowing what to do.

About ten minutes later, a group of police officers burst into our room, then took us straight to the station. The body was covered with a white sheet and carried away by the police at once.

In the police station, we were questioned until deep into the night. It was not until noon the next day that Jiang Chao and I were finally released. The Big Emperor and Liu Dong were still being held inside. To be precise, Liu Dong had already been transferred to the detention center early that morning, while the Big Emperor, being the first to clash with the man with the Lord Guan tattoo, was still under interrogation.

Even if the police determined that the murder had nothing to do with the Big Emperor, he would still have to be detained in the holding center for at least half a month.

After leaving the police station, my head still felt hazy. Even now I still had not come to terms with what had happened. There was no way Liu Dong could have killed that tattooed man so easily, much less smashed his head off with a single beer bottle.

When Jiang Chao and I returned to the dormitory, many classmates who were fairly close with us at school came over to ask what on earth had happened, why Liu Dong had suddenly killed someone.

I had no mind to answer them, and Jiang Chao was much the same, so we immediately kicked them out of the dorm.

In the end, only Jiang Chao and I remained. His face was still deathly pale, and even now his voice trembled as he spoke. “Dao, Wu Dao, what exactly happened? What are we supposed to do now? Do you think Dong... Dong will be executed?”

I said I did not know either. The police had already informed his parents. Did he have any connections in your family who might help?

Jiang Chao said he had come from the countryside; what connections could he possibly have? But this whole thing was too strange. How could Dong have knocked that man’s head off with a beer bottle? Even if Tyson came himself, he still could not have done it.

I did not answer Jiang Chao. Instead, I went alone up to the rooftop, lit a cigarette, and kept replaying every detail of what had happened before.

When Liu Dong smashed that man, I had already felt something was wrong. At the time, I had sensed that the man seemed to have no breath of the living about him at all. Then came the scene of Liu Dong bringing down the bottle and knocking the man’s head off. Thinking back on it now, I could almost be certain that this was absolutely a supernatural event.

But if I went to the police and told them it was a ghostly affair, asked them to let Liu Dong go, would they believe me? Liu Dong had killed someone in broad daylight, and not only that, he had torn the man’s head off. The police would definitely treat this as a major case. Liu Dong might very well really be sentenced to death.

The more I thought, the more disordered my mind became. In the end, I forced myself to calm down, then kept summoning the Hundred Ghosts section from the Book of the Yellow Springs in my mind, hoping to find some information about a situation like this. But to my disappointment, the Hundred Ghosts section only recorded most of the demons and spirits in this world. There was no record of anything like this at all.

Just when I was at my wit’s end, my phone suddenly rang. I picked it up and saw that it was an unknown number.

I did not think much of it and answered right away. As soon as the call connected, a sleepy, yawn-filled voice came from the other end. “Is this Wu Dao?”

“Who are you?”

The voice sounded very familiar, as if I had heard it somewhere before, but I could not remember at once when.

“I’m Peng Li. We’ve met before!”

“Peng Li?” The name felt familiar too. I kept searching my memory, and then I suddenly remembered. I blurted out, “Are you Officer Peng, the one who showed up at that hotel last time?”

“Yes, that’s me. Interested in talking?”

My mind instantly lit up. No matter how his colleagues in the police station mocked Peng Li as a madman, Liu Dong had been arrested now, and the Big Emperor had been detained as well. I had no connections at all and was worried about having no one in the police to guide me. Wasn’t Peng Li the perfect person to turn to?

I said yes at once. “Officer Peng, where are you?”

“Right outside your school gate.”

So I ran straight toward the gate. There I saw Peng Li’s battered off-road car, covered in dents, parked crookedly and occupying two spaces. Other car owners were unhappy with the way he parked, but when they saw the police emblem, they swallowed their complaints.

Peng Li still looked as scruffy as ever, with stubble all over his face and a bottle of Jiang Xiaobai in his hand. When he saw me, he waved me over to get in.

I did not think too much about it and got into the car at once. Then I said, Officer Peng, have you already found out about my brother’s case?

Peng Li answered, “Don’t call me officer. It sounds awkward. Just call me by my name, or Brother Peng if you want.”

Then Peng Li slammed his foot on the gas. The off-road vehicle shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bow and crashed with a bang into a telephone pole on the opposite side of the road.

I broke out in a cold sweat, but Peng Li acted as though nothing at all had happened. Cursing under his breath, he threw the car into reverse and then drove off ahead at high speed again.

All the way there, my heart stayed lodged high in my throat, because I had no idea when I might be killed in a wreck. Only when Peng Li finally drove the car into a garage beneath a residential building in the city and parked did I at last let out the breath I had been holding.

On the way, I had roughly counted the damage to Peng Li’s car. He had hit three telephone poles, two trash bins, run two red lights, and in the end, when he entered the garage, he even backed the trunk hard against the wall. I swear, if I ever rode in his car again, I would be his grandson.

After that, Peng Li led me into a two-bedroom apartment in that residential building. The whole place was a mess. Only after he shifted a huge pile of random books off the sofa did he clear a seat for me. Then he asked what I wanted to drink.

I said anything was fine, so he went to the refrigerator, threw me a can of beer, opened one for himself, and said, Kid, tell me exactly what happened with your brother’s case.

I nodded and quickly told Peng Li the whole story from start to finish. After listening, he fell silent for more than a minute, then stared at me with an extremely strange look and said, “Wu Dao, let me ask you a question.”

“What question, Brother Peng?” I said.

“If one day, while you were walking on a street abroad, you suddenly ran into an acquaintance who had been dead for many years, what would you do?”