Klasse 0 der 10

Kapitel 23

Yang Zheng softly uttered two words: "Yangmei".

Luo Bin understood.

“Even if I hadn’t attacked you, you might not have been able to leave this building. I’m a prime example. It was all clearly arranged by the detective. Perhaps he was hiding in the Night Child Bar from the beginning, and he knew we were two people when we went in.”

"A detective." Luo Bin's tone held a hint of mockery. "You really believe he's a detective?"

Yang Zheng paused for a moment, then asked, "What do you mean?"

"Because I am the real executioner!" In the darkness, Luo Bin's tone sounded somewhat indignant.

"You're a criminal investigator? Then all of this was arranged by you?" Yang Zheng asked in astonishment.

Luo Bin smiled wryly: "Would I really put myself in a place like this?"

Yang Zheng remained silent, still unable to understand what Luo Bin was talking about. Fortunately, Luo Bin no longer intended to hold back and explained the whole story.

"Looking back now, I really regret having that thought back then, which caused such a huge mess."

The story begins with the heavy snowfall before the Lunar New Year.

The snow started falling that evening and continued for three days. On the first night, Luo Bin and his girlfriend returned home late. It seemed they had attended a friend's party that night, drinking and then going to karaoke, staying out until after 2 a.m. They finally managed to hail a taxi, which drove to the small street near their home. They got out and turned into the alley.

For the past two years, Luo Bin has been living with his girlfriend in a rented apartment in a residential building constructed in the 1970s. Back then, the building's construction team didn't know that garages were required at the base of the building, so the residents built sheds along the front wall of the building, in a long row, with each family occupying a small area to store bicycles and pile up miscellaneous items.

That night, Luo Bin and his girlfriend were about to go upstairs when they inadvertently saw a woman lying in the shed in front of the building entrance.

“That woman’s name is Xu Li. You’ve met her before; I brought her to your place to film a movie,” Luo Bin said.

Yang Zheng remained silent. Of course, he remembered Xu Li. He recognized her from the online video recording and had told the household registration officer, Ge Hua, about her situation. Later, two police officers from the Criminal Investigation Brigade came to him to inquire about the situation. That day, he only told the police that Xu Li had come to his place to have her picture taken, but he concealed something. Xu Li's first visit was late one night; Luo Bin had taken her and another man to take some very unusual photos. After the shoot, Luo Bin told him that the woman wasn't in the entertainment industry; the man had hired her.

Later, Xu Li went to his studio to take another set of photos. At that time, Yang Zheng pretended not to know her, and she didn't say anything.

“When my girlfriend and I saw Xu Li in the bike shed, she looked very strange. Her eyes were closed, but she was babbling incoherently. Her face was blue from the cold, but she was still sweating on her forehead. At that time, she was obviously not in her right mind. We helped her up from the ground, but she tried to break free from us. She sat on the ground, waving her arms and legs, and slowly spitting out some white foam.”

“My first thought was that she was sick and needed to go to the hospital, so I immediately took out my phone to call 120. But my girlfriend stopped me. At that moment, I also noticed something was wrong. Xu Li was now confused and behaving strangely, but she had a very enjoyable expression on her face. The kind of enjoyment that makes you feel itchy just thinking about it.”

“My girlfriend went up and rolled up her sleeve, and saw a lot of needle marks on her arm. We both realized that she was a drug addict and must have just injected herself.”

Yang Zheng seemed to have understood something. He said, "So you carried her home."

Luo Bin nodded: "We've never done drugs, but this kind of thing often happens in movies and TV shows. Once the effects of the drug wear off, the person will be fine. If we were to take her to the hospital, she would definitely be in a lot of trouble. But we ran into her, so we couldn't just leave her there. You know, even though she was wearing a down jacket on the outside, she was dressed quite lightly underneath. If we left her alone in the snow, she might freeze to death once the effects of the drug wore off. So, my girlfriend and I discussed it and decided to carry her upstairs together."

“I know that if the police find me one day and I say that we carried Xu Li upstairs because we wanted to do a good deed and save her, the police definitely won’t believe us. In other people’s eyes, we are all people with personality defects, we are all oddballs. Some people even talk about us as if we are some kind of demons or monsters. They either laugh and scold us or firmly draw a line between us, as if we are all devils who harm anyone they catch.”

Luo Bin's tone was full of helplessness: "But we are human too. We use special ways to satisfy our desires, but that doesn't mean we are bad people. If we find a wallet, we know to hand it over to the police. We know to give up our seats to the elderly on the bus. If we see a child drowning, we will jump into the river without hesitation. We even know that our interests are unhealthy, but we just can't control ourselves. We are actually just like those drug addicts, unable to control ourselves."

Yang Zheng sighed inwardly; he deeply understood that sense of helplessness.

"Today, in that room, I heard what the person on the other end of the phone said to you, and I felt that he really spoke to my heart. We are all confronting another version of ourselves deep inside, and we are actually in a lot of pain. No one understands us, and even when we are walking in the sunlight, we can feel the strange looks from those around us. So, sometimes we really have the thought of giving up—since things are already like this, what else do we care about?"

Luo Bin was silent for a moment, then gave a self-deprecating bitter laugh: "Alright, let's not talk about these irrelevant things. Let's talk about that night. My girlfriend and I carried Xu Li home and put her on the sofa. We tried to give her water, but she vomited it all up. We covered her with a blanket, but she kicked it off after a while. Later, we just left her alone and went to sleep in the bedroom. But I couldn't sleep well that night. Later, when I went to the bathroom, I saw Xu Li lying motionless on the sofa. I got a little scared and went to check her breathing. She was already dead."

Yang Zheng exclaimed "Ah!", clearly quite surprised.

“I was terrified. I thought Xu Li would wake up once the effects of the drug wore off, but she actually died. I woke up my girlfriend, and she was even more scared than I was; she was trembling. We just wanted to do a good deed, but we ended up in such big trouble. If we called the police, they would definitely investigate us and find out that we were some kind of weirdo. They wouldn't believe us at all. So, my girlfriend and I were both desperate that night, and in our despair, we actually acted impulsively.”

Yang Zheng knew what Luo Bin meant by "impulse".

Luo Bin was quite frank; perhaps he also needed someone to confide in: "When I made love with my girlfriend, we did it in a different way. The thought that there was a corpse next to us gave us a pleasure we had never experienced before."

"So later, you came up with the idea of filming that video," Yang Zheng interrupted him.

Luo Bin paused for a moment, then continued, "That's right. I can't even remember how I came up with that idea, but we actually did it. You know, in a killing spree, everyone covers their faces and takes photos and videos to share with others. But there are never any dead bodies among them. If I release this video, it will definitely become the focus of attention."

Yang Zheng understood Luo Bin's thoughts. Some online forums have sections like "Netizen Highlights," where users can post their photos, and some people enjoy doing so, finding pleasure in showing themselves off. In video and voice chat rooms, some women aren't doing it for money, but they're willing to take off their clothes and expose their bodies to so many strangers. These people's mentality is actually similar to Luo Bin's; only the content they display is different.

"Moreover, before filming that video, my girlfriend and I discussed it for a long time. No one knew that we had brought Xu Li home, so the best way was to dispose of her body without anyone knowing. People in the murder group are thinking about how to kill every day, and of course, there are many ways to dispose of a body. After thinking about it for a long time, we all felt that the best way was to bury her. Of course, the location of the burial is very important; we want to bury her in a cemetery."

"Although cremation is now practiced and there are public cemeteries, in some rural areas, burial is still the norm. In the wilderness, you can sometimes see dozens of interconnected earthen graves. If Xu Li is buried there, no one will know."

"You found such a place?" Yang Zheng asked.

"Yes, I happened to know such a place. The next day, I borrowed a car from a friend and drove Xu Li's body there overnight to bury it. Once the body was gone, my girlfriend and I felt relieved and weren't so afraid anymore. But then we thought that if we sent the video to the murder group, it might get us into trouble, since there were real dead people in it. But we didn't want to give up an opportunity to show it off, so we came up with a foolproof plan."

"On the third night, I used hacking software to scan for a server with security vulnerabilities and uploaded the video, which was in RM format, to the server. There are many such hacking software programs online; they are all user-friendly and easy to use. However, I knew that servers usually record the IP address of intruders, so I didn't dare to do this at home. Instead, I sneaked up to the rooftop of a building and randomly connected a telephone line."

"You were the one who called the radio station?" Yang Zheng blurted out. "I didn't even recognize you."

Luo Bin smiled wryly: "A person's voice is definitely different when it comes to the radio than usual. Besides, I deliberately strained my voice in the phone booth that day."

"How did you come up with the idea of writing the words 'Criminal Officer' on that mask?" Yang Zheng asked.

"That was my girlfriend's idea, a sudden inspiration. We originally wanted to write about executioners, but we thought that was too vulgar, so we thought of a criminal officer instead. We don't actually know if this official title really existed in history."

Yang Zheng was speechless. If the torture video circulating online was fabricated by Luo Bin, then who was the executioner who appeared in the massacre later? At this point, Yang Zheng also understood why Luo Bin insisted on having his help, to become the executioner's accomplice, after knowing that the executioner had appeared in the massacre.

“No matter what, I bear responsibility for what happened. The detective who orchestrated all of this must have seen my video to think of using the name ‘detective.’” Luo Bin’s tone was full of remorse.

"All I want to know now is what the executioner wants to do by bringing us here," Yang Zheng said.

The two had been talking in the dark for so long that it seemed they had only now realized they were in trouble, and they didn't even know where they were.

Just then, the lights suddenly came on, and the sudden light made both of them close their eyes, and then slowly open them again.

This is a long and narrow room.

The floor and walls were made of blue bricks, creating a very oppressive atmosphere. On one side was a tightly closed iron door, and on the other side was a half-open wooden door. Pushing it open, one entered a bathroom. The floor and walls were made of marble, with patterns of flowers, birds, fish, and insects carved into the walls. There was a small ventilation hole in the corner of the ceiling. The outer room was very spacious, containing nothing except a television hanging on one wall.