By then, I was eighteen and didn’t want to be a burden anymore. Maybe it was because Trần Diêu had bought the house, but whenever I thought about it, I felt uneasy.
So I got a part-time job at a convenience store, working while studying for my exams.
Mrs. Li sold homemade pickled vegetables and sauces at the entrance to the complex.
Gradually, she built up a clientele of regulars.
On my days off, I helped her and rubbed her shoulders.
Life went on like that.
But then… Mrs. Li began acting strangely.
She often forgot to collect money and muttered to herself as if talking to thin air.
Thinking back… it all began the last time Trần Diêu came home.
The neighbors said that day Trần Diêu had brought back lots of expensive gifts and asked them to keep an eye on the old woman.
Everyone praised her for being such a devoted daughter and said Mrs. Li was lucky to have her.
Back then, I naively thought, “Maybe she’s just getting forgetful with age.”
Now that I think about it… I was such a fool.
“What did you find out?” Officer Lục stopped writing and stared at me.
“Officer Lục.”
I raised my head, my eyes stinging. “Tell me… how can people be so cruel?”
“You mean… Trần Diêu?”
“You want to know where Mr. Trần Trường Quý is, right?”
I met his gaze. “Go to Mrs. Li’s old house. The third floorboard in the bedroom… it’s hollow.”
This time, they took me along to the scene.
I pointed to the floorboard, my finger trembling slightly. When the police pried it up… the whole room fell silent.
There was no body.
No bones.
No ashes.
Only hundreds of neatly stacked, sealed plastic bags.
Inside each bag… was a piece of dried human flesh.
Someone vomited on the spot.
Someone else stumbled back in fear.
“This is Trần Trường Quý.” My voice was perfectly calm.
The forensic team began collecting the bags one by one.
Officer Lục pulled me aside and lowered his voice. “There isn’t a speck of dust underneath. Did you… put these things here?”
I nodded, staring at the family portrait hanging on the wall.
In it, Mrs. Li held baby Trần Diêu, still red from birth, while Mr. Trần stood beside them with an arm around his wife, smiling gently.
He probably never imagined that the child in his arms… would one day chop him into tiny pieces.
The forensic team quickly confirmed that the dried human tissue was Mr. Trần.
Officer Lục handed me the report. “Judging by the cuts, every stroke was incredibly precise. Trần Diêu’s husband is a doctor.”
He looked at me, his gaze dark and unreadable. “You know a lot more than you’ve told us.”
He was right.
For the past six months, I had tracked down everyone connected to the Trần family, following every lead.
What I knew… was far more than that.
The night Mr. Trần discovered that his daughter was involved in international organ trafficking, he insisted on taking her to turn herself in.
Trần Diêu held a knife to her throat and threatened him.
When Phùng Cương saw that he couldn’t talk him out of it, he shoved Mr. Trần hard.
His back struck the edge of the table, and he was paralyzed from then on.
After he died, Trần Diêu came back.
Not to pay her respects, but to dig up her father’s body and steal it.
Her business overseas kept growing. But her parents knew her secret, like a ticking time bomb.
So she came up with a vicious plan: use her father’s corpse to threaten her mother.
Officer Lục frowned. “You… are you telling the truth?”
“That wasn’t all she could do…” I looked at him, my voice growing colder.
“She also realized she could use her father’s corpse for something else: to break her mother’s will.”
From then on, Mrs. Li received gifts from overseas every month.
Inside the elegant gift boxes… there was always a sealed bag: sometimes a piece of dried skin, sometimes a finger joint.
To make sure she wouldn’t be exposed, Trần Diêu also sent her personal doctor on a regular basis.
They claimed to be giving her mother a checkup, but in reality they injected her with drugs, leaving Mrs. Li with memory problems and emotionally numb.
As a result, Mrs. Li grew more and more haggard, her eyes gradually losing focus.
By the time I found out, my voice was trembling. “…She’d been dead for three days. The room was full of flies.”
I jerked my head up and glared at Officer Lục. “Tell me, doesn’t Trần Diêu deserve to die?!”
“I let her die far too easily!”
I slammed the table and screamed like I’d lost my mind. “That animal… doesn’t deserve to be called human!”
The officers rushed over to restrain me.
As they forced me down onto the table, a scene from six months earlier flashed through my mind: the moment I opened the door to Mrs. Li’s house.
The stench of a corpse filled the air.
Mrs. Li sat swaying in her chair, eyes wide open and filled with despair.
I waved away the flies and took her icy hand. “Ma’am…”
But how could she answer?
She’d been dead for three days.
Beside her was an open bottle of vitamins.
I felt around inside and found a sealed bag. It held a dried ear.
There was a black mole on the earlobe.
Mr. Trần had an identical mole.
It had been sent from overseas in a luxurious gift box.
Sender: Trần Diêu.
I searched the house and found eighty bags like that in all.
At that very moment, I swore I would kill Trần Diêu and Phùng Cương.
“So you pretended to be Lý Xuân Mai for six months?”
Officer Lục looked at me as if I were crazy.
“That’s right. I spent six months preparing for this day…”
Trần Diêu was overseas, and I didn’t know exactly where she was.
That made it very difficult to act.
To kill her, I first had to lure her back.
I moved into Mrs. Li’s house and tried to keep up the appearance that she was still alive.
I spent three months learning makeup techniques online.
I poured all my savings into supplies: imported latex, wrinkle prosthetics, and professional body paint.
Mrs. Li’s farmworker’s stoop was incredibly difficult to imitate. I stood in front of a mirror, practicing every movement over and over until my muscles had memorized them.
Her voice was hoarse and deep, with a heavy local accent.
I practiced every day with pebbles in my mouth until it was raw before I could imitate her.
By the time I stood before the mirror with that hunched back and wrinkled face, I had truly become Lý Xuân Mai.
The gifts from overseas kept arriving regularly.
As for those injections…
I didn’t care.
Because after I got my revenge, I planned to die too.
Once everything was ready, I had to figure out how to get Trần Diêu to come back.
I cleared my throat and made my vocal cords tremble like an old woman’s.
The contacts in Mrs. Li’s old Nokia phone numbered only three: Tiểu Mãn, the neighborhood committee, and Trần Diêu’s international number.
The call had to be perfect: just enough to make Trần Diêu worry and come back, but not enough to make her suspicious.
I dialed.
“Hello, Mom?” Trần Diêu’s voice sounded a little sleepy because of the time difference.
“Diêu Diêu…” I pretended I was out of breath.
“Lately, Mom… I keep seeing your father…”
The other end of the line fell silent. Her breathing grew noticeably more ragged.
“Are you having those dreams again, Mom?”
“It wasn’t a dream… He was standing at the foot of my bed, saying it was so cold down there…”
I heard something hit the floor. It sounded like a phone.
I heard Phùng Cương ask her something, then Trần Diêu lowered her voice. “Mom, you’re taking your shots on schedule, right?”
“I am…”
I deliberately imitated the side effects, making my voice falter. “But… after the shots… I get even dizzier… Yesterday I mistook… vinegar for… soy sauce…”
Silence fell on the line.
I knew they were looking at each other.
That was exactly the reaction I wanted.
“We’ll come back next month.”
Beep! Beep!
I breathed a sigh of relief.
The first step had succeeded.