The two brothers quietly agreed on their story. When they heard a commotion outside the door, they pretended to be unconscious, each slumped in a corner of the room.
The youngest son had killed the expert to make sure Mrs. Ho was dead for good. The older brother had helped stage the scene!
This shocking truth thrust the case involving Mrs. Ho and her two sons back into the public eye.
The case had initially been classified as an accident caused by superstition, but now many people were beginning to have doubts.
Once the truth came out, there was no way to keep everything hidden.
The gambling house that had operated underground in the county for years was raided, and its owner fled. The youngest son’s enormous debt to the gambling house was confirmed. After Mrs. Ho died, the gambling house stopped trying to collect from him, and a large sum of money really did appear in his account. Investigators traced it to an account controlled by the gambling house.
The scene in the hospital room was also reconstructed and compared with the autopsy report and photographs, proving that it was the youngest son who had killed the expert.
The older brother claimed he had only wanted to protect his younger brother and that their mother couldn’t go on living, but he was still charged with staging the scene. His sentence, however, was much lighter than his brother’s.
But that still wasn’t the end of the story…
10
Ten years later, after getting out of prison, the eldest son lived in a small apartment complex. Divorced and with no one to keep him in check, he lived recklessly. Different women were constantly coming and going—sometimes two or three at a time—and they would stay the night. Rumors about him spread among the women who regularly visited. Some said he had bought a house somewhere else and was having it renovated, and that he would move away after a while and never come back.
Others said he had recently grown paranoid, always claiming someone was watching him, so he had to have someone sleep with him every night.
Some even said he had wanted to leave for a long time, but whenever he tried, something came up. Either one of his children got sick and delayed the move, someone crashed into his car, or he couldn’t find the necessary paperwork.
The neighbors who heard these stories joined in the gossip. They said they had once seen an old woman following him into his home. At the time, they had wondered why the man had such peculiar taste—how could he be attracted to an old woman like that?
Not long afterward, a downstairs neighbor said they often heard a late-night “clop, clop, clop,” like high heels or a wooden cane striking the floor.
The neighbor added mysteriously that they had gone to speak to him the day before, to tell him to keep quiet late at night. But when they knocked, no one answered, and a strong musty smell wafted from inside, so strong they could smell it through the door. If they hadn’t happened to run into him downstairs, they would have thought he’d died in his apartment.
It was only a matter of time. One night, an ambulance and police cars arrived. When they opened the door, they found the eldest son huddled in a corner, slashing wildly at the air with a knife and muttering, “It’s all my younger brother’s fault. It’s all my younger brother’s fault. It has nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me.”
The medical staff talked him down for a long time before he finally let go of the knife. He had numerous wounds on his body, all self-inflicted. He had even bitten off a piece of his tongue, making his speech hard to understand.
After he was taken to the hospital, he was assigned to the very room where Mrs. Ho had died. It seemed as if everything had been arranged, though no one could say whether it was fate or someone’s deliberate doing.
That night, he smashed a glass bottle and cut open his own abdomen, performing an operation on himself. He died in excruciating pain. Patients in the adjoining room and the nurse on duty later said they had been in a daze all night. Even after splashing cold water on their faces, they still felt as if they were in a trance. They could vaguely hear someone whispering, “You’re Mommy’s good son. You’re Mommy’s good son! Then come here to Mommy. Come here to Mommy!”
The words sounded so warm, but the voice was full of resentment. In the dim light of the hallway, they also saw an old woman without arms or legs gliding past.
Less than two days after the eldest son died, the gambling house owner who had fled years earlier turned himself in. He rushed to the police station as if relieved, saying that lately he had been tormented by an old woman’s ghost to the point that he could barely take it and was close to breaking down.
Someone had suggested he go to prison to save his own life, so he hurried back and confessed everything. But what he revealed stunned everyone: the eldest son who had just died had been his partner. The idea to bet on whether Mrs. Ho would live or die, hire a powerful practitioner to lure people into betting that she would survive, and threaten his younger brother to make sure she died—all of it had come from the eldest son.
They simply hadn’t expected the person they hired to be a genuine expert, and things had become far more complicated.
11
Only now did the story truly come to an end. Throughout all this, what no one could explain was where the video recorded in the hospital room had come from.
Later, someone with ties to the authorities let slip a little information. They said an investigation into the video’s origins had traced it to a man who specialized in repairing old cell phones.
He had received an old phone and saved the video on it. After watching it, he had planned to go to the police, but he feared it might be a staged video and worried even more that he could be targeted in retaliation, so he decided to post it online anonymously.
An analysis of the original video showed that it had been recorded using the phone’s screen-recording software.
When they recovered information associated with the phone, they discovered it belonged to Mr. Li the Half-Immortal.
So people speculated that the expert and Mr. Li the Half-Immortal might have started a video call at the time so Mr. Li could help them. In the chaos, Mrs. Ho’s two sons hadn’t noticed the phone sitting somewhere in a corner, and Mr. Li had recorded the whole thing.
The person who revealed this information added one more thing. He leaned over and whispered to a few people sitting at the same table, “Do you know“Do you know who Mr. Li the Half-Immortal is? I bet you’d never guess.”
Everyone listened closely.
“He’s Lưu Tiềm’s father-in-law.”
“Just a man who rambles all day. His daughter doesn’t care much for him, so hardly anyone knows about their relationship.”
“Otherwise, how could an ordinary man like Lưu Tiềm have such skill at taking revenge?”
-THE END-