Chapter 44: The Case of the Hammer Fiend (Part 13)

Whenever this moment arrived, his thoughts would drift back to his parents.

In his childhood, although financial conditions were poor, life was stable. There was no need to run and hide, nor to live in constant fear and trembling.

He remembered when he was in middle school; the food brought from home was never enough. The rations meant for a whole week would be consumed in four days, leaving him to endure hunger through the weekend. Yet, his spirit had been high back then, wholly focused on studying hard with the sole hope of entering university and escaping poverty. Thus, despite the hunger, his heart remained full of hope.

One Sunday, on his way home, his stomach rumbled with such intensity that it felt as though his belly was pressed flat against his spine. Upon arrival, his mother had already prepared a steaming pot of bean-and-millet noodles. Without even pausing to wash his face, he picked up the bowl and devoured four bowls in one breath.

"If only I could go home right now and eat a bowl of bean-and-millet noodles rolled out by my mother's own hands, how wonderful that would be!" In his hunger-induced delirium, the scenes of the past materialized vividly before his eyes.

Yet at this moment, he had plunged into an abyss from which there was no return. He could never go home again, nor would he ever dare to face his aging parents. He feared implicating them, and even more, he feared being captured; he knew that once he returned home, he would never be able to leave again.

"Once a person reaches this stage, life is truly worse than death!" Amidst the biting wind, the short man's thoughts descended into chaos, as if another "him" were conversing with him right now.

He laughed at times, wept at others, drifted into lucidity, and lapsed into madness.

"You should find a way that is both painless and allows you to escape the bitter sea of this mortal world," he said calmly.

Suddenly, a ferocious expression twisted his features. "Suicide? Never! Hehehe, how could I possibly commit suicide? Suicide must be agonizing."

"You have already lived a life steeped in sin; must you still struggle in this mortal world?" Abruptly, he reverted to a state of normalcy.

Immediately following this, he assumed a careless, indifferent attitude. "Why think so much? Just drag out this miserable existence somehow!"

Icy muddy water seeped through the cracks of his labor-insurance shoes, and the sharp stinging pain reminded him of the first winter he spent in the detention house. Outside the iron bars, goose-feather snowflakes drifted down. A fellow inmate had leaned in, exhaling a puff of white vapor, and sneered, "Hey you, shorty, go crawl into the latrine and sleep!"

He had bitten right through the man's throat, and the spurting blood stained the gray wall like an abstract painting.

At this very moment, bloody water was seeping out of his socks, dragging a broken red line across the muddy ground—resembling the crooked handwriting on his confession letter with uncanny exactness.

"Over here!" A gentle voice pierced the morning mist.

Among the reeds along the edge of the field, a half-formed, bloody footprint shimmered faintly beneath a layer of frost.

"He was here." Li Rui squatted down and used a pair of tweezers to pick up a scrap of fabric stained with sulfonamide powder.

"Here, the evidence bag." Wen Rou handed it over.

Li Rui stood up and gazed into the distance. Although the footprints had already blurred, he seemed to see that staggering figure, limping all the way from the other side of the mountain.

Until that figure walked past his very eyes.

To live, one must eat; even in mere survival, the stomach must be filled.

Yet with what could he fill his stomach?

Having no food, he could only scavenge the fields for something to stave off his hunger. Like a stray dog in a sweet potato field, he clawed here and rummaged there, until after a long while, he managed to unearth a leftover tuber. Wiping it hastily on his sleeve, he shoved it straight into his mouth.

*Snap.* What had fallen?

He turned his head; it was his own diary. He had cultivated the habit of keeping a journal, recording an entry after each crime, but fearing discovery, he would invariably burn it once written.

Looking at the notebook, missing who knows how many pages, he shook his head. "It seems even you no longer wish to follow me."

"So be it. Burn it!"

Thus, he set a fire in the empty fields—one that flickered like a terrifying ghost fire.

"Li Rui, look!" Wen Rou discovered a pile of ashes on a nearby ridged field. "It looks like a notebook."

Using tweezers, Wen Rou carefully placed the still relatively intact ashes into an evidence bag.

The wind sweeping across the fields was fierce, scattering the ashes long ago, leaving behind only the cover, which remained somewhat intact. Made of kraft paper, even after being burned, the embossed characters "Notebook" upon it remained distinctly legible.

Yet there was no name inscribed within. Presumably, its owner knew this precisely, which was why no name had ever been written.

"Who would burn a notebook out here in this freezing weather?" Wen Rou murmured to herself.

"It must have been left by him," Li Rui said, resting his chin in his hand.

"Him? You mean the killer?" Wen Rou looked at him, doubt shadowing her eyes.

"He is on the run," Li Rui said, staring at the ashes on the ground. "This is him bidding farewell to his past self. He cannot turn back, nor will he ever."

It must have been the day before yesterday when he stood entirely alone in the bitter wind, isolation, helplessness, and despair permeating his heart.

Like a wild wolf caught in a blizzard, he huddled pitifully with his head pulled in, wrapping his arms around himself, shivering violently from the cold. His once-ferocious eyes now held a gaze of absolute despair.

While hurrying through the open fields, the darkness and deep snow caused him to tumble into a dry well—narrow at the opening and wide at the base. The brick walls were slick, and the water at the bottom was bone-chilling, soaking his clothes completely.

Wet garments only added to his dead weight. The moment he dragged himself out of the water, he felt himself plunging straight back down, and despite exhausting every ounce of his remaining strength, he failed to climb out.

At that moment, he thought, "My sins are too heavy; Heaven has truly forsaken me!"

After lingering in the pitch-black depths of the well for a while, an unwillingness to perish in such a manner flared within him. He stripped off his clothes, tied them tightly around his waist, and using the very knife with which he had committed his crimes, began gouging holes into the well wall, digging with the blade and clawing with his bare hands. Before he knew it, his fingertips were torn and bleeding.

Yet, cornered by absolute desperation, he cast all else aside, hacking and scraping away with manic tunnel vision. Every time he carved out a crevice, he jammed his toe into it, gripping the wall with his hands, climbing upward bit by bit.

It took him over two hours to finally haul himself out. The moment he emerged from the wellhead, biting gusts of wind whipped against him, instantly drying his cold sweat. Frost quickly formed over his soaked garments, causing him to shiver violently as he stood exposed to the gale, a profound desolation rising from the depths of his soul.

What was even worse was that his ankle had been injured during the ascent, bleeding continuously. Yet to preserve his life, he had no choice but to run through the fields like a madman to generate body heat. Once his temperature rose, he sprinted desperately toward a nearby village, slipping into a villager's home to steal several padded cotton garments to change into.

"Damn it, I've really been driven to a dead end," he felt his sanity unraveling and his body collapsing. "If this keeps up, I'll either freeze to death or starve to death."

Li Rui gazed out at the frost-covered fields, a bleak desolation rising from the bottom of his heart. "He is like a wild wolf, wandering and fleeing day in and day out. He is likely nearing his end."

Wen Rou cast a skeptical glance at him. "Nearing his end? How could you possibly know?"

"On one hand, he must evade police pursuits; on the other, he must endure the onslaught of wind, frost, snow, and rain. Every day, after finishing one meal, he has no idea where or when the next will come, or what it might be," Li Rui seemed to empathize completely with the short man's state of mind. "Whenever night falls, it is also the moment he feels most desolate. Across the distant and near dark clusters of villages, there is not a single place that belongs to him as a resting spot."

He paused for a moment before continuing. "Looking out over the endless expanse of wilderness, he has no notion of where his ultimate destination lies, constantly plagued by the sensation of having reached the very end of his life's road."

Wen Rou stepped over and gently tugged his hand, pulling his thoughts back to the present. "Li Rui, are you alright? Have you simply been working too hard lately?"

Li Rui shook his head. "I am fine. I am merely placing myself in his shoes to experience what he is thinking."

Uncomprehending, Wen Rou remarked, "You've developed this kind of ability now, have you?"

"Remember when I took that elective in psychology during university?" Li Rui looked at Wen Rou. "Freud's psychoanalytical theory posits that criminal behavior stems from the conflict between the id, the ego, and the superego. The killer's inner world is severely distorted, which implies that his id and ego are collapsing, or perhaps have already been destroyed. In other words, he may very well possess a dual personality."

"Are you suggesting that the murders were committed by his alternate personality?" Wen Rou asked, half-convinced.

"Perhaps," Li Rui sighed. "I feel as though we are drawing agonizingly close to him, yet we still cannot grasp him. His footsteps will not pause; we must move faster than he does."

The morning mist wove a grayish-white gauze across the fields, and Li Rui's breath condensed into minute ice crystals in the frigid air.

He suddenly caught a faint, ghost-like scent of chalk dust—it reminded him of Professor Zhou, who always insisted on hanging a portrait of Freud right beside the blackboard in the university lecture halls.

That had been an autumn afternoon ten years ago, when the sunlight filtered through the gaps in the sycamore leaves, casting swaying patches of light across his psychology textbook.

"Student Li, tell us your thoughts." Professor Zhou's fingers tapped against *The Interpretation of Dreams* resting on the podium, his gaze behind his spectacle lenses as sharp as a blade. "Why is criminality described as the floodgate of the subconscious?"

A younger Li Rui had stood up, the cuffs of his white lab coat still stained with the formaldehyde scent of anatomy class. "Just as an infected wound requires lancing and drainage, certain distorted minds treat violence as—"

His peripheral vision caught the nape of Wen Rou's neck in the front row, the golden fuzz along her hairline catching the sunlight like a delicate veil.

"Well said!" Professor Zhou suddenly used a piece of chalk to sketch a distorted human silhouette on the blackboard. "But remember this: every demon was once a fragment of an angel. You must find the fissure that shattered that holy light—"

The piece of chalk snapped in two with a sharp crack, and white dust drifted softly onto the edge of the podium.

"The fissure..." Li Rui muttered the word repeatedly, then suddenly squatted down.

On the frost-covered ridge, several crushed, withered leaves formed a peculiar pattern—the spacing between the footprints, deeper on the left and shallower on the right, suddenly grew denser, resembling the final struggle of a lame man.

He pulled out an evidence bag, using his tweezers to lift a withered leaf stained with pus and blood. "He is rotting away, and not just his wounds."

Wen Rou's phone suddenly vibrated; a surveillance screenshot sent by Lei Chen lit up the screen: beside the national highway late at night, a limping figure was hosing down his left leg at an automated car wash. Within the shadows washed by the water jet, the turned-down sock of a labor-insurance shoe was vaguely visible, exposing the upper half of a diamond-patterned sock rim.

"He wants to go home." Li Rui bolted upright, the hem of his coat sweeping up fine grains of frost. "If a man can push himself forward like this despite being injured, then his final destination must be his true home."

Some say that hardship is a catalyst; it can make a resilient person even stronger, or render a cold person even colder.

He had indeed set foot upon the road home. During those periods when he hovered on the brink of death, he invariably found himself inexplicably drifting toward the direction of his family.

Yet in the end, he never returned—like a wolf cast back into the wilderness, even in death, he would never turn back.