Chapter 55

On the third afternoon of the incident, when Lu Siyu came out of the fitness center located in the villa area, a light rain began to fall from the sky. Unlike the usual heavy rain, this rain was minimal, unable even to conceal the sun, producing a gentle rustling sound, like a breeze.

Having spent quite some time in the hospital, Lu Siyu was determined to rebuild his physical strength. Despite his less-than-perfect health, thanks to his youth and relatively low body fat, a little rehabilitation noticeably increased his muscle tone. This time, he worked out for over an hour. After taking a shower and grabbing his phone, Lu Siyu opened Song Wen’s contact to check. At this moment, the police station should be at its busiest. After a brief consideration, Lu Siyu decided to put his phone aside.

Back at his desk, Lu Siyu received the latest information compiled by Zhu Xiao. He held a thick stack of documents in his hands.

This was the latest breakthrough in investigative methods, a technique ignored by the police eighteen years ago. The cyber police and tech experts had aggregated all the statements and accounts associated with Xia Weizhi’s ID and common IP addresses from early years. Combining this information with her life history, a more comprehensive profile of her personality could be constructed. This technology had been applied to many major cases, yielding crucial information.

Wearing a clean shirt, Lu Siyu poured himself a cup of warm water, put on his glasses, leaned back in his swivel chair, and occasionally marked notes on paper, piecing together fragmented information to form a coherent picture.

Over twenty years ago, during the early rise of the internet, everything was clumsy, akin to a baby crawling forward. Subsequently, it gradually matured, transitioning from infancy to adolescence, then sprinting forward without knowing where the end was. At one point, there was a surge of online platforms like classmates.com, happy network, forums one after another, and they all subsequently faded away, leaving vacant spaces. People migrated from various blogs, Tieba, to Weibo, short videos, and many websites one after another closed down, becoming corpses on the internet, yet some data was fortunately preserved.

Many people had accounts they never logged into again.

Whenever Lu Siyu went to search for this information, he felt like he was standing in a vast and deserted virtual ruin. It was incredibly open yet filled with various information. These ruins were virtual but real, consisting of zeros and ones, behind which sat living individuals.

These people could be old, young, men, women, and they might not have realized that sometimes they themselves were already gone. The casually expressed remarks, used avatars, signatures, and viewed information were all preserved. These things documented their lives.

Xia Weizhi’s father was a laborer, and her mother helped in a pharmacy. She was never officially enrolled, possibly influenced by her mother. Xia Weizhi went to medical school and majored in clinical studies.

From elementary school to high school, Xia Weizhi consistently achieved excellent academic results. In her spare time, she studied dance for a while. Because her family considered it useless and believed it would hinder her academic studies, she only pursued it for a short year. Xia Weizhi harbored grievances about this incident, feeling that her parents had destroyed her dreams.

In college, Xia Weizhi had a delicate appearance and excellent academic performance, but she didn’t have many friends in her class. Often, she would sit alone in a corner with a book. She was a bit arrogant, considering herself outstanding and mature. Thus, she disdained making friends with classmates and preferred seeking advice from senior students and teachers.

During her senior year internship, Xia Weizhi left the school for some reason, nearly dropping out, but her family managed to bring her back. During this period, she felt somewhat nihilistic.

After graduating and returning to school, while other students went to major hospitals, Xia Weizhi was assigned to this nursing home. At that time, the nursing home was still a state-owned institution, and doctors had professional qualifications. Medication supervision was not as strict as it is now, and bulk purchasing was possible. The ambitious old director wanted to make it the top elderly care institution in the southern city.

For those with compassion, working in a nursing home was a way to serve the people. However, for the young and excellent Xia Weizhi, never did she imagine that, after graduating, she would end up here rather than in a hospital.

In Xia Weizhi’s perception, this place was like a prison, and she felt like a prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment.

From her past online posts, it could be seen that she envied and admired her peers. She despised the elderly residents, didn’t want to talk to them, and found their aging wrinkles and age spots nauseating. In her eyes, those elderly people constantly described their medical conditions, making unreasonable requests, causing her headaches. When faced with elderly people unable to care for themselves, she felt on the verge of going crazy.

Having gathered this information, Lu Siyu sighed, took off his glasses, rubbed his forehead, and continued reading. It was somewhat challenging for him to imagine how someone like her could become a doctor working in a nursing home.

If Xia Weizhi lived in the present era, she might have more choices. However, in the conservative past, influenced by her upbringing, she was taught to safeguard her job at all costs.

Resigning? That was an absurd notion. Uttering such words was blasphemous, as many people spent their entire lives working in one unit until retirement.

At that time, Xia Weizhi’s father fell ill, and she needed this job more than ever to survive and maintain the normal expenses of her household. Under such pressure, Xia Weizhi likely suffered from severe depression, becoming melancholic. She had attempted suicide, losing twenty kilograms in a year, hospitalized twice, yet no one noticed her abnormality.

Next was the process of Xia Weizhi’s crimes. Most of what circulated online were speculative analyses. The police station possessed more detailed information, allowing a clearer understanding, though missing many details. Lu Siyu synthesized it, organizing Xia Weizhi’s experiences.

Initially, Xia Weizhi might have intended to conduct a medical study on the elderly or accidentally caused a patient’s death while administering medication. This first incident may have been unintentional, and Xia Weizhi was terrified. However, later, no one discovered the incident, and the elderly person was smoothly removed and hastily cremated.

Under immense pressure, Xia Weizhi suddenly felt like she had opened a new door.

Previously, her life was like an airtight cocoon, enclosing her so tightly that she couldn’t breathe. Suddenly, she realized that she could breathe again. And she began to transform gradually. Subsequently, she escalated her actions, mistreating and retaliating against the elderly in the hospital who had bad tempers or serious illnesses.

Xia Weizhi was the most educated doctor in the nursing home, and apart from her, there were only two retired nurses rehired. Most of the elderly residents had lower education levels, so she specifically targeted those who were seriously ill, elderly, or unable to communicate, handling them with great caution.

For the lazy and troublesome caregivers and nurses, the death of seriously ill elderly residents saved them a lot of trouble. Some family members even felt relieved to be rid of the hassle.

Thus, Xia Weizhi gradually transformed into a devil. She appeared to be a quiet woman, but when faced with frustrating situations, she would vent her frustration on the elderly residents.

All of this came to an end after the 519 task force began investigating the nursing home. The police discovered the abnormalities in the deaths of those elderly people and quickly traced them back to Xia Weizhi, the physician at the nursing home. Initially, to prevent exposure, the nursing home’s director attempted to cover up the facts.

Until everything was exposed.

In September of that year, some angry family members surrounded the nursing home and vandalized it. However, after the situation was brought under control by the police, people discovered that Xia Weizhi had disappeared.

Witnesses claimed to have seen Xia Weizhi talking to a man, and afterward, she disappeared. From that day on, the witch troubling the entire city seemed to vanish without a trace. Her online accounts that had once posted comments were never logged into again.

Lu Siyu furrowed his brows slightly. He had an instinctive feeling that something was missing in this woman’s life. The beginning and the end of the story seemed to have some issues.

Then he started profiling. Xia Weizhi’s life trajectory was relatively normal until her third year in college. In her senior year, her emotions began to become unstable. After she joined the nursing home, influenced by her professional environment, she faced oppression and high-pressure work. In her job, she frequently encountered death, gradually becoming accustomed to it. Her victims were a special group—those elderly people who, in her eyes, were inferior, not normal equals, and she experimented on them, concocting various drugs, committing murder to satisfy her desire for control and gain pleasure.

Then he created an analysis chart, marking the possible times of the crimes as revealed by the police. He plotted a curve graph, showing a sharp increase in the number of deaths during the hottest and coldest times of the year. Additionally, on specific days of each month, fixed crimes occurred. These data couldn’t rule out the possibility of an increase in the illness and death rates of the elderly during summer and winter. The influence of female physiological hormone changes on crime also couldn’t be excluded. What other reasons were there?

Lu Siyu still had some questions he couldn’t figure out. Xia Weizhi had always been a well-behaved girl, the only daughter at home. Her life had been smooth, and even if she suffered from depression, it was not enough to drive her to commit such frenzied murders. What prompted her to embark on this criminal path? And in the end, where did she go? Although consultations were not highly developed more than a decade ago, it was hard to imagine a living person completely disappearing in the city, making it impossible for anyone to find her.

Alive but unseen, dead but without a body. Unless she had an accomplice? Or an enemy?

Listing all the questions, Lu Siyu called Wu Qing. At this stage of the investigation, there was nothing closer to finding answers than asking someone who had experienced it firsthand. He remembered in the previous call, Wu Qing had said not to contact him unless it was urgent, but his current case seemed to be stuck, making it a special circumstance, right?

After some pleasantries, Wu Qing said, “Your recent exam results came out. You scored 86.”
Lu Siyu furrowed his brow slightly. In all his previous exams at school, he had never scored below 95, and all the exams had concluded before he left. Wu Qing seemed to be hinting that the phone might be recorded or monitored.

Lu Siyu quickly changed his approach, saying, “Professor Wu, following your advice, while organizing those old items recently, I found a key. It seems like it can open an old mansion. I want to check it out. However, I don’t know much about the place. Do you happen to know about it?”

“Oh, that place. I’ve been there before,” Wu Qing pondered for a moment, thinking about how to tell Lu Siyu without raising suspicions. He spoke, “I suspect that place is not the end of everything; it should be the beginning of everything.” It was just his suspicion, a conjecture he had when reflecting on the case. He hoped it would be helpful to Lu Siyu.

Lu Siyu nodded, sensing the meaning behind Wu Qing’s words.

“Also, try planting the flower seeds I gave you before. See if they can bloom into something,” Wu Qing added. Lu Siyu flipped through his bag, finding a contact Wu Qing had given him when he left school. At that time, Wu Qing had mentioned that the owner of this number held a lot of information in Nancheng. If there were difficult things to investigate, Lu Siyu could go and ask.

After hanging up the phone, Wu Qing lowered his head, pushing the wheelchair beneath him. How similar Lu Siyu now was to him when he was young. No, perhaps Lu Siyu was even more intelligent, more sensitive, and more decisive.

Wu Qing turned to look out the window, where darkness prevailed. That darkness represented everything he had fought against with all his might but had been unable to overcome. However, what he couldn’t do, Lu Siyu might be able to.

TN:

“I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race, including myself… I preyed upon the weak, the harmless and the unsuspecting. This lesson I was taught by others : Might makes right.”