“This person is Yu Zhenxiao. She used to be… she used to be a friend I got along with pretty well.” Zhou Xi pointed to a class photo from a spring outing. At the far right of the second row of girls stood a sullen-looking girl. Chen Zheng immediately noticed that the girl’s right shoulder sat lower than her left.
And in the surveillance footage provided by Quanmao Center, the fox-masked woman’s most distinctive feature had been her uneven shoulders.
That was exactly what had made Zhou Xi think of Yu Zhenxiao. She looked anxiously at Chen Zheng. “Officer Chen, if it really is her, she isn’t coming after me, is she?”
Chen Zheng said, “Don’t panic. First tell me what happened between the two of you back then.”
Zhou Xi fell silent, apparently considering where to begin. Chen Zheng did not rush her. Instead, he looked around the old factory-worker apartment in Lanzhu Alley.
Lanzhu Alley had once been home to a fairly large condiment factory, with numerous employee apartment buildings constructed around it. After the factory shut down, some apartments remained occupied by former workers while others were rented out. Across from Lanzhu Alley there had also once been a school for employees’ children, but it too had closed several years earlier.
Zhou Xi said, “Yu Zhenxiao used to live around here too. Her mother worked at the factory. I… I don’t know where she lives now. We went to Lanzhu Elementary School, and for a while we used to walk to and from school together all the time.”
Zhou Xi had always avoided remembering those difficult years before her parents became successful. With no one bringing them up, she had almost forgotten that she too had once been poor. She certainly never volunteered the fact that, before fifth grade, she had lived in a workers’ neighborhood like Lanzhu Alley.
Yet now, forced to look back, she discovered that those memories had remained startlingly clear in her mind.
Her parents had been different from most families in Lanzhu Alley. They had come from a small town to Zhuquan City to do business, but at first they struggled badly and had no capital, so they could only take whatever odd jobs they could find. The condiment factory had not yet closed then, and its workers drew steady wages and looked down on Zhou Xi’s family. When Zhou Xi first started school, she could not even find a single friend. The other children absorbed their parents’ attitudes and did not want to play with the daughter of street vendors.
She was miserable, but she did not want to burden her busy parents. She could see how hard they worked: they left before dawn every day, and by the time they came home exhausted at night, she would already have been asleep for some time. She quietly endured being excluded by her classmates until one day a girl with slightly uneven shoulders asked her, “Do you want to do the exercises with me?”
The girl was Yu Zhenxiao. Zhou Xi knew who she was. She had no father, her clothes were always dirty, and she was very fat, with the flesh on her face crowding her features together. The boys in class cruelly compared her to the lump of flesh Nezha had been before his birth.
Elio’s Notes: In the traditional Nezha legend, Nezha is born as a ball of flesh before emerging as a child. The boys’ comparison here is meant to be viciously insulting.
One part of the school exercises required students to work in pairs. Anyone who was isolated or had no friends became painfully obvious the moment that section began. Zhou Xi therefore dreaded the exercises and never dared look around to see who else had been excluded. She had not known that Yu Zhenxiao, standing behind her, was also alone.
Children’s ideas of beauty and ugliness were brutally simple: pretty was pretty, ugly was ugly. Zhou Xi also thought Yu Zhenxiao was ugly, and her hair was greasy too. But the thought of finally having a partner during the exercises made her agree at once, afraid Yu Zhenxiao might change her mind.
That was how the two gradually became friends. They were not together only during the exercises. Between classes Zhou Xi would ask Yu Zhenxiao to go to the restroom with her, and Yu Zhenxiao always went. After school they walked home together too. Some disgusting boys would trail behind them making rhymes about one looking like a duck and the other having a crooked shoulder, but Zhou Xi could not be bothered to care. Once she had a friend, other people’s opinions mattered much less.
Zhou Xi’s parents were hardworking and shrewd. By the time she was in third grade, their business had begun improving and they gradually earned more money. Zhou Xi’s mother adored her. Whenever she had time, she took Zhou Xi shopping and bought her pretty dresses and fancy stationery within the family’s means. Zhou Xi already had naturally attractive features. She had only been excluded before because the Zhou family had been poorer than the factory-worker households. Now, dressed like a little princess and using the newest stationery, with her mother even giving her a perm, she quickly became one of the most eye-catching girls in school.
The children who had once looked down on her began approaching her one after another, wanting to become her friends, eat her imported snacks, and attend her birthday parties. But Zhou Xi remembered exactly what they had looked like when they excluded her. She only wanted to be friends with Yu Zhenxiao.
Yu Zhenxiao herself changed a great deal over those two years. Most noticeably, she became much cleaner. Her hair was no longer greasy, and she lost weight. Zhou Xi took credit for all of it, because she was always supervising Yu Zhenxiao: bathe often, change clothes often, lose a little weight. “Doesn’t TV always say girls get pretty once they slim down?”
Yu Zhenxiao treasured Zhou Xi as a friend. Whatever Zhou Xi told her, she took seriously. Yet after losing weight, Yu Zhenxiao did not become prettier. If anything, her ugliness stood out more starkly. There was simply nothing especially attractive about her features. Before, everyone’s attention had gone to her weight. Now that the weight was gone, every perceived flaw was exposed.
Zhou Xi also knew her friend was not good-looking, but she never disliked her for it. No one knew better than Zhou Xi what a good person Yu Zhenxiao was. In third grade, she had believed their friendship would last forever. After all, she was already a pretty little princess and still had not abandoned Yu Zhenxiao, her friend from the hard-up days.
But things rarely developed the way people wished. The Zhou family grew wealthier and wealthier. Her parents had already set their sights on a home downtown, Zhou Xi’s clothes became prettier, and rumors about her and Yu Zhenxiao spread quickly. Looking back now, some of the things people said were vicious.
People said Yu Zhenxiao sure knew how to cling to someone. If you were ugly, shouldn’t you at least keep a low profile? How could she have the nerve to hang around Zhou Xi? Zhou Xi was only too nice to kick her away. Yu Zhenxiao stuck to her like a burr; anyone would be annoyed. And look at their families. What kind of family did Yu Zhenxiao have, and what kind did Zhou Xi have? How could Zhou Xi really want to be friends with her?
Countless times, Zhou Xi wanted to argue: No. That’s not true. Yu Zhenxiao is my friend! What does family background have to do with it?
But not once did she actually say those words aloud. Yu Zhenxiao was clearly affected by the gossip too and began refusing to speak to Zhou Xi or walk home with her. Zhou Xi felt terribly wronged. I’ve defended you this much, and instead of comforting me or staying with me, you deliberately give me the cold shoulder?
She and Yu Zhenxiao began drifting apart. Deep down, Zhou Xi still cared about her very much, but once she distanced herself from Yu Zhenxiao, more people immediately gathered around her, and for the first time she felt relaxed.
It took her years to understand where that sense of relief had come from. She and Yu Zhenxiao were fundamentally different people and had been from the beginning. Zhou Xi was pretty; Yu Zhenxiao was ugly. Being excluded had temporarily brought them together, but Zhou Xi could become wealthy while Yu Zhenxiao could not simply become beautiful. And so they drifted farther and farther apart until there was no intersection between their lives at all.
“That’s why, after that, I only made friends with people whose family circumstances were similar to mine,” Zhou Xi said. “It wasn’t that I looked down on anyone. I just wanted to spare myself some trouble.”
“What happened afterward?” Chen Zheng asked. “You never made up?”
Zhou Xi’s thoughts returned once more to her days in Lanzhu Alley. For a while she had stopped paying attention to Yu Zhenxiao. During summer vacation her parents took her to the seaside, and only after school resumed did she hear that Yu Zhenxiao’s mother had been injured at work. She had spent the entire summer in the hospital and might never be able to work again.
Zhou Xi worried about Yu Zhenxiao a little and was surprised to discover that Yu Zhenxiao had gained weight again, sitting sloppily in the last row with greasy hair. Zhou Xi hesitated for an entire day before finally deciding to go speak with her.
But then, outside the water room, she overheard several classmates saying, “I heard the Yu family needs a ton of money. Yu Zhenxiao doesn’t even have a dad. Where is she supposed to get that much?”
“If it were me, I’d borrow from Zhou Xi. Weren’t they close before? Beg Zhou Xi a little and she’d definitely lend it.”
“Exactly. She’ll definitely go to Zhou Xi. Ha, once you have money, you can never escape your ‘poor relatives.’”
The words terrified Zhou Xi, and she fled. Even now she could not quite describe what she had felt at the time. Somewhere in her subconscious, she was deeply afraid that Yu Zhenxiao would ask her for money, as though the moment that happened, their friendship would truly be over. Distracted, she returned to the classroom and looked up straight into Yu Zhenxiao’s eyes.
Yu Zhenxiao stood up, apparently wanting to say something to her. A cold laugh rose inside Zhou Xi. You were the one who ignored me and avoided me. What, now you remember I exist? You’re here to borrow money, aren’t you?
Yu Zhenxiao really did walk toward her, but Zhou Xi did not let her come close. She turned and ran. She did not know how Yu Zhenxiao reacted, and she told herself she no longer needed to know. They were not friends anymore.
For the rest of that semester, Yu Zhenxiao frequently missed school and became nearly invisible in class. At the end of the term, Zhou Xi moved away with her parents and transferred to a key elementary school, leaving the poor years of Lanzhu Alley behind for good.
She thought she would never see Yu Zhenxiao again. Even if they crossed paths as adults, she probably would not recognize her. Yet not long after starting Grade 10, she unexpectedly ran into her old classmate on Shuiban Street.
Yu Zhenxiao had grown much taller and lost weight again. She was even thinner than the first time she had slimmed down. Her long hair was tied back with a plain elastic, she wore glasses, ordinary jeans, and a long-sleeved T-shirt. In truth, she looked quite different from the Yu Zhenxiao in Zhou Xi’s memory. Girls could change dramatically as they grew, and the glasses somewhat disguised Yu Zhenxiao’s flat nose and small eyes. Even so, Zhou Xi recognized her immediately.
They happened to be in the same stationery shop. Zhou Xi had a small basket hanging from her arm, filled with decorative tape and stickers for journaling, plus several blind boxes. She did not see what Yu Zhenxiao bought. Yu Zhenxiao recognized her too and smiled. The old unhappiness seemed to have faded with time; when Zhou Xi thought about it, none of it had really been such a big deal. They chatted briefly. Zhou Xi asked where Yu Zhenxiao went to school, and Yu Zhenxiao said she was also at No. 10 Middle School.
Chen Zheng looked mildly surprised. “She was at No. 10 too?”
Zhou Xi looked confused. “That’s what she told me. She didn’t say which class, but I never saw her at school. Oh, and she wasn’t wearing a uniform that day either. I don’t understand. Why did she take my student ID? Why imitate me?”
Because the two of you once walked the same road. At least, that may be how she saw it. But your changes made you shine, while hers only exposed the things people mocked her for. You kept moving farther ahead, and everything went more smoothly for you, while she was left behind.
Chen Zheng had already formed a rough judgment. He had originally planned to canvass Lanzhu Alley, but it was far too late. He drove Zhou Xi and her family home, then told the detectives on duty to pay attention to Zhou Xi’s safety.
In the early hours of the morning, Chen Zheng sat at Beiye Sub-bureau holding one of the dolls. It could not exactly be called ugly, but the way its features came together gave it an intensely resentful expression. If the fox-masked woman really was Yu Zhenxiao, as Zhou Xi suspected, and her looks had always been a source of pain, was she making these dolls as an outlet for her anger?
But based on what they knew so far, selling the dolls really had helped Honghua Welfare Home, and deputy director Zhao Hongfang spoke very highly of her. Aside from stealing Zhou Xi’s identity, she did not seem to have harmed Zhou Xi in any way. The one exception was Liu Wenran. But did Yu Zhenxiao even know that the girl who received one of her dolls had disappeared? Could she herself simply have been used?
Chen Zheng closed his eyes. None of that could be judged until they found Yu Zhenxiao.
As soon as daylight came, the investigation moved. Kong Bing sent officers to No. 10 Middle School to find out which class Yu Zhenxiao was in. The academic-affairs office said there was no such student. Not that she was no longer enrolled. She had never been enrolled there at all.
She had lied to Zhou Xi. She was not a No. 10 Middle School student.
By the time Chen Zheng reached Yu Zhenxiao’s home in Lanzhu Alley, the dust on the door and the storage rack outside suggested that no one had lived there for a long time. The neighbors still remembered the unfortunate mother and daughter. “Second Sister’s been gone for years. Zhenxiao never finished school either. She went out to work.”
Chen Zheng opened the door and smelled paint that had been sitting for a long time in an unventilated room. Old apartments like this were rarely spacious and did not even have a proper living room; beds stood in both the outer and inner rooms. The bed in the Yu family’s outer room was piled with boxes and cotton batting, clearly unused for ages. The quilt on the inner bed lay spread out, while an open book sat on the table. Chen Zheng glanced at it. It was about hand-dyeing techniques.
Across from the book stood a storage shelf. Chen Zheng immediately recognized what was on it: the dolls the police were investigating. More precisely, unfinished dolls. Their shapes were identical to those already in police possession. What differed, once again, were details such as color, hair, and clothing. Anyone sensitive to such things could easily see hostility in their faces.
As the crime scene examiners collected traces inside the apartment, Chen Zheng continued asking the neighbors about Yu Zhenxiao and her mother.
Yu Zhenxiao’s mother was known around the neighborhood as Second Sister. She was hardworking and honest. When the condiment factory began teetering toward closure, she left voluntarily and found work elsewhere. But Heaven seemed blind, and this fatherless household suffered another blow: she injured her lower back in a fall and could no longer work, leaving her bedridden at home and dependent on a small subsistence allowance.
Yu Zhenxiao barely had a childhood. She never properly attended elementary or middle school, dividing her time between caring for her mother and taking odd jobs. Because she was underage, many places would not hire her, and even those that did paid very little. They struggled on like that until Second Sister could no longer bear watching her daughter be dragged down by her. One day while Yu Zhenxiao was away, she pulled herself to the window with her hands, climbed over, and fell to her death.
Everyone pitied Yu Zhenxiao and helped arrange the funeral. Later, Yu Zhenxiao enrolled in a vocational school, apparently studying fashion design. The neighbors seemed to stop seeing her sometime that summer and assumed she had gone away for work.
“She never explicitly said she was going to work somewhere?” Chen Zheng asked.
The neighbors looked at one another. “She wasn’t living here anymore. She must’ve gone to work, right?”
It couldn’t have been work, Chen Zheng thought. The state of the apartment suggested she had left and then been unable to return.
The crime scene examiner said the dust inside the home was distributed very evenly, with no footprints or fingerprints appearing anywhere. That strongly suggested someone had come looking for Yu Zhenxiao and deliberately erased all traces of their presence.
Chen Zheng asked, “Did any of you see someone come looking for Yu Zhenxiao? Or did she ever bring anyone home?”
Only then did a few neighbors finally grasp the implication. “Did something happen to Yu Zhenxiao?”
At once everyone started talking over one another. Crowds were like that, easily swept into excitement. Chen Zheng did not interrupt and listened, but after a long while he had heard nothing useful, so he asked again whether any strangers had appeared.
One neighbor said awkwardly, “A girl who looks like Yu Zhenxiao… men wouldn’t be interested.”
They had automatically interpreted Chen Zheng’s question as meaning “a suspicious man,” and from there concluded that with Yu Zhenxiao’s looks, she simply had no romantic prospects.
Chen Zheng learned which vocational school Yu Zhenxiao had attended, instructed sub-bureau officers to continue canvassing Lanzhu Alley, and went to the school himself.
The vocational school confirmed that Yu Zhenxiao had indeed been a student there. The problem was that she had never reported for this semester. Her teacher said her grades ranked near the top of the class. She rarely socialized and generally kept to herself, but she had performed very well in both theory and practical exams the previous semester. This term was supposed to include an internship, and the school had some connections for placements. Yet Yu Zhenxiao never returned to register, and no student had seen her over the break. Her teacher had called, found her phone switched off, and after several attempts stopped trying.
The school explained that vocational schools were different from ordinary high schools. If a high-school student failed to report, teachers would do everything possible to track them down. But every year vocational students simply stopped attending partway through, and the teachers had grown used to it. Especially someone as capable as Yu Zhenxiao. She would not necessarily need the school to recommend her anywhere. She could find a job on her own, so why waste another year’s tuition?
Strikingly, the teachers and neighbors had reached exactly the same conclusion: Yu Zhenxiao had gone away to work.
The vocational school still had Yu Zhenxiao’s enrollment photograph. Chen Zheng took it to Zhao Hongfang, who immediately said, “Yes, yes, that’s the girl! Her name is Yu Zhenxiao?”
The real Yu Zhenxiao looked nothing like Zhou Xi, but few people scrutinized ID photos closely. At the time, Yu Zhenxiao had only flashed Zhou Xi’s student ID at Zhao Hongfang, and Zhao Hongfang had barely seen the photograph.
“She’s such a good kid. Why would she lie to me?” Zhao Hongfang simply could not understand it and kept telling Chen Zheng how kind Yu Zhenxiao was. She always dressed plainly and looked like someone whose own life was already difficult, yet she willingly spent time with the children, told them stories, and even sold the dolls for charity to raise money for the welfare home.
People often came to the welfare home to adopt children, but the ones taken away were usually healthy and attractive. Those left behind were viewed by many people as defective, so some of the children became withdrawn and psychologically troubled. Yu Zhenxiao encouraged them: having a disability was not their fault, and being less attractive than other people was not their fault either. Precisely because other people might look at them differently, they had all the more reason to make something of themselves.
Chen Zheng gradually understood Yu Zhenxiao’s state of mind when she came to the welfare home. The place gave her a sense of belonging. Or, put more coldly, perhaps it gave her the sense of superiority she had never possessed elsewhere.
“Wonderful. I investigate one thing and somehow dig up another missing person!” Kong Bing irritably tossed his phone onto the desk, turned toward Chen Zheng’s clue wall, then after half a minute gave a vicious sigh and went over to add the new lead.
Ming Han returned just then and laughed. “Captain Kong’s temper is running hot again.”
“You keep giving me…” Kong Bing had been about to say you keep giving me trouble, but he knew it was only frustration talking. Investigations were never smooth. The deeper a case went, the more tangled it usually became. Besides, Chen Zheng only appeared to be creating work for him. In reality, he was helping. If Yu Zhenxiao had never been uncovered, the investigation would inevitably have gone down the wrong road later.
Kong Bing changed course. “Why weren’t you with Director Chen?”
“Director Chen got sick of me always hitching rides in his car and stopped taking me along.” Ming Han joked, “He gave me something else to do.”
Kong Bing asked, “What?”
Ming Han had gone to see Huang Fei again and asked whether he had ever paid attention to Yin Gaoqiang’s friends. Huang Fei was still deeply affected by Yin Gaoqiang’s death and by the doll appearing in his home. His mood remained low enough that he was showing signs of developing a psychological disorder. He reacted slowly to Ming Han’s questions and said he genuinely could not think of anyone right now, but would contact the police if someone came to mind.
Ming Han felt he could not simply leave him in that state, so he took him to see a doctor. Huang Fei resisted the entire way, repeatedly insisting that he was physically healthy and had absolutely nothing wrong with him. When he learned Ming Han meant a psychologist, he became even more anxious. “I’m not crazy!”
“It won’t cost you anything,” Ming Han said. “Once you’re doing better, you’ll be able to give us useful leads. You don’t want Uncle Yin to have died without anyone ever finding out why, do you?”
Only then did Huang Fei reluctantly agree.
After hearing this, Kong Bing casually muttered, “None of them ever gives us a moment’s peace.” Ming Han did not answer. Kong Bing glanced at him. “Something else?”
Ming Han had already dropped the joking tone he had worn when he came in. He frowned. “I had to pass No. 2 Middle School on the way to Huang Fei, so I went in for another look. Guess what I found?”
Kong Bing was impatient by nature. “Do me a favor and stop keeping me in suspense!”
Ming Han’s gaze darkened. “People are selling imitation dolls. In this little time, that thing has somehow become a fashion trend on campus. A lot of students have them hanging from their bags.”
“What?” Kong Bing simply could not understand. “Weren’t they all scared of the thing? Two days ago everyone was saying it was cursed, that whoever had one would have bad luck!”
When word first spread that Liu Wenran had received one of the dolls, No. 10 Middle School, Liren Middle School, and several other schools had all panicked. Students who had bought dolls at Quanmao Center handed them over to teachers or police. Most had reacted the same way Xiao Ling had. How had it suddenly become… fashionable?
“People follow trends.” Ming Han tossed the imitation doll he had brought back from No. 2 Middle School onto the desk. There was no way to mass-produce highly accurate copies so quickly. Most of these were crocheted with yarn or made as very crude clay pieces or acrylic charms.
“No, wait!” Kong Bing rubbed at his aching head. “If it’s supposed to be a curse, why hang it on your bag? Who’s making these things?”
“A curse can become a trend too.” Ming Han’s voice grew colder. “Just like malice spreads more easily than kindness. Captain Kong, your burden is about to get heavier.”
Kong Bing froze. “What do you mean?”
“If people imitate the cursed dolls and vendors exploit them for profit, then sooner or later someone will imitate the malice behind the dolls too,” Ming Han said. “Something is going to happen on campus. Maybe it already has. And with the manpower we have and the rules investigations operate under, the reality is that we can’t stop it.”
At No. 10 Middle School, the panic caused by Liu Wenran’s disappearance had quietly faded with time. Students who had bought the cursed dolls were still uneasy, but the others seemed to have adapted. Vendors selling imitation cursed dolls appeared outside the school gates, and plenty of students crowded around handing over money.
Lü Ou moved through the crowd with the collar of his uniform pulled up over half his face, hiding his expression. Both hands were buried in his uniform pockets, and one palm held a miniature cursed doll.
That evening, an anxious father hurried into a police station to report that his son, Du Qing, had not come home and could not be found at school either.
At the same time, a serious incident occurred at Liren Middle School: a group of girls from an experimental class pushed a teacher from an upper floor.