Prologue (Part 1)

Years Ago.

I remember it all started on a spring afternoon. The sunlight was sharper than usual…

Our school had a tradition: every year, students were sent to clean up Beigong Park in the city as part of a "Learn from Lei Feng" volunteer activity. This year, it was our turn—everyone in the 11th grade.

Beigong Park had been around for as long as I could remember. As a kid, I loved coming here with my parents and sister on weekends. Though the park had become a bit run-down over the years, it was still our favorite place to hang out.

Earlier that year, the government funded a major renovation of the park. Maybe someone in charge thought the spending had gone overboard because the final cleanup work was handed off to free labor—us students.

I wasn't exactly taking the task seriously. My best friend, Zhao Shitou (real name Zhao Lei), and I goofed off after barely working for a few minutes. We ran behind the artificial rock formation and started messing around.

Then, out of nowhere, a strange feeling hit me. It was suffocating, like something was pressing on my chest. I gasped for air, my heart pounding.

Shitou saw me struggling and panicked. "Jinbao? What's wrong? Don't scare me like that!" He grabbed my arm to steady me.

I leaned against him, trying to catch my breath, but the sensation wouldn't go away. My head buzzed, and an overwhelming unease filled me. And then—I knew.

There was a body. Right under the massive blue stone where we'd just been playing.

That stone was new, placed there during the renovations to "ward off evil." But instead of warding anything off, it was covering something—a corpse.

I could see him clearly in my mind: a man in a gray-blue work uniform, hands and feet tied with rope. His face was bruised and swollen—he had suffered before he died.

Images flashed through my head like a movie. A stocky man strangling him from behind, the victim's eyes wide open in pain and fury.

It was the first time I had ever witnessed a murder—if you could even call it witnessing. It wasn't like in the movies. Killing someone took effort. It was brutal.

I doubled over and threw up my entire lunch.

Shitou freaked out and ran to get our teacher. Our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Qu, a strict woman in her fifties, rushed over and pressed her fingers against the pressure point below my nose.

Maybe it worked, or maybe I was just adjusting to the feeling. Either way, I stopped puking.

Mrs. Qu looked worried. "Jinbao, are you okay? Do you feel sick? Maybe something you ate?"

I shook my head. "I'm fine. Just overexerted myself. I just need to sit down."

She still looked unsure, so she told Shitou to keep an eye on me and take me home if I got worse.

Once she left, I whispered, "Shitou, I need to tell you something—but don't freak out."

He gave me a weird look. "Come on, just say it. What could possibly scare me?"

I hesitated. He was my best friend, my only real friend.

After a long pause, I finally said, "You see that big blue stone behind the rock formation?"

He glanced at it. "Yeah. What about it? Think there's treasure under there?"

I looked him straight in the eye and slowly shook my head. "No… there's a dead body under it."

He snorted. "Oh, sure. What, you think it's like some kind of magic monkey from a myth, trapped inside a rock?"

His disbelief shut me up. If the situation were reversed, I wouldn't believe him either.

I let it go. But that night, I developed a raging fever.

My sister freaked out when she saw my temperature had hit 107°F (42°C). She ran out to get our dad, who was playing mahjong at a neighbor's house.

When my parents saw how bad I was, they rushed me to the ER.

And that's when I started talking in my fevered delirium.

According to my sister, I said things that terrified the doctors, nurses, and even my parents. But she didn't know exactly what—she had stayed home.

She only found out later by eavesdropping on our parents.

Apparently, whatever I blurted out led the police straight to Beigong Park. They dug beneath the massive stone—and found a corpse.

The victim was Wang Dahai, the park's missing operations manager. He had disappeared over a month ago.

The police discovered a loan note in his pocket. It was from a contractor named Sun Zichu, who had borrowed 10,000 yuan from him.

Turns out, Sun Zichu had bribed Wang Dahai to secure the park renovation project, promising to pay him 10,000 yuan afterward. He even wrote an IOU.

But during construction, two accidents happened, and Sun lost money. If he paid Wang Dahai, he'd be in the red.

Desperate, Sun decided to back out of the deal.

But Wang Dahai wasn't the type to let things slide. He threatened to take the IOU to court. "If you don't pay up, I'll ruin you."

Cornered, Sun snapped. One night, he lured Wang Dahai to the park and strangled him.

The next day, workers placed the giant blue stone right over the body—sealing the crime. If not for my outburst, the truth might never have come to light.

After that, everything changed.

My classmates avoided me. Even Shitou, my best friend, started keeping his distance.

At the time, I didn't understand why.

It wasn't until a later visit to my grandma's house that I started to realize what I had become…