**Secret.**
My hands trembled as I glanced back into the darkness.
The old man Si’s nasal bone was broken, along with his eyes, which I could never tell if they were blind or not. However, when he was alive, he showed almost no signs of being blind, which still puzzles me to this day.
He must have had many secrets. Chen Pi Ah Si was unlike anyone else; he had no moral burdens, killing without blinking and showing little concern for the lives of others. My family often took extreme precautions for the greater good, which led to messages being communicated too subtly and not being passed on effectively. But Chen Pi Ah Si was different. The information he left behind stirred a long-buried curiosity within me.
But I truly didn’t know how to remove his nasal bone in this state. I felt lucky if he would let me keep my own nasal bone.
I took a deep breath and slowly walked into the darkness, approaching Chen Pi Ah Si from behind. I smelled a faint fragrance, which I recognized as the so-called “forbidden incense.”
I covered my nose and cautiously moved closer, trying to make a little noise.
For some reason, there was no response. I tugged at my shorts and continued to inch closer.
In the dim light, the figure before me slowly began to take shape. I was drenched in cold sweat as I inched forward.
I saw a face that was nothing but skin stretched over bones, covered in wrinkles and spots from being soaked in water. The eyes bulged but had no eyeballs, just white. The fingernails of its hands were tangled in my meteor hammer.
At the nasal bone, there was a horrifying scar that ran across the eyes and the bridge of the nose. The object I needed was likely beneath that scar.
How to get it?
I held my breath, thinking, should I insert my fingers into the nostrils? That would be quite the feat.
I knew that many nasal surgeries required lifting the upper lip, cutting at the connection between the lip and the gums, and lifting the skin of the face to expose the entire nasal bone. Other methods would make it hard to reach the upper part of the nose. Of course, directly smashing the face was also an option.
After thinking it over, I squatted down and retreated, deciding to take a risk with the most foolish method.
I bit down on the oxygen lamp and started moving some stones around, beginning to build a wall around the old man Si’s body.
In the darkness, there was no sense of time, and I had no idea how long it had been—surely quite a while. My whole body ached as I built a tower around the corpse, encasing it within.
It was a chaotic mess, like a child’s game of house. If my grandfather and third uncle knew, they would surely be furious. But I had nothing else; all I could use were these stones.
I knew this thing required a lot of strength, so I specifically stacked several layers of stones the size of a human head. I learned about construction and made adjustments to the structural mechanics; one stone wedged against another, and the higher I built, the more weight made the tower sturdier. It was like eating monkey brains, wrapping the old man Si entirely in stones, leaving only his head exposed.
Then I climbed to the top of the tower, raising a sharp stone and smashing it down onto the old man’s face.
With just one hit, the old man Si moved, thrashing around in the stone circle. The stones quickly loosened, but because of my design, the collapsed stones all fell onto him, completely pinning him down.
I struck again, and his entire face caved in. The stones shifted; he tried to crawl out, and I shouted, “Offended!”
With all my strength, I smashed down, and my face immediately shattered open.
My face was still twitching, and my eyeballs were crushed and pushed out to the sides.
I didn’t dare to reach in directly; there was nothing around me, so I had to take off my underwear, wrap my hand in it, and reach into my nose to pry open the facial bones.
I felt a ring, and it seemed there was a copper wire leading into the nasal cavity.
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