"Shut up."
Ming You's voice was not loud, but it carried such an icy, absolute certainty that Chang Wo fell silent for a moment. He saw Ming You turn around, take two quick steps. The hand holding the cleaver traced a short arc.
Chang Wo didn't even have time to understand what was happening. He only felt a terrible, crushing blow to his throat. Not a sharp pain, but precisely a blow, as if a concrete pillar had been driven into him. The cleaver sank deep, almost to the hilt. The blade severed the larynx, the trachea, and came to rest against the spine. Air stopped flowing into his lungs. Instead, something in his throat gurgled and bubbled.
He tried to inhale—and drew his own blood into himself. Warm, salty, thick. It rushed into his lungs, triggering a new, terrible spasm. He coughed, and this only made things worse—blood sprayed from the wound, from his nose, from his mouth. He was choking. His body, obeying instinct, jerked violently, trying to get air that wasn't there.
Dark spots swam before his eyes. The pain from the wound was deafening, but it was already being overridden by the panicky, all-consuming feeling of suffocation. He saw Ming You, without changing his expression, pull the cleaver from his throat. A new fountain gushed from the wound, drenching his chest and face with warm stickiness.
Consciousness began to slip away. But before the darkness completely consumed him, he managed to see Ming You turn towards the body of his wife.
"Ch...Chang... Yeon..." he rasped, and it wasn't words, just bubbles of blood escaping his destroyed trachea.
The last thing his fading gaze captured was how Ming You, bracing his foot against the still-warm torso of his wife, grabbed her hair and yanked it towards himself. A crunch was heard as the last ligaments holding the head together tore. Then the crimson, shapeless mass went into the black trash bag he held ready.
Darkness closed in. Chang Wo finally died, with frozen horror in his eyes.
He was wet. Covered entirely in dried and fresh blood, bile, vomit. He hung on ropes, and each one bit into his flesh like a red-hot wire.
And his already dead eyes saw.
They saw Ming You, kneeling on the blood-soaked polyethylene, dismembering his wife's body. Not a body anymore. Already a corpse.
Ming You worked with the cleaver, but now it wasn't just a chopping tool. Its blade, dulled by bone and coated with a matte film of dried and fresh blood, became an extension of his arm. The heavy tool entered the flesh with a dull, wet thud, with a crunch like a dry biscuit snapping, severing small bones, but the main work was ahead. He began, as was proper, with the limbs.
Lifting Chang Yeon's limp, already cooling arm, he pulled it away from the torso, finding the elbow joint with his fingers, slippery from fat and blood. The cleaver hung in the air for a moment, as if scanning for the optimal point of application of force, then descended in a short, sharp motion.
Thwack.
Not the clean ring of metal, but a dull, heavy crunch-squelch as the blade pierced the skin, tore through muscle, and met bone. The joint didn't sever on the first try—the sturdy ball of the radial head offered resistance. The arm twisted unnaturally, hanging by shreds of skin, flaps of muscle, and severed tendons that gleamed white in the depths of the wound like split twine.
A second blow, at a different angle, with a twisting of the blade—and the connection was finally broken. The arm fell with a quiet slap onto the spread polyethylene, already sagging under puddles of dark, almost black blood.
Ming You picked up the severed arm, turned it in his hands, studying the cut. In the rainbow of sliced tissues, fragments of the humerus were visible with sharp, jagged edges, like a broken chicken drumstick. Muscles, bundles of dark red fiber, contracted weakly in final convulsions, exposing the white, glossy ends of tendons that slowly retracted inward, like cut elastic bands. He threw the arm onto the floor, into the general pile that was beginning to resemble raw materials at a slaughterhouse.
Then the left leg—the blow fell not on the joint, but directly through the femur, the thickest bone in the body. The cleaver sank deep but stuck two-thirds of the way in. Ming You, without changing his grip, pressed his whole body onto the handle, using it as a lever. A drawn-out, grating screech sounded, the bone cracked, then, with a disgusting, juicy crunch, split open, releasing a gelatinous, fatty pale-yellow marrow.
The flesh parted, exposing bone fragments. He severed the right leg through the knee, carefully hooking the patella with the blade and tearing it out along with a piece of tendon. Each blow was accompanied by its own unique soundscape: a squelching intro, a bony crescendo, and a final wet slap of the severed part hitting the plastic sheeting.
Having severed the limbs, Ming You moved on to the torso. He opened the chest cavity—not with surgical precision, but with butchery efficiency. A blow under the ribs, sharp, with a twisting jerk—the cleaver blade plunged deep into the flesh and stuck. He didn't pull it out. Instead, bracing his foot against the corpse's side for leverage, he pulled the handle towards himself like a saw.
A crackle of breaking ribs sounded—thin, curved plates that didn't break cleanly but crumbled, driving their fragments into the innards. He widened the incision, breaking the rib arches with his hands, hearing them crunch and separate from the sternum. Inside, in the still-warm, steaming cavity, a sweetish-coppery smell swirled mixed with the sour breath of empty intestines. Ming You thrust his gloved hand in there, elbow-deep in sticky, warm blood, and began pulling out organs like vegetables from a garden.
First, the lungs—huge, porous, grayish-pink sacs, marbled with dark crimson bruises from agonal convulsions. They slipped out with a wet hiss, still trying to contract in a final, spasmodic movement, and plopped onto the polyethylene.
Then the heart. It was smaller than he expected, the size of a tightly clenched fist, covered in yellow fat and dark purple vessels. Ming You cut the remnants of the aorta and pulmonary artery, pulled it out, feeling under his fingers the last, weak tremors of the muscle. He turned it in his hands, as if appraising goods, then suddenly, with all his might, squeezed it. The muscle tissue burst under the pressure, from the torn chambers and severed vessels the last, thick drops of black blood sprayed directly into his face.
The intestines. He wound them around his arm like an endless, slippery, warm rope. The loops were pale pink, bluish, in some places swollen with decomposition gases. They plopped onto the floor with a heavy, wet sound, releasing a foul-smelling mucus. The liver—dark burgundy, a weighty gland with a smooth capsule that tore under his fingers. The kidneys—bean-shaped, in a fatty capsule. The spleen—loose, blood-filled. Everything was carefully extracted, examined, and placed in a separate, growing pile on the polyethylene—future biological waste.
When the chest and abdominal cavities were empty, turned into a bloody cave with protruding rib fragments and a spine at the bottom, Ming You took on the head. Or rather, what was left of it—the skull separated from the torso with shreds of muscle and trachea on the neck dangling like bloody ribbons. He placed it on the floor, face down, took a heavy mechanic's hammer from his backpack, and aimed at the parietal bone.
Thud.
A dull, bony knock, like hitting an empty pumpkin. The skull cracked, a dent formed, but it didn't split. A second blow, with more force. A third. The bone at the back of the head caved inward, and from the fan-shaped cracks, as from a broken egg, grayish-white, gelatinous brain matter spurted and oozed out, laced with thin vessels. He continued to beat rhythmically until the skull wasn't just fragments, but a flat, wet pancake of bone crumbs, tangled hair, bits of skin, and homogeneous brain paste, in which only dental prosthetics or crowns could identify anything.
And so, when all that remained of Chang Yeon was a pile of white, cleaned-to-a-shine bones, fragments, and an amorphous mass of meat and organs, Ming You proceeded to the next, key phase. He took a long, narrow, incredibly sharp boning knife. His work now required not strength, but patience and meticulousness. He hooked the femur of Chang Yeon's wife, firmly clamped it in his hand, braced against the glove slippery with fat. The knife blade entered with a squeak at an angle into the meat remaining on the bone. This wasn't slicing—it was picking, scraping.
He ran the blade along the bone, scraping off every fiber, every thread of connective tissue. The meat, permeated with small vessels and fascial membranes, didn't come off in slabs, but in shreds, with a quiet whistling and a crunchy sound of fibers tearing from the periosteum.
Ming You picked it out from every pit, every protrusion, every articular cavity. Each piece, no bigger than a thimble, fell into the trash bag with a soft, sticky thud. From the ribs, he pulled out the intercostal muscles in thin, trembling red strips. From the pelvis, from the deep groin areas, he scraped out dark red, fatty lumps mixed with lymph nodes.
The spine became a separate task for him—he had to slip a finger and the knife into each intervertebral space to extract the gelatinous nuclei of the discs and pieces of the deep back muscles. This painstaking process took long hours.
In the end, in the trash bag lay not slices, but precisely mince—an uneven, sticky, pink-red mass of pieces of different sizes, ground tendons, bits of fat, and membranes. This mass he then further chopped with a cleaver into even smaller fragments until it became a homogeneous, moist, pulsating under the moonlight mush.
Only after that did he dump it into another black trash bag, where it clumped into one heavy, shapeless lump. He did this with every bone, with every fragment of flesh.
And only when all that remained of Chang Yeon were several tightly packed, oozing black trash bags, emitting a sweetish-putrid smell of fresh meat and blood, did Ming You finally turn to Chang Wo.