Chang Wo was no longer a person, but a dead piece of flesh. Ming You approached him. The cleaver in his hand dripped heavily, each drop falling onto the polyethylene sheet with a distinct, clock-like plop-plop. He planted his bloodied boot on Chang Wo's chest, pinning him against the back of the post to secure the torso, and raised the cleaver.
The first blow shattered the collarbone. The next strike — to the shoulder joint. At first, there was slight resistance from the skin, then a juicy tear of muscle, followed by a grating, vibrating screech against the ball head of the humerus, and finally — a dull, internal crunch as the glenoid cavity of the scapula cracked and the entire structure collapsed.
His right arm hung, held on by a flap of skin, severed muscle, and a bundle of nerves stretched out like wires. Ming You, dissatisfied with the messiness, finished the job with a second, precise blow. The arm fell off, dangled from the rope he was tied with, swayed for a moment like a pendulum, and dropped.
Ming You chopped off his other arm, then, methodically, chopped off his legs. He wasn't just hacking; he was dismembering, choosing points where the bone was thinner. Each blow was measured, economical. He didn't waste extra energy, breathing evenly, only beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, which he wiped away with a bloodied sleeve.
When Chang Wo was nothing but a bloodied, trembling torso with a head dangling on tatters of neck, Ming You made the final, longitudinal cut from the jugular notch to the pubis. The skin parted with a quiet rustle, like dense fabric. Subcutaneous fat, yellow and granular, bulged from the incision.
The abdominal muscles, the last barrier, split apart, revealing the shiny peritoneum. He opened it, and the intestines, still warm, began to slowly spill out under their own weight, loops of intestine sliding over his thighs onto the floor. Ming You tore open the chest cavity, broke the ribs, exposing the lungs.
Ming You, thrusting his hand into the chest cavity, felt around, cut the remaining vessels, and pulled out Chang Wo's heart. It lay on his palm, still contracting, making final, weak, arrhythmic twitches, like a caught fish. Each contraction squeezed out a thin, pulsating stream of dark blood from the severed aorta and pulmonary trunk.
Then Ming You clenched his fist. Not with sudden force, but slowly, with increasing pressure, watching as the engine deformed, as muscle fibers burst, as the chambers ruptured. The organ burst with a quiet, deep squelch-splat, turning into a shapeless lump in his palm, showering everything around with a warm downpour.
Ming You worked for several more hours, moving from one body to the next with a cold, cyclical methodology. The garden shears, extracted from the girl's eye sockets, lay on the polyethylene nearby. Their long blades, sticky with dried brain matter and vitreous humor almost up to the handles, slowly dripped a transparent-pink ichor, forming small puddles on the sheet. The traces of his struggle with the tool were visible on her face — the edges of the wounds around the eye sockets were torn, pulverized from the effort as he rocked and pulled the shears, feeling their ends crunch free from the ethmoid bone.
With the coach, with the girl, the same inexorable algorithm repeated. Her brain, as he had suspected, was deformed, driven inward into the skull by the thin, sharp blade, resembling crumpled, bloodied gelatin with a deep, ragged channel through the center.
And again, for each of them, the phase of total annihilation began. Ming You wasn't just dismembering. His goal was the erasure of the very biographical form. He crushed the large bones of the adult man with particular diligence, the cleaver's poll rising and falling with a monotonous thud until the humeri, femurs, and pelvis turned not into fragments, but into a pile of white, oily crumbs mixed with fatty, pasty bone marrow squeezed out like toothpaste.
He pried the teeth from the jaws with a kitchen knife, one by one, hearing the nasty grating of metal on enamel and the thin crack of breaking roots. The girl's baby teeth came out easier, with a soft click. All of them, pearly and yellowish, were collected into a garbage bag.
And then began the most painstaking, almost meditative work — picking out the meat. A long, thin boning knife became an extension of his fingers. He would take another bone — radius, tibia, rib — and begin scraping. The blade scraped along the bone with a quiet, rasping sound, stripping every fiber, every thread of connective tissue that tore away with a microscopic crunch.
Ming You picked the meat out of every pit, every protrusion, every articular cavity, turning the bone into a perfectly clean, white, slippery anatomical cast. Meat, fat, fascia — all of it fell into a common metal container, mixing into a sticky, pink-red mass. Intercostal muscles were pulled out in thin, trembling strips. Dark red, glandular lumps were scraped from the pelvis.
When the collection of cleanly picked bones grew in the corner, and the container was filled with this heterogeneous organic matter, the final act began. He took a heavy cleaver. And started chopping.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The sound was no longer cracking, but dull, wet, homogeneous. He chopped until nothing crunched under the blade, until the entire mass — the coach's muscles, the woman's liver, the girl's lungs, everything that was once alive and individual — turned into a uniform, sticky, pink-gray substance. Into anonymous mince. This process, taking hours, was a sacred act for him.
When only a uniform paste remained on the spread-out polyethylene floor, Ming You set aside the cleaver. He took garbage bags. Crouching down, he began scooping up the sticky mass. It didn't pour; it stretched after his hand in greasy, shiny strands, falling into the black garbage bag with a heavy, wet slop-plop.
Each such lump, weighing several kilograms, thudded dully against the bottom of the bag, and the bag gradually bulged outward, becoming shapeless and awkward. Ming You worked meticulously, scraping out every drop of mince with his hand, scraping off stuck pieces with the back of the knife blade. He filled one bag almost to the top, leaving only room to tie it. The bag's dense film tightened under the weight of the gelatinous contents, and in places, a murky, pinkish color showed through.
After tying the first bag with a double knot of zip ties, he proceeded to the second, where he put the bone crumbs, internal organs initially set aside separately, and that pile of white, clean bones that now held no value. The bones, despite their volume, were relatively light, and the bag with them became more puffy than heavy.
The third bag became a receptacle for all other "non-conforming" biological material: hair, torn out in clumps and gathered into a sticky ball, nail clippings, bits of cartilage, and everything that hadn't yielded to perfect shredding. He tied this bag with particular care.
Finally, before him on the floor lay four dark, pulsating with internal tension bladders. They didn't just stand — they lived their disgusting, passive existence, slowly settling and taking the shape of the floor's surface. The smell from them was thick, sweetly coppery, with a sour note of incipient decay, penetrating even through the dense plastic. Ming You sprayed each knot and seam of the bags with disinfectant solution from a spray bottle, killing possible odors and traces on the surface.
The polyethylene sheeting, laid in several layers, had served its purpose. When the main work was done, Ming You carefully rolled up the bloodied top layers inward, turning them into huge, sticky rolls. Then he rolled up the clean bottom layers. He packed all of this into additional garbage bags.
Then began the cleanup — the final, no less important ritual than the destruction itself. Even before the main operation, during the preliminary inspection, Ming You had found in the corner of the neighboring room, littered with plaster debris, two items that became key for the cleanup phase: a rusty but intact galvanized bucket without a handle and a large, slightly dented enameled basin with chipped edges. They were covered in dust and cobwebs but had no through holes. He took them to the "work zone," after first washing the outside with the water he had brought. The bucket was for the bleach solution, the basin for the initial rinsing of tools and draining liquids.
He had brought the chemicals and specialized agents with him, stored in his hiking backpack, which served as his mobile laboratory. The backpack stood in a clean corner, on a fresh, untouched layer of polyethylene. Unzipping it, Ming You extracted from it, wrapped in several layers of bubble wrap, two containers: a large liter canister of hydrogen peroxide and a liter bottle of professional concentrated cleaning agent based on chlorine and alkali, designed to remove biological contamination and odor. Nearby lay packages of sterile wipes, a roll of heavy-duty black garbage bags, and a couple of spray bottles.
The first step of the cleanup followed. He started with himself. Removing the thick rubber gloves, which sloshed and hung from his hands like bells filled with pinkish liquid, he poured their contents into the common drainage basin, then immersed them in the bucket of clean bleach, where they remained lying at the bottom like soaked limbs. Then he took the large plastic canister of hydrogen peroxide and the container with the professional, caustic cleaning solution for bio-contamination.
Ming You moved from the center of the room to the periphery, like a scanner. Every square centimeter of surfaces he could have touched underwent double, even triple treatment. First, he liberally poured or sprayed peroxide — the liquid hissed, reacting with the tiniest, invisible-to-the-eye remnants of organic matter, raising white, bubbling spots even where there seemed to be no traces.
He observed this chemical purge with cold interest, letting the reactions complete. Then followed the chlorine and surfactant solution. He didn't just wipe — he scrubbed with pressure, going over the same spots with a clean, white cloth again and again, checking for the slightest yellowish or pinkish tint on the white fabric. He paid special attention to tool handles, the edges of the basins and the post on which Chang Wo and his family had died. Every item taken out of the room was dipped or wiped to a sterile shine.
The tools — the cleaver, cleaver, kitchen knife, shears, ropes — went through a real baptism. He soaked them in a deep basin of concentrated bleach solution, where they lay, covered with fine gas bubbles. After ten minutes, he took them out, rinsed them under a stream of water from the bottles he'd brought, dried them with disposable towels, and then meticulously wrapped each tool in several layers of cling film, then in foil, and finally, packed them in individual heavy-duty ziplock bags. They were no longer murder weapons, but turned into faceless, hermetically sealed bundles.