The staff room greeted him with the smell of old paper, dust, and bitter coffee. He acted quickly but without the slightest fuss, every movement calculated and purposeful. His gaze, scanning like a bird of prey, slid over the shelves crammed with folders and stacks of journals. On one of the lower shelves lay a pile of last year's attendance journals.
"At the start of each academic year, current addresses and phone numbers for emergencies are entered there. The conservatism of the system is its main vulnerability," flashed through his mind.
His fingers, thin and tenacious, quickly flipped through the yellowed pages covered in neat characters. And there it was—the needed class. Line by line... Names, birth dates, contacts. And finally:
"So Ho. Cheongil Street, 12. Apartment 45."
"Perfect," Ming You thought, and deep within his black eyes, empty and bottomless, a cold flash seemed to reflect for an instant—not emotion, but satisfaction from a correctly solved equation.
He didn't write it down—a paper trail was an unnecessary risk. Instead, he simply took out his unremarkable smartphone, a model lost among countless others, and took a clear, detailed photograph of the page. A moment was spent checking the photo: all lines, all characters were perfectly legible. Then, maintaining the same methodicalness, he carefully placed the journal back in the stack, precisely aligning its spine with the others.
His attention automatically shifted to the surrounding space. He checked if he had moved anything: the angle of a folder on the table, the position of a chair, the orientation of journals on the shelf. Not a speck of dust, not a hint of his presence. The room looked exactly as it had a minute ago—a preserved, untouched microcosm.
Completing this silent ritual, he exited. The door closed without a click. The key was returned to the teacher with a light, grateful smile—a mere formality instantly forgotten. And within a moment, his figure dissolved into the gathering stream of students, becoming an indistinguishable part of it.
…
After classes, the action shifted from the reconnaissance phase to the phase of practical preparation. Already in his apartment, Ming You, in the kitchen, pulled out a desk drawer and removed a false bottom. From there, with ritual precision, he began extracting items packed in airtight bags.
Thin vinyl gloves, silent and leaving no traces. He stretched one, watching as the material tightly hugged every joint of his fingers, turning the hand into something impersonal, surgical. A roll of dense, matte construction polyethylene hissed as it unfurled on the countertop.
Ming You ran his palm over its cool, slightly rough surface, imagining how it would absorb sound, light, life. A bundle with tools: nylon cable ties, strong and flexible; a roll of wide painter's tape with a characteristic rustle when torn; a small but powerful flashlight with a red filter, turning the world into a crimson surrealistic picture.
And the last — he unfolded a cloth with almost reverent slowness. A butcher's cleaver, heavy, with a wide blade. And a long kitchen knife with a narrow, mirror-polished blade of high-carbon steel. He took it by the textured handle, feeling the perfect balance. The cold metal reflected the ceiling, distorting its smooth line into a convex, frightening grimace. In this warped reflection, he fancied for a moment something more than just concrete and whitewash — as if reality itself was bending under the pressure of his will.
"Everything must be sterile," he said aloud in a quiet tone, checking the contents of the bag. "No traces, no witnesses, no bodies. Polyethylene, solvent, lime... the location is already determined. But the process... the process must be clean."
He changed into nondescript, worn black hoodie and faded khaki pants, which he never wore to school. The fabric was rough to the touch. The clothes were slightly oversized to hide the contours of his body, to turn him into an amorphous shadow. A medical mask and a black beanie went into the deep pockets.
Ming You looked at himself in the hallway mirror. The impeccable student, the straight-A student with an empty smile, had disappeared. Before him stood a faceless silhouette, a ghost without age or distinctive features. Only the eyes — charcoal-black, bottomless — peered from the depths of the hood with cold, almost bored clarity. The corners of his lips twitched in a semblance of a smile.
…
The road to So Ho's house was covered by him like an ordinary person going about his business. Ming You didn't creep along walls, didn't hide his face. He walked purposefully but without haste, with an average stride, like someone who knew exactly where he was going and why. His gaze, however, was not absent-minded. He scanned the surrounding space with the cold efficiency of a radar: sliding over building facades, noting the locations of outdoor surveillance cameras (there were disappointingly few, mostly by banks and large stores), recording the movement patterns of residents — mothers with strollers, office workers returning home. He noted the dog park and the exact time when an elderly man walked a large, lazy dog. All this was stored in his consciousness, forming a map of patterns, a schedule of vulnerabilities for this neighborhood.
The abandoned basement in the semi-ruined utility building two blocks from the target had been selected by him earlier from satellite images. The place was ideal: remote from busy streets, unlit, with a rotten wooden door hanging on its last hinges. Wild bushes grew nearby, hiding the entrance from casual glances.
Ming You stopped in front of the door, listening. Only the wind in the branches was audible. He turned on his phone's flashlight, circled the building, making sure no one was around, and slipped silently inside. The door closed behind him, muffling the sounds of the outside world.
Inside smelled of dampness, mold, dust, and long-forgotten junk — a scent of desolation and oblivion. The white light of the flashlight, not as bright and noticeable, pulled out of the darkness piles of old bricks, plaster debris, and bare, moldy concrete walls. The air was still, heavy, as if the very atmosphere here had frozen in anticipation.
Ming You spread the polyethylene in the center of the largest room, away from possible leaks from the ceiling. He laid it in several layers, carefully smoothing each layer with his palm, securing the edges with bricks as weights and sealing the seams with wide tape. The work was meticulous, almost meditative. Every movement was deliberate, devoid of haste, filled with a strange, rational grace.
He imagined how this layer would absorb, isolate, how it would become a boundary between the clean space of his actions and the dirt of the surrounding world. When the last edge was fixed, Ming You stopped and surveyed the prepared area.
"Here," he said to himself. "Here everything will be brought to a logical conclusion. Here the threat will not just be neutralized. It will be... studied. So Ho wanted the truth. He will get it. The most definitive one. The one that lies beyond words, beyond fear. The one that is learned through pain."
The thought of simply eliminating So Ho now seemed primitive to him, almost insultingly wasteful:
"His stubbornness, his principles, that stupid, childish belief in black and white — I won't just erase it, I'll take it apart piece by piece, showing all its fragility and meaninglessness."
Ming You felt a light, almost intellectual excitement.
He turned off the flashlight. Absolute darkness swallowed him, broken only by the sound of his own, even breathing. In this darkness, the plans gained final clarity. He mentally ran through the list of tools, the sequence of actions.
Leaving the basement as silently as he had entered, Ming You headed towards So Ho's house. He moved now with a different purpose — not reconnaissance, but final confirmation of the pattern. He approached the basketball court opposite the apartment building. And there, as suggested by social media data and observations, was a familiar figure.
So Ho was playing one-on-one with a girl. She had the same piercing gray eyes as So Ho and long black hair tied in a practical ponytail. She wore a black long-sleeved shirt and black shorts. She moved easily and confidently, laughing at a missed shot. So Ho, focused, was trying to beat her, but in his smile, in how he teased her, there was ordinary, human warmth.
The scene was so normal, so saturated with simple life, that for a moment it evoked in Ming You a strange, cold curiosity:
"Interesting, how will this connection, this attachment, behave under pressure? Will it be the lever that amplifies the suffering, or, on the contrary, provide unwanted strength? An interesting variable factor..."
Ming You pulled up his hood, sat on a bench in the shade of trees, far enough away to be inconspicuous but close enough to see and hear.
"He is more relaxed," Ming You analyzed. "Less vigilant. The sister — his comfort zone. This makes him stronger morally, but weaker operationally. He doesn't expect a threat here and now, doesn't scan the surroundings with the same intensity. The protective instinct is directed at her, not at the perimeter."