Ming You stood over the lifeless body of So Yeon. The red flashlight beam pulled a surreal picture from the gloom: her beautiful, once-living body was now a bloodied, mutilated doll lying in a huge, pulsating puddle. The puddle wasn't just red. It was multi-layered.
At the bottom, soaked into the polyethylene, lay a dark burgundy, almost black layer of congealed blood. On top of it — a layer of fresh, bright scarlet, still warm blood. And at the very top, in the depressions and folds of the polyethylene, shimmering with a greasy, glossy sheen in the red light, floated islands and swirls of whitish, viscous semen mixed with blood. At the edges of the puddle, a pinkish foam was congealing — a mixture of saliva, froth, and other bodily fluids expelled in agony.
Ming You's pleasure from the act of violence had been replaced by the cold, practical necessity of disposal. He bent down, and the long, narrow kitchen knife was in his hand again. It was covered in blood from tip to handle.
Ming You didn't start with dismemberment, but with… examination.
He placed the blade of the knife, still warm, flat against one of the shallow cuts on the inner side of So Yeon's forearm. Then, with slight pressure, he ran it along the cut. Blood, which had already begun to clot at the edges of the wound, was squeezed out as a dark red, thick paste.
From this movement, from the new, albeit weak, pain signal, the body on the floor gave a residual nervous reaction. The fingers on one hand twitched feebly, like a sleeping cat's. From her half-open, mangled mouth came a quiet, hoarse exhalation, more like the moan of a sleeper.
"Ugh…!"
She was still alive. Monstrously mutilated, bleeding out, but a tiny spark of life, stubborn and stupid, still smoldered somewhere deep in her ruined brain.
"So Yeon! So Yeon!" So Ho's hoarse, strained scream broke through his stupor. He saw the movement of her fingers. Naive, insane hope, like a poisonous thorn, pierced his clouded consciousness. "Hold on! Please, hold on!"
But his sister couldn't hear him. Her consciousness, if it still existed anywhere, was floating in a sea of fog, pain, and the deafening noise of dying neurons. In her clouded eyes, one intact, the other a terrible, bloody hollow, nothing was reflected. They were glassy, dull, staring at the ceiling but not seeing it.
She moaned weakly, her lips, torn by pliers, moving, trying to form either a word or simply to release her last breath. Her face, once lively and expressive, was deathly pale, almost porcelain, save for the dried blood around her mouth, nose, and the empty eye socket. Her skin had taken on a waxy, semi-transparent hue, through which a bluish network of vessels showed at her temples and neck.
"So Yeon!!!" Tears welled up again in So Ho's eyes, already dry from crying. But these weren't tears of grief—they were tears of absolute, helpless agony, the tears of a witness watching the last embers of life glow in what he loved most in the world.
His sister seemed to focus her gaze for a second. Her single intact eye slowly, with incredible effort, turned toward the sound of his voice. In its depths, in that murky glass, something flickered—not recognition, but a final, animal instinct, a last attempt at connection. Her lips trembled. She wanted to say something. Maybe his name. Maybe "mom." Maybe just "it hurts."
But she didn't have time.
Ming You, who had been observing this pathetic attempt with cold, clinical interest, decided the experiment was over.
He changed his grip on the knife and took it like a stiletto. He directed the tip, thin and sharp, toward her intact eye. The eye was open, the pupil dilated, almost black, reflecting the distorted red spot of the flashlight.
"No…" So Ho exhaled, but it was no longer a scream, just a quiet, desperate groan.
Ming You drove the tip of the knife right into the center of the iris. There was a quiet but distinct squelching sound, like puncturing a very ripe grape. The eyeball resisted for an instant, then the blade penetrated inside. Transparent fluid—the vitreous humor—mixed with drops of blood, seeped out of the puncture in a thin trickle and ran down her temple.
So Yeon didn't scream. Her body tensed in a final, convulsive arch, then froze, and then went completely limp. The only sound she made was a short, ragged exhalation—"A-ah…"—more like relief than pain. And then—absolute, final silence from her. Her chest no longer rose. The fine trembling ceased, and the last spark went out.
"So Yeon!!! You bastard, you won't get away with this!!! I'll find you! I'll haunt you in every dream! I'll scrape your soul out of hell!!!" So Ho shouted, but there was no more strength in his curses, only empty, ritualistic despair.
He saw the light finally leave his sister's eyes. And at that moment, something inside him snapped, not with a crash, but with a quiet, cold click. All that remained was a huge, bottomless void, filled with a single image: the tip of a knife entering an eye.
Ming You wasn't listening to him. His mind was now on the next, practical task: dismemberment and disposal.
He set the knife aside and went to his bag. From it, he pulled out a large, heavy cleaver. Its wide, massive blade was designed for chopping bones and tendons. It gleamed dully, mercilessly.
Ming You returned to the body. He stood over it, assessing where to begin. His gaze was calculating, like a butcher's. He decided to start with the limbs.
Ming You placed the cleaver's blade against the skin on the inner side of her left thigh, high up, almost at the groin. The area was already covered in blood and cuts, but it didn't matter. He raised the cleaver and brought it down with a short, sharp effort.
THWUMP-CRUNCH!
The sound wasn't as clean as in movies. It was a wet, heavy, crushing sound. The blade sank into the flesh, easily cutting through muscle and fat, but met the femur. Ming You leaned his weight on it, pressing the handle. There was a disgusting, grating crunch—the bone, not severed on the first try, cracked, and fragments dug into the surrounding tissue.
He pulled out the cleaver and raised it for a second strike. Dark, thick blood spurted from the wound, splattering his shoes and pants. With the second blow, the leg was almost completely severed, held on only by a flap of skin and tendons. He set the cleaver aside, took the knife, and carefully, as if butchering a carcass, cut the remaining connections. The severed leg with its small, elegant foot fell onto the polyethylene with a dull, soft thud.
"AAA!!!" So Ho's cry was no longer conscious. It was a reflexive howl ripped from his throat each time the cleaver fell.
His body was racked with spasms. He couldn't take it anymore. His stomach, already empty, clenched into a tight, painful knot, then turned inside out. He vomited—first bitter, yellow bile, then just dry, agonizing heaves. The smell of stomach acid mixed with the all-consuming stench of blood and death.
Ming You didn't stop. He proceeded without the slightest haste to sever the second leg, then both arms at the shoulder joints. Each blow had its own sound accompaniment: a juicy squelch when cutting muscle, a dull thud when hitting bone, a grating crunch when it shattered. He neatly placed the severed limbs aside on a fresh piece of polyethylene.
Then he turned to the torso. The cleaver was too crude a tool for precise work. He took the knife again, then rolled the bloodied torso onto its back. The chest with its now bluish, sagging breasts, and the torn abdomen. He plunged the tip of the knife into the soft tissue just below the sternum and made an incision downward, to the pubic bone. Skin, subcutaneous fat, abdominal wall muscles—all parted under the sharp blade with a quiet, silky hiss. The abdominal cavity opened up like a terrible, warm flower.
And the blood and smells gushed out. If it had mainly smelled of blood before, now the air filled with a thick, sweetish-putrid, indescribably nauseating smell of opened entrails. The smell of half-digested food from the stomach, the sharp smell of bile, the metallic tang of the spleen, the sweetish, dense aroma of the liver, and something else, warm, organic, unspeakably foul.
Ming You, without blinking, rolled up his sleeves above his elbows; his gloves were already covered in blood up to the elbows. He plunged his hands into the incision. His fingers sank into the warm, slippery mass. He felt for the ribs, spread them apart to widen access. Then he began extracting the organs, one by one, with the precision of a pathologist.
First, he pulled out the stomach—a grayish-pink, flabby sack, partially filled with fluid. Ming You placed it on the polyethylene. Then he pulled on the intestine. Loops of slippery, pale pink intestine, several meters long, began to slither out of the incision like huge, disgusting snakes. They were warm, pulsating with residual peristalsis. Ming You pulled them out and coiled them into rings.
Then the liver—a dark burgundy, dense organ, still warm and oozing dark blood. The spleen, kidneys, pancreas… He extracted each organ, studied it for a second as if checking the quality of goods, then set it aside.