Chapter 1

When I was brutally killed, Mom was praying with my little sister for her final exam.

She also cruelly hung up on my call for help. “This is a huge deal that decides Sarah’s life. If you want to die, then go die. You’re such bad luck!”

Later, the city sent someone to inspect the school.

The inspection team found hundreds of scattered body parts buried in the concrete poured under the track on the school field.

To avoid causing panic at the school, they could only put it aside for the time being and dig the body parts out after the exams were over.

Mom stitched the remains together on the operating table herself and pieced together a face she knew all too well.

Jennifer from Class 3 at SKY High School.

Her own daughter, missing for two months, the daughter she hated to the core—me.

My limbs were removed from the concrete under the plastic track in the middle of the night on the day Sarah’s final exam ended, by a SWAT team that secretly came to the school.

The SWAT officers wore gas masks and dug for three hours, pulling out a total of four hundred and thirty-two scattered pieces of my body.

They transported the remains to the police station overnight, and several officers stayed up all night before finally piecing the body together into a rough human shape.

You could barely tell it was a young girl.

But the surface of the body had already turned into adipocere, and the stench was overwhelming.

One rookie officer with a weak stomach only glanced at “me” before he bent over the trash can and vomited until his face turned white.

Mom, who was the station’s guest forensic expert, stood nearby. She looked once, then turned away, her face full of pity.

She put on her gloves, switched on the bright lights over the autopsy table, and scanned every inch of me from top to bottom, her eyes filling with a trace of doubt.

My soul floated beside her, screaming and waving as hard as I could, even though I knew it was useless.

My body wasn’t complete. One piece was missing here, another piece was missing there.

The face that could best identify me had been slashed into vicious red marks by the killer, leaving no trace of what it had once looked like.

Even a monster looked less frightening than I did now.

Mom looked at my broken body so calmly, as if I were just another ordinary victim in her career.

The officer beside her could see her confusion and felt a little guilty.

“The body was cut up too finely. We searched all night and only found this much.”

Mom cut in steadily, “It’s fine. That’s enough to tell.”

After all, I hadn’t been dead for very long, and because I was sealed in concrete, the decomposition had slowed down.

Even though some adipocere had formed in places, that was actually a good thing.

The adipocere preserved the abuse and wounds I had suffered when I was alive very well.

It was obviously helpful for solving the case.

Mom suddenly froze, probably because several pieces of my body had fragments of SKY High School’s uniform stuck to them.

She picked up those pieces, a flicker of hesitation crossing her eyes, and her scalpel stopped too.

The owner of these body parts was a student at this school, a young girl.

Didn’t she look a lot like your daughter who had been missing for two months?

I stood nearby, my heart filled with emotions I couldn’t even name.

Mom, did you recognize that it was me?

She suddenly pulled back the white sheet, revealing my lower half.

Her hand reached toward my thighs, where there were large brown marks, as if something burning hot had been pressed against me.

They left behind ugly scars.

She ran her fingers over the scars several times, but found nothing.

Of course there would be nothing. To destroy these identifying marks on my body, they dragged me into an alley and rolled a curling iron over me again and again.

I still remembered that scorching heat, a temperature so hot it felt like it could burn away a person’s soul too.

Mom covered me back up with the white sheet. She took off her gloves, and the autopsy was over.

She still hadn’t recognized that the inhuman monster on the table was her own daughter, who had been missing for two months, the daughter she hated with all her heart—me.

I gave a bitter smile.

Forget it. I was already used to this.