It’s Him – Ch49 (End)

Grand Finale (Part 3)

Li Xun did not go to the arrest scene. She wanted Tao Feng and Zhao Xin to believe that she was dead.

Her mother’s bail had already been approved. The Qian family’s lawyer took her to pay the bail money, and then she could take her mother home.

Li Yugui came out, having lost even more weight and aged considerably. The first thing Li Xun noticed was her white hair.

When they met, Li Yugui immediately saw the bandages on Li Xun’s legs and the bruises on her neck.

She said, “It’s good that you’re alive, it’s good that you’re alive.”

Li Xun’s nose tingled, and she comforted her mother by holding her arm, still speaking in a hoarse voice, “Originally, the plan could have gone more smoothly, but I didn’t anticipate the crocodile. Who would have thought there would be a crocodile in there?”

Li Yugui held Li Xun’s hand, trembling slightly. She paused for a while to process the words, and then said, “We should have gone earlier.”

They walked back together, and Li Xun took her to the police station to identify the children.

They both knew what they had to do, but it felt like a forbidden topic that they couldn’t bring up.

There were five children inside the Kitchen counter. Taking them out was not easy—not just technically, but also emotionally.

If people can feel sympathy for the death of a fellow human, then the death of a child is even harder to accept.

The process was interrupted several times.

It wasn’t until dark that the dismantling of the Kitchen counter was finally completed.

But there were only five children…

Zhang Mingcai’s eyes searched inch by inch, and finally, she said, “There’s no child of mine here…”

She turned to find Zhao Xin, saying, “Where’s my child?”

Zhao Xin hadn’t spoken a word. He stood on the side, watching everything as if it had nothing to do with him. Even when pressed, he remained silent.

Zhao Jingzheng was already numb.

The children were neatly placed in the living room. This was his home, the place he grew up in, yet so many children had been kept here.

After hearing their words, he spoke, “When my dad made the Kitchen counter, he also made two nightstands.”

His nightstand wasn’t the kind that could be pulled out like others, but a long rectangular one for placing water cups and books.

Everyone hurried to the bedroom and found the two nightstands.

Li Yugui arrived the next morning. No one had slept. The children were rescued from that confined space and laid out in the living room.

Some bold people tried to sneak in and take photos by climbing in through the window from the next door, hoping to make big news, but once they got in, they immediately ran out.

Li Yugui and the others bumped into them as they entered. Everything in the house was enveloped in an air of despair.

Li Yugui recognized her child as soon as she came in.

The child’s little hand covered its eyes.

Her daughter always covered her eyes when she cried out of sadness.

Li Yugui stepped forward, and in her mind, she had already considered it. The killer always killed one at a time, and the coroner had said the child’s fingers were removed while she was still alive, unlike other cases.

Maybe he didn’t kill her daughter. Maybe her daughter was still alive.

But now, everything was shattered.

Zhao Xin watched this scene, and the person who had remained silent until now finally seized the opportunity and said, “This is your daughter…”

“I remember her well. She was the most obedient one. When I told her not to cry, she wouldn’t cry. When I told her not to make a fuss, she didn’t. She even asked me if we could not dig out her eyes because she didn’t want her mother to be sad.”

Li Yugui turned around to look at him, and after so many years, it felt as though her daughter was standing right before her again.

“Her thoracic vertebra was broken. I was planning to wait until she died before leaving, but after waiting for a while, she didn’t die. I even removed her fingers, but she still didn’t die. I had a class in the afternoon, so I left to go back to class. When I came to see her the next day, she was like this—”

Before he could finish, Li Yugui rushed at him.

She wanted to kill him! She didn’t care anymore, she would kill him! She regretted it—she should have killed him back in the basement, stepped on his rib, and watched him slowly breathe his last!

Everyone hurriedly pulled them apart. Sun Ning dragged Li Yugui back while fiercely kicking the pervert several times.

The police quickly moved to restrain the situation.

When they came out, a crowd had already gathered outside.

Zhao Xin walked through the crowd.

Suddenly, a fist-sized rock was thrown, hitting him in the head.

There were too many people, and no one could tell who had thrown it.

At that moment, “the law does not punish the crowd” reached its peak, and many people started throwing things.

On the internet, the trending searches began to explode with keywords starting from yesterday.

—Pingcheng High School, high school teacher, Zhao Xin, reincarnation.

“It really was him.”

“I have a second aunt who lives in the same neighborhood as him, and I heard some insider info. All those children were at his house! Who would have thought they were all at his house!”

“Before this, I thought I wouldn’t be shocked by this case anymore, but today, this really is a devil who breaks the limits of humanity.”

“This morning, the children were brought out, and neither side could bear to look. If they were alive, they should be with us on Weibo right now.”

“This case is definitely a death sentence, no doubt. My only request is, can we let the victim’s families each stab him once? I can’t imagine how painful it must have been for them to claim their children.”

“Back then, he killed the victim and sent their fingers to the victim’s family. That was one murder. Now, it’s another. Can we sentence him to multiple executions?”

“I apologize for my previous thoughts. I always thought there would be a twist. Because of the reincarnation rumors and the public discourse, it was clearly manipulated. Now, I apologize for my thoughts.”

Some netizens also noticed some unusual information.

“It feels off. I heard there were seven kids, but this number doesn’t match up. I remember this serial killer case had seven victims, and now there are seven kids in his family. Adding the one found at the basketball court, that makes eight victims. So who is the eighth victim?”

“Wait for the official notification. It’s so heartbreaking. Maybe the other party thought the children were just abducted and still alive, but the notice came like this.”

Some remained true to their original intentions.

“Really incredible. Is this evidence that reincarnation is real? In that high school girl’s post, there were two things mentioned: one was the body, and the other was the killer—both almost impossible, yet both turned out to be true. I can’t figure out how this happened. The only explanation is that the victim reincarnated and remembered the killer’s face.”

“It’s confirmed—reincarnation. This is shocking. This case all relied on the reincarnated person remembering the killer.”

Li Xun looked at the comments online. She thought, it wasn’t that someone reincarnated and remembered the killer’s face; it was that someone preferred to live a life full of pain rather than a normal life, all to remember the killer’s voice.

She thought that soon everyone would know the truth.

She didn’t just study individual behavior; she also studied collective behavior. Everyone was focused on this case. It wasn’t just a serial murder case. More than that, it was because, in situations like this, humans are united. Humans feel compassion for the deaths of their kind. Perhaps that is the reason humans are human.

In her view, Zhao Xin was not human.

Meanwhile, Tao Feng still wanted to argue, but the police showed him the video.

In the video, he was seen pulling the rope tight, directly strangling Li Xun, and then throwing her into a large pond.

Everything was crystal clear. Tao Feng saw his own grotesque face and was startled, stepping back a little.

Of course, the video didn’t show the part where Li Xun climbed out of the pond.

“This is an observation point for birdwatchers. It just happened to capture the moment you committed the crime. Do you have anything to confess?”

Tao Feng immediately thought of the death penalty. He knew he would surely face it now.

He didn’t want to die.

When Zhao Xin was at home, he didn’t speak, but he was wondering how everything had happened.

He didn’t understand. Li Xun coming to Pingcheng High School was entirely a coincidence. Then, Li Yugui must have come to the school, saw him, and recognized him.

It was then that they began to set a trap for him.

He calmed down completely, replaying the whole event in his mind.

He had always thought that only he had been schemed against, but he hadn’t expected that Li Xun had brought Tao Feng into it too, even willing to die to drag them all down.

What had once been a huge puzzle now had an answer right in front of him.

—What was Li Xun after? If it was just to recover the victim’s body, he could have kept quiet, and they would have been helpless.

No one had expected that Li Xun wasn’t just after the victim’s body, nor just trying to send him to prison. She also wanted to send Tao Feng, the imitator, to prison as well.

Zhao Xin only saw one side of things and couldn’t understand. Now, looking back, everything was clear.

In the interrogation room, he said nothing.

After a while, two more police officers entered.

They laid out the victim’s photos in front of him and pointed to one, asking, “Did you do this?”

Zhao Xin had only recently seen the posthumous photo of this child, the one whose body had been found at the basketball court.

He smiled. “Yes, I did it.”

He knew that he was definitely going to face the death penalty, so why not add trouble for them? They probably wanted to send the imitator to the death penalty, but he wouldn’t give them what they wanted.

“I did it. She was too noisy.”

“Then why wasn’t she placed with the other victims?”

“It was an accident at the time. I didn’t want to send her home, and the place was just right to bury the body.”

Guo Ying finally knew everything, shocked and impressed, but she also had a doubt.

“What if Zhao Xin directly admits that the case was his doing? For him, adding another murder won’t affect his death sentence. If he could repeatedly get the death sentence, that would be great.”

Li Xun said, “There’s also Tao Feng.”

She wasn’t picking people at random. Tao Feng’s roommate was her university classmate. The other person was an intern at the Qian family business. That year, they only needed to live in Tao Feng’s dorm and occasionally pass on some information.

Tao Feng’s family valued their son greatly. Li Xun had checked it out. They had spent so much money on the test-tube baby because they had found a channel and screened the gender.

This obsession with their son, reflected in various aspects of life, would eventually form a deep-rooted belief in Tao Feng’s subconscious:

“Everyone in the family should make sacrifices for me.”

It was time to make Tao Feng’s family pay for their actions.

Tao Feng’s family already knew what he had done. They came to the police several times, wanting to see Tao Feng, but they were refused. According to regulations, family members couldn’t visit during this period.

Tao Feng’s family was desperate. They had connections with some self-media and exposed the situation to them, insisting they didn’t know why their son was being detained by the police and had no explanation.

Tao Feng didn’t know what was happening outside. He didn’t know that Li Xun was still alive. His mind was filled with thoughts of the death penalty.

He remembered what his roommate had said before. A criminal sentenced to death in the first trial had his sentence overturned in the second trial because of his confession to other cases, which reduced his sentence.

The fear of death immediately consumed all his thoughts. He started convincing himself.

—”My parents will definitely agree.”

“They were the ones who made the mistake.”

A couple of days later, he reported his own family.

The body found at the basketball court wasn’t killed by the serial killer, but by his family, who imitated the crime.

The entire Tao family was arrested.

Many netizens thought they were arrested for expressing dissatisfaction with the police online.

For a while, public opinion moved in that direction.

The police were confused. They had no idea about the online situation, so they quickly issued a statement to clarify the entire matter.

In the announcement, netizens saw two important pieces of information.

“Tao [Tao Miao’s son] is suspected of murdering [Li Xun].”

“Tao Shen, Tao Yin (Tao Shen’s father), Zhao Li (Tao Shen’s wife), and Zhou [Tao Shen’s mother] are suspected of murdering Tao Miao.”

Netizens were stunned for a few seconds. What does this even mean? Who murdered who? Why is the whole family suspected of murder?

Naturally, some people figured it out.

The top comment explained—

“To put it simply: the original case might have been a copycat crime.”

“I’ll translate: They didn’t just kill their own child and blame it on the serial killer; they also cut off one of the child’s fingers and sent it to their own family. This is terrifying.”

Someone immediately said, “Wait, what about the reincarnation?”

“Didn’t the reincarnated person say Zhao Xin was the killer?”

“Go check! The post on Zhihu has been updated. The person denies being the reincarnated one, and says that the reincarnation part was fake.”

“This is so complicated. Can someone explain? I just finished my graduate school vocabulary and really don’t want to think anymore.”

“After reading the whole post, my brain is about to explode.”

“I’ll summarize: This post was written by a friend of the author. The friend knew the victim’s sister, who had witnessed her family kill and bury the body. Later, the victim’s sister was abandoned by her family, but met the post author’s friend, who told the story. That’s how they found out the burial site. They knew Zhao Xin was the killer because the last case’s victim’s mother survived and recognized the killer’s voice.”

“This is incredible. The post author’s friend is amazing.”

Li Yugui was the first to go to trial, and her lawyer’s defense focused on Li Yugui’s mental issues. After losing her child, she had been searching for the killer’s voice. When she found the killer, she realized it was the class teacher of her adopted child, and her mental breakdown led to her crime.

Li Yugui was sentenced to one year in prison, with a two-year probation.

Zhao Xin was sentenced to death, but he appealed. The second trial upheld the original sentence.

Tao Feng was convicted of attempted murder, but he showed signs of cooperation, receiving a fifteen-year sentence. He appealed, but the second trial upheld the original sentence.

Miao Miao’s grandparents were the ones who had carried out the crime. The grandfather was sentenced to death, the grandmother to life in prison, and the parents to eight years in prison.

The three human traffickers were also arrested. The ringleader was sentenced to death, and the other two received life sentences.

After the sentencing, Li Xun finally allowed the sisters to rest in peace. They were buried next to Li Yugui’s child.

On the day Zhao Xin and Miao Miao’s grandfather died, Li Xun went to the cemetery with Li Yugui.

Li Xun stayed at the cemetery for a long time.

On this day, she truly came of age. Everything seemed like her coming-of-age ceremony.

When she was a child, she always thought that adults and children were two different species, enemies to each other.

She still remembered the surprise and confusion she felt when she discovered that adults were just children who had grown up.

And now, she had become an adult, and she could accept that she was an adult.

The first thing she did as an adult was to take revenge for her younger self and for the companions who never grew up.

That little girl had grown up.

She walked forward.

Passing by one tombstone after another.

She continued to walk forward, just like when she was a child.

Perhaps she would still have nightmares, or maybe she would never have them again.

When Li Xun got off the hill, it seemed as though she heard the voice of a child. She turned around, and the tombstones sparkled in the sunlight, the light seeming to penetrate the tombstones, seeping into the earth.

In the brilliance, the suffering souls returned to the sunlight.

Postscript

This serial murder case was officially recorded as seven incidents, one of which was a copycat case. Among the bodies they found, one was a complete corpse, and this victim was not listed in the records.

The police had already conducted a genetic comparison, and this child was likely part of a missing children case.

But the result they received confused them.

“This case was indeed reported at the time, and initially, it was suspected that the child was taken by this pervert. The scene at the time was the child crying and making a scene, the nanny even scaring the child. But later, nothing was found, and the family insisted that the child had definitely been abducted by human traffickers.”

This wasn’t the key.

The key was—

“They searched for three years, and that year they had just successfully caught a human trafficker, and that family found their son.”

“How rash? Didn’t they conduct a paternity test?”

“That’s why I find it strange. The result of the paternity test was that it was indeed their child!”

So what about this child? Could it be twins?

The police notified the family, and as soon as the family arrived and saw the child, they immediately started crying.

“Baby…”

“I knew that wasn’t my child! I knew it!” She had done three paternity tests, all of which confirmed the paternity. She had always thought that the child had changed after suffering outside, changing in appearance and temperament.

“Mom’s here, I’m sorry.”

This case once again caused a sensation online.

During lunch, a police officer asked, “What about the one from their family? The child is here, so how could the paternity test show it’s their child?”

“The testing center made a mistake. An employee, seeing that the parents couldn’t find their child, felt sorry for them and decided to give them a paternity test.”

“Ugh, how could they do that? Those parents are so tragic, raising a child for so many years, only to find out it’s not their biological child, and their real child is with a murderer.”

“What’s even worse is that the adopted child tried to commit suicide two years ago and is still unconscious.”

“Sigh. This adopted child is pitiful too.”

“That’s not all. That adopted child killed a student from Pingcheng High School.”

“Sigh. In the end, it’s all Zhao Xin’s fault.”

If he hadn’t committed crimes, that child would have grown up with their real parents, and perhaps the Pingcheng High School student wouldn’t have been driven to suicide.