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Sinmonger by San Tian Liang Jiao || Book 1: Sin Is Born of the Heart

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Chapter 2: The First Victim

After the daylight had already faded, Ikeda finally arrived home. His father hadn’t returned yet. Perhaps he was still lingering in an izakaya somewhere.

Ikeda took a nutrient bar from the fridge, put his legs under the kotatsu, and turned on the TV. This was one of his favorite moments of the day, aside from bedtime — sitting in front of the TV, munching on junk food, which only the poorest of families would keep in supply, while he did his homework.

For Ikeda, the TV had taken on the role of a father figure since he was very little. In that book of his, there was also a line like this: “The TV won’t come home drunk; the TV won’t leave me behind in the zoo; the TV won’t hit me or swear at me. The TV is the one who actually taught me how to be a proper person.”

More than once, he had fantasized that he could be like the protagonist in one of those fictional stories, and run into some aliens, someday, or meet a mysterious girl, or get recruited by a secret government agency — or even arrive, in a flash of lightning, on another world, thereby turning his life around. He wish, even more, that he could be like the heroes in film, whom people relied on rather than held in disdain and persecuted.

But, everyday, the moment he opened his eyes in the morning, Ikeda had to face reality, in all its harshness and cruelty.

Life was unimaginably painful for this seventeen-year-old.

The deepest, darkest fears come not from what is in front of your eyes, but from what lies in the future. The worst of despairs is not that you don’t have a clear picture of future, but that while you are still young, you can already foresee your despicable future.

At some point, the pen in Ikeda’s hand came to a stop. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was ten twenty, and his father had still yet to come home.

Ikeda crawled out from under the kotatsu, went back to the entrance of his home, put on his shoes, and walked briskly into the night.

Once on the silent and secluded streets, the youth’s expression turned grave, moreso than ever before. Behind his glasses, his eyes took on a slightly frightening, savage aspect.

Tianyi’s bookstore was already closed for the night when Ikeda passed by. Although he wanted to go in and confirm once more what he had to do, he would obviously get no response by knocking on the door.

“Since I’m already out, there’s no turning back!” Ikeda told himself.

He walked for over an hour. It was already near midnight when he arrived at his high school. In a pitch-black campus, the only bit of light came from the security guard’s shed.

The guard on duty was probably long since asleep, at this hour. This was because the school admins mandated that the night shift guard must do one round of patrol between midnight and 5 AM. The guards would usually sleep early, get up around 4 the next day, and go out for some breakfast after they were done patrolling.

The school gates, which employed a horizontal folding design, were not tall. Ikeda wasted no effort in getting over it and to the other side. He took the path to the classroom building, and walked until he was right out front.

He discovered, after he’d already mustered up all this courage to get here, that the door to the building was secured with a cable lock at night. Perhaps to a fictional hero it would pose no difficulty, but Ikeda was stumped.

“What was I thinking…” He smiled mirthlessly.

He turned to leave, muttering to himself: “There’s nothing to be done… So what, if I’m leaving empty-handed now? Even if I’d expected to be in this situation and brought a pipe wrench, destruction of public property at school is a serious offense.”

Ikeda really hated himself. He knew, too, that saying all this was pointless and nonsensical. The truth was, even if he made a resolution to do something, he would easily give up because of a single minor mishap.

“I’m a useless piece of trash, after all… Being called ‘nerd glasses’, I deserved it…” Ikeda started tormenting himself. He looked back grudgingly at the classroom building, as if doing so would grant him a thread of hope.

“That’s — !” Ikeda’s eyes grew wide. Hope had truly appeared! Incredibly, good fortune sometimes graced his tragic life, too.

He saw, as he approached, that one of the windows along the first floor hallway hadn’t been shut properly. A small crack had been left open. It wasn’t super obvious from the get-go, but he’d somehow noticed it when glancing back.

He went to the window, took a deep breath. The chill night air rushed into his lungs, clearing his mind. He reached out and pulled the window open. A few seconds later, he successfully crawled into the hallway.

Ikeda could barely contain his excitement. He was trembling all over, Tianyi’s words from a few hours earlier echoing in his ears: “Sneak into Matsuo’s office at midnight, and take any one of his personal belongings — if you can do that, I will let you read Muira’s book.”

Though Ikeda knew not why Tianyi would make such a request, nor why the latter was acquainted with Matsuo and Muira, he’d seen the weird book that was filled with one’s thoughts, and so he thought nothing of these other strange matters.

Up until the point where he was standing in front of the door to the faculty office, his heart still wasn’t set on his course of action. He was Ikeda, after all — Ikeda, who didn’t have the courage to retaliate even when he was being beaten up. Even he himself couldn’t believe he was doing something so out of character, in this moment.

He felt an unfamiliar sense of thrill at the novel experience. Perhaps he had too much adrenaline in his system, at this moment, as the hand he reached out to draw open the door was shaking badly.

The door opened. Under the clear, crisp moonlight, the first thing to enter Ikeda’s sight was a pair of feet.

A pair of feet that was suspended from the ground, its toes pointed inward, dangling in mid-air.

Ikeda’s heart stopped. Reflexively, he looked up, and very quickly saw Matsuo’s face.

The two eyeballs jutted outward, the tongue half-extended out of the mouth, the visage a purplish-black. Clearly, thoroughly and completely dead.

“Gah…ah… ack…” Ikeda fell on his backside, and scurried backward. His back promptly found the wall in the hallway.

He wanted to scream at first, and then he wanted to hurl. But in the end, he covered his mouth tightly with both hands, swallowing both screams and bile.

He couldn’t shout, for he would be unable to explain why he had come to school in the middle of the night, after the security guard came; he also couldn’t throw up, because that would leave obvious traces at the crime scene.

Ikeda didn’t know why his thoughts were so clear and logical. Did the fact that he was able to make such cool and collected judgements in this horrific situation mean that he was somehow cruel by nature, or else numb to death?

He had no time to think more. The problem at hand, which he needed to consider instead, was —

What next?

“From the looks of the situation, Matsuo likely committed suicide. But if I call the police, there’s no way to justify my sneaking into school at midnight. Even if it’s proven at the end of the investigation that Matsuo’s death had nothing to do with me, the school will still expel me.” After some deliberation, Ikeda pounded his thighs fiercely a few times, and then struggled upright. Even though his legs still felt weak, the pain helped him recover some feeling in them, to the point where he could walk again.

Ikeda walked into the faculty office, purposefully avoiding Matsuo’s terrifying visage. He hurried past the hanging corpse, quickly grabbed a pen from the pen holder on Matsuo’s desk, then turned and ran without a backward glance.

Ikeda dashed from the third floor to the first, arriving at the window through which he’d entered earlier. He was just about to cross over again, when he noticed something upon looking down — there were two distinct sets of footprints on the window ledge!

He hadn’t noticed earlier, since the ledge was backlit on his way in, and the footprints obscured under his own shadow. Now, under the stark moonlight, this discovery made his hairs stand on end. There were two shoe prints on the window ledge, the tips both facing the hallway, but one was clearly larger than the other. The smaller one was his own, if he wasn’t mistaken, but what about the larger one?

His mind was surprisingly quick, at moments like these. Ikeda soon had his answer. The larger footprint was probably left behind by Matsuo, because security would lock the doors around seven or eight in the evening, after checking every room in the classroom and athletic buildings to make sure there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. So, Matsuo couldn’t have killed himself before then. He must have snuck in after eight, and died after then. This would also explain why there were only footprints leading to the hallway, but not back out.

After thinking this point through, there was nothing more to fear. Ikeda climbed over to the other side, and carefully cleaned up the footprints he had left going in and out. He even erased the fingerprints on the window frame, though he didn’t touch Matsuo’s footprint.

Ikeda, believing he had left no tracks, tucked his hand into his sleeve and cautiously returned the window to the state he’d found it in. After that, he promptly escaped from campus, and began sprinting towards home.

A figure stood silently in the dark hallway of the classroom building, watching Ikeda’s retreating silhouette.

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