Chapter 3 At the Bookshop

The bookshop the perpetrator had mentioned wasn't a real business. It was a private operation hawking pirated books — no proper storefront, no street stall. The owner had rented a bicycle storage room in one of the local buildings and ran his trade out of that cramped space, barely five feet in any direction. The sign, naturally, was nothing to speak of. Plenty of people sold pirated books, but this particular owner seemed to have no interest in doing it openly. No signage aimed at customers, no effort at promotion — no, the sheer casualness and secrecy of the setup went beyond lazy marketing. To Ma En, it felt less like an invitation than a warning to stay away.

Not that it mattered to him. He'd been to all sorts of pirated book operations over the years, hunting for material. Sometimes he actually turned up books that no legitimate bookstore or library carried. These were volumes without proper publication numbers — sometimes several books' worth of content crammed into one, printed in tiny type, never proofread, riddled with errors. But now and then, something genuinely startling hid among the garbage. And when the books were secondhand, bought off someone else and resold, the notes previous owners had scrawled in the margins were sometimes worth the trip alone.

He'd never pretended pirated books were moral. The printing and selling were illegal, full stop, and authors and editors got hurt. But Ma En had no real feelings about the pirated book ecosystem one way or the other. If anything, speaking purely for himself, he was glad it existed. He'd have happily made a few dishonest arguments about "resource sharing" just to keep the trade alive.

He'd never denied what it gave him, either — and still gave him. Not money. What pirated books opened up was a network of channels, and through those channels flowed content that was equal parts filth and treasure. Because the original authors couldn't profit from pirated editions, that very fact filtered out anything written for commercial appeal. What remained — the things that had no commercial value but also didn't meet anyone's bar for professionalism — those circulated here, and nowhere else.

Hidden ideas. Private obsessions. Niche theories, inspirations, legends — true or false, sane or delusional, useful or dangerous. Everything that could never pass through legal publishing and official review ended up in this channel. That was its nature.

Of course, he'd never point anyone else toward it. Not upstanding citizens, not strangers, not even his own friends and family. The content demanded a fierce capacity for critical judgment, or you'd lose yourself in what amounted to spiritual sustenance that reeked and smelled delicious at the same time. By any measure, content that had survived legitimate publishing and formal review was safer. That much was simply true.

He'd watched people's lives collapse in these waters — people who lacked the discernment, the analytical ability, the sheer resistance to wade through pirated content without drowning. Strictly speaking, from a narrow angle, the perpetrator in this case had drowned here too, in his own way.

Writing and reading cut deeper into the human psyche than almost anything else. In Ma En's view, the medium called "books" was far more sinister than its respectable surface suggested — more dangerous than ordinary people ever suspected. Spend enough time with the truly unrestrained material, and you'd start to think books were the most effective vehicle for the spread of demonic power. More insidious than games, more corrosive than entertainment. Books pulled people down into the deep places of their own consciousness, and the more a person thought while reading — really thought, pushing deeper and deeper — the greater their odds of encountering something that could destroy them.

From that angle, "books" were terrifying. Ma En stood before the narrow, shabby storefront and couldn't help thinking so.

The "bookshop" hidden inside the bicycle storage room had no windows. The tenant had sealed the ventilation holes with wooden boards — an attempt to keep rats out that, as far as Ma En knew, accomplished nothing. The door stood half open. One glance at the gap was enough to imagine the air inside: stagnant, thick, oppressively warm, even on a day of cold rain like this.

On the outer wall, four characters had been handwritten on a sheet of printer paper: "Small Bookhouse." A sign, presumably. But as noted — absurdly crude.

Ma En stood outside and studied the shop for a good while. A stranger in this neighborhood, he drew stares — but the stares didn't hold. One by one they withdrew. No one approached. No one greeted him. He could feel the eyes on him but saw no one, and he didn't bother looking around. He just studied the bookshop, serious and intent, as though something about its appearance might reveal a secret if he looked hard enough. He didn't let his attention wander. That solemn, unblinking expression would probably have unsettled most people.

The bookshop owner was unsettled. He'd noticed a figure outside, but hadn't thought much of it — customers didn't come on days like this. He had no habit of greeting them when they did. But then this one just stood there, umbrella up, in the pouring rain, for an unnervingly long time. That didn't happen. Curiosity got the better of him, and he turned to see who it was.

He flinched.

A neat dark suit. Black briefcase in the left hand. Black umbrella in the right. And a quality about the figure that was impossible to ignore — deep, pale, monotonous, the kind of presence ordinary people simply didn't have. You could feel it from the silhouette alone. The umbrella hid the upper half — the face was invisible — but the bookshop owner's mind sketched in the outline of a young man anyway. The image didn't comfort him. It made him more uneasy.

He thought about it and decided the whole scene looked like a mysterious character's entrance in a movie. Maybe that was the source of the unease — the sense that trouble was about to follow this person in.

"Here to buy a book?" he called out, deciding to take the initiative. As though speaking first might settle his nerves.

"Yes." Ma En answered easily. He hadn't given any thought to what kind of first impression he'd made on the owner, but his voice — ordinary, unstrained — did seem to ease the man's tension.

"Come in, then. Rain's coming down hard." The bookshop owner waved him in.

Ma En stepped inside. His height nearly reached the door frame, and he ducked slightly to clear it. The interior wasn't any better — the bicycle storage ceiling hung well below standard room height, and flaking debris and grimy surfaces pressed in from every side, creating an uncomfortable sense of compression. Ma En didn't mind. He was long used to places like this. Using a bicycle storage room as a shop wasn't this owner's invention — small-time vendors did it everywhere.

His tall frame blocked the view outside in an instant. The bookshop owner had seen plenty of tall people, but he was certain this young man — under 30, just as he'd imagined — was the most peculiar one he'd ever encountered.

Ma En closed his black umbrella, shook the water off with a few sharp flicks, and leaned it by the door. He carried his briefcase to the counter and met the bookshop owner's eyes. The gaze was straight, undisguised, and it deepened the owner's impression of him: something monotonous, something pale, something devoid of warmth. Alive, but not a word like "vibrant" applied. Meeting those eyes made the owner nervous. He tried not to show it.

"What are you looking for? Rentals too, but I'll need a deposit and ID." His throat felt dry as he said it. He picked up a paint-chipped green military canteen and took a sip.

"You know about the serial murder case the city police cracked recently?"

The question froze the bookshop owner mid-swallow. Of course he knew. The story had spread everywhere — a vicious serial killer, the kind of thing you only saw in movies, right here in their unremarkable little city. Anyone with even a passing curiosity had followed the case. The bookshop owner had studied the photo the police released. At first the face just looked vaguely familiar. Then the recognition hit: the killer had been to his shop. It was the most bone-chilling, skin-crawling realization of his life, and the aftershocks of dread still hadn't fully faded.

What if the killer had attacked me? The thought kept surfacing, unbidden. But the man had been caught, and the day the owner found out, he'd drunk himself into oblivion to celebrate. He'd assumed the whole affair was over. He hadn't expected a postscript.

No — he hoped it was only a postscript. Not a continuation.

He wanted to play dumb. Brush the question off. But the young man's gaze carried a pressure that made honesty feel compulsory, as though lying would cause something bad to happen. Not violence — the young man didn't feel violent. But the gaze suggested that bad things weren't limited to something as simple as violence.

"What do you want?" The bookshop owner wrenched his eyes away, his voice climbing.

"You're scared?" The bluntness stung. The bookshop owner felt a spike of anger, but before he could snap back, the young man continued: "Don't be scared. I'm just an ordinary civil servant."

As he said this, he set his briefcase on the counter. The bookshop owner shrank back, half-expecting something terrible to emerge from it. But all Ma En produced was his employee ID from the post office, which he held up for inspection.

The gesture was practiced, formal — absurdly so, given the setting. From anyone else, the bookshop owner would have found it ridiculous. Affected. Overwrought. But coming from this young man, the formality only tightened the knot in his throat. A reporter? Police? He looked at the ID. The unit listed was: Post Office.

The tension dropped out of him like a stone.

He felt dazed. Maybe he was the one who wasn't right — maybe his reaction had been absurd from the start. But why would someone flash a post office ID? Why would a civil servant from the post office be asking about a serial killer? What was this young man after?

"Mailman?" Even as the word left his mouth, he knew it was wrong — mailmen weren't civil servants. Civil servants at the post office sat in offices. Higher up.

"Civil servant." Ma En smiled. In the bookshop owner's eyes, the smile carried no emotion whatsoever.

The bookshop owner drew a long breath. "Kid, I don't know anything about any serial murder case."

"You're lying," Ma En said, flat and even. "You know about it. And the killer bought a book from you. He said the book drove him to kill —"

"He didn't buy a book!" The bookshop owner cut him off, sharp and loud.

"Fine. He didn't buy one. But he read one." Ma En's voice stayed calm — bland, soft, flavorless. "I want to know what book he read."