Chapter 4 – Shattered

The atmosphere hung thick in the air, the harsh neon lights slicing the scene into two distinct halves. Nearly everyone in the room held their breath. Chen Xian hadn’t seen Zhou Liao like this in far too long.

He glanced at Qin Zhan, who was hunched over, blood oozing from his fingertips. His hair, soaked with spilled liquor, clung to his forehead. Yet, Chen Xian felt an inexplicable tightness in his chest—this sight made Qin Zhan truly resemble a ghost crawling up from the depths of hell.

“Hmm?” Zhou Liao tapped Qin Zhan’s cheek lightly. “Or do you have the money to pay for it?”

The boy who had gone to fetch cleaning supplies for Qin Zhan had already summoned the manager.

The manager arrived to find a scene that made his head ache. The table was covered in expensive drinks, enough to rival ten other tables combined—clearly, a customer they couldn’t afford to offend. But holding his employee like this was unacceptable, especially with so many onlookers; it was bad for business.

“Excuse me, sir, sorry to interrupt. Did one of our staff members make a mistake?” The manager rushed over, plastering a servile smile on his face.

“Can’t you see the mess on the floor?” Zhou Liao snapped, glancing up irritably at the interruption.

“Did our waiter break your bottle?” The manager, eager to resolve the situation quickly—after all, this group didn’t look like anyone he could afford to cross—spoke with forced generosity, “How about this: we’ll comp you another bottle of Hennessy.”

“You think I’m short on cash?”

“Of course not, sir. It’s just a proposed solution.” As the manager spoke, the bar’s security guards had already moved forward. “Or do you have a better solution in mind?”

Zhou Liao glanced around the room before settling back into his seat, one arm draped casually over one of the twin sister’s shoulders. His gaze, however, remained fixed on Qin Zhan, who stood with lowered eyes. “Your waiter said he’d clean it up. I made him lick it up. Any problem with that?”

The manager paled. “Sir, we understand your anger, but this…”

“Let him go first,” Chen Xian interrupted.

Zhou Liao’s forehead twitched as he glared at Chen Xian, but Chen Xian ignored his gaze.

“Let him go back first. Settle his matter first, and we can discuss the rest later.”

Seeing someone offer a way out, the manager immediately seized the opportunity to back down gracefully. He immediately adopted an angry demeanor, turning to the staff and barking, “Did you hear what the guest said? Leave the stuff here and go help out back!”

After a two-second pause, Qin Zhan stood up, gave a rote bow to the table, and turned to leave.

“The fuck do you think you’re going?” Zhou Liao roared, lunging to his feet, but Chen Xian grabbed his arm and pushed him back down, his voice low with warning. “Don’t let them film you.”

Hearing this, Zhou Liao took a deep breath and clenched his fists. His parents were always busy with work, rarely home more than half the year. Their only rule was: “Don’t cause trouble that blows up.” They had money, but little time or energy to deal with his messes.

“Fuck.”

……

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to serve that table,” the man said apologetically in the changing room, holding a freshly washed tablecloth to wipe the spilled wine from Qin Zhan’s clothes. Most of it had already dried.

Qin Zhan stopped him just as he was about to touch him. “I’ll do it myself.”

“Alright.”

Instead of wiping himself, Qin Zhan turned sideways and stripped off his work clothes right in front of him. The man blushed upon seeing Qin Zhan’s well-defined muscles. Qin Zhan’s skin tone was starkly contrasted; areas frequently exposed to the sun were tanned a healthy wheat color, while the rest remained an almost sickly pale.

What nearly made the man gasp and cover his mouth, however, were the grotesque scars marring Qin Zhan’s waist. Some had healed into raised white scars, while others looked like newly grafted skin from burn wounds.

“Qin—”

Qin Zhan quickly changed back into his own clothes. He glanced at the man, his gaze cold and detached.

Ollie, unsure how to approach the topic, settled for a begrudging compliment: “You have such a great figure. You must be very popular.”

Qin Zhan glanced at Ollie’s name tag, which read “Ollie.”

“No.”

“It’s just… you never really give any hints about your preferences…” Ollie murmured, his ears flushing as he fidgeted with his hair. He was trying to gauge Qin Zhan’s sexual orientation, convinced the man wasn’t as aloof as he seemed. “What’s your type?”

Qin Zhan seemed not to understand, merely glancing at Ollie as he stuffed his clothes into the locker.

“Everyone has preferences, right? I’m just curious…” Ollie ventured, his words laced with hesitation.

Qin Zhan remained silent until Ollie began to feel embarrassed and regretful for overstepping. Then, unexpectedly, he spoke.

“Broken.”

“What?”

“I like broken things.”

“Ah… what a unique taste.” Ollie opened his mouth to say more, but a voice called from outside for him to deliver the drinks. Flushing, he hurried out.

Qin Zhan hadn’t lost his job, but the manager docked his pay for the night. Qin Zhan heard that the last table had paid in full, and the manager hadn’t demanded any compensation. After all, the surveillance showed the patrons weren’t actual deadbeats; they were just looking for trouble. Qin Zhan guessed that the manager was using this as an excuse to cut wages.

Qin Zhan neither complained nor protested, silently accepting the penalty. He knew how difficult it would be to find another night job with better pay, and few service industry part-time gigs would hire someone like him.

The manager berated him for a long time, and by the time Qin Zhan left the bar, it was nearly four in the morning. As he emerged from the dark alley, he could still hear the roar of a sports car engine outside.

He glanced over and saw Zhou Liao and his group standing in the bright light. Zhou Liao, clearly drunk, was leaning against the car, kissing one of the twins. When the girl pulled away, he grabbed the other by the jaw and continued.

Qin Zhan only noticed the cigarette between Zhou Liao’s fingers when the girl, blushing, slapped him. It turned out Zhou Liao had transferred the smoke from his mouth into hers.

……

He pulled his hat low and quickly left.

Qin Zhan’s home wasn’t far from the bar—a brisk half-hour walk through an urban village in the Development Zone, an area marked for demolition. The house had been left to him by his aunt; without it, he might still be living in a small town on the outskirts of the city.

He had a deceased father with mental illness and a mother who was trafficked to the area, only to escape after years of torment by her mentally ill husband.

He also had a male-chauvinistic grandmother with uremia. He felt both pity and a sense of karma toward her. Obsessed with having a son, she had given birth to a mentally ill man with a violent streak. After years of tormenting her, he drowned in a river while drunk—a tragic yet almost comical end. Her only daughter, unable to bear the male chauvinism, fled at age seventeen by claiming to go out for work and never returned to see her again.

Qin Zhan had never met his aunt. It wasn’t until he scored first in the county-wide middle school exam, but was about to decline the prestigious city high school’s scholarship offer due to his family’s circumstances, that he received a letter from her.

Inside the envelope were a few hundred yuan, the address of an apartment, and its key—the very same urban village unit he now occupied. The letter explained that it was a property she no longer wanted, and that he could live there while studying.

The apartment was small and dilapidated, barely over fifty square meters, and most of its neighbors had already moved out. Next to the unit stood a dilapidated shed, once used for pig farming by locals but later abandoned. Qin Zhan had repurposed it into a small storage unit.

When he emerged from the shower, the sky was beginning to lighten. Qin Zhan drew the curtains shut to block out the early morning light. He sat down in a chair and put on disposable gloves. As he turned on the desk lamp, the sudden bright light seemed almost ghastly in the dim room.

The storage unit reeked of a faint yet foul odor. On the desk lay a dead bird wrapped in white paper. Its corpse, left to stiffen for too long, was rigid and unnaturally contorted.

Qin Zhan studied the bird for a moment. He cleaned the festering wound on its lower abdomen with an alcohol-soaked cotton pad, then picked up the knife beside him and began slicing from the bird’s throat down along the contour of its feathers. The sharp blade pierced through the accumulated fluids, releasing a foul, metallic stench.

He didn’t enjoy abusing animals; their desperate struggles reminded him too much of his own pain, making it pointless.

But he loved the corpses of dead animals, relishing the way they shattered under his hands, transforming from whole to fragmented, filled with an indescribably twisted yet grotesque beauty.

The putrid odor emanating from their decaying flesh was identical to the smell from his childhood.

He’d always smell that stench at home, until the day his mother left with a suitcase, saying she was going to a faraway place. She left him a birthday gift she’d bought a month in advance. He’d never received such a present before and eagerly opened it, only to find inside a shriveled, mangled infant corpse covered in wounds.

He saw himself: dead, innocent, abandoned by everyone.