1 Chapter 1 Nothing Left of the Dead_1

"The winner of the Best Actress Award at the 19th Chinese Magnolia Awards is—Yin Ruowei!"

On the city center's LED big screen, the beautiful hostess announced each word with precise and rounded Mandarin, capturing the attention of thousands.

Blood boiled.

*

Dark night.

In an abandoned factory.

"...Who are you? Why have you kidnapped me? Is it for money, or is it for something else?"

Tonight, Yin Ruowei, who should have been celebrating her Magnolia Best Actress Award with champagne in a luxurious mansion, was kidnapped to an old abandoned factory in the outskirts.

The woman in her dust-covered, elegant dress, a blindfold over her eyes, was tied up and sitting on a peeling chair. Her carefully coiffed hair was slightly disheveled. A stroke of lipstick was smeared at the corner of her mouth, giving her a disheveled look.

She tried to negotiate with the 'kidnapper'.

She seemed calm and rational.

Yet her slightly trembling voice betrayed the panic in her heart.

When she finished speaking.

All was silent around her, save for her increasingly rapid heartbeat and heavy breathing.

Not far away, water from a steel pipe dropped, bit by bit.

Drip, drip, drip.

In the gloomy darkness, this sound always made it so easy to conjure up a grim picture...

Just thinking about this sent Yin Ruowei into a state of immense fear.

Yin Ruowei could almost imagine the entertainment headlines for the next day—

[New Magnolia Best Actress Yin Ruowei kidnapped and brutally murdered!]

If the kidnapper were a bit more cruel, she might not even have a whole body left behind, let alone an intact face, dying with her eyes wide open...

No!

Yin Ruowei vehemently refused.

She was still so young; she was China's hottest new Best Actress; she was youthful and as beautiful as a flower; she possessed a fortune; she had a handsome and attractive fiancé...

She couldn't die!

Especially not such a humiliating death!

Yin Ruowei bit her lower lip hard, suppressing the panic in her heart. She opened her mouth and spoke with a dry, hoarse voice, "As long as you let me go, I can give you anything..."

"What if I said, I want your life?"

The hoarse, enchanting female voice chuckled softly beside her ear and asked, "Will you give it to me?"

Yin Ruowei's body stiffened sharply, then began to tremble.

That voice...

She was all too familiar with it!

The blindfold over her eyes was violently ripped off, and light suddenly invaded her line of sight.

Yin Ruowei saw the person before her.

Dressed in a loose orange cleaning outfit that completely concealed her figure, revealing not a hint of her body's shape, a black mask hid most of her face, and only the black, silk-like hair under the faint light hinted that this was a woman.

For a long time.

Yin Ruowei called out her name with a hoarse voice, "...Ming Ge."

The woman lifted her hand, revealing the hands of a beautiful woman, slender and pretty. She pulled down her mask, exposing a face that was horrific.

She tilted her head and smiled.

Her smile was a terrifying baring of teeth.

She greeted her warmly:

"Ruwei, long time no see."

The disfigured woman, against the backdrop of the dim, abandoned factory, looked like a vengeful ghost from hell coming to claim a life.

Her voice was melodious and moving.

To Yin Ruowei, it was nothing short of a death knell.

She swallowed hard, her voice rough and tinged with fear: "Ming, Ming Ge, what do you want to do?"

"Ruwei, you're really adorable, so young and already suffering from dementia, blindness, and deafness. Didn't I just tell you what I want? I'm thinking..."

Ming Ge affectionately called out her name, then her tone abruptly turned sharp, each word imbued with a hint of ruthlessness:

"I, want, your, life."

The sharp knife pressed against her neck, as if it was about to slice open her throat the next second.

Yin Ruowei screamed, begging for mercy, expressing regret.

"No, no, no!"

"Ming Ge, I was wrong, please let me go, I was wrong, I was really wrong, please spare me..."

"Where did you go wrong?" Ming Ge withdrew the knife.

Yin Ruowei's mouth opened, but she couldn't find the words: "I..."

Indeed.

People are always like this, never shedding tears without seeing the coffin, even with a knife to their neck, this Magnolia Film Queen still coyly refuses to personally pull away the last veil of humanity.

Ming Ge almost indifferently smiled, "Is it that you don't want to talk, or have you done too many things to wrong me and don't know where to start?"

"Ruwei, it's okay, I'll help you 'properly' remember."

She grinned, calling her name with feigned affection, with every word she bit off sending chills down Yin Ruwei's spine.

"Fifteen years ago, you, your white lotus of a mother, and your stupid brother came to our house."

"Ten years ago, you stole that scum Su Jinci away from me at my birthday party."

"I entered the entertainment industry, and so did you; who plotted against me to be blacklisted across the entire net, you know very well in your heart."

She listed them one by one.

Each one a heinous crime, shocking to behold.

"Actually, you could have that scum Su Jinci if you wanted, I don't really care about that, the slander and skullduggery you played against me, these little antics, I can overlook."

"But..."

She paused, her voice lowering, gently murmuring, asking, "Why did you have to kill Ming Ci, that bastard, and my old man?"

"They were my only family left in this world."

"And..." Ming Ge pulled down the mask on her face a little lower, letting Yin Ruwei see her face clearly, "this face."

In Yin Ruwei's suddenly constricted pupils, fear, disgust, and panic floated...

Ming Ge had seen such gazes plenty, and so she wasn't as hysterical as she had been at the beginning.

However, seeing such a gaze on the face of the instigator, she couldn't remain calm.

A surge of intense fury emerged in Ming Ge's heart as she said, word by word,

"You, your mother, your brother, you three destroyed my family, left me disfigured, Yin Ruwei, tell me, what do I need to do to let you off the hook?"

Such deep-seated hatred could only be cleansed with fresh blood.

...

Ming Ge's hand holding the blood-stained knife trembled gently.

Following that, this trembling, uncontrollably spread from her fingertips throughout her whole body.

...Yin Ruwei was dead.

This thought emerged in her mind, and a reflex from her nerve endings abruptly made her let go, dropping the weapon.

The knife hit the ground with a crisp 'clang' sound.

Ming Ge's heart trembled, her temples throbbing violently, her nerves stretched to their limit.

She needed a nicotine fix.

Ming Ge somewhat frantically pulled down the zipper of the bulky, puffy orange sanitation worker's uniform and fished out a pack of cigarettes from inside, placing one in her mouth.

Fingers stained with the stench of blood slipped on the lighter, failing to light it the first time but after several attempts, it finally caught fire.

The cheap taste of tobacco made her cough, her eyes reddening in an instant.

The faint white smoke swirled around, blurring the face behind her.

Certain distant memories, on this nascently warm night, suddenly surged into her heart.

Looking back on her life thus far, it really was—

"...worse than a dog's."

Ming Ge scoffed at herself, stubbing out the cigarette between her fingers.

'Wait for daylight, then turn myself in.'

Even having killed someone, Ming Ge, still insisting she was a good citizen, had this thought in her mind.

But, she had just reached the entrance of the abandoned factory.

The next second.

"Boom—"

It exploded.

*

The blast echoed through the sky, flames rolled forth, and the dilapidated building on the outskirts was blown to unrecognizable ruin.

A hundred meters away from this abandoned factory, a black car was parked.

The car window rolled down, revealing a woman sitting in the back seat, her features hidden behind sunglasses.

Her red lips curled into a mysterious arc as she asked.

"Is she dead?"

"Yes." A shadow bowed, deferentially replying, "Ming Ge is completely gone, no chance of survival, miss can be assured."

"Hmm, then let's go."

Moments later, the black vehicle quietly left.

The darkness buried all sins.

Little did they know, Hell Flower was slowly blooming...