But all of a sudden, he was just inexplicably tired, having done all he could have done.

And he thought of a young woman biting into the earthen oven cake, licking the sesame from her lips on her way back to the office in the early morning, just a few days ago.

Then his cellphone buzzed.

It was an email with attachment from Detective Yu.

Lou confessed readily after the phone conference in the backroom of the neighborhood committee office.

In fact, Lou had prepared a detailed statement in his cellphone to be released online upon the completion of the seven-seven ritual, with the seventh victim claimed, or at the moment of his being surrounded by the police. It was because the preemptive strike caught him off guard, so he did not have the time to do anything about it.

I’m attaching his pre-prepared statement here, and I shall follow up with more information.

Chen downloaded the statement and began reading.

The statement was quite a long one, which began with an account of the love-at-first-sight romance between Lou, an IT technician in his mid-twenties, and Shen, a sales manager at a computer store, two years younger. Falling for each other, the two soon became inseparable. There was only one hurdle to their much-dreamed-about future. In the city of Shanghai, it was of absolute necessity for a young man to have an apartment under his own name. It was a convention developed out of an increasingly materialistic society, but it was also seen as a realistic insistence on the part of her parents. Under Mao, it had been quite common for a family of two or even three generations to stay squeezed in one room, but with the changes of the economic reform launched by Deng, it was now considered the norm for a young couple to live out of their own space. Shen’s parents vetoed the idea of Lou’s parents measuring out a partitioned cubicle for the young couple, as well as their plan of renting an apartment first. It was not easy for young people to save up enough money with the housing prices continuously soaring up. The price for one square meter at seventy thousand yuan actually equaled a whole year’s income for Lou. So the two young people had to put off their wedding plans, one year after another, working overtime or at several jobs to save enough for the down payment. After five or six years, her parents finally relented, letting them settle on an old one-bedroom apartment in Zabei instead of a new two-bedroom property in Xuhui. It took all their savings, but they moved in and got married.

Still on the honeymoon, she started to have a persistent cough. Possibly because of the new paint in the old apartment, or because of her working too hard for the last several years. He bought her some herbs as well as antibiotics. But with her cough not going away, he took her to see a doctor who diagnosed her as suffering from lung cancer – at the fourth stage. How was it possible? She did not smoke. Nor did he. The doctor showed them a chart showing a large number of people suffering from lung cancer because of the polluted air. In the hospital she fought a hard battle, holding his hand, trying all the treatments available, but to no avail. In less than four months, she passed away one early smoggy morning.