In order to confirm that the Ma Jinhuo that Shopkeeper Tang was referring to was the same person that we meant, Xiaotao called the police station to get someone to send a photo of Ma Jinhuo to her phone. She then showed it to Shopkeeper Tang.

“Yup!” he nodded eagerly. “That’s the guy!”

“Do you have his recent photos?” I asked.

Shopkeeper Tang smiled.

“My phone is an ancient one with no camera function.” He then pulled out an old antique-looking Nokia phone.

“Do you know Ma Jinhuo personally?” I asked.

Shopkeeper Tang paused briefly and scratched his nose. “No.”

I sneered and stared into his eyes, “You’re lying!”

“No, Officer! It’s the truth! I swear to God!” he insisted.

“There’s no use in swearing to God! Come with us to the police station now!”

He was visibly intimidated by my threat. Shopkeeper immediately lowered his head; his face was downcast. It seemed that he was not that strong-willed a person.

“Alright, I’ll admit it. Ma Jinhuo and I came from the same village.”

Xiaotao was taken aback. “How could you not mention such an important fact before?”

“I-I know that there’s something wrong with him, but it’s just that I… I feel sorry for the guy…”

He then revealed to us that Ma Jinhuo came out to the city to work ever since he was a teenager. He worked at a construction site, where all his colleagues were men. When a group of men is grouped together, what else can they talk about other than women? Ma Jinhuo was very young and impressionable back then, so he quickly caught the habit of masturbation from the other guys. At one point it got so out of control that he had to do it at least once, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to go to sleep.

After a while, Ma Jinhuo’s skin gradually turned pale and yellow and he got thinner and thinner. The bags under his eyes got heavier and darker too. Though he was only in his twenties, his hair had already started to grow white.

Despite that, he managed to work and saved up some money and went home to the village, bringing a beautiful woman from the city back with him. Everyone applauded him for being able to catch such a pretty wife for himself.

However, people soon found out that this woman was actually a prostitute. She only married Ma Jinhuo to get the few acres of land left by his family. In no time their relationship turned sour, and they were often heard quarrelling. Soon rumors spread about how Ma Jinhuo was impotent and unable to satisfy his own wife in bed.

But his wife was a woman of strong desire. Unable to find any satisfaction from her husband, she then started to look for it from the young men in the village. It became an open secret of the village that Ma Jinhuo’s wife had cheated on him with multiple men.

That humiliated and crushed Ma Jinhuo’s spirits. During that time, he walked around the village with his head hung low and he wouldn’t speak to anyone. The other villagers looked at him with the utmost pity.

But then, Shopkeeper Tang saw something that not only robbed all the sympathy he felt for Ma Jinhuo, but replaced it with disgust and utter contempt!

One morning, Shopkeeper Tang saw Ma Jinhuo digging the ground at the foot of a hill. He went over to say hello, but saw Ma Jinhuo quickly slipping something into his clothes, and his expressions were suspicious indeed.

Shopkeeper Tang’s curiosity was piqued, and he felt that something was wrong about Ma Jinhuo. So after the guy left, he carefully examined the ground. He found that the ‘karma collector ghosts’ of the Li family had been dug up.

“Karma collector ghosts?” I interrupted him.

“Yes… Well…” Shopkeeper Tang hesitated. “It means stillborn infants.”

Both Xiaotao and I were shocked. Shopkeeper Tang said that there were often many cases of stillborn infants in the countryside. These were believed to be bad spirits who haunted the pregnant women, so they were called karma collector ghosts. These dead infants had to be buried without coffins, but they were often buried together with pig and cattle feces. There must even be a big stone pressed into the ground to prevent the karma collector ghosts from escaping the ground and haunting the village.

Some people suffered many miscarriages, and they were believed to be attacked by angry karma collector ghosts. They’d invite Taoist priests to perform some rituals and smash the dead baby’s body with a hatchet, then mix it with the blood of chickens and black dogs. These were made into a spell to protect them from the karma collector ghosts.

When I heard this, I thought that these dead infants might not all be stillborns. They were probably deformed children or unwanted daughters, due to marriages between close relatives and traditional patriarchal ethos still prevalent in rural areas. I had heard of stories about these unwanted children who were drowned in the toilet.

I let Shopkeeper Tang go on with his story without further interruption. He went on to say that he checked several of these graves and found that the dead infants were all gone. He remembered the strange smile on Ma Jinhuo’s face. That led Shopkeeper Tang to conclude that the guy must’ve eaten the dead babies!

Shopkeeper Tang was not one to waste time. He ran to Ma Jinhuo’s house and confronted him. Ma Jinhuo admitted to it and pleaded him not to reveal it to anyone else. He then went on to explain that he heard eating a dead baby could cure impotence. Originally, that was his only intention, but after tasting human flesh for the first time, he became obsessed with it and simply wanted more.

He said it was just so tasty that he wanted more and more. He lost control of himself. Whenever there was a stillborn, he would plan to steal it the next day to cook it. He even cooked the bones and chewed them all and swallowed them, and the broth that he made with human flesh and bones tasted so divine that he drank them all to the last drop.

Shopkeeper Tang said Ma Jinhuo told him all that while smiling. It was the most terrifying sight he’d ever seen. His eyes gleamed like a beast, and he was even drooling. Just thinking about it brought chills down his spine.

Shopkeeper Tang punched Ma Jinhuo in the face and told him to get out of the village immediately, otherwise he would expose the truth to the whole village. If the villagers knew that their dead children had been eaten, he could guarantee that Ma Jinhuo would die a terrible death!

On the evening of the same day, Ma Jinhuo left, and Shopkeeper Tang always kept the secret to himself. But every time he thought of it, he would always feel sick to the stomach.

I observed the expressions on Shopkeeper Tang’s face the whole time and found that everything he said was the truth.

When he finished, Shopkeeper Tang lit up a cigarette and drew in a deep breath.

“I’ve seen it in the village,” he continued. “When a dog eats a dog, it will soon go crazy. Some people would feed their cows with discarded parts of other slaughtered cows, and although these cows seemed to grow strong and fat at first, they would always go berserk without fail in the end. I guess when a human being eats another human being, the same thing happens, and they just lose their minds.”

“Animals aren’t meant to eat the flesh of the same species,” I explained. “It’s a rule of nature, probably to prevent extinction. The flesh of the same species often contains a certain toxin that is harmful to the members of the same species.”

Shopkeeper Tang nodded, “This young officer sure knows a lot! I don’t understand any of these scientific principles. All I know is that people would go crazy if they eat human flesh!”

“But if you know of Ma Jinhuo’s perversion, why did you trust him enough to buy meat from him?” I asked. “Weren’t you afraid that he’d mix it with other things?”

“Well…” Shopkeeper Tang sighed again and again. “I was in a bind. Ma Jinhuo owed me a hundred thousand yuan. He couldn’t pay me in cash, so he paid me with the meat he brought me…”

Shopkeeper Tang said he didn’t expect to meet Ma Jinhuo again in Nanjiang City. Since leaving the village, he had become destitute. He started drinking and gambling, and he owed the mafia a hundred thousand yuan. Shopkeeper Tang had a soft spot for him since he was a man in desperate need of help and they did come from the same village. Under Ma Jinhuo’s repeated begging, he finally took out the money in his account which he’d saved up to build a house to help the guy pay back his gambling debt.

A hundred thousand yuan was a lot of money for Shopkeeper Tang. But after three years, Ma Jinhuo still hadn’t paid him back a single cent. Shopkeeper Tang thought of his wife and children who were still living in mud houses and he became anxious, so he demanded Ma Jinhuo to pay up. Ma Jinhuo said he had no money to pay at all, but he could offer to barter some goods with him. It just so happened that Ma Jinhuo was working in an abattoir. He said that a pound of pork would cost twenty-five yuan in the market, but he could sell it to him at twenty per pound.

Shopkeeper Tang thought it was a good deal, so he agreed. Besides, it turned out to be a big bargain, since not only was the meat much cheaper, it was much fresher too since it came directly from the slaughterhouse. Ma Jinhuo would send him ten pounds of meat every time. Sometimes it would be pieces of meat, sometimes it would be minced meat. Lately, it had always been minced meat, but he swore to God it never crossed his mind that it could be human flesh!

“Can’t you taste the difference between human flesh and pork?” Xiaotao asked.

“I know!” cried Shopkeeper Tang. “At first I did notice it tasted a bit weird, but I just thought nothing of it because I swear to God it never occurred to me that Ma Jinhuo would murder people for their flesh!”