Hi, I'm SeraphimGate. My heart beats for uncovering the untold stories of extraordinary individuals across industries. Over the years, I've meticulously preserved countless interview records—each a tapestry woven with threads of human experience. Some stories will tug at your heartstrings with their poignancy; others will leave you wide-eyed with disbelief; while a few may cast long shadows of melancholy. These are the hidden chapters of real lives that unfolded quietly in our world, yet remain largely unknown to most.
I pour my soul into sharing these authentic human narratives, hoping they'll resonate deeply with fellow seekers of truth. Please note: Every story you're about to read is 100% real, though all names have been changed to protect the privacy of those who bared their souls to me.
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Before officially delving into today's bone-chilling story, I embarked on a nervous yet truth-seeking quest, scouring the vast ocean of information on the Internet for two mysterious sets of data. One of the figures clearly stands at 100,000, while the other remains as elusive as a ghost lurking in the dark mist, its exact value obscured and difficult to ascertain. All that is known is its enigmatic and unknowable nature.
These two seemingly ordinary yet cryptic figures correspond respectively to the large-scale operation to clear and disperse pyramid scheme (multi-level marketing) participants in 2003 and the chilling nationwide number of missing persons in the same year.
Perhaps in today's era of information overload, many people have already grown hazy about that chapter of history. But do you realize that in that particular era, pyramid schemes were as rampant and destructive as the telecom fraud that has wreaked havoc in recent years, and their dangers were only just beginning to be recognized and publicized by society. A seemingly innocuous phone call, like an invisible yet malevolent hand, could effortlessly set countless people on a path away from home and into the abyss of an inescapable scam. Most of them, like puppets being manipulated, gradually experienced the despair of imprisonment, the madness of brainwashing, the struggle against returning home, and ultimately severed all ties with their families, disappearing into the vast sea of humanity.
As time rushed by, this once-rampant wave of scams has gradually receded, leaving behind only faint traces like the aftermath of a nightmare. Few people talk about it anymore, and even fewer are aware of the immense harm it once caused. However, the painful experiences of being deceived by loved ones and being mercilessly confined in isolated, enclosed spaces are like demonic seeds hidden deep within human nature, quietly taking root and sprouting in the darkness, giving birth to unimaginable "monsters" within people's hearts.
If you don't believe me, just open the Internet and casually search through the overwhelming amount of information available. You'll be shocked to discover cases like the gruesome dismemberment of a 25-year-old college student in 2004, whose bloody scene still seems to loom in the darkness; the revenge massacre of a pyramid scheme gang in Liuzhou in 2004, where the flames of hatred still seem to burn to this day; the shocking case in 2008 involving Li Zhiyong and Qiu Xinglong, where they killed four people after initially killing two... These horrifying cases are all, without exception, intricately linked to pyramid schemes.
Our protagonist in this story is Li Wenjie, a forensic doctor. Not only is he a member of the public security team dedicated to safeguarding the people's safety, but, unexpectedly, he was also once a victim of the pyramid scheme scam, having personally gone through those nightmare-like, dark times.
One day, by a twist of fate, he stumbled upon a gruesome case that occurred in a pyramid scheme den, which led him to unexpectedly uncover the existence of these "monsters" lurking deep within human nature.
The following is an oral account from an interview with Forensic Doctor Li Wenjie:
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Before I became a public security forensic expert, I was a victim once, being deceived both physically and emotionally.
In 2000, we had landline phones in our university dormitory. To make a call, you had to use a one-time recharge card, the last cent in it, and you could keep calling as long as you didn't hang up.
I often called a junior high school classmate named Amin until the receiver was so hot that I couldn't bear to hang up.
She invited me to Chongqing over the phone. At that time, I had already anticipated that I would enter the police force after graduation. As a quasi-police officer in a certain sense, I was fearless and bought a train ticket to Chongqing. Besides Amin, there were two men to pick me up. Then I found that everything was completely different from what I had expected.
Amin originally said she would take me to the rented house where she lived alone.
When I got there, I found out that it was a shabby old residential building with three bedrooms and one living room. Amin occupied only one bedroom and four or five people lived in the other two rooms. I couldn't chat with Amin at all. Instead, I was dragged to play poker all the time until late at night.
The next morning, I was surrounded by a group of people, had some pickled mustard greens porridge, and began to "listen to the class", with a well-dressed middle-aged man holding a small blackboard explaining the logic of compound interest. I listened for less than five minutes and understood that this was pyramid selling. But the people around me, especially Amin, were particularly serious.
Finally, in the evening, I said I had to report to my family that I was safe. So the pyramid scheme gang asked Amin to monitor me and we went downstairs to the small store to make a phone call.
I asked Amin to buy two bottles of drinks and then dialed 110, but she still found out.
Amin screamed and ran back upstairs. Then I saw my luggage being thrown out, and the rental house was empty in less than half an hour.
That cold and damp winter night, I sat at the door of the grocery store with my luggage in my arms, looking at the completely unfamiliar streets and crowds, my whole body stiffened. Until the flashing police lights appeared at the intersection, looking at the police approaching slowly, I couldn't get excited at all, I almost cried.
A few years later, when I actually entered the police station and received my first internship pay, my current girlfriend, Lili, asked, "Would you like to come and sit in my rental house?"
I was a little hesitant.
Lili looked at my complicated expression and asked with a smile if I was shy or if it was the first time I had been invited to a girl's room.
I smiled without saying a word.
Lili found a rental house in Yangji Village, Guangzhou, which costs three hundred yuan a month. It was just across the overpass from Tianhe City, where all kinds of grocery stores, hair salons and fast food restaurants formed a complete circle of life where you could find anything you wanted, including the illegal ones - machetes, guns, drug syringes.
Lili said she lived alone on the "top floor" and led me up the damp first floor, not stopping but pulling me up to the rooftop.
Just as I was confused, Lili turned to the side of the staircase and found out that Lili's landlord had built a tin shed on the rooftop, less than ten square meters in size and only two meters in height. Standing inside, I felt as if I could touch the roof with just a little tiptoe. And that was her little house.
The entire room had only one small sliding window, and the direct sunlight filled the room with hot and humid air, just like a sauna.
There was no bed, she had only a thin palm mattress on the floor, and the Southern Daily pasted on the sliding window was the only decoration in the room. But Lili was satisfied, saying it was cheap enough for her to live alone in this big city of millions of people.
Yangji Village makes me feel particularly close and warm because of the presence of Lili, but the urban villages in my jurisdiction often mean trouble.
My master Yan Ge and I often dealt with middle-aged men who died suddenly in our rented houses, and occasionally saw venomous ghosts with syringes stuck in their groin, dead stiffly. Most of them are migrant workers in a foreign land, without relatives, and no one cares if they don't go to work for a day or two. Only neighbors or landlords would call the police when they smelled the stench.
Another weekend, just as I was planning to go to Lili's place, I received another alarm that two "salted fish" had been found in a rented house in the city village.
That was the term used by Guangdong police for highly decomposed corpses.
I walked into the rental house, and at one glance, the scene reminded me of what I had experienced in Chongqing.
The crime scene was the oldest kind of house in the urban village. Even downstairs, I could faintly smell rotten eggs. The source of the stench was Room 302 on the third floor. The door was aaxed and the police officers who were supposed to stand guard at the door were hiding on the edge of the platform, breathing in the fresh air.
The incident occurred in a small alley in the same town
I noticed the faces of members of the Major Crime Unit in the crowd. This is no ordinary murder case.
The room was a normal two-bedroom living room, but strangely, more than half of the living room was covered with thick colored plastic MATS, and apart from the altar and low cabinet in the middle, there were only a few storage boxes. Neighbors reported that the room was often visited by strangers who always sat together on the plastic mat singing and making a lot of noise.
The house is likely a pyramid scheme den.
This time it was Yan Ge who led me to the exploration site, following the stench of the corpse straight to the master bedroom, which was a wide double bed with a pair of feet in sneakers exposed under the big flowered quilt.
The big flowered quilt, soaked in the corpse water, had taken on a strange, dark black color.
Even though I wore a gas mask and couldn't smell anything, I felt even more suffocated looking at the flying flies and the quilt.
Rock lifted a corner of the blanket, revealing a short-haired male head. It was a swollen, dark face with a dense swarm of white maggots wriggling around the eye sockets and nasal cavity. Perhaps because of staring, I felt that the deceased's bulging eyeballs were about to pop out of their sockets. I couldn't help swallowing.
When we were in college, there was no need to go to the front line of professors to brag to us. Don't be afraid of highly decomposed corpses. From a microscopic perspective, they were just some proteins and fats that were breaking down. The most powerful one he boasted was: "Don't worry!" There aren't many highly decomposed corpses to be dissected, no more than two a year!"
I've only been an intern in the Guangdong police force for two months and I've come across three, and this is the fourth.
Brother Yan spread a layer of plastic sheeting on the ground. Only then did he and I each hold the two corners, spread the quilt flat and lift it up, placing it on the ground.
He was very careful with his movements. But no matter how I looked at it, it was nothing more than a black quilt soaked in rotten blood, nothing special. Yan Ge gestured the quilt for a while, and then I noticed that apart from the decaying corpse water, there were dry red spots on the quilt.
This means that the person was killed on the bed, and that's why the quilt is stained with blood.
Even more strangely, why did the murderer have to use a blanket to cover the victim's face?
While I was still thinking, Rock suddenly jumped onto the bed. I also wanted to go up, but Yan shouted to stop and asked me to bring a flashlight to light it.
He wanted me to shine the flashlight on the head of the corpse.
I felt that when the light was focused, the maggots wriggled faster and I wiped out a large area of them. The worms were crawling all over his gloves. And he didn't care, he wanted to examine the body.
I was still shuddering when Rock reminded me, "Move the flashlight. I'm going to examine the neck of the male corpse."
The maggots there were denser than on the face because that was where the wound was. As I watched Rock stick his finger in, I thought of the murderer stabbing into the neck with a knife. The male victim also had several stab wounds on his chest that looked the same as those on his neck, and there were corresponding cuts on his coat and sweater.
Was it stabbing a person through the chest? How much did the murderer hate him for stabbing him in the neck?
After examining the male body in the master bedroom, Yan changed into a pair of gloves and went to the guest room - the police had told us that there was also a female body lying on its back here.
Her hands and feet were tied up, and her head was wrapped in circles of sealing tape, which made her decayed face more distorted than that of the deceased man.
The half-roll of unused sealing tape was thrown beside her, and at the end of the bed there was a dark scabbard with a dragon pattern.
With the long knife, with the sealing tape, and with the rope, so well-prepared?
I can't help but think of that home invasion robbery after the Spring Festival, the same robbery and murder. Are these people so blatant?