Pristine Darkness

Chapter 85

This chapter starts off with Bo Jinyan giving a detailed profile of the 'Butterfly Killer' - does he sound familiar to you? We then find out more about the murder of Jian Yi as our Scooby Team interviews the last (known) survivor of those charged with the murder. It really seems that the Butterfly Killer is a lot closer to home than Jian Yao expected, or desires.

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Translator: shl

Editor/ Proofreader: Anks

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"The person we are looking for is a man aged 35 to 40 years old. He is tall and sturdy. He constantly works out, and has a very robust physique as a result. This is how he is able to transport the bodies of his victims to the mountaintop on foot.

He has trained in unarmed combat or taekwondo or some form of martial arts before, and is an expert in that form. He is a meticulous thinker and is very good at plotting. He has some way to access information on police cases, and is very familiar with criminal investigation techniques. This is why he has been successful in tracking down so many fugitives and slaughtering them.

He has an excellent financial situation. Either his family circumstances are great, or he has a job with a considerable income.

He is from Tong City. At present, it is impossible to ascertain whether he has any connection to Jian Yi's case that year. However, he definitely suffered some huge psychological provocation in his early youth, after which, he started killing people. His experience in slaughtering people has matured from the chaos it was when he started. His first targets were selected without any pattern whatsoever, and each and every one of them was haphazardly hacked to death, with a butterfly painted behind them thereafter. Later on, he changed progressively, and focussed on killing criminals, even including the bandits who were guilty of terrible crimes. Moreover, he executed them by nailing them with iron nails, and completely transformed himself into an 'enforcer of the law'.

There seems to be no clear time period within which he committed crimes, and no clear pattern of occurrence, either. In fact, there is a gap of several years in the middle. I suspect he was distracted by other reasons during that time, such as imprisonment, going abroad or hospitalisation.

The incense burner at the scene, as well as the different ways in which he handled the two types of corpses, also confirms his remorse and guilt over his treatment of the earlier victims. Although he is a psychopath, he is always struggling, and has a conscience. I believer, after he became an 'enforcer of the law', he attained a considerable measure of relief, and his mental state also stabilised. This is because he finally found a way to balance his need to kill and his conscience.

However, from a psychological perspective, this stability is only superficial and temporary. The more he killed, the greater the degree of his psychopathy. After so many years, I am certain that his mental state was teetering on the brink of collapse. All it needed was an ignition point.

And, recently, that ignition point appeared. He finally, publicly killed the accomplice of the person who had imitated his butterfly murders."

All the criminal investigators were silent after Bo Jinyan laid out his deductions. Jian Yao, however, felt inexplicably uneasy; what was this feeling? There was always this feeling of deja vu, of details that just seemed so familiar; there was always the sense that some important person and situation was right there, on the cusp of being revealed. But, because she was caught in the net, she was unable to see clearly.

She looked at Bo Jinyan and remembered his earlier words to her. Slowly, her heart regained a measure of calm.

Don't be afraid to face your wounds.