At night, the funeral home south of the city was so quiet that you could hear your heartbeat thudding against the concrete floor. The air was thick with the strange stench of formalin and the lingering smoke of incense, making your throat tighten. Wu Yan crouched beside the mortuary table, a small makeup brush clenched in his hand as he leisurely touched up the cheeks of the nameless man laid out on it. It was nothing fancy, just an attempt to make the face look less ashen, so the man could leave with some dignity.
He was twenty-three, the youngest mortuary cosmetologist at the funeral home. His skills were even more deft than Old Zhang's, though the man had worked there for over a decade. But when it came to personality, Wu Yan was famously taciturn. He never spoke to anyone for more than three sentences, and there was never a smile on his face. Behind his back, his coworkers called him “Ice-Cold Wu,” and no one dared get too close.
