My name is Lin Mu. I'm a dentist.
You probably think, what kind of story could a dentist possibly have? Staring into mouths all day, breathing in halitosis, listening to the whine of the drill, going home with hands that still reek of antiseptic. The most exciting thing that ever happens is some terrified grown man screaming like a baby in your chair.
Yeah. I used to think that too.
Until I took a job.
Pull one tooth. Ten thousand yuan.
Ten thousand yuan, my friends. I charge three hundred to fill a cavity, and people still complain I'm ripping them off. Five hundred for a wisdom tooth extraction, and they'll haggle you into the ground. Now someone's offering ten grand just to pull a tooth? The only thought in my head was — this guy's got to be an idiot, right?
But I still took it.
Only an idiot wouldn't.
I had no idea how ironic those words would look in hindsight. That night, lying in bed covered in someone else's blood, ears still ringing with that laugh — the kind no human being should be able to make — I kept thinking: Lin Mu, you're the idiot. The biggest idiot there ever was.
I studied dentistry in college. Five-year program. Flunked nine classes by year four. The school very politely invited me to "voluntarily withdraw." My mom called and cried for forty minutes straight. My dad didn't say a word. Just hung up. Later my sister told me he'd been drinking himself to sleep every night, telling everyone he ran into: "My son's a waste of space."
I couldn't argue. I was.
After dropping out, I lay in my rented room for two weeks, borrowing money from everyone I could until there was no one left. Eventually I had to face reality: I needed to earn a living. But a dentistry dropout who couldn't even sit the assistant practitioner exam — what legitimate clinic would touch me?
Then a buddy recommended an app. Said you could pick up odd jobs on it — food delivery, errands, designated driving, you name it. Figured it didn't need a degree, so I downloaded it.
At first I just did deliveries. Eight yuan a run. Run yourself ragged all day, make maybe three hundred, minus gas and food — you're barely breaking even. The beat-up Wuling minivan I was driving was borrowed from my brother-in-law. Thing guzzled gas like it had a grudge against me.
Then I found a section buried at the bottom of the app. It was called "Special Requests." I clicked in and — holy hell — the payouts were insane.
But the jobs were just as insane.
My first Special Request said: "Need someone to move rocks." Five hundred yuan. Five hundred to move rocks? What kind of rocks, gold?
The address was out in an old shantytown on the edge of the city. I drove the van there, navigation leading me down a dirt road lined with corrugated tin shacks. An old man stood outside the farthest one, wearing blue overalls, two teeth left in his mouth — one on the left, one on the right, like guardian statues at a temple gate.
He pointed at a pile of rocks by the door. Big ones — granite chunks, every single one of them forty, fifty pounds. I had a hand cart and gloves in the van, so I asked where to move them. The old man muttered something about "the backyard" and went inside.
I sweated it out for an hour, hauling every last rock to the back. Knocked on his door to ask if there was anything else. He opened up, shoved a wad of cash at me — five hundred-yuan bills — and slammed the door shut again.
I sat in the van counting the money, feeling pretty damn good. Five hundred for an hour's work. Better than a whole day of food delivery.
Then I saw the old man come out again.
He must've thought I'd left. He hurried around to the backyard, walked up to the rock pile I'd just finished stacking, picked up the top one, and started hauling it back to the front — all hunched over, staggering under the weight.
I sat there and watched for five minutes. He went back and forth like an ant carrying crumbs, hauling the rocks one by one right back where they started.
My brain couldn't process it. Thinking back now — this old man paid me five hundred yuan just to move rocks from the front yard to the back, so he could move them right back again. What for? A workout?
I took more weird jobs after that. A middle-aged woman hired me to come name her six kittens. She said she'd made a deal with some "thing" when she was young — something that had sworn to destroy everything she ever owned. Her solution? Get an outsider to name her belongings. That way they didn't "belong" to her anymore. That thing couldn't touch them.
I sat on her couch with six kittens in my lap, naming them one by one. Snowball, Midnight, Patches, Ginger, Sheriff, Christmas. She let out this long exhale when I was done, tears running down her face, and pressed six hundred yuan into my hand.
That afternoon I took another job: pick up a bouquet from a florist, deliver it to a nursing home. The recipient was a woman in her eighties. She held those flowers and sobbed the whole time. Said they were from her daughter. Her daughter who'd been dead for thirty years.
You never knew what the next job would bring.
My family hated what I was doing. My mom brought it up every time she called — "wasting your life," "bringing shame on the family." At the last family dinner, my sister called me a "day laborer" in front of everyone at the table. The tone she used was the same one you'd use for "convicted felon."
I didn't bother explaining. The money was real. The numbers hitting my bank account every month were real. As for how bizarre the jobs got — bizarre was fine. None of it was illegal.
That's what I really believed.
That night I was scrolling the app while eating instant noodles, flicking my thumb down the list. Way at the bottom, a new request popped up.
"Dental service needed. Tooth extraction. Compensation: 10,000 yuan."
I nearly spat noodles everywhere.
Ten thousand? To pull a tooth?
The most expensive tooth I'd ever pulled was eight hundred — an impacted wisdom tooth that took forty minutes of wrestling. Ten thousand is what? You could get a full dental implant for less.
I glanced at the posting time: two minutes ago. If someone else grabbed this, I'd regret it for the rest of my life. I didn't even read the details. My thumb was already pressing "Accept."
Only after taking the job did I look closer. The description was three lines: "One tooth needs extraction. Bring necessary tools. Details to be discussed in person."
The address was up in the northern villa district. Qingxi Hills. I knew the place — the most expensive real estate in the city, units going for twenty million plus. Someone living there wants a tooth pulled for ten grand? Maybe it wasn't so crazy after all.
I wolfed down the rest of my noodles, grabbed my car keys, and bolted. My mom's old pickup was parked out front. I hesitated for a second as the engine turned over — should I bring anesthetic? Decided against it. My toolbox had the basics. Enough for one tooth.
It took an hour to drive from the south side to the north. Qingxi Hills sat up in the mountains. The security guard stopped me at the gate, asked which unit I was visiting. I gave the address. His expression went a little strange, but he let me through.
The mountain road was lined with plane trees on both sides. My headlights caught the leaves shuddering in the wind. After about ten minutes, I rounded a bend and the view opened up — a white two-story villa perched on the slope, surrounded by immaculately trimmed lawn.
The whole house was dark. Not a single light on.
But the grass had just been mowed. The walls were clean — not even a strand of ivy.
I parked, grabbed my toolbox, and walked to the front door. Dark hardwood. Bronze door knocker. Heavy-looking. I knocked three times.
On the second knock, the door swung open by itself.
A strange smell drifted out. Not mold. Not perfume. Something like — the antiseptic smell of a dental clinic, mixed with something unnameable.
"Come in."
The voice came from inside. Neither loud nor soft. But there was something off about it — brittle. That's the word. Brittle.
I pushed the door open and stepped through.
The entryway was dim. Just a few recessed lights in the ceiling, their glow pale and sickly. Dark tile floors. Gray latex walls. Clean. Empty.
Cold. Like an operating room.
A man stood at the end of the hallway. He wasn't tall. His skin was unnaturally pale — the kind you get from never seeing the sun. He wore a dark gray bathrobe, the belt tied loose and sloppy. Bald on top, just a thin ring of grayish hair above his ears. But his eyebrows — those were thick. Thick as two caterpillars crawling across his face.
A foreigner? The thought flickered through my mind.
He grinned.
I've seen a lot of teeth in my life. It's literally my field. I've seen mouths you wouldn't believe — smoke-stained yellow, coffee-blackened, rotted down to nubs, gum disease so bad the teeth looked like they were sinking into a swamp. I've seen it all.
But this guy's teeth? First time for everything.
Every single one was like a little brick. Thick. Square. Packed in tight. A normal adult has thirty-two teeth — sixteen up top, sixteen on the bottom. A rough glance told me his upper jaw alone had more than sixteen. Some of the extras were squeezed in crooked along the gum line. Others were forcing their way out between two molars.
And they were clean. Gleaming, porcelain-white. Like freshly polished.
A chill went down my spine. But my mouth was already moving. "Hello. I'm Lin Mu. I accepted the tooth extraction request."
I reached out to shake his hand. He didn't take it. Just tilted his head in a "come in" gesture, turned, and walked deeper into the hallway.
"Let's talk in the room." That brittle voice again. It made the back of my neck crawl.
The hallway was long. It got darker the further we went. I followed him for what felt like two full minutes, passing at least three or four closed doors. At the end of the hall, he turned a corner and pushed open another door.
Crunch.
I looked down. Plastic sheeting. That clear protective film they put down during renovations — the kind with air bubbles that pop when you step on them.
The room was small. Maybe two hundred square feet. Gray walls. Gray floor. Gray ceiling. In the center sat an old-fashioned dental chair — the foot-pump hydraulic kind, its leather cracked and worn, yellow foam poking through. A ceramic bathtub stood in the corner. White. Covered in cracks, held together with tape.
Beside the dental chair: a stainless steel instrument tray. Pliers. Forceps. Probes. Periosteal elevators. All dental surgical tools. Neatly arranged.
The blood in my veins went cold.
I stepped back. The plastic sheeting crunched again.
The man noticed. He smiled, walked over to the dental chair, and sat down.
"I know, I know. It looks a little alarming." He adjusted the chair back as he spoke. "Let me explain. My situation is... unique. I immigrated here. A long, long time ago."
His accent was strange. Hard to place. Something like a northerner who'd picked up a southern dialect, mixed with a foreigner's way of speaking Chinese. But he was fluent — throwing around terms like "immigration" and "citizenship status" with ease.
"My citizenship application has dragged on. Now your government has eyes on me." He kept talking. "I don't want to see a doctor. Not until my status issue gets resolved, at least. The less attention, the better. You understand, right?"
He said it casually. Like he'd forgotten his wallet at the grocery store.
But alarm bells were screaming in my head.
Even if everything you're saying is true — even if you're really an undocumented immigrant who doesn't want to see a dentist — you'd at least find a back-alley clinic. You don't go online, hire a random errand runner, and tell him to pull your tooth. Not just any tooth, either — a perfectly healthy one. You hand that job to some amateur and you're asking for infection, for hemorrhaging, for hitting a nerve and winding up with half your face paralyzed. What the hell?
"So you're saying... you're offering ten thousand yuan. Just for me to pull one tooth?" I tried to keep my voice steady, inching backward.
He laughed. Not a grin this time. A full laugh, the sound dragging on and on, bouncing off the bare walls.
"No, no, no, my dear boy." He wiped tears of laughter from his eyes. "I'm offering twenty thousand."
Twenty thousand.
I stood there, feet planted on crinkly plastic, surrounded by surgical instruments, facing a strange man with way too many teeth. A thought was screaming inside my skull: Turn around. Run. Run out of this gray room, down this endless hallway, out of this dark and empty house. Run and never come back.
But twenty thousand.
Twenty thousand would cover two months of credit card payments. Half a year of my mom's property fees. It would keep me from being the family failure at my brother-in-law's dinner table.
I walked over to the instrument tray and picked up the needle holder.
Wait. Not the needle holder. The extraction forceps. I was that rattled. Switched tools. Got the right one this time.
"Which one?"
He opened his mouth and tapped the inside of his upper left jaw with his index finger. The tooth way in the back. It was crowded in there, hemmed in by a wisdom tooth and swollen gum tissue. It did look a little inflamed.
"This one in the back. It's been acting up. Hurts for days. Can't be bothered to treat it — just pull it and be done." He laughed again. "It's not like I'm running low."
He opened his mouth wider. The angle was wrong. Just wrong. A normal person's jaw opens about three fingers wide, tops. His looked like it could swallow a fist. The space inside his mouth stretched and distorted, like a snake unhinging its jaw before a meal.
I took a breath. Slid the forceps in. Clamped onto the tooth.
The feel was wrong.
That tooth wouldn't budge. Like it was fused into the bone. A normal tooth — no matter how stubborn — gives a little when you clamp and rock the forceps. This one didn't. I was half convinced it wasn't a tooth at all, just a nail driven into his jawbone.
I looked deeper into his mouth.
The root was thick. Way too thick. And it wasn't the normal tapered cone shape, either. It was... I don't even know how to describe it. Just wrong.
And his teeth — they were clean. No calculus. No plaque. His gums were pink and healthy, textbook-perfect.
A normal human being cannot have that many teeth. Cannot have teeth that clean. And absolutely cannot be grinning while someone's got forceps clamped around one of them.
But I pulled anyway.
Because by then, all I could think about was the twenty grand.
"Go ahead and pull." His voice came from beneath my hands — muffled, but perfectly calm.
I pulled.
Didn't come out.
I pulled harder, throwing my body weight into it, upper body bearing down.
Still nothing.
My brain was screaming: This isn't a tooth. This is welded in. I was about to let go and say "sorry, can't do it," when he raised a thumb toward the ceiling. The gesture was unmistakable. Keep going.
I clenched my jaw. Slid the forceps in deeper — right up against the alveolar ridge — then threw everything I had into one violent yank.
Crack.
Not the snapping of a tooth. The sound of something being ripped out of flesh. Like pulling a carrot out of frozen ground. But deeper. Heavier.
A whole tooth dangled from the forceps.
Shreds of tissue and nerve endings hung off the root, wet and stringy, dripping blood.
I almost dropped it. The thing was heavy — at least twice the weight of a normal tooth. I flung it onto the instrument tray. Metal clinked against metal.
"About the payment—" I started. I needed to lock this down. What if he backed out? Jobs like this had no contract. Everything was verbal.
"Forty thousand." His voice came out thick and garbled.
He lay there, not moving, eyes staring straight up at the ceiling. His pupils had shrunk to pinpoints under the fluorescent light. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, down his chin, soaking into his bathrobe.
"Forty thousand? It was twenty." I froze.
"Forty thousand." He said it again. Blood-flecked spittle sprayed from his lips and hit my shirt. "Forty thousand. Keep going."
I looked down at the bloodstains on my clothes. Wiped my face with the back of my hand.
"Keep going pulling how many?"
He spat the bloody saliva pooling in his mouth onto the floor. The puddle spread slowly across the plastic sheeting. Dark. Almost black.
"Pull until I say stop."
His mouth opened again.
This time my brain wasn't failing to sound the alarm — it was screaming so loud I couldn't hear it anymore. Forty thousand. Plus the twenty from before. Sixty thousand. One night. Two months of income.
I wasn't free of doubt. I stood there thinking for at least thirty seconds.
Then I picked up the forceps again.
The second tooth was smaller than the first. Round. Like a soybean. I clamped on, twisted my wrist. Pop. It came right out. Blood gushed — way more than the first — running down the corner of his mouth in thick streams.
He didn't frown. Didn't even flinch.
Third tooth. Fourth. Fifth.
I moved like a machine. Grab. Pull. Drop. Grab. Pull. Drop. My hands got steadier. My heart got colder. The teeth piled up on the plastic sheeting, each one clean and white and too damn bright.
His face started to swell. Chin first. Then cheeks. Then the eye sockets. His whole head was bigger now — a good size larger than when I'd arrived. The skin stretched shiny and tight. Like an overinflated balloon.
He started making sounds. Not screaming. Low, guttural groans squeezing out from deep in his throat. His hands gripped the armrests of the chair. Knuckles white as bone.
My hands were slick with blood. The forceps kept slipping. Sweat soaked through the back of my shirt, dripped into my eyes. It stung like hell.
My stomach heaved.
I stopped. Started backing away.
He grabbed my wrist.
That hand was freezing. Like it had been in a refrigerator. And the grip strength — it didn't belong to a body that size. His eyes, nearly swollen shut, locked onto me. His lips trembled. A voice barely above a whisper scraped out:
"Sixty... sixty thousand... don't... don't stop..."
Sixty thousand.
Add everything up — one hundred thousand.
One hundred thousand yuan.
I swallowed the nausea, shoved it back down, and tightened my grip on the forceps.
The next hour is mostly a blur. I remember one thing: the motion. Clamp. Pull. Drop. Clamp. Pull. Drop.
By the end, his face was so swollen I couldn't see the man anymore. Lips turned inside out, gums exposed and pulpy like a split-open pomegranate. Blood and saliva mixed into a paste, running down his cheeks, onto the chair, dripping to the floor. The puddle on the plastic sheeting was dark red now. All those teeth I'd pulled — floating in it. Like peanuts soaked in blood.
I don't know how many I pulled. Forty? Fifty? He didn't have a single tooth left. I had cleared out his entire mouth. Every last one.
I dropped the forceps on the instrument tray. Turned away. Bent over against the wall and threw up.
When I was done, I crouched there on the floor, gasping, head completely empty. By the time I pushed myself up and started toward the door, the thing in the chair moved.
It stood up.
No. Not "he." It.
The thing crawled out of the chair — hands and feet on the floor — dragged itself a few paces, then propped up against the wall and lurched toward the bathtub. Its head was swollen to the size of a watermelon. Eyes sealed shut. Lips so bloated they'd turned inside out, revealing naked, bloody gum beds. Blood poured down its face, leaving black-red streaks across the gray bathrobe.
It reached the bathtub. Knees buckled. Hands fumbled blindly for the rim, then the whole body tipped over and tumbled in.
Splash. Cold water everywhere.
The tub had water in it. Ice cold. It sprayed onto my shoes, sloshing across the plastic sheeting, sending teeth and blood swirling in every direction.
The thing lay there in the tub, its grotesque, ballooned head resting on the rim. Its body shuddered. Twitched. Every spasm sent a ripple through the water.
And then I heard it.
Laughter.
From that thing's mouth — toothless, lip-swollen, head swollen to the size of a damn beach ball — came a laugh.
"Hrrrk... hrrrkkk... hrrrkkk..."
It wasn't human laughter. It was the sound of air being forced through a blood-clogged windpipe. A wet, rasping wheeze. But its body was laughing. Its shoulders were shaking. Its hands slapped against the side of the tub like it had just heard the funniest joke in the world.
That's when I heard footsteps above me.
From upstairs.
Lots of them. Small. Rapid. Like children running. Moving across the ceiling, from one side of the house to the other. Getting closer. Getting denser.
They were coming this way.
Those things were coming this way.
I ran.
The hallway lights flickered over my head — fluorescent tubes on their last legs. I sprinted down that long corridor, plastic sheeting crackling under my feet. Behind me, the laughter kept going. It poured out of the room at the end of the hall and chased me the whole way.
I burst into the entryway. The front door was right there. A few more steps—
Something caught my foot. I went flying. Slammed into the doorframe. Shoulder and elbow both went numb, but I didn't care. I scrambled up and looked back.
A black duffel bag.
Sitting right in the middle of the hallway. Black canvas — the exact same color as the dark floor tiles. I hadn't seen it when I came in. The zipper was half open. Stacks of cash spilled out. Red hundred-yuan bills, glowing under the lights.
There was another one right beside it.
I froze for one second. Then bent down, grabbed one in each hand, and lifted. Heavy. Each one had to be at least twenty pounds.
I yanked the door open and ran. All the way to the pickup. Threw the bags into the back seat. Turned the ignition. Slammed it into gear. Floored it.
In the rearview mirror, the white villa shrank smaller and smaller. The plane trees rushed past on both sides. My headlights carved a path down the mountain road. I gripped the steering wheel — hands still shaking — covered head to toe in blood, mouth full of the taste of rust.
In the back seat, the two black duffel bags sat there. Quiet. Still. Like a pair of well-behaved passengers.
I drove all the way back to the city without stopping. Found a public parking lot two blocks from my apartment. Parked. Killed the engine.
I sat in the dark, listening to my own heartbeat. Slowly, slowly, I let my forehead fall against the steering wheel.
I still don't know what happened that night. I'm not even sure any of it really happened. Maybe I fell asleep scrolling the app. Maybe I'm still lying on the couch in my rented room, instant noodles going cold on the table.
But those two bags in the back seat were real. The smell of blood in the car was real. The bruise on my arm was real.
I didn't open the bags. I couldn't. I wasn't scared the money would be fake. I was scared it wouldn't be.
When I got home, I stripped off every piece of clothing, stuffed it all in a trash bag, and stood in the shower for forty minutes. Scrubed my skin raw. But I could still smell it — that mix of antiseptic and rust. Like it had seeped into me.
I lay in bed. Closed my eyes.
And there it was. That face.
Swollen. Toothless. Bleeding. Twitching in the bathtub.
It was laughing.
Lying in that tub, head grotesquely bloated, staring at me through eyes swollen down to slits, laughing that "hrrkk hrrkk" sound from its empty mouth.
I don't know when I fell asleep.
My phone buzzed. I grabbed it, thinking it was my alarm. Three-something in the morning.
Not my alarm.
A push notification from the app.
The sender's avatar was a gray default icon. The username was a string of garbled characters. The message was one line.
"Same time next week."