Everyone: “…”
That was fast.
Jiang Yunxin lifted the white cloth. When she saw everyone staring at her, she suddenly felt uneasy. Had she done something wrong?
“Do we… need to perform some kind of ritual first?”
Like bowing a few times or burning incense or something?
Should I cover him up again?
Although she had never had such a habit before, she supposed she should follow local customs.
“No.” Fang Mingyan finally spoke. “It’s fine. Go ahead. Everyone, get to work.”
No wonder this girl had been able to frighten her stepmother away by screaming and shouting about ghosts and gods. She really wasn’t an ordinary person.
Jiang Yunxin relaxed. Beneath the white cloth in front of her lay the body of an elderly man. It was normal and intact.
The next body was that of a middle-aged man. Its large face was turned toward her—and it had no nose.
“My lord, this body has no nose,” Jiang Yunxin reported at once.
Everyone came over.
More precisely, the corpse had no nose tip. In the place where the nose should have been were two black holes.
The bodies in the Mortuary were frightening enough as it was. A corpse with no nose was even more terrifying.
Long Qiao could not help saying, “What’s wrong with this person? Why cut off a dead man’s nose? What are you going to do with it, use it as a drinking snack?”
The moment those words left his mouth, everyone glared at them.
Not being afraid was one thing. Being scary was another.
It was already eerie and terrifying enough. Did they really have to say something so grotesque?
Fang Mingyan examined the corpse for a while, then frowned. “Xiao Jiang, can you tell whether his nose was cut off before or after he died?”
Jiang Yunxin examined it carefully.
“My lord,” Yunxin said, “the nose was cut off after death. Injuries inflicted long after death, particularly after rigor mortis has set in, leave very little gaping at the wound, and the wound edges show no sign of contraction. They are completely different from wounds inflicted before death.”
This corpse had been dead for more than two days. The man was thoroughly, irrevocably dead.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. At least the nose had not been cut from a living person—but then they realized that something was still wrong.
They had come to investigate the case of corpses being robbed of their body parts. That was terrifying enough in itself.
The Mortuary had reported that, over the past half month, corpses had been found with their ears, noses, or fingers cut off, or their eyes gouged out.
It was not just one body. The methods were vicious enough to make one’s blood run cold.
Fang Mingyan was very satisfied with Jiang Yunxin’s expertise.
They continued examining the dozen or so remaining corpses in the Mortuary, each covered with a white cloth.
Sure enough, besides the male corpse whose nose had been cut off, there were three more bodies that had respectively been stripped of their ears and fingers.
As they were examining the corpses, Fang Mingyan suddenly turned his head slightly and said in a low voice, “Someone is outside.”
Before he had even finished speaking, Long Qiao had already darted out.
It was wonderful to know martial arts. Jiang Yunxin watched Long Qiao vanish from sight before the sound of their movement had even faded and made a secret resolve.
Sooner or later, I’m going to dissect someone who knows martial arts and see exactly what makes such a person different from everyone else.
After Long Qiao rushed out, a voice carried over.
“Lord Long, Lord Long, is that you? Has Lord Fang come too?”
It was a somewhat weathered male voice, with a slight tremor to it.
It seemed to be someone they knew.
Long Qiao said, “Zhou Changchun, where have you been running off to at this hour?”
Zhou Changchun grabbed Long Qiao by the arm. “Lord Long, I think I just saw that thief.”
Jiang Yunxin ran outside and saw an old man clutching Long Qiao’s arm and trembling all over. The moment the old man saw Fang Mingyan emerge, he immediately let go of Long Qiao and rushed over to grab Fang Mingyan instead.
Fang Mingyan did not even get angry. He merely said, “What happened? Explain it clearly.”
Zhou Changchun said, “The wind was strong today, so I had a little wine and went to bed early. But I didn’t sleep soundly. I kept hearing rustling inside. It didn’t sound like a rat, either. There have been so many corpses losing body parts lately, so I woke up with a start. When I came out to look, sure enough, there was a shadow.”
“When the shadow realized I’d seen it, it ran for its life. I chased after it, but I couldn’t catch it. I chased it all the way to the top of that hill, and then it got away.”
Old Man Zhou finished speaking breathlessly. Fang Mingyan immediately said, “Take me there.”
Leaving two people behind to guard the Mortuary, Fang Mingyan led the rest of them after Old Man Zhou up the mountain in the darkness.
It was called a mountain, but the hills in this area were not high, and the woods were not dense. In reality, they were a series of slopes, with ridges and hollows running into one another and creating a rolling landscape.
Old Man Zhou knew the area extremely well and soon brought them to the place where he had lost sight of the thief.
“It was here.” Old Man Zhou was getting on in years, and after rushing back and forth in his haste, he was now bent over with his hands on his hips, panting heavily.
Fortunately, they had to accommodate Old Man Zhou’s pace. Otherwise, Jiang Yunxin would not have been able to keep up either.
Everyone looked around. All they could see were dark hillsides.
“Over there—over there.” Old Man Zhou pointed ahead. “That person ran in that direction.”
This was outside the capital, not some desolate wilderness. People lived all around them, and there was more than one village nearby. The direction Old Man Zhou pointed toward led to one of them—a village called Springwater Village.
Fang Mingyan let Old Man Zhou catch his breath, then sent Long Qiao and several others ahead to take a look in that direction.
The rest of them followed shortly afterward. They had barely taken a few steps when Long Qiao suddenly shouted, “My lord, we’ve found something here!”
Then Long Qiao crouched down, as though they had spotted something on the ground.
When Jiang Yunxin reached them, she was surprised as well.
Whether the corpse thief had dropped them in his panic and fear, or for some other reason, several scattered body parts had been left behind on this patch of grass.
There were ears and fingers. Everyone hurriedly held up their torches and searched carefully, gathering the scattered remains from the ground.
“What a sin. What a terrible sin.” Old Man Zhou prayed under his breath while cursing the thief. “How could anyone be so immoral? If you want to steal gold or silver, fine—but what use could you possibly have for stealing these? Now the dead don’t even have complete bodies. What a terrible crime. After he dies, he’ll go straight to the eighteenth level of hell!”
Although the others did not say it aloud, they were all thinking the same thing.
The dead housed in the Mortuary were, apart from criminals guilty of the most heinous offenses, either from impoverished families or people who had died far from home. They were already pitiful enough. It was out of compassion for all living things that the imperial court allocated funds every year to bury them together.
But after this, their bodies were incomplete. Even after burial, they would not be able to rest in peace.
Searching for body parts on dark hillsides in the middle of the night was a frightening thing in itself. Fortunately, there were many of them. Seven or eight torches illuminated the slopes as they searched, and Jiang Yunxin followed local custom as well, taking a torch and joining in.
Before long, they found two or three fingers, two ears, and a nose along the way.
The group wrapped the pieces in handkerchiefs and placed them together, then brought them to Jiang Yunxin.
It was not that they wanted to frighten her. She was the coroner, after all.
Jiang Yunxin glanced at them and, sure enough, noticed something wrong. She let out a surprised sound.
“My lord, you said this was a corpse-theft case, but this finger isn’t from any of the corpses.” Jiang Yunxin pointed at one finger among the pile of scattered remains.