Netherworld Investigator

Having seen the dead body, I quickly came to a conclusion.

“There are four victims in this murder case,” I proclaimed.

Everyone present was surprised. Even Huang Xiaotao looked at me with questioning eyes.

The coroner Dr. Luo Weiwei was the first to speak up.

“You don’t mean to say that she was pregnant, do you?” she asked.

I pointed to the exposed uterus and asked, “Wasn’t it obvious to you?”

Luo Weiwei was wearing a mask, so I couldn’t see her full expression, but the disdain in her eyes was as clear as day.

“What do you mean by obvious?” she snapped angrily. “What you’re making is a half-baked speculation! You haven’t even done an autopsy on the body yet! At the very least, the bodily fluids should be tested first before making any conclusions! Forensics is a science, you know? You can’t make any statements based on guessing in science!”

“Dr. Luo,” I said, “you rely too much on instruments. There is a passage in the Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified that states that when a fetus is a month old, it is like an autumnal dew; when it is two months old, it resembles a peach blossom. Judging by the presence of this tiny clump of flesh here that looks like a peach blossom, I’d say that the victim was two months pregnant when she died.”

“I don’t believe these superstitions,” Luo Weiwei brushed off. “Besides, this book of Collected Cases that you’re talking about is just a centuries-old novel read by the uneducated folk.”

I laughed. A novel read by the uneducated folk? This coroner really knew how to get on my nerves.

“Then go ahead and do all the testing you like,” I said. “You’ll see that I was right.”

Luo Weiwei gave me a look, then pulled out a cotton swab and collected some uterine secretions, then kept it in an evidence collection tube and went out of the morgue to do the testing.

Seconds after her last footsteps were heard, Dali came in with three coats and asked, “Why was that pretty coroner stomping out like that? Oh my god!”

Dali screamed in horror when his eyes caught sight of the horrifying dead body on the metal table. He quickly turned his eyes away from the corpse and shivered in fear.

“Idiot…” said Huang Xiaotao, rolling her eyes.

I asked Dali to help us put our coats on as our hands were in rubber gloves. I felt a lot warmer the second I had my coat on.

Dali did not dare to look at the dead body again. He kept his eyes at other places the whole time he was there.

“What else do you need, dude?” he asked. “I’ll go out and buy them for you now.”

“I need a kind of medicinal herb, called midnight horror,” I told him. “Then get a bottle of linseed oil or olive oil, two stainless steel pots—one big and one small.”

“Are you making stir-fry?” asked Dali, a bit puzzled.

I smiled and said, “Idiot, aren’t you afraid of saying something like that in front of the body? You’d better be careful tonight! You might find that someone is looking for you.”

Dali was so scared he put his palms together in a prayer and then apologized earnestly to the dead body. He then turned to me and asked, “What the hell is a midnight horror, dude? Do they sell it in the pharmacy? I don’t know any Chinese medicine shops nearby.”

“Midnight horror is also called tree of Damocles or Indian caper,” I explained. “You don't need to go to a Chinese medicine shop. You’ll find it at the place where you can buy herbal tea in the supermarket. Get me about 125 grams of that. And don’t forget to choose those with the highest quality.”

“You don’t need to tell me that!” quipped Dali. “Alright, I’m off!”

Dali was then about to sprint out of the morgue.

“Wait a minute!” I stopped him, then pulled up the white sheets that covered the second and third dead bodies. The husband had really been decapitated. There were many stab wounds on the body and the intestines spilled out of his belly. Meanwhile, the hands were clenched in stiff fists. It seemed that he was also holding a knife at the time of his death. I grabbed his arm and moved it a few times. I now had a good idea of what to do next.

The elderly victim was slightly better off, but that was not saying much. The pieces of broken glass on her body had been cleaned up. There were only some scratches and bruises, and they were not very deep. The eyeballs in both of her eye sockets had been pierced through, and the black and red mass of flesh and blood around them had solidified. This made it look like her eyes were two deep bloody holes.

I slid the palm of my hand under the corpse and moved it around, and found that the direct causes of death were of a broken spine and broken skull.

“Buy me some elastic bands for trousers,” I told Dali, “and a strong wooden stick, some large sewing needles, a magnet, some hooks and super glue.”

“Roger!” Dali replied before he left.

Before I returned to the first body, Huang Xiaotao leaned her head aside and looked at the victim’s uterus and asked, “Song Yang, how did you know that she was pregnant? And what is it about fetuses looking like peach blossoms? Is there any scientific reason behind it?”

“How many petals do you see in this peach blossom? I pointed at the clump of tissue.

“Five petals,” Huang Xiaotao replied.

“And what color is it?”

“Pink.”

“Do you see a stem-like structure behind it?”

Huang Xiaotao took a closer look, then exclaimed, “Yeah!”

I explained to her that the shape of the peach blossom that appeared on the uterus was actually a baby’s premature form. The five petals were its limbs and head, and the ‘flower stem’ was the umbilical cord.

The full horror of the case suddenly hit Huang Xiaotao.

“How atrocious!” she lamented. “A two-month-old baby who never even saw the world yet just died senselessly inside its mother just like that!”

“Exactly!” I agreed, then let out a long sigh.

Fortunately, the fetus was only two months old. At this time, the baby couldn’t yet be regarded as a person. If it had been at least five months old, when the brain and limbs started to develop, then this body would properly be counted as containing two lives.

According to the books I read, the souls of these dead fetuses were reported to be extremely resentful. After the autopsy, the Traditional Coroner must cleanse his body with the smoke of mugwort leaves, otherwise the soul that failed to reincarnate would follow him, and if he went home to his pregnant wife, the soul would take over the fetus and an abnormal child would be born, often with four hands and four feet or two heads. These babies weren’t conjoined twins, but more like chimeras, meaning two different bodies were joined together, as if another baby had forcibly ‘borrowed’ the uterine to be born.

Many of the taboos passed down by the ancestors had deep meaning behind them. Although they gradually became a seemingly meaningless ritual, Grandpa taught me that they should not be brushed off as mere superstitions, lest we would be sorry later. For this reason, I usually made sure to keep this type of taboos respectfully in mind.

I asked Wang Yuanchao to hand me the echolocation rod from my bag. I then used it to perform organ echolocation on each of the victims’ bodies. I determined that the time of death was about forty hours ago. Although the details were already written in the death reports, I still had to go through the necessary process to make sure that I missed nothing.

At that moment, Luo Weiwei came in with a report in her hand. I asked her, “Is the test result out?”

“I admit that you guessed it right this time,” she muttered. “The victim was indeed two months pregnant.” Everyone else in the room began to whisper at each other, and the way they looked at me changed a little.

I guessed it right? Now that was funny.

“Then let me guess one more thing,” I said. “The sequence of events went like this: the husband killed the mother, then he killed the wife, and finally the husband committed suicide!”

“You must be kidding, Special Consultant Song!” snorted Luo Weiwei. “The husband was a very good son to his mother all along! How could he kill his own mother so brutally? Not even a fit of insanity would make him do that!”

“Dr. Luo,” I replied, “did you buy your qualifications with money? What does the findings of an autopsy have to do with speculations about the victims’ personal relationships?”

Luo Weiwei glared at me with eyes full of rage.

“I have no obligations to believe what you say!” she shrieked. “If you want me to take your claims seriously, then you’ll have to prove it to me!”

“Old Wang,” I said, “Can you please get me a UV lamp from the forensics department?”

Wang Yuanchao nodded and left. I picked up the left hand of the male victim and squeezed the fingertips a few times. Small particles suddenly appeared at the fingertips. Although I could see it clearly with my eyes, I knew that these particles were too tiny for the average person to see.

Wang Yuanchao soon came back with a UV light.

“What a sight!” joked Huang Xiaotao. “Even you are using modern instruments now!”

I laughed. “I’m utilizing the best of both worlds!”

In truth, the work of a Traditional Coroner was akin to that of a forensic scientist. It required me to move with the advances of knowledge instead of blindly following what was done in the past. Take this UV lamp, for example. People in ancient times also used ultraviolet light to examine corpses, but due to technological limitations, there was no reliable source of ultraviolet rays other than the sun, so dead bodies used to be moved under the sun and covered with a special gauze soaked in a specially concocted syrup to act as the light filter. But now that UV light had been invented, there was no reason for me to use the ancient method anymore.

Thus, I took the UV light and swept it across the fingers of the male victim. The UV light made some tiny objects appear clearly, it looked like short strands of coarse hair. When she saw it, Luo Weiwei’s eyes suddenly widened and beads of cold sweat formed on her forehead.

I looked at her and sneered, “Do you see what’s on the husband’s fingertips now?”

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