Netherworld Investigator

NEW NOVEL: First and foremost, I'm delighted to announce that our long-time veteran translator littleshanks has finally launched his new novel, Rise!  Rise is a novel about the esports scene in Shanghai, the competitive gaming capital of China. It follows the story of Lin Feng, a boy who has just moved to the city for his last year of high school. He's a passionate gamer and dreams of being the best professional League of Legends player in the world. The twist? He almost achieved his dream, but failed at the...

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Captain Xing took us to a hotel near Nanjiang Medical School. I suddenly remembered that Sun Tiger’s daughter, Sun Bingxin, was a student there, but I’d never visited her here.

“Are the couple medical students?” I asked.

“No,” Captain Xing shook his head. “The man is a rich man’s son. His father is the owner of East Asian International Corporation. The victim was a model.”

“Whoa!” Dali cried with his mouth open. “You mean the dude’s father owns the East Asian Mall?”

“Yup,” Captain Xing answered. “That’s the one.”

The East Asian Supermarket was a large national supermarket chain. It ranked among the top five in the domestic retail industry. I heard that their headquarters was in Nanjiang! In addition to the retail industry, the East Asia International Corporation was also involved with hardware, household chemicals, food, clothing, and other industries. Half of the goods in their supermarkets were produced by themselves.

In short, the guy involved in this case was no small fry. Compared to him, even Ye Shiwen was just another ordinary guy. 

“Why would these people stay in a small hotel near the college?” I asked. “Would a rich guy stay at a cheap place like that?”

“I’m not sure either,” Captain Xing answered. “But it was the model’s name that was filled in on the check-in form.”

There were a lot of police cars parked around the hotel and some passing students started to crowd around trying to find out what was going on. I glanced around, for fear that I would bump into Sun Bingxin here. We were childhood friends after all, and all these years not once did I pay her a visit, even though we had been studying in the same city.

Dali had no idea what went through my head, so he smiled naughtily at me and teased, “Dude, these girls are on another level, aren’t they? I’m kind of regretting not studying medicine right now.”

“Didn’t you hear about that murder case in the news?” I asked. “There’s a medical student who stabbed her boyfriend for cheating on her. She knew exactly where to stab so he’d die a painful death, but in the end all she got was a manslaughter charge. Do you want a girlfriend like that?”

“Can you not spoil the mood?” Dali snapped.

We crossed over the police line and entered the hotel. The murder scene was up on the fifth floor. I saw a room with its door ajar and with policemen standing near it, so I went in immediately. There was a body on the bed covered with a white sheet and a handsome young man looking distraught talking to the police.

As soon as Dali saw the corpse, he gasped and grasped my shoulder tightly.

“Calm down!” I whispered.

All eyes in the room turned to us. Many of the police officers had met me before, and they smiled when they saw me. 

“This is Special Consultant Song Yang,” Captain Xing announced. “You’ve all heard of him before, haven’t you? I asked for his help to solve this case.”

When one of the police officers who knew me heard it, he immediately lit up and said, “Now that Song Yang’s here, this case is practically closed!”

“Whoa, dude, you’re famous!” Dali crowed with a grin on his face. “Aren’t you proud of yourself?”

“Shut up!” I spat. Then I turned to Captain Xing and asked, “Can I take a look at the body now?”

“Sure!” he replied. He then told everyone to get out of the room because it was getting really crowded in there.

I pulled up the white sheet and saw the corpse of a woman lying on her back on the bed. She was clearly very attractive when she was alive, but now, she was no different from any other corpse.

I put on the latex gloves and pried the victim’s eyes open to check the pupils. I then pressed the skin with my fingers, then moved the joints. I found that the cornea of her eyes had turned cloudy, rigor mortis had set in, and livor mortis had appeared but it still dissipated when I pressed on the skin. This meant that the time of death should’ve been about two to three hours ago.

Captain Xing nodded as he heard my conclusions, telling me that these were the same things that Coroner Wu had told him. The coroner was not here at the moment because he had to run to the nearby hospital to do some testing on a few pills that were found at the scene at one of their labs.

At that moment, I noticed that the blood vessels on the victim’s body were dark brown and her nails were blue.

In truth, Traditional Coroners tested for poisons too. They used silver needles to test for poisons. They were ridiculed nowadays as quacks and pseudoscientific, but in fact, silver would react with arsenic—a common poison in ancient times—and turn black.

As time passed, new poisons continuously emerged, and with that, Traditional Coroners adapted accordingly. The first edition of The Chronicles of Grand Magistrates listed about two hundred poisons in one of its chapters. By the time the book was passed down to Grandpa, the list had grown to 4,600 poisons. That might sound like a huge number, but currently there were over thirty thousand known toxic substances in the world. In other words, I must admit that poisons were a major weakness of mine.

Fortunately, I was able to guess the exact poison used in this case. All I had to do now was verify it.

I asked Dali to turn the body over to see if there were any signs of trauma and poisoning. Dali’s face turned red as he approached the corpse, so I whispered to him, “Are you seriously blushing in front of a dead body? You’re not a necrophile, are you?”

“Shut up!” he retorted. “You’re the weird one! What red-blooded man wouldn’t blush when they see a nude body? How can you be so calm?”

I stared at the back of the dead body and casually answered, “Because I’m looking at totally different things from you.”

After examining the body closely with my eyes, I did Organ Echolocation to check the victim’s inner organs. No matter how the poison was ingested, it would always eventually end up in certain inner organs. For example, mercury would accumulate in the kidneys, arsenic in the liver, aconite in the digestive system, and snake venom would congeal in the bloodstream.

There was a five-fold classification system in traditional Chinese medicine that described the functions of the heart, liver, spleen, stomach and kidneys. Traditional Coroners used this same system to classify various poisons for easy identification.

Through Organ Echolocation, I discovered that the victim’s heart was very stiff. This gave me a suspicion, so I used a needle to draw some blood from the victim’s body.

It was much more difficult to draw blood from a corpse than a living person. The needle had to be pierced accurately through the vein, otherwise it wouldn’t work. Fortunately, the victim was thin so her blood vessels were very obvious and easy to find.

I then took the elixir that I brought with me and dropped the victim’s blood into it. The blood didn’t spread and mix easily with the elixir at all. Instead, it formed a teardrop-shaped droplet suspension.

“What kind of magic potion is that, dude?” shouted Dali. “The blood is floating in it!”

“It’s called Blood Replica,” I explained. “It has exactly the same density as human blood. When you drop poisoned blood into it, you can roughly tell through the position of the blood suspension what kind of poison was used.”

“How do you tell?”

“Well, for example, if someone was poisoned by the snake venom, their blood would sink to the bottom. If they inhaled poisonous gas, their blood would float on top.”

“So what poison do we have here?”

“I can’t tell for sure yet,” I replied. “There’s something else that I need to verify. Can you get me a cotton swab?”

I took the cotton swab that Dali handed over and spread the victim’s legs open. I inserted the cotton swab into her vagina and checked the secretion. Everyone in the room became visibly uncomfortable when they saw what I did, but because they were police officers, they kept their cool really well. They must’ve seen much worse than this.

Dali, on the other hand, was getting agitated. 

“Will you hurry up, dude?” he whispered. “It’s getting awkward in here!”

“Shhh! I found something!”

When I checked the victim’s secretions, I discovered an abnormality in her vagina. I paid no heed to the eyes in the room and proceeded to pry the victim’s vagina open with the cotton swabs and looked into it with Cave Vision.

After that, I rummaged through the trash can and walked around the room. I saw something on the bedside table and grabbed it immediately.

What an ingenious way to poison someone! I thought. This case turned out not to be simple after all.

At that point, I’d figured out what poison was used and how the victim was poisoned. That’s when I noticed the tense atmosphere in the room. My behavior in the last few minutes must’ve made me look like a lunatic to those who didn’t know me.

Captain Xing cleared his throat and politely asked, “Did you find anything, Song Yang?”

“Yes,” I replied. “The victim was poisoned with…”

Before I could finish my sentence, a middle-aged man wearing a white coat burst into the room and loudly proclaimed, “I’ve figured out what poison was used!”

“Oh, Dr. Wu,” Captain Xing remarked. “What a coincidence. We’ve just figured that out too.”

“What? Who did?” asked Dr. Wu, taken aback. He then glanced at me and frowned. “Oh, it’s you. I know you. You’re the brat who got Dr. Qin into trouble. Why is he here, Captain Xing? Don’t you trust my capabilities?”

I got Dr. Qin into trouble? I wondered. That old man must’ve been spreading lies about me to his other colleagues.

“It’s not that, Dr. Wu…” Captain Xing tried to explain. “I just want to solve the case as soon as possible.”

“So you invited this quack to the crime scene?” Dr. Wu spat. “I wonder how Traditional Coroners test for poison? Using a silver needle? Hah! You must be kidding me!”

Then he turned to me and asked, “So what kind of poison did you detect, boy?”

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