“It looks like bamboo splinters,” Luo Weiwei said, cold sweat dripping from her forehead.

I turned off the ultraviolet light, “Judging from the presence of these splinters, the victim must’ve forcefully pushed an object made of bamboo not long before his death. If you still don’t believe it, then you can check if the outer layer of the chopsticks peeled out.”

“So the husband really did kill his own mother!” Huang Xiaotao exclaimed in shock. “Oh my god, it’s horrible! What an appalling thing to do!”

“Even if you’re right about this,” argued Luo Weiwei indignantly, “the last one to die was still definitely the wife, because…”

“Because you think that people can't cut their heads off, right?” I interrupted.

I noticed that Luo Weiwei was somewhat hesitant in answering me. It seemed that she had begun to doubt her previous judgment.

At last, she stubbornly insisted on her own point of view.

“Of course it is impossible!” she said. “There are so many nerves and blood vessels in the neck. You’d die even before you’re decapitated. How can you cut off your own head, then? This is all just basic common sense!”

“Do you want to make a bet?” I asked with a sneer.

“What… What kind of a bet?” Luo Weiwei panicked.

She was a woman, after all, so I wouldn’t want to make her eat the contents of an ashtray or anything like that. So I finally settled on something more suitable for her.

“Can you drive a car?” I asked.

“Yes,” she nodded.

“If I can prove that the husband committed suicide,” I said, “then you will be our driver for free for the rest of the time we’re in Wuqu City.”

“What?” Luo Weiwei widened her eyes. “Why would I do that?”

“What’s wrong?” I teased. “Aren’t you confident in your own conviction?”

Luo Weiwei frowned, probably weighing the gains and losses.

“And what if you lose?” she asked. “I don't need you to be my driver!”

“Even if you did, I don’t have a driver’s license.” I laughed. “If I lose, then you can punish me however you like.”

“Okay,” she said after considering it for a while. “If you lose, I want all four of you to apologize to Bai Yidao!”

That wasn’t what I expected at all. I thought she would ask us not to work on the case again. I didn't think that Luo Weiwei would defend her boyfriend so openly. To her credit, it seemed that she had some self-awareness, and she knew that they could never solve the case themselves..

So, I readily agreed.

“Not only would we apologize to him,” I said, “we could even go down on our knees and admit our mistakes!”

Huang Xiaotao glared at me with her big, round eyes and yelled, “Hey!”

Luo Weiwei folded her arms proudly and said, “Good! Since you suggested it yourself, then—”

“You have my word as a gentleman!” I interrupted.

Huang Xiaotao then whispered to me, “Song Yang, this is between you and that woman! Why did you have to involve the rest of us? I’ll have you know that I’ll never kneel down in front of that bastard!”

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Do you really think that I’d make a mistake?”

“Oh, all right, I’ll trust you,” she relented. “You’d better not bring dishonor to the Nanjiang City police force!”

“Yes, madam!”

When Luo Weiwei saw that I hadn’t done anything yet, she impatiently urged, “Come on, why are you wasting your time chatting? We’re all waiting to see what you can do!”

“There’s no use hurrying me,” I said bluntly. “I have to wait for my assistant to come back.”

After waiting for more than 20 minutes, Dali finally came back. He carried a big bag and a small pot on his back. If we weren’t in such a serious situation, I would laugh at how ridiculous he looked.

“Geez, dude, the restaurants here are so hard to find!” he announced the moment he arrived. “Here you go!”

“Thanks!”

I asked Wang Yuanchao to help me glue the hooks in a row on the ceiling.

“Hey!” Luo Weiwei called out. “Don’t mess around and do stupid things in here!”

I glared at her.

“Do you want me to do an autopsy or not?” I asked. “Don’t you worry about the mess. I’ll clean it up later.”

Once all the hooks were glued onto the ceiling, I tied each of the elastic bands into a circle, then thread the wooden stick through them, and spread the elastic bands out so they were all equally distanced from each other. I then hung the wooden stick on the row of hooks on the ceiling. I pulled at the elastic bands to make sure that they were all firm and secure.

All the police officers stared at me, probably wondering what the hell I was up to.

“Old Wang! Help me lift the body up!” I ordered.

Wang Yuanchao and I then carried the male body directly below the hook, placed it in a kneeling position on an iron table, and put the arms through the elastic bands. The body was now hung up like a puppet.

“Is this... Corpse Positioning? Like what you did during the vampire case some time ago?” asked Huang Xiaotao.

“No, this time I’m using an even more advanced method than Corpse Positioning.” I took out the needle and magnet and rubbed the needle in one direction until it became a magnetic needle.

This preparation process took quite some time. Dali got bored so he began to shoot the breeze.

“Dude, I heard a joke two days ago, it’s pretty funny. Wanna hear it?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“There were two policemen at a murder scene,” Dali said. “The older policeman said to the younger one, ‘Xiaoming, this case has something in common with the secret room murder that took place last month, as well as the dock corpse case, and the crossroads murder a few months ago.’ The younger policeman asked, ‘You mean, these murders were done by the same person?’ The older policeman answered seriously, ‘No. I mean these are all cases that I can’t solve!’”

When he finished telling the joke, Dali slapped his thigh and laughed heartily. It was a stale joke, but because of how much the idiot was pleased with himself, even Huang Xiaotao and I couldn’t help but laugh at him. Luo Weiwei and the other police officers in the room didn’t hear what Dali said, so they probably assumed that we were making fun of their ineptitude, and I noticed that their expressions grew more and more sour.

Huang Xiaotao playfully admonished Dali, “You idiot, is this the time to be telling jokes?”

Dali’s glance swept across the room and he saw Luo Weiwei’s serious expressions. He almost jumped with surprise.

“Okay, I’m sorry,” he said.

By this time, my preparations were completed. This time I chose to use a method that was probably one level above Corpse Positioning—that is, Corpse Reanimation. This esoteric method was recorded in The Chronicles of Grand Magistrates, and it was supposed to ‘reanimate’ the dead body through magnetic needle acupuncture.

In the vampire case, I used the Corpse Positioning method by chance. After that, I went back and studied the hell out of human anatomy and acupuncture.

What was the principle behind acupuncture? Once, some Western doctors dissected the human body to find out if there was any scientific basis behind the connectivity of veins according to the practices of acupuncture, and they concluded that there was no basis behind the theory at all and declared acupuncture to be a mere superstition from the East.

However, in the thousands of years of China’s medical history, acupuncture proved to show healing effects. In the theory of traditional Chinese medicine, the human body was an inseparable whole, and it was said that certain points on the body were connected to certain organs or other parts of the body. This was a fact that had been repeatedly verified for thousands of years.

Therefore, there was a view that there were many small magnetic fields in the human body. Where these small magnetic fields met, a biomagnetic pulse was formed. This was the essence of the twelve veins discussed in the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor![1]

The basis of Corpse Reanimation was to puncture the magnetic needle into some special acupoints, releasing the residual magnetic force in the human magnetic pulse, causing the muscles to repeat their movements before death.

Of course, the energy in these muscles that were ‘reanimated’ were tiny, so they relied on external forces, such as using this elastic to share the weight of the body, to see the effect.

Before I pierced the needles, I cautioned Dali, “Something shocking is going to happen soon. You can go wait outside if you like.”

Dali shook his head with excitement, “It’s fine, dude! I can handle it. I don’t get to see this every day. It’s much more exciting than a horror film!”

I laughed and told him not to blame me if he got spooked later on.

I measured the spine of the deceased male with my fingers, then pierced the magnetic needle into the major acupoints along the vertebrae, namely Shendao, Lingtai, Zhongshu, Xuanshu, Mingmen, and Yao Yang Guan. The depth that the needles pierced through wasn’t much at all—not even half of the needles’ total length.

These acupuncture points were critical points on the body, and should not be attempted willy-nilly on a living person, because if done wrong it might even kill the person!

But on a dead body, it wouldn’t make any difference anyway, so I didn’t really need to be too delicate about it at all.

Soon, all the needles were pierced through the skin. Nothing happened.

“Hmph! All that time wasted on the preparations, all for nothing!” scoffed Luo Weiwei.

“Just wait for it!”

I slapped the dead body’s shoulder for a few times, and after a while, the corpse actually began to slowly move!

1. An ancient text of which Chinese medicine is based on.