“Figuring out the mystery behind the case got you excited, didn’t it?” asked Xiaotao with a laugh as we were returning to Cao Da’s corpse.

“Uh, no…” I protested weakly, but in truth, I really was much more motivated now than when we first arrived here. We were literally and metaphorically completely in the dark back then, but everything had begun to make sense now.

“Don’t lie to me, silly!” replied Xiaotao. “I know you inside and out!”

“Wait!” Dali stopped me before I pushed the door to the morgue open. “Can you promise me no zombie will ambush us when we enter the room?”

“Oh, for god’s sake!” snapped Xiaotao. “Stop imagining things and scaring yourself witless!”

Xiaotao slapped Dali’s back with force, making Dali squeak and tumble forward against the door, pushing it open. Nothing that he imagined happened, of course. The middle-aged man’s corpse was still lying on the floor as it did before and everything else was unchanged. I went back to performing autopsy on the corpse and determined the time of death to be about less than an hour ago, which was to say that the murder occurred around the same time that we arrived at the funeral home.

I glanced into the furnace and noticed that the corpse inside had only been burned to ashes about twenty minutes ago. Normally, a corpse wouldn’t need that much time to burn to ashes. It seemed that the middle-aged man had turned the furnace temperature down for some reason, and I suspected that he used it as a heating source!

He was spending a cold November evening by a burning corpse that was his source of warmth, drinking alcohol, and fooling around with a beautiful female corpse—you’d need to be perverted to a certain degree to do that!

The other male corpse in the room was probably next in line to be burned that night, and in the crematorium staff’s mind, he was probably no different than a log of wood to stoke the fire with.

Speaking of which, there was a Song family member in the past who exhibited similar questionable behaviours. He was completely misunderstood, though. His philosophy was to care for the dead bodies as if they were his close friends. Every time he performed an autopsy, he would shut himself up with the corpse and spend days alone with it. He would even take off his clothes and lay next to the corpse and chat with it for hours and hours, sometimes for the whole night. On one occasion, an official bumped into him in that circumstance and accused him of defiling the corpse. My ancestor couldn’t prove his innocence, so in the end he was forced out of his position and became a farmer instead.

If you spend a lot of time dealing with corpses and death in general, your psyche would change in a major way that differentiated you from the rest of humanity. Take me, for example. When normal people encounter gory dead bodies, they’d recoil in disgust and horror whereas I would feel inexplicably excited and fascinated about it. I sometimes worry that I might be on a downward spiral towards a mental breakdown…

I kneeled down to sniff the victim’s penis, much to Dali’s revulsion. The lubricant on the victim’s penis was indeed petroleum jelly, which meant that the female corpse did not secrete any bodily fluid.

Then I poured the alcohol I found on the table over the victim’s head to wash off his blood. I found that his skull was fractured in many spots. Comparing the fractures with the ashtray, I tried to reenact the murder. From what I found, the dead woman was lying on the straw mat when she suddenly came back to life. When she realized what was happening, she picked up the ashtray on the table and bashed it on the victim’s head violently about three times, causing the victim’s death.

The ashtray shattered into small pieces, and they scattered all over the floor. I searched among the pieces carefully and finally found something interesting. I picked it up with tweezers and showed it to Xiaotao.

“Fingernail?” she exclaimed in surprise.

I checked the victim’s fingers. The fingernail was obviously not his, which meant that it must be the murderer’s. I noticed the fingernail was stained with some blood too, and it could well be the murderer’s as well.

This would be a crucial piece of material evidence, enough to convict the murderer in court. I carefully placed the fingernail fragment in an evidence bag. Then I asked Dali to help me carry the victim’s body off of the mat. The blood had soaked into the straw mat and stained most of it red, but my eyes noticed something else on it that I had to examine more closely.

“Dali, open the furnace door!” I ordered.

“Why? You wanna add more firewood?”

“Shut up and hurry up! This isn’t the time to be joking!”

Dali put on a pair of thick cotton gloves over the latex gloves that he had on and pulled open the furnace door. The flames raged wildly inside the furnace, causing Dali to flinch subconsciously. I could make out a skeletal figure in the blazing fire, and it was surrounded by a blue halo. This was caused by the phosphorus in the human bones. Light emitted by phosphorus flames had an even shorter wavelength than the ultraviolet light. In ancient times, my ancestors would use this uncanny light to perform autopsies. And now, I would utilize the very same method too!

I opened my Autopsy Umbrella and let the light from the furnace stream through it and onto the straw mat. As I turned the umbrella in a circle, the blood on the mat began to change colors. When I turned the umbrella to a certain angle, the outline of a woman’s body appeared on the mat.

Xiaotao and Dali were flummoxed.

“Is that the murderer?” Xiaotao asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “The blood had soaked into the whole mat, but at the moment the murderer ‘woke up,’ she was lying on the mat and the victim was above her. She smashed the ashtray onto the victim’s head and his blood sprayed on her, leaving her outline when she left. The murderer then pushed the victim away, got up, and left. After that, more blood flowed onto the mat and covered the first layer of blood, mixing them all up. But actually, the different layers of blood decayed at different rates, and they would appear in different colors under the phosphorus light.”

“Fascinating!” exclaimed Xiaotao as she stared at the human outline on the mat.

The color of the bloodstains kept changing under the flickering glow of the phosphorus light. It looked as if the ‘woman’ on the mat was moving!

“Hurry up and take a picture, Dali!” I shouted.

Dali had been standing there stunned for a few minutes. When he heard my voice, he quickly pulled out his phone and took pictures of the mat from different angles. I then closed the furnace door.

Dali put up his hand like an elementary school student and timidly asked, “If the murderer was fighting back during the victim’s assault, wouldn’t this be an act of self-defense?”

“That is for the court to decide,” answered Xiaotao. “Our duty is just to identify and arrest the murderer.”

I’d examined the body thoroughly before, but I went back to it again just to see if I’d missed anything. At that moment, Xiaotao suddenly announced, “Hey, Song Yang! Care to witness the peerless detective skills of the Huang family?”

“Okay, sure!” I replied with full interest.

“Here I go,” she said. Then she cleared her throat and began, “The victim’s nickname is Lao Gui. He had a friend who’s also a necrophiliac. Lao Gui told his friend he found a good ‘toy’ that he could lend him for two days. That black Santana you saw just now was probably Lao Gui’s friend.”

Dali gasped and cried, “That’s amazing, Xiaotao-jiejie! Maybe you’re a descendant of the legendary Huang Tianba!”[1]

“Shut up!” snapped Xiaotao.

I noticed that Xiaotao was hiding one of her hands behind her back, so I told her, “Okay, Xiaotao, now hand over the evidence!”

She stuck out her tongue at me and revealed an old-fashioned Nokia phone in her hand. She’d found it in the corner of the room. There were several text messages on it which contained the same information that Xiaotao just told us.

“I thought he was the murderer’s accomplice,” I said. “Turns out, he could be the next victim. We have to hurry and go find him!”

“But he’s just another pervert,” remarked Dali. “I don’t see the point of going out of our way to rescue him.”

“How can you say that?” retorted Xiaotao. “That’s no reason to ignore him. As a police officer, my duty is to protect all citizens, no matter what their perverted hobby may be.”

Just then, we heard the sound of sirens. I burned a stack of joss paper in honor of the victim and prepared to leave.

1. A historical court official in the late Qing dynasty and the protagonist of many historical novels.