Human memory is unreliable—except for mine.
Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin thought as much, and without hesitation, they checked the surveillance footage. The footage showed that on March 7th at 7:15 PM, Luo Sui exited the elevator and walked past the nursing station toward the ward; at 11:15 PM, she left the ward and entered the elevator.
There were no cameras in the ward; it was a private area.
Four whole hours.
Early the next morning, Old Hu’s condition took a sharp turn for the worse, and he died after resuscitation efforts failed.
After obtaining the surveillance evidence, the two left the hospital and went to the crematorium.
The crematorium was crowded. In this world, wherever life is born, death must follow. This balanced cycle is inescapable, not something humanity can avoid by shutting their eyes and covering their ears.
They found a staff member at the crematorium, showed their badges, and explained their purpose.
The staff at the crematorium were mostly young or middle-aged men. Their reaction to Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin was a mix of indifference and subtle hostility. This was not hard to understand; due to previous procedural loopholes, the current regulations for cremation were very strict. If the two detectives found any faults, the staff would be the ones to take the fall and be held responsible.
In the end, the person designated to interface with them was a young male employee.
The young man was wearing old white gloves with double-stitched seams. All ten fingertips were stained with green, purple, and pink powders, which had blended together, making the white gloves look gray and mottled—staining his listless face with the same mottled look.
He was a mortician, responsible for preparing the bodies.
“Do you remember a man named Hu Kun who came here to be cremated on March 10th?” Huo Ranyin asked.
“Quite a few were cremated on the 10th,” the mortician hedged. “That was over a week ago; I don’t remember clearly. Maybe he was here, maybe he wasn’t.”
Ji Xun had a way to deal with this.
He swiped a pack of cigarettes from a nearby table and handed them to the mortician: “Brother, have a smoke. How long have you been working here? Is it busy?”
“Not even two years. It’s definitely very busy.” The mortician’s expression softened.
With this cigarette and the universal question of “is work busy?”, the two opened up a conversation. When the rapport was built, Ji Xun changed the subject, adopting a tone filled with sympathy: “Since you’re so busy, you probably don’t have time to go online. You surely wouldn’t know about the ‘Smoke Locks the Funeral Home’ case, one of the three great unsolved mysteries on Today’s Focus?”
“Wh…” the mortician asked, “What ‘Smoke Locks the Funeral Home’? What three mysteries?”
“You really don’t know?” Ji Xun sighed. “Brother, this case reached the highest levels of government and directly changed the cremation procedures for funeral homes!”
“What case is it exactly?!”
“In short, it’s a bit complicated. I’ll pick the parts relevant to you: staff at a crematorium were using blank cremation slips to send people they had murdered into the incinerator, burning them to ashes. So, we are also suspicious regarding the body of Hu Kun…”
“Wait!” The mortician jumped up. “You can’t just throw out suspicions during an investigation! The system at the crematorium has been reformed; you must present a death certificate for cremation, and there is surveillance footage to prove it.”
“Then we’ll check the surveillance,” Huo Ranyin stated coolly.
“You wait here!”
The mortician hurried off in a flurry. Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin remained where they were.
Ji Xun tossed the cigarette to Huo Ranyin.
Huo Ranyin threw the cigarette back onto someone’s desk.
“Wouldn’t it have been better to just do this from the start? What a waste of time,” Ji Xun scoffed.
Huo Ranyin chuckled.
Perhaps wary of the “Smoke Locks the Funeral Home” case Ji Xun mentioned, the crematorium was very cooperative afterward, and they actually found the surveillance footage for the staff.
Old Hu was lying in a white coffin wearing a blue burial robe, surrounded by fresh flowers, his expression peaceful.
His gray hair was neatly combed into a side part, and rouge decorated his cheeks, masking the ashen color peculiar to the deceased.
Those wrinkles—the rings of time—covered every inch of skin exposed to the air.
This version of him was even more different from the portrait of the forty-something-year-old man in the memorial hall.
This should have been his last splash of color in the human world, yet none of his family members cared, nor did they bother to preserve it.
Aging is always like this: the photos don’t last, and neither does the name. For those of advanced age, people are used to calling them “Grandpa” or “Grandma.” The names they used in their youth seem to drift further and further away from their aging bodies, long since submerged in the passage of years.
Hu Kun.
Old Hu…
Watching the surveillance footage, Ji Xun’s brow suddenly twitched. He said to the mortician, “Wait, stop right there. Zoom in on the image. Why are there spots on the deceased’s right cheek? And his temple—is there a dent?”
The image was zoomed in on the face as Ji Xun requested.
Now, the face of the deceased was clearly visible to both men.
To the naked eye, a number of small, fresh bloodstains were concentrated on the right side of the deceased’s face. Near the right brow bone, in the direction of the temple, there was a visible impact indentation.
“A fresh impact injury,” Huo Ranyin also saw it clearly.
“No wonder Hu Zheng was in such a rush to cremate his father. There were clear signs of an impact on his face, yet the hospital’s death certificate stated he died of ineffective cancer treatment, making no mention of this injury,” Ji Xun mused, then asked the mortician, “When you were cleaning him, did you see anything embedded in the wound? Was it sand, gravel, or something else?”
Faced with this face, the mortician’s blurry memory was triggered: “It seems… it was glass…”
“Are you sure it was glass?”
“…Yes, yes, I’m sure.” The mortician’s tone was certain. “It was a huge hassle to clean, and I even complained to the family about how they could let an old man fall so badly. The family snapped at me right then and there. I remember that clearly.”
“Then do you remember one more thing?” Ji Xun asked again.
“What thing?”
“On the back of the deceased’s neck, was there a red scar?”
At this point, a question mark had simultaneously appeared in the minds of both Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin.
While it wasn’t impossible that the hospital’s lack of supervision led to Hu Kun accidentally falling before his death, triggering a deterioration of his condition and eventual death, but—
Investigating up to this point, the various clues and questions made a suspicion emerge.
Was the “Hu Kun” who had been treated in the hospital really the same “Old Hu” they had met twice?
This seemed to better explain why the doctor had ignored the impact injury when issuing the death certificate.
“He…” But just then, the mortician wavered. “He…”
The two stared at the mortician’s mouth, watching those thick lips hesitate.
“I don’t think so…?”
“You aren’t sure?” the two asked.
“I seem to have seen it, but then again, maybe not.” The mortician thought and thought, gestured at the back of his own neck, and after a long while, hesitantly changed his answer again: “No, maybe there was one. I remember seeing a red wound, but you saw the surveillance, it didn’t capture it. I’m afraid if I say the wrong thing, I’ll be giving false testimony, and I’ll be finished. Just consider me unable to answer.”
Huo Ranyin did not give up and continued to ask: “You are so hesitant—is it because there are so many people coming and going here that you aren’t sure who that wound belonged to?”
The mortician was stunned. “If you put it that way, I… suppose?”
Huo Ranyin went straight to the point. He decided to investigate from the day the “Old Hu” in the hospital was confirmed dead: “Show me the list of everyone sent to the crematorium from March 8th to the present, as well as the footage of their remains.”
“Hey, wait.” Ji Xun quickly grabbed the criminal police captain, who had forgotten he hadn’t fully recovered yet. “We shouldn’t forget our colleagues in Qin City for a good thing like this.”
Truth be told, when the Qin City team was called over by the two, their expressions were blank, filled with question marks. Each question mark was composed of these two sentences:
Isn’t this just a simple revenge-seeking case? How did it suddenly turn into a murder case involving a body swap?
“You think the Hu Kun in the hospital isn’t the real Hu Kun?” Zhao Wu asked.
“Correct.”
“The motive?”
“A ‘fake Hu Kun’ dies of natural causes in a hospital, gets a death certificate issued by a doctor, and then uses that certificate at the household registration office to deregister the ‘deceased’s’ identity. Then, the still-living real Hu Kun is given the status of ‘dead’ by society. As for the real Hu Kun—he could be drowned, strangled, hit, smothered, or poisoned. In any case, the people at the crematorium won’t perform an autopsy; they only verify the death certificate,” Ji Xun explained.
Zhao Wu pondered: “Regarding the true and fake Hu Kun, finding evidence is simple. ‘Hu Kun’ went in and out of the hospital for treatment many times; the surveillance must have captured his face. Just compare his face with the one on Hu Kun’s ID card, and it will be clear immediately. But the flow of people in the hospital is massive; finding something in the surveillance won’t be that easy… Besides, Hu Kun received treatment so many times; how could the hospital not have noticed if the identity information was wrong?”
“Maybe they didn’t not notice,” Huo Ranyin said.
“What do you mean?” Zhao Wu was startled.
“When we went to the hospital earlier, we asked the attending physician about Hu Kun’s condition. The physician blurted out something about a ‘dead man resurrecting,’ then quickly found an excuse to leave. Thinking about it now, the physician probably knew about the patient’s unusual situation.”
“You mean the attending physician is also involved in this murder?” Zhao Wu found it hard to believe.
“The deceased had brain cancer, and the cost of treating brain cancer is not trivial,” Huo Ranyin said calmly. “I mean, even if they guessed it, they chose to ignore the issue of the patient’s identity due to the gray areas of gifts or personal favors. After all, in most cases, it’s just someone borrowing a medical insurance card for reimbursement. If a real homicide occurs, they can just pretend they were confused and blame it on procedural issues, and they wouldn’t have to bear responsibility.”
“…Investigate,” Zhao Wu finally decided. “Go to the hospital first, pull out the surveillance footage, and confirm the true image of the ‘Hu Kun’ in the hospital!”
The surveillance investigation at the hospital yielded results the next day.
The image of the “Hu Kun” in the hospital finally appeared before Ji Xun and Huo Ranyin.
The tired, weak, emaciated old man who looked like a withered log, who usually appeared in a wheelchair and was so listless in the late stages of cancer that he couldn’t even tidy his own clothes.
It was worlds apart from the Old Hu they had met before.
They were absolutely not the same person!
After spending the day with bloodshot eyes searching through surveillance, a “rabbit-eyed” Zhao Wu, besides producing this evidence, also told the two:
“We checked this person’s true identity. We found him. His surname is Lan—Lan Cun-gang, from Sangzhou. ID number: XXXXXXXX. He has a son in his hometown, but this son was indifferent toward him. We called him, and he didn’t even know when his father left home. We also checked his relationship with Luo Sui. So far, we haven’t found any direct connection, but they are definitely not relatives.”
“Not relatives, yet she took such pains to care for him,” Ji Xun clicked his tongue. “I suspect if you check Lan Cun-gang’s local medical records, you’ll find he also suffered from cancer. Luo Sui brought him for a full-body examination and immediately admitted him to the hospital, so she clearly knew about his condition.
“So, assuming this is a long-premeditated murder, Luo Sui specifically picked someone who was near death to take over Old Hu’s medical records, and finally killed a healthy Old Hu. I saw a case in the news a while ago: a person didn’t want their relative’s body cremated, so they found a homeless person on the street, knocked him out, and put him in the coffin. The crematorium finished the job without ever knowing the body in the coffin had been switched. Whoever came up with this trick knew exactly where the weak link in our funeral industry is.”
Author’s note: “Smoke Locks the Funeral Home” is a true case… a very bizarre one. To put it simply: Wang had an affair with the wife of Zhang, a crematorium employee, and decided to hire two hitmen, A and B, to kill Zhang. But the two amateur hitmen failed repeatedly. In the end, Wang gave up on the plan, stirred up trouble between the two hitmen, and had A kill B. Unfortunately, man proposes but God disposes. At the same time, Zhang learned that Wang had cuckolded him and tried to hire someone to kill him. Feeling that Wang had gone too far, Zhang killed Wang, stuffed the body into the incinerator, and destroyed the evidence… (.)
Also, the example Ji Xun mentions at the end of this chapter is also a real event.
