After discovering the corpse and catching a brief glimpse, Ji Xun had tactfully retreated from the center, moving to the very outer edges of the crowd.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t very effective.
The stench continued to relentlessly assault his sense of smell. Covering his nose didn’t help; holding his breath didn’t help either. This patch of the hillside, perhaps the entire mountain, seemed to have become the corpse’s domain, where insects, birds, beasts, trees, and grass were all under its command.
Ji Xun was so overwhelmed by the stench that his brain throbbed, making it nearly impossible to think straight. He could only listen passively to the fragmented words coming from the forensic examiner at the center, alongside the boisterous chatter of the deputy captain.
“…Formed a complete layer of adipocere… the fatal wound should be at the back of the head… blunt force trauma…”
“What’s wrong with you people? Why do you all look like wilted eggplants, vomiting and crying? Is it really that powerful? How come I don’t feel anything? I’m telling you all, you’re being too delicate—”
It was a sad state of affairs; the deputy had been injured in the line of duty just yesterday at the port and had finally managed to get a decent night’s sleep in the hospital. Today, when a new corpse was discovered in the temple, no one could talk him out of it; he insisted on coming along, enduring the bumpy ride, determined to see the scene and review the case with his own eyes before he could set his mind at ease.
Still, his presence wasn’t a total loss. At the very least, now that everyone in the station—all these tough guys—had shed tears, no one could mock anyone else.
“Ji Xun.” Huo Ranyin’s voice suddenly came from above.
Ji Xun looked up, meeting Huo Ranyin’s amused gaze. He was crouching behind a large tree. Theoretically, the tree had lush foliage and released a large amount of oxygen through photosynthesis; if one breathed that in first, they wouldn’t smell the stench. In reality…
“Your eyes are red,” Huo Ranyin’s leisurely voice drifted down. “You really feel aggrieved.”
“…” Ji Xun stared back with eyes like a rabbit’s.
“You cried, didn’t you?” Huo Ranyin’s lips curled up. “There are still water droplets on your eyelashes.”
“…” Ji Xun blinked, whisking away the moisture.
“So, who was it,” Huo Ranyin finally squatted down, looking Ji Xun straight in the eye, his trap fully sprung, “that said men only cry in bed?”
“You are too petty!” Ji Xun exclaimed.
“Hmph.” Huo Ranyin chuckled, making it clear that yes, he was indeed petty.
He then reached out and gently wiped the corner of Ji Xun’s eye, clearing away the lingering dampness. He went to pull away, but Ji Xun didn’t let him. He reached out to hook his arms around Huo Ranyin’s shoulders, burying his face into the crook of his neck and taking two deep breaths of the man’s scent.
Feeling his cells come back to life after that, he heard Huo Ranyin say: “…That’s enough, isn’t it?”
Ji Xun: “Still not enough.”
Huo Ranyin was testy: “If it’s not enough, go hide further away yourself. I’m not going to pull you back. What’s the meaning of flipping your shirt up to cover my head?”
“The meaning is,” Ji Xun sighed, “to let your sensitive nose have a few minutes of survival under my clothes. You noticed my eyes were red, but didn’t you notice your own nose was rubbed red too?”
The shirt was fully flipped up, covering both their heads. Sunlight filtered through the gaps in the leaves, casting diamond-shaped light patterns onto the yellow-green fabric. A bird with a lame eye mistook the clothing for rugged ground and landed on it; after taking two steps, it felt the fabric shift beneath its claws and flew off in a panic.
This tiny moment of intimacy hidden behind the tree under a shirt was interrupted two minutes later by a new report from the forensic team by the corpse.
The examiner coughed twice, his voice slightly strained:
“…The corpse’s genitalia have been excised…”
After the preliminary examination at the scene, the body was transported back to the police station for a more detailed autopsy. The adipocere had preserved the body quite well; through the layer of brown waxy substance, even the facial features were vaguely discernible. Whether identifying the person through these features or through DNA extracted from the remains, there was no problem.
In fact, after an emergency test at the station, they confirmed the victim’s identity that very evening.
The victim was Wen Chenghu, born in 1966, from Xiazhu County near Qin City. He had a technical secondary school education. His father was Wen Zhonghe, his mother Feng Yu. He was the third child in the family, with an older sister, an older brother, and a younger brother.
These people were all still alive, but not all of them came to the station. Only one came to identify the body: Wen Chenghu’s older sister, Wen Meihua.
Wen Meihua was the quintessential older sister from a rural family: no makeup, no skin care, aged prematurely, but healthy and sturdy, always appearing somewhat reserved in front of government officials like the police.
“My brother went missing in ’97…”
“But looking at the files, you didn’t report it until the second half of ’98. Why?” Zhao Wu asked.
“My brother wasn’t very close with the family. In ’97, he was already thirty years old and still hadn’t taken a wife. My parents would talk about it every day, and after a while, he didn’t like calling home anymore. Besides, we were all in Xiazhu then, not in Qin City. It was far away; if he didn’t call, we couldn’t reach him…” Wen Meihua was a bit long-winded, as elderly people tend to be, but the woman in the gray clothes laid out the situation clearly enough. “And he didn’t just suddenly vanish.”
“What do you mean he didn’t just suddenly vanish?” Zhao Wu questioned.
“My brother went to Qin City a long time ago. Although he wasn’t married, he had been doing quite well for himself. He had some small businesses of his own; he bought a house and opened a small grocery store near Qinmen University… It was precisely because he had money but refused to marry that my parents were always nagging him at home, saying there was something wrong with him…”
The topic had returned to marriage. Older generations, for some reason, placed such immense importance on it, as if the entire purpose of being born was to reach a certain age, get married, have children, and raise them, making one’s life as meaningful and full of hope as an old workhorse’s.
Zhao Wu was good-natured and listened patiently, waiting for an opening to steer the conversation back on track.
“Not a sudden disappearance.”
“Right, right. He didn’t just vanish. Before he went missing, he told us he was planning to sell all his assets in Qin City to develop in another city. He said there would be a period where he wouldn’t contact us, and he’d reach out again once he was settled.”
“When he said this, was there anything unusual about Wen Chenghu?” Zhao Wu asked carefully.
“…” Wen Meihua hesitated for a moment. After all, it had been a decade or two; recalling it wasn’t easy. “No, I remember he was happy all the time during that period. We all suspected he had found some way to get rich. I remember my older brother was poor then and wanted to cash in, asking Xiao Hu many times, but Xiao Hu kept saying he didn’t have any secret route. The two brothers even had a falling out over it.”
“Then he sold the house and the store, and he went missing. We couldn’t get in touch with him,” Wen Meihua explained in detail. “It wasn’t until the end of ’98, when we still couldn’t reach him, that we felt something must have happened, so we came to the police station to report it.”
“Does your family have any ideas about Wen Chenghu’s disappearance? Anything at all—for example, did he provoke anyone, or flaunt his wealth…”
“I never heard of my second brother having any enemies outside,” Wen Meihua shook her head, her face full of confusion. “We also initially thought it was because he flaunted his wealth and someone saw it, leading to a robbery. But after we reported it, we found that all the money he got from selling the house and the store was still sitting in his bank account, untouched.”
Zhao Wu asked: “Any romantic entanglements?”
The very specific act of excising the genitalia after death always inevitably led to such thoughts.
“He was a bachelor; what romantic entanglements could he have? Didn’t I just say he wouldn’t marry? He opened a shop near the university, dreaming of marrying some refined, high-class college girl, and having a cultured child go to college to rise in the world. But how could those girls look at him? They said he had money, but it was just enough to scrape by; the matchmakers would hear his requirements and immediately say it was impossible.”
“Could he have had a secret crush?”
“No. We initially thought maybe he was a toad lusting after a swan’s flesh, with unrealistic fantasies in his heart. But his younger brother lived with him for a while and never found him pining for any young girl. Later, we speculated privately that maybe it was just because he never got to go to college himself and didn’t want to be a ‘mud-legged peasant,’ so he wanted what he lacked.”
Zhao Wu asked a few more questions, but Wen Meihua had nothing more to add.
Zhao Wu had someone escort Wen Meihua out of the station and headed to his office. As soon as he entered, he saw everyone sitting in a circle around the table. It was rather strange; usually, during meetings, everyone would be sitting in all sorts of sloppy, casual postures, but today, for some reason, everyone was sitting bolt upright, legs pressed together, their posture as disciplined as elementary school students aiming for a model pupil award.
What was going on? Zhao Wu was puzzled.
In the circle, the deputy was occupying his usual spot, presiding over the situation with great solemnity. He raised a hand, his palm flat like a knife, and made a swift cutting motion toward his crotch:
“Who cuts someone’s crotch for no reason? Listen to me, 100 percent—it was caused by a relationship between a man and a woman!”
Following that swift, precise gesture, Zhao Wu felt a small gust of wind and a slight chill in his crotch.
Looking at the people around him, their legs were pressed as tightly as possible.
His own legs also quietly drew together…
