Torrential rain lashed against the bluestone slabs, sending up sprays of water. Pi Yanlin shrank his neck and stuffed another scrap of cloth into his sleeve.
The dark gray uniform of a Xuan'an Bureau handyman was already soaked through, and a scrap of an unpeeled official dispatch still clung to the back of his neck. This morning, Registrar Zhang had forced him to go to the mass grave west of the city to collect unclaimed corpses. Feigning a stomachache, Pi had slipped away, and now he was desperately looking for a place to take shelter from the rain.
"Damn it, this rain is coming down like someone poked a hole in the heavenly river." He wiped the water from his face and looked up to see a vermilion-lacquered gate tower half a li away.
The Zhao Estate?
He remembered that three months ago, the case files of the Xuan'an Bureau had mentioned this place: seven members of this household had died within half a month, and the last elderly couple had hanged themselves from their bedroom rafters. Their corpses had hung there for three days before the neighbors discovered them.
"An empty house is an empty house." He rubbed his frozen, reddened hands and stepped over a yard full of shattered tiles to move inside.
The door hinges let out a groan of "creak," and a smell of mildew mixed with an indescribable, fishy stench rushed toward him.
Just as Pi Yanlin crossed the threshold, his heel suddenly struck something hard. He staggered twice and tumbled into a pool of accumulated water. The instant he looked back, the hair on his arms stood on end:
A livid corpse lay right beside his feet.
The rain leaked in from the tattered eaves, weaving a fine net across the dead man's face.
He was a man in his early twenties, still wearing washed coarse-cloth short-jacket trousers. The blue-purple scratch marks on his neck looked like a ferocious centipede, yet not a single other wound could be found on his entire body.
Pi Yanlin's throat tightened. He reached out and touched the corpse's wrist; it was as cold as a block of ice, and the livid post-mortem lividity had not even congealed yet.
"This, this isn't right..." He retreated two steps, crashing against the door frame, his mind entirely filled with the records from the case file.
The Zhao Estate had been sealed for three months, and the doors were locked with Xuan'an Bureau official seals. How could a fresh corpse suddenly appear here?
What was even weirder was that although this room was dilapidated, the tables and chairs were arranged neatly, and even the teacups were lined up properly on the desk. Yet that foul stench of decay seemed to grow claws as it drilled straight into his nostrils.
"Who goes there!"
A thunderclap-like roar startled Pi Yanlin so badly that he almost toppled into the nearby flowerpot.
Two patrolling constables rushed in, holding water-and-fire staves, the light of their lanterns casting greenish-black shadows across their faces.
The bearded leader stared at the corpse on the ground, then at Pi Yanlin, who was dripping with water. The corners of his mouth immediately curled into a sneer: "Well, well. A Xuan'an Bureau handyman has turned into a murderer?"
"Official! I'm just hiding from the rain!" Pi Yanlin hurriedly raised his hands, rainwater streaming down between his fingers. "I just found this corpse. It really wasn't me..."
"Cut the crap!" The bearded man jabbed him in the chest with a staff. "Come back to the yamen with us!"
In the interrogation room, the charcoal brazier crackled away, yet Pi Yanlin felt a chill all over his body.
Judge Wei banged the gavel with a thunderous crash, and right beneath the heavy gavel lay his own waist tag—Pi Yanlin, handyman of the Xuan'an Bureau, native of Luoshui Town, both parents deceased.
"With human witnesses and physical evidence both present, what else do you have to say?" Judge Wei shouted at the top of his lungs, his spit spraying onto Pi Yanlin's face. "The Zhao Estate is a sealed crime scene, yet you sneaked in at midnight and were caught red-handed!"
Cold sweat broke out on Pi Yanlin's forehead.
Could he say that he had sneaked into the Zhao Estate just to escape the corpse-collection chore?
Could he say that this corpse had appeared even earlier than he had?
He cast a sidelong glance at Gu Qinghuan, who was sitting alongside the judge as an assessor—the newly promoted female captain of the Xuan'an Bureau, rumored to be someone who could snap a person's wrist bones with her bare hands.
At the moment, she was leaning against a pillar with her arms crossed, her willow-leaf eyebrows twisted into a knot, and her gaze scraping across his face like an ice-tempered blade.
"My lord!" Pi Yanlin suddenly raised his voice. "I need to relieve myself!"
"What kind of tricks are you trying to pull?" Judge Wei's eyes widened.
"This humble one really can't hold it..." Pi Yanlin hunched over and groaned, the hems of his trousers still dripping with the filthy water from the Zhao Estate. "Look at me like this, where could I possibly run?"
Gu Qinghuan spoke abruptly: "Take him." Her voice sounded like frost-drenched copper bells. "Have the jailer follow."
The smell of mildew was even heavier in the dungeon. As Pi Yanlin was shoved into the straw in the corner, he heard the prison door clang shut.
He curled up into the shape of a shrimp, his fingernails digging into his palms—last night's dream suddenly resurfaced.
He had dreamed of an old man in a green robe squatting by a well, with countless points of light floating inside. The old man had said, "Lie down and check in to acquire the Trace-Seeking Eye." At the time, he had simply thought it was a delusion brought on by extreme hunger, but now...
"Dead horse treated as a live horse." He gritted his teeth and lay down on the straw.
The straw chaff pricked his back painfully. He closed his eyes and chanted silently: "Check in."
A pale golden text suddenly floated before his eyes, like gold dust scattered by the wind, before slowly gathering into a line: [Today's check-in successful. Acquired skill: Trace-Seeking Eye (can trace the scene's traces within twelve hours, viewing things as if watching a video played in reverse).]
Pi Yanlin snapped his eyes open.
The world had changed.
The sparks in the charcoal brazier became drawn-out golden threads, the crawling tracks of insects on the straw were pale blue trajectories, and even the wood shavings chewed by mice in the corner emitted a faint glow.
He stared at the ground. Where the corpse from the Zhao Estate had lain, there was a faint, looming line of blood—no, not blood, but a certain kind of mucus that dragged all the way from the threshold to the center of the room, congealing into tiny particles in the gaps of the bluestone bricks.
Even more terrifyingly, those particles suddenly moved.
Pi Yanlin held his breath.
He saw that twenty paces away by the desk, a dark figure was squatting beside the teacup, its fingernails scraping across the porcelain surface with a screeching sound.
The dark figure raised its head, revealing a face identical to that of the corpse. Yet its neck was expanding, and something was crawling beneath the skin until, with a "crack," five livid fingernails burst out from the flesh of the back of its neck, precisely clamping onto its own throat...
"Clang—"
The prison door was suddenly kicked open, and the jailer shone his lantern inside. "Done dawdling yet?"
Pi Yanlin sat up with a start, and the trajectories before his eyes instantly vanished.
He wiped the cold sweat from his brow, but a wave of warmth surged in his heart—he knew how that corpse in the Zhao Estate had died.
"Let's go!" The jailer pushed him impatiently.
Pi Yanlin followed him out, stumbling slightly as he passed Gu Qinghuan.
The female captain reached out to steady him. The moment her fingertips touched his wrist, he lowered his voice: "The corpse at the Zhao Estate strangled itself."
Gu Qinghuan's fingers abruptly tightened, clamping onto his wrist bone like iron tongs.
He drew in a sharp breath of pain, but he saw turbulent waves churning in the depths of her eyes—the light that only appeared when the true culprit was found.
"Lord Wei." Gu Qinghuan released her grip, her voice even colder than before. "I think this case requires us to escort the handyman Pi back to the Zhao Estate scene to take a look."
Judge Wei was still slamming his gavel. "Absurd!"
"My lord." Gu Qinghuan drew her token from her waist, the dark iron tiger emblem of the Xuan'an Bureau gleaming coldly in the firelight. "By custom, once the Xuan'an Bureau takes over strange cases, local officials may not interfere."
Pi Yanlin followed them out the door. The rain had stopped at some point.
Moonlight leaked down through a gap in the clouds, illuminating his grass-chaff-stained dark gray uniform.
Touching the red mark on the back of his neck left by the prison straw, he suddenly smiled—since he had to go to the Zhao Estate scene tomorrow to give testimony, wouldn't it be better to bring a quilt?
Checking in while lying on a coffin should still count as a fixed location, right?