Chapter 67

Chapter 67

Inside the vehicle.

Because time was tight, Shen Huaizhou and Dai Xingyu had not had a chance to study the case fully.

Xie Qingling therefore explained it to them during the drive to the outskirts.

“…The body was discovered this morning. A photography studio shooting wedding photos on location reported it to the police. The scene is sealed off now, and they need us to go ‘clear it.'” Xie Qingling summarized the matter in the fewest words possible.

Shen Huaizhou and Dai Xingyu nodded.

They held the materials Xie Qingling had given them and quietly leafed through the pages.

After roughly three hours of jolting travel, the off-road vehicle finally reached the foot of a deep, secluded mountain.

By then, it was already three in the afternoon.

The summer sun still shone high, and darkness would not fall anytime soon. Yet standing beyond the city made them feel a faint chill.

The instant Xie Qingling stepped out of the vehicle, an icy breath struck her face, as though countless cold droplets clung damply to her skin. The mountain air was heavy with dew and moisture, and she could not suppress a shiver.

The driver said, “The body was found in an extremely remote place that few people visit. The vehicle can’t handle the rest of the route, so we’ll have to continue on foot. I can take you up the mountain and show you the cordoned area. After that, though, you’ll be on your own.”

Shen Huaizhou said, “There’s no need to guide us. Just tell us the direction. We probably won’t come down tonight.”

The man paused, then said, “All right. Head west, circle around the slope ahead, and continue a little farther. You’ll see our people guarding the scene.”

“Keep in contact at all times. I’ll wait here. If you haven’t come down by the agreed time, I’ll leave then.”

Once they had the correct direction, Shen Huaizhou and the other two set out.

Xie Qingling asked him, “Why didn’t you let him guide us?”

“If this truly is a special incident, bringing him up there would only force us to divide our attention to protect him. Better not to let him go in the first place. Besides…”

Shen Huaizhou said, “He’s too slow. A half-hour walk would take him an hour.”

Xie Qingling said nothing.

You only refused because he walked too slowly, didn’t you?

Still, all three of them were Spirit Wielders, and their bodies were stronger than an ordinary person’s. Even when simply traveling, they could move faster and endure longer than most people.

Shen Huaizhou was not wrong about the driver being slow. Bringing him along truly would have delayed them.

An ordinary person would need at least three hours to navigate the winding route through the valley. The three of them took shortcuts and used rocks and trees to climb, finishing the entire journey in less than an hour.

They had now rounded the mountainside and reached the summit of the second mountain.

From there, the distant scenery stretched beneath their eyes, offering an unobstructed view of the mountain landscape and terrain.

Wind howled from every direction, carrying the sound of a rushing river in the distance.

Looking down, they could see a corpse lying in the valley enclosed by mountains, its features impossible to make out.

Against the green meadow, the figure sprawled amid the lush grass looked exceptionally jarring and out of place.

“Let’s go,” Xie Qingling said. “We’re here.”

The three descended together. Halfway down, they met the three people assigned to guard the area.

After exchanging information and completing the handover, Xie Qingling and the others continued downward.

Climbing a mountain was easy; descending was hard.

The distance from the mountaintop to the valley floor looked short, yet Xie Qingling and the others stumbled constantly as they made their way down.

Dead branches and fallen leaves littered the ground. Moss-covered stones threatened to send them slipping at the slightest lapse in attention. Everything became an obstacle in their path.

The journey was exceedingly difficult.

“Your satellite signal is weak…”

“GPS signal is weak…”

“Signal is weak…”

The farther they descended, the more insistently the navigation compass in Xie Qingling’s hand repeated its warnings. Suppressing her irritation, she smacked the compass and muttered, “Quiet!”

At last, they finished the grueling descent and reached the valley floor.

Luo Yuancheng’s corpse lay before them.

Even before reaching it, merely looking from a distance filled Xie Qingling with an indescribable sense that something was wrong.

The corpse felt strange. Extremely strange.

For the moment, she could not say what exactly seemed wrong. She would have to examine it before drawing any further conclusion.

She opened the case of dissection tools Ling Fang had prepared for her and put on a pair of gloves. Once her preparations were complete, Xie Qingling took out a flashlight and shone it toward the corpse.

She first swept the light around their surroundings. Only after confirming that nothing was there did she allow Shen Huaizhou and Dai Xingyu to approach.

The three walked up to Luo Yuancheng, bringing the full horror of the corpse into view.
Standing before the corpse was nothing like seeing it in a photograph. A photograph captured only what the eye could see; here, all five senses took in far more.

For example, the stench of decay.

Or the buzzing of the flies swarming around the corpse.

It was not a pleasant scene.

Xie Qingling remained perfectly composed.

Shen Huaizhou… showed no expression either. His tolerance was also quite different from an ordinary person’s.

After the harsh lesson of the Painted-Skin Ghost incident, Dai Xingyu felt much calmer when looking at Luo Yuancheng now.

Still, he could not avoid a certain melancholy.

He covered his nose with one hand and waved the other through the air, shooing away the flies trying to land on his shoulder. He lamented with heartfelt anguish, “Why would someone living a perfectly good life come exploring in a godforsaken place like this? Now he’s gotten himself killed and ended up like this. Sigh!”

Xie Qingling swept her flashlight back and forth over the corpse with one hand, while using the other to turn it and conduct a preliminary examination.

Numerous claw marks, scratches, and bite wounds crisscrossed the body’s surface. It was a horrifying sight.

One bite wound on the neck was particularly obvious. A clear ring of teeth marks had been left in the gray-white skin, hideous and terrifying.

Hearing Dai Xingyu’s words, Xie Qingling suddenly said, “No. He didn’t come here on his own.”

Dai Xingyu froze. “Huh? How do you know?”

“Didn’t you find the descent difficult? Mountains surround this place on every side. No matter which direction you come from, you face a steep, pathless slope. Even we struggled to get down. For an ordinary person, walking in here would be a death sentence. Didn’t you notice that the people guarding the perimeter stayed above because they couldn’t descend? His file says he was an experienced mountaineer. Surely he knew the difference between exploring and courting death.”

Dai Xingyu suddenly understood. “So he didn’t come here himself. This was murder.”

What a profoundly useless observation.

If it were not murder, why would they be here?

Xie Qingling ignored Dai Xingyu’s fuss and tapped Shen Huaizhou’s leg, then handed him the flashlight.

Shen Huaizhou accepted it, adjusted the beam, and held the light for Xie Qingling.

With both hands free, Xie Qingling could examine the corpse more thoroughly.

“Two broken ribs. A cracked shoulder blade. A fractured leg… There are fractures across the body. The wounds are clean, with no dirt or debris. He didn’t tumble down the mountain,” Xie Qingling said. “Someone dropped him from midair.”

And from an extreme height. The fall had left almost no bone in his body intact.

After reaching that conclusion, Xie Qingling pulled open Luo Yuancheng’s collar, took out a knife, and cut into an artery.

The blood had indeed been completely drained.

Or rather, something had sucked it dry.

Shen Huaizhou said, “If someone dropped him here from a great height, then either the culprit was human and used a helicopter, or they could fly through the air.”

Xie Qingling gave a quiet hum of agreement.

She took a tiny pair of tweezers from the dissection kit and carefully picked through an open, decaying wound. At last, she extracted three things.

The first was an oval, milky-white speck resembling a grain of millet, only smaller.

The second was… a white maggot.

The third was a brown, pupa-like object.

Dai Xingyu seemed to picture something and looked ready to vomit.

He stared at Xie Qingling in horror, unable to understand how her expression could remain unchanged. Her gaze had even grown more intent!

Xie Qingling suddenly looked up and asked the two of them, “How long do you think this person has been dead?”

Shen Huaizhou thought for a moment. “Three or four days?”

He was guessing blindly.

Who the hell knew?

Dai Xingyu examined the corpse. Although the exposed flesh had begun decaying, the uninjured skin remained intact and gray-white, somewhat like the skin of a living person.

“Four or five days,” Dai Xingyu said, also choosing a number at random.

Mainly, three or four days seemed too short for the wounds to have decayed to this degree.

Yet the skin still looked intact, without the decomposition and lividity one would expect.

Xie Qingling shook her head. “He’s been dead for at least two weeks.”

She pointed at the milky-white speck. “This is a fly egg.”

“The second is a fly larva.”

“The third is a fly pupa. It will soon become an adult fly.”

Shen Huaizhou and Dai Xingyu still looked confused after hearing her explanation. They could only wait for her to continue.

“In this weather, flies reproduce at their fastest and under their most favorable conditions. Even if the mountain temperature slows their reproduction slightly, the difference shouldn’t be significant.”
Xie Qingling said, “I don’t have specific experimental data right now. I’m only making a rough estimate of how long these things take to appear.”

“First, the egg. At this mountain’s temperature, a fly egg takes about twelve hours to hatch into a maggot.” Xie Qingling pointed at the second clump of white maggots. “This thing here.”

“The larval stage lasts approximately five to eight days before it becomes a pupa.” She pointed at the third, pupa-like object. “The pupal stage takes roughly three to six days.”

“A fly needs about ten days to complete one generation. This pupa is already close to emerging as an adult, which means this body has been dead for nearly ten days at the absolute minimum.”

Xie Qingling raised her head and gestured toward the flies buzzing endlessly around the corpse. “Look. There are so many flies. That means we’re already looking at more than one generation…”

Shen Huaizhou’s and Dai Xingyu’s expressions changed at her explanation.

Luo Yuancheng might have died shortly after he was reported missing.

If Xie Qingling’s explanation was correct, the corpse had been dead for half a month, perhaps nearly a full month. Yet it had not completely decomposed. That could only mean there was something abnormal about the way he had died.

At the very least, it had not been a normal death.

Both the way Luo Yuancheng had appeared here and the corpse’s bizarre rate of decay proved this was no ordinary death.

Xie Qingling said, “Move back and put some distance between yourselves and the corpse. Also, tell the people guarding the perimeter to withdraw. We don’t want them getting caught up in this.”

Shen Huaizhou had been right. If some extraordinary entity truly existed here, those people would be unable to help. They might only force the three of them to divide their attention to protect them.

Dai Xingyu nodded and immediately used his communicator to notify the people on the mountain and tell them to leave.

They quickly responded, gathered their things, and began descending the mountain.

At that moment, the Golden Crow sank in the west, and darkness gathered around them.

The wind in the valley grew louder, while everything around them became increasingly quiet.

It carried the sound of a river surging against its banks. The sound seemed very far away, yet also strangely close.

Xie Qingling asked, “What does the department usually do in a situation like this?”

Shen Huaizhou answered, “Generally, to prevent a corpse from reanimating and harming anyone, we douse it in gasoline and burn it to ash.”

“But then we can’t draw out whatever is behind this…” Xie Qingling considered for a moment. “Let me try something.”

With that, Xie Qingling crouched and pressed one hand against the ground.

She said softly, “Soul Recall!”

The sun set and the moon rose, hanging high in the sky as silver radiance spilled across the mortal world.

As Soul Recall took effect, Luo Yuancheng’s already gray-white face turned deathly pale beneath the moonlight.

Unlike the other skeletons Xie Qingling had summoned with Soul Recall, he did not rise at her command. Instead, several low growls resembling an animal’s rumbled from his throat.

Luo Yuancheng made hoarse, rasping noises that sounded both human and bestial. Then a layer of fine white fur sprouted across his exposed skin!

Shen Huaizhou said, “A Hairy Zombie.”

As he spoke, Shen Huaizhou drew a throwing knife and prepared to launch it at once.

Xie Qingling stopped him. “Wait.”

Her divine ability had finished taking effect.

Luo Yuancheng finally quieted as well.

Xie Qingling did not know whether Soul Recall could control Luo Yuancheng now that he had become a zombie, but she asked without much hope, “Can you tell me how you died?”

Luo Yuancheng laboriously turned his decaying eyes. He seemed to look at Xie Qingling, then nodded.

He turned and began leaping rapidly through the mountains in a posture no human body could achieve.

Xie Qingling said, “Follow him!”

The three immediately gave chase, wrapping their feet in Spirit to increase their speed. They raced through the forest, sometimes taking to the air, and kept pace with Luo Yuancheng as he bounded madly ahead.

At last, Luo Yuancheng led them to a river winding around the green mountains.

Standing at the riverbank, he did not hesitate before leaping straight in.

The three stopped.

After a moment, Xie Qingling asked, “Dai Xingyu, can you swim?”

Shen Huaizhou said, “Dai Xingyu, you can swim.”

Dai Xingyu fell silent.

Dai Xingyu undid the straps around his body, set down his case, then jumped in after Luo Yuancheng.

About five minutes later, Dai Xingyu surfaced after diving into the depths.

Horror filled his face. “Under the river… There’s something under the river!”