Chapter 211
Chapter 211
It didn’t matter how pitiful the thing imprisoned in the pool was, or that it had let slip it could let Qin Ying and the others leave of its own accord. Qin Ying had no intention of bargaining with a monster that ate people and specifically targeted women.
The moment it exposed Qin Ying as another test subject, it was doomed to die.
Knowing how vicious it was merely made her feel a little better about it on a moral level.
Before taking action, however, Qin Ying needed to find as many clues here as possible.
Clues about the door, or the Marrow Fluid.
She walked over to the Confusion Tree and cautiously asked, “Are you sure it really won’t explode?”
Di Shang had become considerably more cooperative after receiving a small piece of a gold bracelet. It extruded a drop of mercury-like liquid and shaped it into a tiny hand pointing forward.
It was telling Qin Ying to go ahead and trust it.
Taking a deep breath, Qin Ying stepped toward the desk beneath the Confusion Tree.
Once she was close, she bent down and looked underneath it. A fine sheen of sweat immediately appeared on her forehead.
Five or six detonators had been attached beneath the desktop, and the trigger mechanism was connected to a ring of floor tiles around the desk. Whoever had set the trap hadn’t held back in the slightest.
A belated chill ran through Qin Ying as she looked at the waterlogged corpse sitting behind the desk.
If she hadn’t been worried about getting sticky corpse wax on her hand, she would have slapped the rotten bastard across the face several times.
After cursing the dead man and his entire family in her heart, Qin Ying moved to the side of the desk and nudged an obviously raised stone tile with her toe. Sure enough, it shifted beneath her touch.
But it would have been easy to mistake that looseness for damage caused by prolonged flooding.
One careless step, and someone would be blown sky-high.
She pressed it a few more times with her toe to make sure there was no danger, then took her place beside the desk.
Although a Wax Corpse was sitting behind it, so much time had passed that there was no real stench left.
Still, the moldy smell of rotting wood and the Wax Corpse’s melted face were unpleasant enough.
Di Shang spread over Qin Ying’s right hand and transformed into a silver metal glove that encased even the joints of her fingers.
She first examined the object on the oak desk that resembled a final letter.
Unsurprisingly, it had been written in Italian with a pencil.
Qin Ying knew only a little Italian. She struggled over the hastily scrawled page for a long time before finally deciphering the first line:
To whoever comes after me: By the time you read these words, you may already have brushed the hem of Death’s robe.
Qin Ying couldn’t help looking at the waterlogged corpse’s melted face.
Anyone able to read that line had already reached the desk. Chances were, they would have been blown sky-high by then.
Wouldn’t that count as brushing against Death?
Qin Ying flexed her fingers and continued reading the final letter.
To her disappointment, the man’s indecipherable scribbles contained nothing important at all.
She took out her phone, switched it to airplane mode, and snapped a picture.
Then she turned her attention to the Wax Corpse.
Despite every fiber of her being resisting the idea, she still reached out with her right hand.
When her fingers gripped the corpse’s suit and pulled it open, the fabric, saturated with corpse wax, made a sticky peeling sound that set her ears itching.
Qin Ying had only intended to search the body for clues about the cause of death. Instead, the moment she pulled the suit open, the corpse’s completely empty chest and abdominal cavities were exposed.
This corpse, dressed in a suit and leather shoes, had been deliberately stripped of all its internal organs.
Qin Ying’s fingers trembled.
Then she noticed that the gaping cavity in the corpse’s abdomen had been carefully treated.
Decorative patterns had been carved into the exposed vertebrae.
The treated spine had turned black, its vertebrae fashioned into a piece of bone sculpture.
The sight struck Qin Ying as familiar. She suddenly recalled the materials she had once studied on Soul-Container Consecration.
Wasn’t the person before her an artificially created Soul-Container Body?
Disgusted as she was, Qin Ying immediately brightened.
If this really had been made in imitation of Soul-Container Consecration, there had to be something inside the abdominal cavity that represented this person.
When Qin Ying created her Soul-Container Puppet, the representative items had been eyes, so she had fudged it with protein-coated contact lenses and rice stained with blood.
She had also used chunks of her own flesh with the skin still attached, along with her hair and eyelashes.
Then what had been used to represent the identity of the god receiving Soul-Container Consecration?
Qin Ying dragged the chair the sodden corpse was sitting in around to face another direction.
Staring into the pitch-black abdominal cavity, she took a deep breath.
She comforted herself with the thought that as long as Di Shang was between her hand and the corpse, it didn’t count as reaching in bare-handed. Then she rolled up her sleeve.
Slowly, she reached into the Wax Corpse’s belly and began feeling around.
This fine gentleman hadn’t exactly been healthy when he was alive. His body fat had been on the high side.
Qin Ying’s entire hand was met with the slick, slimy texture of rotten mud.
As she searched, she chanted, “I’m foraging on the mudflats. I’m catching loaches.”
She had to fool herself first, or she would throw up on the spot.
The Thunderbird recoiled, pulling its little head back, then flew higher to keep watch for her.
Qin Ying muttered, “Di Shang, I’ll give you an extra piece of gold when we get back. Please, just hold together.”
It absolutely could not suddenly disappear, or Qin Ying would never be able to eat again for the rest of her life.
Perhaps the constant muttering distracted her, because her nausea gradually subsided.
Given the corpse’s seated position, any Soul-Container Consecration objects that had slipped loose should have fallen into the abdominal cavity by now.
As she felt her way around, her fingertips suddenly touched something hard.
Delighted, Qin Ying yanked her hand free of the corpse wax with a squelch and looked at what she had pinched between her fingers.
It was… something like a badge.
It was completely smeared with unnamable filth that gleamed with an oily sheen beneath the Confusion Tree’s cold light.
Out of sight, out of mind. Now that it was in plain sight, however, she could no longer suppress her disgust.
Qin Ying dry-heaved and placed the badge on the nearby desk.
Then, utterly dead inside, she continued feeling around.
Next, she found a palm-sized bronze plate.
Preserved within the grease and wax, the bronze plate had somehow retained a brilliant golden luster.
After the bronze plate, Qin Ying extracted a sealed lead case from the Wax Corpse’s abdomen.
Its opening had been secured with sealing wax, so whatever was inside should have been perfectly preserved.
Besides those, there were also two small glass vials.
Each contained a single eyeball suspended in liquid.
The emerald-green eyes floated within the yellowing glass, bobbing with the liquid.
By the time Qin Ying was on the verge of vomiting, she finally finished searching every inch of the Wax Corpse.
Exhausted in both body and mind, she removed the monocle from the bridge of its nose and checked the corpse’s eyes.
Sure enough, there were no eyeballs beneath its sunken eyelids.
Unsurprisingly, the eyeballs in the vials had belonged to the corpse.
Once she had finished checking everything, Qin Ying squatted down as if all her strength had left her and rested for a moment. Then she plunged her right hand into the water pooled on the floor and scrubbed and rinsed it furiously.
If only she had brought a brush and disinfectant.
Perhaps Di Shang had grown impatient with her rubbing it against the floor. It began to ripple, on the verge of melting away.
Sensing its intentions, Qin Ying pleaded in an unusually gentle voice, “Gold. I’ll give you gold. Please, don’t move.”
At the word “gold,” Di Shang finally stopped squirming and obediently stayed put.
Qin Ying rinsed her hand in the water for a long time.
She couldn’t tell whether it actually counted as clean, but time was running out. She continued lying to herself and pretended nothing had happened.
Gathering up everything she had extracted, she found a safe place and examined the items more closely.