Chapter 228

Chapter 228

An expert knew what to look for. Deputy Director Chen’s corded muscles were the result of a training regimen he’d maintained since his youth.

Whether it was traditional martial arts or modern combat sports, he could usually identify the practitioner’s school and lineage after a couple of glances.

Pointing at the three bodies on the ground, he said, “The one on the left took a blow to the temple.”

Perhaps he enjoyed teaching, or perhaps he simply wanted to give Qin Ying a few pointers. He gestured to her. “Qin Ying, what kind of weapon do you think struck him?”

He had expected her to at least think it over.

Instead, Qin Ying merely tilted her head and took a look before answering, “A sideways elbow strike.”

She might not know much about other things, but she was very familiar with elbow strikes. She’d gotten into plenty of fights before.

The olecranon at the tip of the ulna was one of the hardest bones in the human body. Combined with power generated from the hips and core, it could inflict tremendous damage.

The same went for the knee.

Qin Ying bent her arm and mimed the blow, then arched a brow.

To smash a person’s skull in with a single strike, scrambling their brains and killing them on the spot, the attacker had been both ruthless and highly skilled.

Seeing that she knew what she was talking about, Deputy Director Chen nodded in satisfaction.

The old man was a fitness fanatic. He liked seeing his juniors and subordinates healthy and willing to exercise.

He pointed at the body in the middle. “This one’s cervical vertebrae were broken. He was killed with a rear naked choke.”

At that, his eyes narrowed. “Concealed sentries are generally alert. Whoever killed them was utterly ruthless and left them no chance of survival.”

Qin Ying looked around. “This is an excellent observation post. A concealed lookout wouldn’t normally be abandoned just because its guards were killed.”

“They didn’t even retrieve the bodies. They simply turned the lookout post into their grave.”

“That kind of haste means the situation in the old mansion must already have been extremely dire when these three died. They didn’t even have time to collect the bodies.”

Taken together, the time of their deaths was obvious: around March 1912, when Shiye and the others were busy evacuating this place.

Qin Ying looked at Deputy Director Chen and received an approving glance in return.

Clearly, they had reached the same conclusion.

After photographs were taken of the three bodies, Xie Shao showed no concern for the filth and began searching them.

The clothes on the corpses had long since rotted into sheets of damp seaweed. Xie Shao peeled the decaying fabric away from the bodies without hesitation.

As he pulled apart the clothes on the corpse with the broken neck, something fell out with a soft plop.

It looked like a small booklet wrapped in kraft paper.

Xie Shao’s eyes lit up. He picked up the booklet, casually shook it a couple of times, peeled back the kraft-paper wrapping, and handed it over.

Deputy Director Chen turned the booklet around, and Qin Ying leaned over without ceremony to take a look.

Several large words were written on the cover: Dental Formulas.

Judging by the title alone, Qin Ying had assumed it would contain something sinister or occult.

But after Deputy Director Chen flipped through a few pages, she realized the booklet actually contained information about dentistry.

There was a recipe called Supreme Tooth-Cleaning Powder, made by grinding the bones of male rats and mixing them with powdered asarum, agarwood, dahurian angelica, and other medicinal ingredients.

According to the booklet, brushing one’s teeth with this powder would prevent them from loosening or falling out, leaving one with a full set of healthy teeth even at a hundred years old.

These formulas somehow seemed both ridiculous and oddly plausible.

Puzzled, Qin Ying asked, “Was he a tooth-powder salesman?”

She turned to look at the corpse. Unexpectedly, of the three bodies on the ground, the gentleman in the middle had the worst teeth by far. They were crooked in every direction.

Qin Ying couldn’t help resting her chin on her hand. “Did he have bad teeth, so he went around collecting secret remedies?”

Before her imagination could run any further, Deputy Director Chen, who had been silently leafing through the booklet, abruptly froze.

“He might also have been a dentist,” he said.

Qin Ying let out a puzzled “Huh?” Then she saw Deputy Director Chen hold the booklet out to her.

That booklet had been sitting on a corpse for who knew how many years. Qin Ying genuinely did not want to take it.
Fortunately, someone promptly handed her a pair of gloves.

Only then did she pick up the booklet and examine it.

The first thing she saw was a Tooth Regrowth Formula that looked both sinister and patently absurd.

According to the instructions, one had to obtain a healthy human tooth, then store it in a cellar for ten days with powdered bones from a male rat, grains of rice, and the blood of a virgin boy. Under a crescent moon, the pointed end of the tooth was to be driven into the gums.

The jaw would then be bound with cloth strips so the mouth could neither open nor close. After three days without food or water, the new tooth would take root and set firmly.

Qin Ying could only marvel at what she was reading.

The earlier prescriptions had at least seemed somewhat plausible, aside from dubious ingredients such as rat bones.

But this particular formula had nothing whatsoever to do with medicine. It was pure mysticism.

Xie Shao found something else on the corpse and called out, “You two!”

Qin Ying looked over just in time to see him holding a filthy cloth pouch. He pulled open its mouth and dumped out the contents.

Clatter.

Amid the yellowed bone powder, dried blood, and grains of rice, several teeth as white as peanut kernels tumbled out.

So the murder victim really had obtained healthy human teeth for this sinister tooth-regrowth ritual.

Qin Ying frowned as something stirred in her memory.

“I think I’ve heard about something like this before.”

“Huh?”

Yunlan Ancient City, where Qin Ying lived, had once been home to every kind of crook and monster imaginable. Children were often abducted there.

As a result, adults mostly kept children in line by frightening them.

One of their favorite warnings was an old tale passed down through the generations.

In the old days, itinerant barbers offered all kinds of services. Besides cutting hair and shaving beards, they gave massages, cleaned ears, and sometimes even pulled teeth.

There were also traveling dentists who roamed the streets.

Yunlan Ancient City had once been home to a particularly famous dentist.

For three generations, the family had worked as barbers. Then, a little over a century ago, they suddenly made their fortune.

Supposedly, they had obtained a secret prescription, and their signature specialty was the Tooth Regrowth Formula.

As long as a patient had money, it did not matter if all their teeth had fallen out or rotted away. In just three days, the family could make lost teeth grow back.

With that skill, the Hu Family bought a large shop and built an enormous estate.

Their sprawling residence, with its multiple courtyards, remained a protected historical building in the ancient city to this day.

At some point, a rumor began circulating through the city: the teeth the Hu Family used for regrowth had to be freshly pulled from the mouths of living people.

But where could anyone find that many living people willing to part with their teeth?

People began claiming that the Hu Family’s Tooth Regrowth Formula relied on children they had abducted from the city.

The rumor spread further and further, but no one had any solid evidence.

Then one day, during a heavy snowstorm, a blood-soaked young beggar stumbled into the county magistrate’s office, leaving a bloody footprint with every step.

When the child opened their mouth, it was full of blood. Every last tooth was gone.

Sobbing and gesturing frantically, the child pointed in the direction of the Hu Family estate and cried out incoherently.

They said the Hu Family had abducted all of them and kept them alive so their teeth could be pulled to treat patients.

The child had appeared in broad daylight. Even though the county magistrate’s office existed in name only by then, this was not something the authorities could simply ignore.

The patrol police gathered a group and headed to the Hu Family estate.

By the time they arrived, however, only a few servants remained.

The Hu Family had already boarded a train and fled together.

Some said they had gone to Nanyang. Others claimed they had escaped to Hong Kong.

Either way, they were gone.

They had left in such a hurry that they had failed to cover their tracks. That was how the young beggar they had neglected to silence found a chance to escape.

“They say that more than a hundred toothless children’s skeletons were later dug out of the Hu Family’s cellar.”

Qin Ying had been such a mischievous child that Qin Zhiguo often used this story to frighten her.

Of course, it had never actually worked.

Now, however, the story had provided another small clue to the identity of the corpse lying on the ground.