Chapter 3

Chapter 3

At four-thirty in the morning, I returned to the Morgue.

The security guard on duty had gone to the front building for a smoke, and a section of the surveillance feed just happened to have gone dark yesterday. This was already suspicious enough. What was even stranger was that when I used the duty key to open the side door, the lock was stained with the faint scent of incense ash.

It wasn’t normal incense.

It was the smell left behind when paper effigies are burned in a funeral shop.

I crouched down and used a pair of tweezers to pull a black plastic-sealed bag out of the vent at the bottom of Cabinet No. 6. The outer layer of the bag was wrapped in medical tape; inside was a very old USB drive and a water-damaged receipt.

Only one line of text on the receipt was still legible.

Wanghe Customs Research Center.

I stuffed the items into my pocket, returned to the duty room, and plugged the drive into the computer.

There were only three folders on the USB drive.

The first was titled “Wanghe Five.”

Upon opening it, I found photos, disappearance dates, and family backgrounds of five young girls, along with a handwritten comparison chart. All five were between nineteen and twenty-four years old. Their birth dates had been circled in red ink, followed by a note I couldn’t understand: “Yin year, Yin month, Seven Fiends incomplete.”

The second folder was titled “Qin Yanxi.”

Only then did I learn the name of that unidentified female corpse.

Qin Yanxi, a local investigative journalist in Linjiang. After resigning six months ago, she had started her own podcast specifically to dig into cold cases. The folder was filled with her interview recordings, photos, and notes. The most recent note was timestamped at five o’clock yesterday afternoon.

“The Wanghe Case doesn’t involve five people; it’s six.”

“Shen Zhiyao isn’t a suspect; she’s the person who left the list.”

“If I don’t make it back tonight, send the materials to the Linjiang Funeral Home and give them to Shen Nian.”

I stared at the screen, my fingers stiffening.

The third folder contained only a single audio file.

The filename was: “To Shen Nian.”

I clicked it.

First came a burst of piercing wind, followed by a young woman’s voice, strained and hushed. I hadn’t heard that voice in ten years, yet I recognized it instantly.

It was Shen Zhiyao.

“Niannian, if you’re hearing this, it means I failed to get them out.”

“Those five girls from Wanghe didn’t go missing on their own. Someone is using a public welfare project to handpick victims, then using folk customs as a cover. Don’t believe the stories on TV, don’t trust the consultants the police brought in later, and especially… do not trust Liang Yucheng.”

The recording reached this point when the sound of an iron door being slammed open echoed in the distance.

I heard my sister gasp, her voice suddenly becoming urgent.

“He knows who you are. The Blue-Covered Ledger Mom left behind isn’t at home, it’s in…”

A violent scratching sound followed, and the recording cut off abruptly.

I stood up so fast my chair screeched against the floor.

Liang Yucheng.

I had heard that name before.

He was the Forensic Consultant most frequently invited by the Linjiang City Public Security Bureau in recent years, a Folk Crime Research Expert. He appeared on television every other day, explaining how to use modern criminal investigation to debunk “murders by ghosts and gods.”

He was also the person Jiang Huaixu said he would invite this morning to help determine the origin of the Red Rope.

I suddenly understood why Qin Yanxi had risked her life to stuff those things into Cabinet No. 6.

She wasn’t just handing the clues to me.

She was warning me that among the people investigating the case, there might be a killer.