Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I did not speak Pei Yan’s name aloud.

Xiao Huairen was a clever man. Seeing the look on my face, he knew this corpse was connected to me, yet he didn’t press for answers immediately. He simply ordered the yamen runners to guard the doors of the Funeral Parlor.

I took up the blade, opened the chest, examined the lungs, and dissected the stomach.

Every cut was steady.

Only I knew that as the blade fell, I heard someone laughing in my ear.

That laughter did not belong to Pei Yan.

It was a woman-gentle, dismissive, as if heard through a layer of water. “You finally see it.”

I paused for a heartbeat.

Xiao Huairen asked, “Did you find something?”

Using forceps, I pulled a half-melted wax pill from Pei Yan’s stomach. The wax shell had been softened by gastric juices, and inside was a small scrap of oil paper.

Only two words were written on it.

“Don’t trust.”

The ink had been blurred by fluid, yet the heavy strokes were still visible, as if the writer had poured all their strength into the tip of the brush before death.

Don’t trust who?

Me?

Or the things my eyes see?

Xiao Huairen took the oil paper, his expression darkening. “The deceased knew his killer.”

“He did more than just know them,” I said. “He feared he would still be used by the killer even after his death.”

Xiao Huairen looked at me. “What did you see today?”

I remained silent.

The Eyes of Remembrance were my secret. In the County Office, only the Prefect and Xiao Huairen knew half the truth. They knew I had an extraordinary talent for autopsies, but they didn’t know I could see the final moments of the dead.

The dead do not lie.

But the living will lie on their behalf.

I had relied on this ability to solve eighteen cases. There was the husband who wept, saying his wife had jumped into a well, but I saw him holding her head underwater in a vat. There was the filial son clad in mourning hemp, but I saw him smothering his mother with a pillow at night. There was the wealthy merchant who claimed his clerk had fled with stolen money, but I saw him burying the man alive in a wine cellar.

I never doubted the dead.

But today, the dead man had pointed his finger at me.

Xiao Huairen did not force me to speak. He tucked the oil paper into an evidence bag. “We’ll start by investigating his identity.”

“There’s no need to investigate,” I heard my own voice, faint and hollow. “His name is Pei Yan, from Pingzhou. He disappeared three years ago. He was supposed to marry the Jiang family’s daughter, Jiang Heng.”

Xiao Huairen froze.

No one in Qingxi County knew of Jiang Heng.

That was because Su Wanzhao had only arrived at the County Office three years ago, in the spring.

She had arrived carrying a letter of recommendation from the old Coroner, Su Cheng, claiming to be his distant relative. She said she had grown up in a funeral parlor and knew how to examine bones and identify poisons. The Prefect was short-handed; after testing her on three cases and finding her results terrifyingly accurate, he kept her on.

I, too, had always believed I was Su Wanzhao.

Until six months later, when I was examining a female corpse by a deserted well. In the remembrance, I saw the woman breathe out a name before she died: “Jiang Heng.”

In that instant, a memory that did not belong to Su Wanzhao suddenly flooded my mind.

A red bridal veil, the ritual wine… my mother sliding a Jade Bracelet onto my wrist, saying, “Ah Heng, there are few people a woman can trust in this life. You must trust yourself first.”

Then came the smell of earth.

A coffin.

And someone whispering in my ear: “I’m borrowing your life.”