Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The next day, the County Office archives were unsealed.

Xiao Huairen helped me pull all the cases involving unidentified female corpses from three years ago. Many people died in Qingxi County every year-refugees, runaway slaves, sickly women, and merchants whose bodies were dumped by mountain bandits. The records filled half the room.

I flipped through the pages one by one, my palms growing colder with every turn.

From late spring three years ago to the present, a total of thirteen female corpses had been discovered in Qingxi County and its six surrounding counties.

The victims were all between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. They had suffered blood loss before death, and their eyes had been gouged out afterward. Some were dumped in river bends, some were buried in desolate graves, and others were stuffed into the hollow bellies of statues in abandoned temples.

The case files noted: Suspected to be the work of a Flower Thief.

But there were no signs of sexual assault on their bodies.

Their eyes hadn’t been gouged out in a fit of rage; they had been harvested.

My fingers stopped when I reached the earliest case.

Victim unidentified. Dressed in a red bridal gown. Indentations from a Jade Bracelet on the wrist bone. Buried on the north slope of Mass Grave Hill; the body subsequently went missing.

There was an autopsy note at the bottom of the file.

The handwriting was elegant and upright: Victim died of suffocation. Eyes intact. Suspected accidental burial.

The signature: Su Wanzhao.

I stared at those three characters, and another sharp pang of pain shot through my brain.

Fragments of memory surged up.

In a dim room, Su Wanzhao sat before a bronze mirror, using the tip of a knife to pry out the eye of a dead bird. An Old Coroner with a head of white hair stood behind her.

The Old Coroner said, “The Eyes of Remembrance are not a divine gift; they are a debt. You see the final moments of the dead, and the dead leave a piece of themselves within you. The more you see, the less you will be yourself.”

Su Wanzhao asked softly, “What if I never wanted to be myself in the first place?”

The Old Coroner looked at her in horror. “Wanzhao, what are you planning to do?”

The vision snapped.

I pressed my hand against my temple.

Xiao Huairen was flipping through another volume of old cases. “Su Cheng. Died in a fire three years ago. His remains were incomplete after death, and Su Wanzhao was the one who performed the autopsy.”

Su Cheng.

The Old Coroner who had recommended me to the County Office.

I had never met him.

Yet, the recommendation letter in my robes was indeed stamped with his private seal.

A dead man had written me a recommendation letter.

Xiao Huairen looked up. “The day you entered the office, the Prefect saw the letter you brought. If Su Cheng was already dead, then who wrote that letter?”

The answer wasn’t difficult.

Su Wanzhao.

The real Su Wanzhao had arranged an identity for me long before I ever woke up.

She had made me become her.

And then, she made everyone believe that Su Wanzhao had been alive all along.