Chapter 64

Chapter 64

How was anyone supposed to survive this?

A ghost had practically reached his face.

Wu Xiaojiu was shaking all over, cold with terror, his mind blank for a moment.

All he could hear was the door rattling under repeated knocks, the handle shaking more and more violently. At the same time, the person outside called out, “Open the door, please! Open the door!”

The voice sounded familiar.

Wu Xiaojiu frowned. The tension in his chest eased a little, and he finally recognized that the voice outside was clearly the intern’s.

Summoning his courage, he crept to the door on light feet and turned the handle, opening it a crack.

Under the dim light, the intern was standing there with a flashlight, sweat streaming down his face.

“What’s wrong? You don’t have a bit of color in your face.”

“You scared me half to death. Didn’t you go to the right?”

The intern nodded in understanding. Looking at Wu Xiaojiu’s pale, sweaty face, he immediately realized he must have been frightened by what he’d said about going downstairs.

He bared his teeth awkwardly and scratched the back of his head with a sheepish grin.

“I suddenly remembered that the head was in this mortuary, in the first mortuary drawer, so I came back. I guess I scared you, huh? What I said while going downstairs was just nonsense. Don’t take it seriously.”

Wu Xiaojiu had nearly lost his wits just now, and he was still unsettled from the fright.

Now that he was looking at the intern’s big face, a burst of anger rose for no reason at all. But he couldn’t possibly vent it on someone this foolish, so he simply stepped aside to let him in.

And with that movement, as he turned his head, Wu Xiaojiu suddenly noticed that after the head had fallen to the floor, it had rolled into the dead corner beside the cabinet.

That was why he hadn’t been able to see it no matter how hard he looked just now.

Wu Xiaojiu pressed at his throbbing temple and thought, People really do scare the life out of each other.

“So you found it, but why did you leave it on the floor? That head was already smashed to pieces, and there are even cracks in the skull. If it gets knocked again now, it might split right down the middle.”

The intern hurriedly picked up the head and placed it on top of the mortuary drawer.

Even with the drawer’s cold storage, the long, stifling heat inside the tree hollow had already caused irreversible decay. The face could no longer be made out; one could only roughly identify where the eyes, nose, and mouth had been.

“You’re this scared, so why did you still take the back door and investigate the case?”

The intern asked curiously. Wu Xiaojiu looked at the head, then at him. With four eyes fixed on him, his gaze drifted away as he made up an excuse on the spot.

“My family’s poor. I didn’t want to keep studying, and I was planning to find a proper job, but I don’t have any qualifications. I heard outside-hired detectives working for the police make good money.”

The intern immediately nodded.

“Actually, your observation skills are pretty good. Just from reading the files, you could think of whether the two cases might be related. The pay for outside-hired detectives really is decent too. Thirty to fifty thousand a month.”

As he spoke, he pried open the head’s mouth and used a cotton swab to scrape the coating off the tongue and the inside of the mouth, while gossiping curiously on the side.

“Your family is poor? That doesn’t sound right. If that’s the case, who opened the back door for you? I heard from my Senior that the person who got you in has a lot of pull, enough to talk to people up top.”

Wu Xiaojiu rubbed the side of his face, figuring he couldn’t very well sell out Bo Suihan.

Since he’d been making things up from the start, he might as well keep using lies to patch the story together.

“It’s a rich kid I know. He’s useless himself, and his father has money. I used all sorts of connections to get in touch with him, and after begging him over and over, I finally got this chance.”

The intern nodded in understanding. Although the opportunity was rare, as long as he could seize it and solve the case, he’d still have a real shot at making a name for himself.
Wu Xiaojiu’s name would definitely spread far and wide. By then, both local Maozi and out-of-town Maozi would surely come to hire him as an external recruit, and that would mean his goal had been achieved.

But on second thought, that didn’t seem right either. The rich second-generation heirs in this city all had worse tempers than the last. How could they possibly have any contact with a poor kid from an ordinary family?

The intern gave Wu Xiaojiu an intrigued look while also sizing up the luxury brands on him from head to toe.

Suspicion couldn’t help rising in his mind.

After two or three seconds, a strange idea surfaced.

Wu Xiaojiu didn’t look like someone from a poor family who had kowtowed his way into this chance. He looked more like someone who had been kept by a patron.

Could it really be just like the internet said: a gambling addict for a father, a sick mother, a younger sister still in school, and a broken him.

The intern’s expression changed. Completely convinced by his own conclusion, he silently lowered his head and moved the swab faster.

In less than two minutes, he had extracted the DNA sample.

Once the real work was done, Wu Xiaojiu didn’t want to stay there any longer. He straightened the arm that had been resting on the Mortuary Drawer and took two steps forward to push the door open.

With a wet smack, he stepped on something soft and squishy.

The blood seeping from the crack under the door had nearly dried already. When Wu Xiaojiu had opened the door for the intern just now, the overwhelming relief had made him forget that pool of blood completely.

Now that he had stepped on that soft mass, he looked down stiffly.

Only to see that the area outside the door was practically a pool of blood, and what he had stepped on was nothing else but a corpse that was still thawing out.

Because the water in a body does not fully drain away after death, if a corpse is placed in a Mortuary Drawer and frozen for a long time, the blood and skin can freeze solid from the inside out.

This corpse had probably been taken out not long ago, like ribs just pulled from a freezer, still seeping blood and water.

“What’s wrong?”

The intern’s voice came from behind him.

Wu Xiaojiu’s body was still stiff.

He pointed straight at the corpse on the ground, and a laugh came from behind him.

“So scared? You really are just a kid.”

The intern squeezed through the gap, a swab in one hand and the corpse half-hoisted in the other.

Meat that has just thawed is soft, and another thing about it is that it’s gummy. Besides the juices and blood seeping out, the soft layer of skin and fat on the surface looked as though it had melted and sloughed open like a molten filling.

It was half draped over the intern’s shoulder. The translucent flesh was slightly cloudy, sticky-looking, and a little disgusting.

“This corpse is the one Miss Zhao brought to the police station. Take it upstairs and compare the two DNA samples to see whether they match. If what you said is true, and this unnamed head is really part of this body, then you’ll have done a great deed.”

The intern didn’t care about that at all. He carried the corpse upstairs.

Wu Xiaojiu followed behind him, his stomach churning.

Especially when he saw the section of bone cut from the middle of the corpse, exactly the detail Wang Xiao had shown him when the body first arrived.

And the spot Wu Xiaojiu had just stepped on was nothing else either.

It was the soft flesh from which that section of bone had been removed, and the side he had stepped on was already crushed to a pulp, blood and fluids spilling out of it, looking especially nauseating.

“Okay, I understand.”

Wu Xiaojiu forced down the feeling in his chest and nodded.

The two of them went on like that, one in front and one behind, saying nothing all the way.