Chapter 67
Chapter 67
It looked like a woman, with shoulder-length hair and a slim figure.
She was holding a comb, her back to the patrol car, slowly combing her hair stroke by stroke.
There was no need to be overly cautious once they got here, but it still felt wrong to wake Maozi, who was asleep. The intern wanted to go upstairs and check the situation.
The front door wasn’t locked.
The two of them went in. The entire first floor was pitch dark and empty, with no sound at all coming from inside. They groped their way upstairs in the dark.
The upstairs was just as quiet.
Only the room where they had just seen the woman had a faint yellow light on.
They exchanged a glance, both thinking that they had no real understanding of what was going on with the Old Softshell Turtle Wedding. Before handling the case, they at least had to ask what the situation actually was.
So they politely knocked on the door, very softly, and Wu Xiaojiu called through the crack, “Sister.”
“We’re the Maozi specially dispatched here. We want to understand exactly what’s going on with the Old Softshell Turtle Wedding. Could you cooperate with the investigation?”
There was no sound from inside for a while.
The two of them thought the woman didn’t want to open the door, and were just about to turn and leave when.
A strange set of footsteps sounded.
Calling it footsteps was actually not quite right, because when normal people walk, even if they’re in a hurry, the sound of their steps isn’t this loud or frantic.
But the noise coming from inside the room was messy and chaotic. It didn’t sound like a person walking at all. It was more like a dog scratching at a door.
Still, the door opened. The woman smiled at the two of them. Probably because of the lighting, Wu Xiaojiu felt like her pupils gave off a green sheen, and her hair had a greenish shimmer to it as well. It didn’t look like human hair; it looked more like the green-haired softshell turtle his family kept at home.
“The Old Softshell Turtle Wedding? Where did that happen?”
Wu Xiaojiu and the other man exchanged glances, thinking they must not have come to the wrong place. There was a whole crowd of Maozi down below, surrounding this two-story self-built house so tightly. With such a huge commotion, this woman couldn’t possibly not know about it.
“It should be what happened in your house. Miss, you really don’t know?”
The intern scratched his head. The woman blinked twice, then lifted her eyelids and stared wide-eyed. The whites of her eyes seemed to swell outward, while her eyeballs bulged out unnaturally, almost as if they were forcing their way out of her sockets.
She looked confused, but her face was stiff and unnatural, making her seem extremely uncomfortable. Her pupils rolled around the edges of those bulging white eyes.
Then she grinned, the smile stretching almost to her ears, and shook her head.
With a face like that, there was no way the two of them weren’t scared.
The intern wanted to force himself to keep asking, but Wu Xiaojiu noticed something was wrong first and suddenly covered his mouth.
Holding the intern down, he bowed toward the woman.
“Alright, we understand. Since there’s nothing else, we’ll head downstairs now and won’t disturb your rest.”
As he spoke, he kept hold of the intern and turned around, dragging him down to the second floor.
By the time they reached the first-floor living room, Wu Xiaojiu finally let go.
The intern looked at him, frowning.
“What was that about? This was the perfect chance to get the whole story straight. Don’t you want to find out the truth?”
Wu Xiaojiu shook his head at him, his voice so thin it seemed to drift out like a mosquito’s buzz.
“Didn’t you notice how off that woman was? Especially when her eyeballs bulged out like that. It was just like a softshell turtle poking its head out, with the eyes bulging forward. And if nothing’s wrong, the village chief’s whole family should be living in this self-built house. But since we came in, we haven’t seen a single person besides that woman. Do you think that woman might be the bride who married the old softshell turtle?”
The intern broke out in a cold sweat.
He didn’t know how to answer. He could only keep waving his hands, his face drained white with fear.
“How could something so wicked be real? The Old Softshell Turtle Wedding is probably just a code name for the corpse. How could there really be a girl marrying a softshell turtle? Stop talking nonsense!”
The two of them kept interrupting each other, trading lines back and forth.
They hadn’t noticed the chaotic footsteps coming up behind them at all.
By the time Wu Xiaojiu realized something was wrong behind him, the intern had already frozen stiff in place, eyes wide, one finger pointing straight at the floor as his lips trembled for a long time without managing to squeeze out a single word.
Wu Xiaojiu’s whole body went numb. Half of him had gone dead, and as he swallowed hard, he only felt that his life was in grave danger.
Still, he gathered his courage and turned his head back a little.
What he saw nearly made him faint.
Somehow, the woman had already come out of the room. She was upside down, on all fours, her head hanging low, and she was using her elbows to inch her way down the stairs.
Her long hair draped over the stairwell, and those eyes shone a faint green glow as she stared at the two of them without blinking.
Wu Xiaojiu met her eyes.
The woman bared a grin at him that stretched all the way to the back of her head.
Wu Xiaojiu shuddered. The intern shuddered twice.
The two of them grabbed each other’s hands and bolted straight out the door together.
“Holy shit!”
The moment they got outside, both of them shouted at the same time.
Maozi, who had been sleeping lightly in his cap, was jolted awake by the curses.
Seeing the two of them come running out of the gate, he also spat out a curse, hurriedly got up, shoved them back, and pulled the gate shut.
“What the hell are you doing? Didn’t I say this whole area is sealed off and nobody’s allowed in or out?”
The intern was already terrified pale, gasping for breath where he stood, unable to answer for a while.
Wu Xiaojiu wasn’t much better.
“Come on, sit down, sit down. Judging by your uniforms, you should be on our side. How could you be this reckless? Don’t you know what’s going on here?”
The two of them shook their heads in unison.
Maozi looked around anxiously a couple of times, likely checking whether the woman had come out. Seeing that everything was still safe, he said to them, “Yesterday, the village chief’s daughter drove a tractor out to bring in the harvest. There’s a small lake in the village, and in the fields near her house it had formed a deep muddy pool. Probably because it had been soaked for so long, plus the heavy rain a few days ago, the mud around that pool had been washed apart. When the village chief’s daughter drove the tractor over there, the left tire sank completely into the rotten mud. Once that side went under, the whole vehicle lost its balance and started tipping into the ground.
“What’s worse, the village chief’s daughter liked smoking, so the doors on both sides of the tractor weren’t closed, and the windows were wide open. She fell straight out. And since her foot was still on the accelerator, the tractor kept moving after she fell. It crushed her neck right away. When we checked the body, the neck was already ground into mud.”
It was enough to make anyone scared.
Especially with not even a single cicada calling around them, Wu Xiaojiu’s eyelid kept twitching.
Afraid something might happen, he quietly unlocked his phone and sent Bo Suihan his current location.
His original thought was simple: if he didn’t return for a long time and something went wrong, at least Bo Suihan would have an address to use as a clue and come looking for him.
He didn’t think any further than that.
After all, it was deep in the night and the whole village was sealed off. Only an idiot would come rushing over foolishly to find him.
After sending the message, Wu Xiaojiu put his phone away and listened carefully to the rest of the story.
“After the village chief’s daughter was run over by the tractor, her family went to collect the body. Only then did they discover that beneath the muddy pool, right where the tire had pressed down, there was a softshell turtle nest that had been crushed in. A bunch of softshell turtles, too many to count, were crawling out in all directions. Those things eat meat, and once they smelled blood, they had gnawed the village chief’s daughter’s corpse until it was unrecognizable.”