Chapter 154: The Corpse That Can't Lie Flat

"1983 'Mirror Demon Case', counting old Ye, the known victims have risen to 9." Qi Fei looked at the dense list in Wu Shanqiu's hand and drank the last sip of cold coffee, sighing slightly.

Under the cold light of the autopsy room, the three female remains shone with a cyan-gray light on the metal table.

"Snap!" Qi Fei snapped the rubber gloves on his wrists, looked at the female corpse with a mask, the nylon rope was intricately tangled on the withered flesh, locking the joints in a distorted kneeling posture. It was just that the hair on the heads of everyone just excavated was finally confirmed to be wigs, which had been removed for testing. The skulls of the female corpses were bare, and the Soul Suppressing Rune that only Zhong Kui could understand could be faintly seen.

"Reasonably speaking, 42 years have passed, these corpses should have been skeletonized, and they can still maintain the posture at the time of death. It's really a bit difficult to say it's not evil." Wu Shanqiu said, looking at Zhong Kui, "Is there really such a thing as soul suppression in this world?"

"Whether soul suppression is effective or not, if you ask me, I will certainly tell you it is effective. However, the rune on their heads, maybe you have all seen it." Zhong Kui said leisurely.

Being said by Zhong Kui, Wu Shanqiu couldn't help but "Eh?" and said, "It really looks a bit familiar."

"Don't believe her psychological suggestion." Qi Fei said with vigilance from the side.

Zhong Kui glanced at Qi Fei and said angrily: "If your memory is poor, don't doubt me. I, an outsider, know more about this place than you, a native of Nancheng."

"Is this rune in Nancheng?" Qi Fei asked suspiciously.

"Are you not going to the Glazed Pagoda of Da Baoen Temple? If you are observant enough, the precious pearl at the top of the pagoda projects talismanic scripts at the 3:00 AM hour on every new moon; old Nancheng residents call this 'Heavenly Talisman Suppressing the Night.' It is said that during the Hongwu era, there was often ghost wailing from deep within the Nancheng ley lines. A Celestial Master divined the hexagrams and saw the Greedy Wolf star encroaching upon the Taiwei Enclosure, pointing directly to an unnamed desolate grave at the southern foot of Zizai Mountain. They dug three feet into the ground and unearthed a broken steed—that is the current location of Nanling. Legend has it that because the resentment of the wrongly executed prince was too heavy, this Glazed Pagoda was built, and Soul Suppressing talismans were carved into the precious pearl. The talisman patterns within correspond to the divisions of the Twenty-Eight Mansions, and every talisman core is embedded with the secret names of the Seven True Lords of the Big Dipper, which is how the sound of the ghost wailing was suppressed..."

In the cold autopsy room, Zhong Kui told this true and false legend, making Wu Shanqiu's hair stand on end.

Qi Fei walked to Zhong Kui's side and shook his hand wearing rubber gloves in front of her: "Wake up, this is just your persona, we have to believe in science."

Zhong Kui had clear eyes like crystal, looking at him steadily: "I am very awake. Humans need to reconstruct reality cognition through symbolic systems—legends concretize uncontrollable survival threats into dispersible demons, which can be considered the deep wisdom of the ancients. Of course, this is also what I am doing now."

"Dry for a thousand years, wet for ten thousand years, neither dry nor wet for half a year. These corpses were buried in silt, just isolating the air. Let alone 42 years, if they were not excavated, 420 years would be fine. However, this cannot be dissected." Xiao Tao's words interrupted their mysterious conversation. The young forensic doctor's focus was obviously different from others. His fingertips wearing latex gloves hovered above the skeleton, suddenly stopping at the lumbar spine of one of the corpses.

"Forty-two years of muscle contracture..." He muttered to himself, the tip of the tweezers probing into the spinal bone seam, and with a "click" sound, the skeleton tilted backward.

"Whoa! Amazing!" This operation really amazed Wu Shanqiu.

With several similar light sounds, this corpse that had knelt for 42 years finally lay straight on the autopsy table in a face-up posture.

"She finally lay flat." Wu Shanqiu blurted out.

Qi Fei looked at her with strange eyes: "You sound very envious?"

Wu Shanqiu waved her hand quickly: "Literal meaning of 'lying flat', hehe."

Xiao Tao looked at the name tag hanging on the corpse's toe, his tone indifferent: "Li Yulan is lying flat." I don't know if he was talking about the matter or echoing Wu Shanqiu's cold joke.

The surgical light illuminated the ring-shaped depression at the tenth thoracic vertebra of Li Yulan's chest, and Xiao Tao checked it at close range: "The bone pressure trace formed by long-term pressure of the rope is consistent with the kneeling binding characteristics of the 1983 case."

Subsequently, Xiao Tao moved the surgical light up, and the glaring shadowless light focused on the face of Li Yulan's skeleton.

His fingers wearing latex gloves lightly touched the upper edge of the deceased's skull orbit: "The orbital bone wall has irregular serrated defects, and the radioactive bone fracture can be seen extending toward the zygomatic arch, which is consistent with the lever action damage mode formed by multiple prying and pressing of blunt instruments."

"Uh... so speaking human language is..." Qi Fei still couldn't help but make this request.

"Her eye sockets are empty, not because the eyeballs decayed, but because someone used a blunt instrument to dig out her eyes." Xiao Tao said without raising his head.

Qi Fei, who was familiar with the "Mirror Demon Case", blurted out: "That is the same situation as the five deceased in Dongji Town."

Xiao Tao bowed his body, his fingers still probing into the depths of the eye socket, and continued: "Although the retrobulbar adipose body has been completely saponified, the stress-related bone callus remaining on the medial side of the greater wing of the sphenoid bone confirms that the damage occurred during the survival period when the deceased's cardiovascular system still had perfusion pressure." This time, without Qi Fei opening his mouth, he explained actively, "That is to say, the deceased had her eyes dug out while she was alive."

For such a shocking conclusion, Qi Fei was not surprised, because this was also consistent with the autopsy report conclusion of the victims in the "Mirror Demon Case".

This proved that back then, Ye Ming did find the murderer who brutally killed so many women, unfortunately...

His gaze unconsciously glanced at Ye Ming's remains placed slightly further away.

His tied body was still kneeling with his head down.

If the autopsy results were consistent, old Ye also suffered the same inhumane brutal killing as other deceased.

The weathered and cracked palm bones were curled up, and that hand once tightly held that button...

At this time, a dull thud mixed with the crisp sound of bone joint dislocation interrupted his thoughts. When he came back to his senses, he saw Xiao Tao almost using his whole body strength to "compete" with the second female corpse.

"Is he arm-wrestling with the corpse?" Qi Fei asked puzzledly.

Xiao Tao's forehead oozed sweat, and the autopsy table made an unbearable creaking sound.

The right arm of the second female corpse was folded back at a bizarre angle, and the scapula was stuck on the edge of the metal table.

"Not arm-wrestling." He adjusted the angle of the tweezers, "The third and fourth ribs on the right side of the deceased have pathological bone callus, indicating that she suffered blunt instrument strikes during her lifetime, leading to old fractures, wait..." Xiao Tao's tweezers carefully stretched into the gap between the ribs, "It seems that other things are stuck in the bones." He said, trying several times, and finally took out that thing... ===== CHAPTER 155 =====