When Shi Ting spoke, his voice carried a weight of quiet authority. Something in his manner commanded respect naturally, and the moment he opened his mouth, the villagers instinctively grew quieter.

When Bai Jin pulled back the rush mat, two charred corpses were exposed to the open air and to the gaze of the crowd — and with them came a sharp smell of burned flesh.

From somewhere in the crowd came a startled cry: “Dead people!”

At those words, everyone surged backward.

Shi Ting said, “We have not destroyed the Mountain Demon shrine. That shrine still stands right where it was on the hilltop. We only dug open the earth in front of it and retrieved the bodies of murder victims buried beneath.”

At the words “murder victims,” the villagers looked at one another in bewilderment.

“Murder victims? Who died?”

“Did someone else in the village die?”

“We just had Zhu San, and now there are more — two more?”

Facing the crowd’s questions, Shi Ting said, “These two are not from your village, but all of you know who they are.”

He turned to the village chief, whose eyes were shifting uneasily: “Village Chief, why don’t you tell everyone — who are these two charred bodies?”

With eyes watching him from all sides, the village chief had no choice but to steel himself and speak. “This is… Qiao Sheng and Qiao Zhong. The two brothers.”

A wave of gasps rippled through the crowd.

The village chief looked puzzled. “After the Qiao brothers died, I had men bury them in the unclaimed grave field. How… how did they end up at the Mountain Demon shrine?”

“Why the Qiao brothers’ bodies were moved — from the unclaimed graves to the Mountain Demon shrine — is one of the mysteries we still need to unravel.” Shi Ting addressed the assembled villagers. “I can tell you this with certainty: the deaths of the Qiao brothers were not an accident. The suicides of Zhu San, Da Zhu, and Old Li were not accidents either. And none of what happened to them has anything to do with the Mountain Demon shrine. The one responsible is not a demon — it’s a person.”

“Zhu San was murdered?”

“How can that be — didn’t people see him take his own life with their own eyes?”

“Does that mean Da Zhu and Old Li were killed too?”

The murmuring in the crowd grew louder. The village chief stepped forward in great agitation: “Officer, are you certain my son was murdered?”

His son had been dead for three years. In those three years, nightmares had frequently jolted him awake. Da Zhu’s mother had been wounded by the blade at the time — an injury that left her permanently disabled — but the physical pain was nothing to a mother’s grief over losing her child.

Da Zhu’s mother had withered with sorrow and her health had declined steadily with each passing day.

“I am certain.” Shi Ting’s word carried more weight than any written document. “As long as everyone cooperates, I will find the killer.”

“Then we will.” The village chief was the first to commit. “If my son was truly murdered, I ask the officer to see justice done for him.”

Hearing the village chief speak this way, the others all nodded and indicated they would give their full support to Shi Ting’s investigation.

With the villagers settled, the problem of the two corpses remained — no one was willing to take them in. Shi Ting had Bai Jin carry them to the courtyard where the Qiao brothers had been killed.

Once the crowd dispersed, Shi Ting kept the village chief behind and asked him to examine the backpack and suitcase that had been buried with the bodies.

The village chief looked at the case with confusion. “At the time I only had people bury the Qiao brothers’ bodies — I never looked at any backpack or case. But I’m certain these belonged to the Qiao brothers. Qiao Sheng even mentioned once that the case was imported, quite expensive.”

“Who was in charge of the burial?”

“My son Da Zhu and Zhu San.”

“When the Qiao brothers came to Wuyin Village, did they bring a vehicle?”

“They did have a vehicle. But because of the fog, the car was parked on an open patch of ground outside the village.”

“What happened to that vehicle?”

The village chief shook his head. “Strange as it sounds, after the Qiao brothers died, I sent someone to look for the car, and it was simply nowhere to be found.”

“Are you certain the Qiao brothers didn’t bring anyone else with them?”

“No, it was just the two of them. No one else in the car.” The village chief said with certainty. “Qiao Zhong was sickly, but he had a warm personality and got on well with the village children his age. He often let the kids play in the car. Sometimes he’d even sleep in it.”

“Is it possible someone in the village drove the car away?”

“That’s impossible. No one in the village knows how to drive. And the keys were with the Qiao brothers — without the key, the car couldn’t be moved.”

“Didn’t Zhu San know how to drive? Didn’t he serve in the military?”

The village chief shook his head. “He was infantry. Didn’t drive. He and my son were close — he told Da Zhu everything.”

“Were you aware that Zhu San had a woman in the county seat?”

The village chief’s face flushed, and he didn’t deny it. “Zhu San had a weakness for women. He was especially generous with them — spent most of what he earned hunting on those women.”

“Three years ago, did your son Da Zhu suddenly come into a great deal of money?”

The village chief’s eyes flickered evasively several times. He wanted to deny it but found he couldn’t, and eventually nodded. “He had a gambling problem — went to the county seat every few days to gamble. His mother and I hid everything of value in the house so he’d have no money to play with and would settle down for a stretch. Three years ago, around this same time of year, he suddenly told his mother he was going to the county seat to play one round. His mother wouldn’t give him money and he said he had his own. When he came back from the county seat, he brought me a good bottle of liquor and bought his mother a pair of gold earrings. Said he’d won it gambling. From that point on, he went to the county seat almost every day — sometimes winning, sometimes losing, though more losing than winning.”

“Didn’t you ask where the money came from?”

“I asked. He said he and Zhu San had done some business deal together in the county seat. I asked what kind of deal, and he wouldn’t say.” The village chief paused as though something had just dawned on him, and stared with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Officer — are you saying that what happened to the Qiao brothers had something to do with my son?”

After the village chief left, the group gathered around the two charred bodies.

“It looks as though Zhu San, Da Zhu, and Old Li are all strongly implicated, and we can’t rule out the general store owner, Old Zhang either.” Shi Ting said. “There’s also the matter of the missing car. If the villagers didn’t take it, where did it go? And who is hiding in the shadows, avenging the Qiao brothers — and where did the ether used to kill Zhu San and the others come from?”

“This person is likely living right in the village.” Yan Qing told everyone what had happened at the foot of the mountain. “At the time, the person used a skinned rabbit’s head to frighten us — probably hoping to drive us away. When that didn’t work, they stirred up the villagers to come confront us, misled them into thinking we had desecrated the Mountain Demon shrine and would bring disaster down on Wuyin Village. Everything they did was aimed at stopping us from solving the case.”

Bai Jin pinched his chin. “That means the killer has been hiding in the village all along, moving freely among the villagers, watching our every move — where we’re staying, who we’re talking to — all of it.”

If the killer was right there in the village, that was a deeply unsettling thought.

Zheng Yun said, “There’s still one thing I can’t work out — how exactly did the fire get started in Qiao Sheng’s room? He couldn’t have set it himself, and the killer couldn’t have lit it right in front of him.”

Shi Ting said, “The killer didn’t need to enter Qiao Sheng’s room. They could have set the fire remotely.”

“Remotely?”

“The fire basin in Qiao Sheng’s room, as well as the surface beneath it, carried the smell of petrol. All it would take is a single spark. Yan Qing and I found a slingshot in Zhu San’s house. For a hunter like Zhu San, who made his living hunting game, firing an incendiary pellet through a window from outside would have been no challenge at all.”

“That makes sense.” The others all agreed with the reasoning.

Shi Ting said, “Zheng Yun and Bai Jin, continue canvassing the village. Focus on people who have returned from outside in the last three years — those are the ones who would most likely have the skills to drive a vehicle and access to purchase ether.”

Zheng Yun and Bai Jin received their orders and immediately headed out.

“Right now we’re in the open and the killer is in the shadows. It seems we’ll need to move faster to find them.” E’Yuan brought over the forensic instruments. “Perhaps these two bodies can tell us who the killer is.”

Yan Qing had already put on her gloves. Murong pushed her to the long table where the bodies lay.

The charred remains gave off a harsh smell of burned flesh mingled with the odor of decomposed tissue — deeply unpleasant.

The two bodies were pressed against each other, their limbs locked into a peculiar hunched posture.

E’Yuan said, “Master, the bodies are in the boxer’s stance — does that mean they were burned alive?”

In high-temperature fires, a body becomes fully carbonized. The skeletal muscles, contracting under intense heat, cause the limbs to draw inward — with the flexor muscles overpowering the extensors, the joints curl into a posture resembling a boxer’s defensive stance. This phenomenon is known in forensics as the “pugilistic attitude.”

Yan Qing shook her head. “The pugilistic attitude alone cannot determine whether a victim was burned alive or whether the body was set on fire after death. Either way, the body will display this posture.”

E’Yuan absorbed this with great interest. Shi Ting meanwhile gave Yan Qing a longer look than usual. He had grown somewhat accustomed to her frequently startling him, yet he still found it difficult to explain how a girl not yet twenty could hold forth with such authority in front of a highly educated examiner like a seasoned professional.

The surfaces of both bodies had carbonized completely, like blackened charcoal — the outer layer thick and hard. A scalpel met considerable resistance against such remains, because the outer surface was like cracked, dried earth.

Burned bodies shrink, and what appears before the eye is noticeably smaller than the person in life. Comparing the two, one body was clearly larger — that was Qiao Sheng, the elder brother — and one smaller, that was Qiao Zhong.

They decided to begin their examination with Qiao Sheng’s body, but first the two bodies — fused together — would need to be separated.

At the moment the fire broke out, the two men had likely been locked in a tight embrace. Later, as the muscles contracted, they had settled into their current position, though a portion still adhered together and could not simply be pulled apart.

As they worked to separate the two bodies, Yan Qing used tweezers to extract a small fragment of fabric. Because of its position at the point where the two bodies had been fused, this piece of cloth had somehow survived when everything else had burned away.

Yan Qing placed the precious fragment into an evidence bag and handed it to Shi Ting. In the past she would have sent it through a physical evidence department for analysis. Here, with limited resources, Shi Ting served as the human equivalent of an analysis and examination unit — possessing not only a memory beyond ordinary reach, but also a sharp, discerning eye.

Shi Ting lifted the piece of fabric and examined it closely, then quickly delivered his conclusion. “A diagonal-weave tweed — an imported fabric. Sold at foreign clothing shops in Shun Cheng. Based on the color and pattern, this is from a men’s suit jacket. Not cheap.”

“Are you certain you’re not a walking encyclopedia?” Yan Qing said sincerely. “I’m starting to think you’re more like a computing machine.”

“A computing machine?” Shi Ting frowned. “What’s a computing machine?”

Yan Qing smiled. “Nothing. Just saying you’re impressive.”

She said odd, inexplicable things quite often, and Shi Ting had learned to take it in stride.

“I’ll go examine the deceased’s backpack and suitcase.” Shi Ting reasoned through it: the village chief had sent men to bury the Qiao brothers’ bodies in the unclaimed grave field, and the ones who carried out the burial were Da Zhu and Zhu San. The killer, in order to dispose of the incriminating evidence, had secretly buried the backpack and case along with the bodies. Later, when someone moved the victims’ remains to the Mountain Demon shrine, they naturally brought the bag and case along with them.