Li Si sat quietly in the pitch-black enormous stone chamber. The room was permeated with an icy aura of death. To this scent of the dead, Li Si was actually not unfamiliar. His old friend Lao Sitou was a coroner who specialized in examining corpses. For Li Si, not only did he not feel disgusted by this smell, but he actually felt a few degrees of familiarity with it.
Li Si smiled. The night before coming to Ancheng this time, he had commandeered Lao Sitou’s corpse-storage room as his sleeping quarters, leaving him to freeze outside all night. Li Si still remembered at this moment that when Lao Sitou saw him off as he departed, he had said viciously: “Good riddance, good riddance! Go to where the living pile up, and stop coming to my den of the dead to bother me.”
After thinking this over, Li Si lifted his head and looked ahead. In the dark corpse-storage room, gusts of eerie wind blew continuously. It seemed that even after leaving Suishui City, even after leaving that old Lao Sitou, he still could not escape this den of the dead!
Li Si stretched out his hand and lightly placed it on the shoulder of an old constable in front of him. The old constable let out a strange cry and turned his head to look at Li Si with an ashen face. Li Si smiled and asked: “What’s the matter, Feng Cheng?”
Feng Cheng was an old constable of Ancheng. He had been a constable for a full ten years, but he had never entered this corpse-storage room. This time, if it were not for this Head Constable Li dispatched from above insisting on entering the corpse-storage room, and happening to encounter the constable of the corpse-storage room attending a funeral, he would never have walked into this forbidden place that living people avoided.
Feng Cheng immediately gave a bitter laugh and said: “Head Constable Li, this person’s identity has already been investigated clearly. He is the famous swordsman from Huainan, known in the jianghu as ‘Golden Swallow,’ Nan Jian. His cause of death is also clear—he drowned by suffocation after falling into the water. I just don’t know what else Head Constable Li still wants to investigate?”
Li Si patted Feng Cheng’s shoulder and said: “Constable Feng, to investigate things that only the dead know.”
Feng Cheng nodded, half-understanding.
Li Si turned to ask: “Among the things Nan Jian left behind, is there anything suspicious?”
Feng Cheng hesitated for a moment, then said: “If we’re really talking about suspicious things, there is indeed one thing I don’t understand.”
A pure white slip of paper, the size of a thumb, lay quietly in the center of Li Si’s palm. On the center of the paper slip were four words written vaguely—Mo Lian Old Friend.
“Mo Lian Old Friend. Could it be that Nan Jian came to Ancheng this time to meet a friend? Could his death be related to this old friend?” Li Si muttered to himself.
Feng Cheng beside him suddenly let out a muffled grunt, his eyes staring fixedly at Li Si’s side, his voice trembling as he said: “It moved… he moved!”
Li Si turned around and discovered that Nan Jian’s already stiffened body was suddenly trembling incessantly, like a huge white corpse worm. Li Si’s gaze was drawn in. On Nan Jian’s deathly pale skin, threads of mysterious purple lines appeared in his blood vessels, instantly converging near his heart. Following this, the purple lines deepened, becoming a patch of hazy purple qi, wandering around Nan Jian’s heart.
Li Si said with sudden realization: “So it’s like this!”
“What?” Feng Cheng said in panic. “Head Constable Li, this—could this be a corpse coming back to life?”
Li Si shook his head: “How could a corpse coming back to life be this terrifying! Do you know what that purple qi on Nan Jian’s chest is?”
Feng Cheng shook his head. Li Si slowly continued: “This is the enormous internal energy that Nan Jian condensed within his body when facing enemies while alive. But for some unknown reason, Nan Jian did not release this internal energy. What’s even more terrifying is that this internal energy completely collapsed. This means that when Nan Jian was dying, his heart meridians shattered, and his internal energy scattered throughout the qi channels of his body. And what can cause heart meridians to shatter are only two things. One is being shattered by a master’s internal energy, but this is impossible, because there are no traces whatsoever of Nan Jian fighting with anyone. And the other…”
“What’s the other?” Feng Cheng asked.
Li Si’s gaze tightened as he said: “Fear. Desperate fear, to the point where liver and gallbladder both split, and the heart shatters!”
Feng Cheng stared at Li Si dumbfounded, then looked at the gradually calming corpse, cold sweat flowing down.
But what kind of reason, what kind of situation, could make a jianghu swordsman like Nan Jian, who had licked blood from the edge of a blade his whole life, have his liver and gallbladder split apart and be literally scared to death? Li Si could not figure it out. He only felt a surge of cold air in the pitch-black space of the corpse-storage room and could not help but shiver.
“We can leave now.” Li Si dropped this sentence and walked out of the corpse-storage room. Only then did Feng Cheng regain his senses and quickly followed behind Li Si.
Feng Cheng led the constables of this city to search for clues about Mo Lian Old Friend in the Nan Jian case. And what about Li Si?
One table, one chair, one teapot, one cup, one dish of vegetables, and one large bowl of hot noodles. Li Si was eating noodles, already sweating profusely. After eating a large bowl of spicy beef noodles, Li Si let out a satisfied burp. A surge of warmth welled up from his heart, and only then did the cold sensation on his back dissipate considerably. Thinking about all the discoveries of today, Li Si felt his head grow large, so he simply continued to bury his head in drinking the beef noodle soup.
The beef noodle shop was not large. It was located at the entrance of a small alley behind the Ancheng county yamen, occupying a palm-sized space, and business was not bustling either. The owner of the beef noodle shop was an elderly man with completely white hair and beard. By the looks of it, he was sixty or seventy years old. The old man squinted his eyes, concentrating on cracking a small pile of peanuts on the counter in front of him. To say he was cracking peanuts, but actually no sound could be heard at all—presumably all of the old man’s teeth had already fallen out.
This beef noodle shop was introduced by Feng Cheng. At first, Li Si had not thought much of it, but after eating there once, he felt that this shop’s spicy noodles had a unique flavor that made one’s mouth water. Therefore, whenever Li Si was in a bad mood, he liked to come here to eat noodles. The more he ate, the more his worries would dissipate.
Li Si heavily set down the noodle bowl on the wooden table, feeling extremely comfortable inside. He counted the empty bowls on the table—there were a full four of them. Li Si patted his stomach and smiled.
“Boss, is there a convenient place?” Li Si asked the old man. The old man casually pointed to a small door behind him. Li Si pushed the door open and, unexpectedly, found an expansive view behind the door. There was a spacious courtyard, and on one side of the courtyard was a high wall—the high wall of the county yamen. From here, one could see the black wall edge on top of the high wall. In the entire county yamen, there was only one place constructed from black wall stones—the corpse-storage room.
Li Si turned his back to the black wall, facing a dead tree to relieve himself. In a brief moment, Li Si suddenly felt uncomfortable all over, especially his back, which felt wave after wave of cold. Li Si’s heart jumped in alarm, and he abruptly turned around.
A pair of icy eyes were quietly fixed on Li Si. Li Si only looked at these eyes once before his entire body went soft. He could not help but cry out: “You, Nan Jian?”
The owner of these eyes was Nan Jian! Only at this moment, Nan Jian’s face and body were covered everywhere with fresh blood. Li Si saw a dark black bloodstain on the high wall winding over from the other end. He steadied his mind and said coldly: “Nan Jian, you didn’t die?”
Nan Jian did not speak. He only stared at Li Si, emitting a low growl similar to that of a wild beast from his throat, with both hands and feet on the ground, his entire person crouching on the ground like a dog. Suddenly Nan Jian charged toward Li Si. Li Si, already prepared, flashed to the side. Who knew that Nan Jian’s body would bend in mid-air to an inconceivable angle, then dart into the beef noodle shop.
Li Si chased out, but Nan Jian had long since disappeared. Li Si hurriedly went to ask the old man. The old man unhurriedly raised his head, completely unaware of what had happened. Seeing that he could not find Nan Jian, Li Si prepared to return to the county yamen corpse-storage room.
The door of the corpse-storage room was kicked open by Li Si with one foot. The cold and eerie atmosphere rushed toward him. Both Li Si and Feng Cheng could not help but feel chilled in their hearts. Li Si cast his gaze into the corpse-storage room. Although he already knew there was little hope, he still searched for Nan Jian’s body.
Unexpectedly, Nan Jian’s body was still there, lying quietly on the corpse bed. Only Nan Jian’s human skin was missing!
Fresh blood dripped down. Li Si looked at the mass of bloody flesh and felt his stomach churning like the waters of the Black River outside the city, no longer able to be suppressed.
The truth was: the body was there, but the skin was gone!