According to Li Tie Niu, on the day Old Li met his end, Li Tie Niu had just come home from the mountain while Old Li’s wife was inside preparing a meal.
She had gotten about halfway through the cooking when she heard strange sounds from outside. She looked through the window and saw Old Li standing in the courtyard, kitchen cleaver raised, the blade driving toward his own neck.
Old Li had once worked at a stone quarry and was known for his great strength. Every stroke of the cleaver had been delivered with tremendous force.
By the time Old Li’s wife recovered from her shock and tried to intervene, Old Li had already severed his own neck.
At just that moment, Li Tie Niu arrived home from outside. As he pushed open the door, a blood-drenched head rolled to his feet. He sat down hard on the ground with a cry, Old Li’s wide-open eyes staring straight up at him.
From that day on, Li Tie Niu’s mind had never been entirely steady. One day while gathering herbs on the mountain, he lost his footing and fell into a ravine, shattering both legs. He had been confined to bed ever since.
Shi Ting asked, “When Old Li attacked himself with the cleaver, was he roasting something in the courtyard at the time?”
“How did you know?” Li Tie Niu nodded vigorously. “Father was roasting a pheasant that afternoon — he was planning to make it for dinner.”
“Where had the pheasant come from?”
“Probably from Uncle Zhu San. Uncle Zhu San often went hunting in the mountains, and when he had game he couldn’t sell, he’d leave it hung on someone’s door without a word — he was always giving wild game to people in the village.”
“How was Old Li’s relationship with Zhu San?”
“They got along well. They often played mahjong together.”
“Mahjong — besides Old Li and Zhu San, who else was in that group?”
Li Tie Niu thought for a moment. “There was also the village chief’s son, Da Zhu, and Old Zhang from the general store.”
Da Zhu, Zhu San, Old Li, Old Zhang — four regular mahjong partners. Three of them were now dead.
Could it truly be coincidence?
Coming out of Li Tie Niu’s room, Shi Ting’s attention was caught by the iron brazier in the courtyard.
This sort of brazier was found in nearly every home in the village. Calling it a stove was almost too generous — it was closer to a fire basin. Its uses were many: set a pot over it and you had a cooking fire; set a wire grill over it and you had a roasting surface.
Not far from the fire basin, under the eaves, was a pile of charcoal — the primary fuel used in the basin.
At the sight of those charcoal blocks, something sparked in Shi Ting’s mind. He turned and pushed Yan Qing’s wheelchair toward the way out.
As they walked, Yan Qing said, “I am more and more certain this is not an ordinary series of suicides. Too many coincidences together cease to be coincidences.”
Shi Ting nodded. “Da Zhu, Old Li, and Zhu San all did the same thing immediately before they attacked themselves — they were roasting wild game. Zhu San hunted his own game, but whether Da Zhu and Old Li received their game directly from Zhu San is something no one can confirm. Perhaps the game was delivered by the killer on purpose.”
“But the game contained no poison. We already tested it.” Yan Qing frowned. “Could it be a matter of insufficient dosage? No — Zhu San had only eaten a small piece of the rabbit meat.”
“It isn’t the food. It’s the charcoal.”
As he spoke, Shi Ting had already brought Yan Qing back to Zhu San’s home, not far away. The crime scene tape stretched in bright warning across the entrance, and two villagers sat outside smoking long pipes and chatting.
Zhu San had arrived in Foggy Hollow Village alone, without family or ties. Now that he was dead, there was no one to arrange his burial. The tiger skin hanging above his gate swayed in the wind, carrying with it a desolate air.
Stepping back into the scene, the air still held the sharp smell of blood. The large pool of blood from the day before had dried, and a dense mass of flies had gathered over it.
Zhu San’s body had been sutured — no longer separated head from torso — and now lay on its back across the two long benches, alone in the room.
The village chief had promised Shi Ting to handle the burial once the case was closed. The local custom was to bury the dead on the mountain above the village, where a large plot served as the cemetery, neighboring the farmland that the villagers worked.
Shi Ting moved to the brazier, pulled on his gloves, and carefully extracted several pieces of charred coal from the ash, placing them into an evidence bag.
“You suspect the killer introduced poison into the brazier?”
Shi Ting nodded. “Since the food was not poisoned, the brazier must be the vessel that held the poison. The killer likely introduced the substance into the charcoal burning in the fire basin. As the temperature rose, the toxic gas dispersed into the air. The victims were seated close to the brazier roasting their food, and continuously inhaled the toxic fumes — which drove them to madness.”
He rose and walked to the wall. The scholar tree outside the wall stretched a leafy branch over the top, and one small section of that branch had been snapped near its tip — the broken piece had already been taken by Bai Jin as evidence.
“Yesterday, Bai Jin asked me how this branch was broken. This section of branch is near the very end of the limb reaching over the wall — it could not have broken under a person’s climbing weight, because that portion of the branch cannot bear the load of a human body.”
Yan Qing was very curious. “So how was it broken? A bird landing on it? Though I’m not sure it would even be relevant to Zhu San’s death.”
“No, it is relevant.” Shi Ting retrieved something from inside Zhu San’s room. “Let’s reconstruct the scene.”
Yan Qing stayed in the courtyard while Shi Ting went out through the gate.
She heard him move to the far side of the courtyard wall and position himself beneath the scholar tree. Though the tree was tall, it was easy enough to climb, and Shi Ting had already made his way up into it.
Then Yan Qing heard a faint sound — a very quiet whisper that parted the air — and the branch reaching into the courtyard shifted. Before her eyes, a section of it snapped at the middle. Because the bark held the pieces together, the branch did not fall entirely but hung there, drooping.
Almost immediately came another sound, and something fell into the brazier.
Before Yan Qing had even bent down to look, Shi Ting was already standing behind her.
“I understand now,” Yan Qing said, realization dawning. “A slingshot.”
“Exactly — a slingshot.” Shi Ting turned the object over in his hand: a well-crafted slingshot, clearly not a child’s toy. This was Zhu San’s own, made for hunting wild pheasants and rabbits, and it carried real force.
What Shi Ting had just fired was nothing more than a small pebble, and it had still been enough to snap the branch.
“The day of the incident, the fog was thick and visibility was extremely low. Even if the killer had been perched on the outside of the wall in that scholar tree, no one would have been able to see them.” Shi Ting held the slingshot and put himself in the killer’s position in his mind. “He must have drawn back the slingshot while Zhu San was still skinning the rabbit. Only the first shot went wide, breaking off a branch from the scholar tree. He immediately fired a second shot, and this time it landed squarely in the burning brazier. Zhu San may have heard the faint sound, but he paid no attention to it — perhaps thinking it was some mischievous child nearby. The toxic substance in the brazier vaporized in the heat, and Zhu San, sitting right next to it while roasting his rabbit, inhaled all of it — and ultimately was driven to hack himself to death.”
Yan Qing agreed fully with Shi Ting’s analysis. “I believe it was not a poison but a hallucinogen. A large dose inhaled can cause severe mental disorientation, inducing frenzied, irrational behavior. Da Zhu, Old Li, and Zhu San all happened to have a kitchen cleaver close at hand — tools for butchering game — and that is why all three chose the same method to end their own lives.”
“I have also heard of this class of chemical compounds. They mostly circulate on the underground black markets in Shun Cheng.”
Yan Qing said with regret, “Unfortunately the conditions here are far too limited. It will be difficult to extract and identify the substance from this charcoal. Otherwise we could trace the killer through the drug’s source.”
“It is both very near and very far.” An enigmatic expression settled over Shi Ting’s face.
Yan Qing looked at him, puzzled.
Shi Ting used the slingshot to point at the broken length of branch. Then he asked a question that seemed, on the surface, to have nothing to do with the case: “Was my aim accurate?”
Yan Qing noticed that the pebble Shi Ting had fired wide had struck at exactly the spot where Bai Jin had discovered the broken branch. Understanding flashed through her instantly, and her eyes lit up. “I see it now.”
When the killer fired his first shot — the hallucinogen pellet — he had missed. Immediately after, he fired the second shot, which found its mark.
That first pellet, fired wide, would still be somewhere in this courtyard.
“I calculated the wind speed at the time, the slingshot’s release velocity and distance, and the resistance produced when the pellet struck the branch,” Shi Ting said. “The pellet should have come down in this area.”
He moved to the base of the wall near the east side room. The area was piled with miscellaneous junk — bricks, broken wooden crates, farming tools, all of it covered in dust and cobwebs, clearly untouched for a year or two at minimum.
Shi Ting searched carefully through the clutter. At last he found a small pellet.
The pellet was wrapped in a layer of paper. To add weight, the paper contained a layer of sand, and inside the sand was a second, smaller paper packet. Opening that revealed a small amount of white powder.
Shi Ting brought the powder to Yan Qing. She raised it to her nose and smelled it first, then gently disturbed the contents with a slender twig.
“Indoleamine-class compound — lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD. A potent hallucinogen.” Yan Qing listed the full name, of which Shi Ting understood only the final three-letter abbreviation.
“Do you recall Bai Jin’s abnormal reaction yesterday?” Yan Qing continued. “Bai Jin was the first person to reach the scene. When he entered the courtyard, the fumes from the brazier had not yet fully dissipated — some of them had mixed with the fog. Bai Jin must have inhaled a trace of the substance, which caused his sudden personality change. But because the amount he inhaled was so small, he recovered quickly on his own. Whereas Zhu San — sitting directly beside the brazier as a large dose of this potent compound vaporized continuously — inhaled it all and ultimately was driven to his death.”
The more Shi Ting thought about it, the more he felt Bai Jin’s extreme reaction the previous day made sense. He had not imagined it was the residual fumes from a hallucinogen.
“From what I know, this substance is not only difficult to obtain but extremely expensive. Given the average income in a village like this, there would be no one here with the means to purchase even a small packet of this powder. Moreover, Foggy Hollow Village is so remote it is effectively cut off from the outside world. The people here have likely never even heard the name of this substance.” Shi Ting placed the small packet carefully into an evidence bag.
“The village chief mentioned that many young people from the village go out to work. Is it possible that one of them brought this back from outside?”
“It’s possible. That means we need to focus our investigation on residents who have left and returned, as well as the social connections of Da Zhu, Old Li, and Zhu San.” He raised a pair of bright, sharp eyes. “Three of the four mahjong partners are dead. Shouldn’t we go and pay a visit to the fourth?”