Book Synopsis
Book Tags
Donation Rankings
Comment
0 Comments
You May Also Like
墨書 Inktalez
Old Tie suddenly stretched its neck and bit Jiang Tianxing's pant leg, dark red blood oozing from the corner of its mouth.
Yan Lan smiled and patted his shoulder. "Not bad, you really are harmless."
Jiang Tianxing was puzzled. "What happened to it?"
Without explanation, Yan Lan pulled Jiang Tianxing along, following Old Tie to the iron door of the Cellar in the overgrown outskirts.
Yan Lan raised her phone to illuminate the area. "Can I write in the report that Jiang Tianxing crawled three streets with Land Turtle?"
Jiang Tianxing remained silent, staring at the door covered in scratch marks, the freshest one still dusted with diatomaceous earth.
As the key turned in the lock, a foul odor mixed with cold air rushed out. The flashlight illuminated layers of crayon drawings on the wall, where little figures in red dresses held hands in a circle.
Yan Lan's breath suddenly caught in her throat; above those innocent lines, adult handwriting was starkly written in charcoal: "They deserve to die."
Old Tie suddenly went wild, crashing into the corner, its shell scraping against the cement with a piercing sound.
Between the bricks lay half a charred diary; in the cover photo, a woman in a white coat smiled, her name tag clearly visible: "Ci'an Orphanage Medical Room."
The musty smell of the Cellar mixed with aged lime powder, making it itch at the back of their throats.
Yan Lan swept her ultraviolet light across the wall; those childish crayon drawings revealed countless pinholes under the cold light, made by children repeatedly poking with sharpened pencils.
"Seven Corpses." She kicked open a broken wooden box in the corner, revealing scattered bones of various sizes at the bottom.
The smallest one curled up tightly, a half-broken plastic hairpin stuck between its ribs; the pink bow had faded to a gray resembling corpse spots.
Jiang Tianxing crouched down to measure the femur length, his sleeve brushing against the skull of the third skeleton.
The sensation felt wrong; his fingertip touched radial cracks. "Blunt force trauma; the depth of the occipital bone's indentation exceeds two centimeters."
Before he finished speaking, Yan Lan's scalpel had already pried open fabric remnants stuck between the bones, revealing dark red school uniform material where "Ci An" was blurred by blood stains.
"I didn't expect you to know about skeletal identification," she said, her knife tip suddenly turning toward my left shoulder. "Why don't you explain why this burn scar matches exactly with descriptions from survivors of the 2000 fire?"
Jiang Tianxing raised his hand to signal. "Something's happening!" His eyes narrowed as he stared at the ceiling of the Cellar; suddenly, there was a sound of falling gravel.
Yan Lan rushed to the surface ahead of him; at that moment, an eerie orange-red hue filled the sky towards the direction of the funeral home.
The floor-to-ceiling window of the Director's office exploded as a fireman leaped from the fourth floor, his charred body crashing onto a police car roof and still twitching.
"Only one left..." The Director's carbonized throat squeezed out this sentence as his clenched right fist burst open in high temperatures, revealing a silver lighter embedded among splintered finger bones, engraved with the initials "S.Y."
Yan Lan picked up the lighter with a branch and turned it in the firelight. "This is Jiang De's personal item. He used this model at the donation ceremony for the Children's Welfare Institute last week."
As Jiang Tianxing approached, Yan Lan suddenly tugged at his collar, teasingly tracing the burn scar on his neck. "Thirty-eight children were burned to a crisp back then, yet you alone managed to escape with such a uniquely shaped burn?"
Old Tie let out a wheezing sound at their feet, its shell cracking with fine lines that had appeared unnoticed.
Jiang Tianxing pried open its tightly clenched jaw, and half a baby tooth mixed with Hei Xue fell into his palm. The inner side of the tooth crown was engraved with the number "07," matching the missing teeth from the bones of the Seven Corpses in the Cellar.
Amidst the distant roar of fire engines, Yan Lan's motion of placing the bones into an evidence bag suddenly halted. She raised a tibia to the moonlight; those seemingly naturally weathered indentations connected to form clear traces of a name that had been repeatedly engraved.
As Jiang De's condolence convoy rolled over the Ashes in front of the funeral home, Jiang Tianxing squatted outside the caution tape, feeding Old Tie some vegetable leaves. The golden threads in his suit cuffs shimmered painfully in the sunlight, but Yan Lan's tweezers were sharper than the sun. She pinched out a grain of dark red soil from Jiang De's hem and held it under her portable microscope. "This is a unique mixture of diatomaceous earth and bone powder from the Cellar. Has Mr. Jiang been to a grave recently?"
Comment 0 Comment Count