Chapter 357: The Vanishing Corpse, Grave Robber

Li Jianye frowned.

‘Asking a madman questions won’t get you any answers.’

He turned to look at Xu Huo.

“What’s the deal with the body?”

“Judging by Shen Fei’s state… they really did bury the body here.”

Xu Huo jumped into the empty grave. He squatted down and, with a gloved hand, touched the dried ooze.

Judging from the residue, it was a product of the body’s decomposition.

In other words, Zhang Jiayu was definitely dead. His body had decomposed; there was no way he could have climbed out of the grave alive.

‘So where did the body go?’

‘It couldn’t really be a ghost… could it?’

‘From the standpoint of basic forensic science, ghosts are impossible.’

‘So where did the body go?’

‘If it didn’t get out on its own, then someone else must have dug it up… Does that mean there’s a sixth person involved in this case?’

‘Who would this sixth person be? What’s their relationship to Zhang Jiayu? His wife who died?’

‘No, his wife is dead too. Zhang Jiayu had no family, no friends, no connections. There’s no one who would want to avenge him.’

‘Besides, my previous deduction—that the “killer” was a hallucination—was correct.’

‘If that’s the case, then a sixth person can’t just appear and contradict all my prior logic.’

‘So…’

“Could it have been a coincidence?”

Li Jianye asked with a frown.

“It’s highly likely.”

Xu Huo nodded.

He mulled it over for a moment, then, as a thought struck him, he looked at the surrounding burial mounds.

Wang Wei’s ancestors were buried in those mounds.

‘If this is what I think it is, then that means…’

‘…the bodies in these graves have probably vanished too.’

“Let’s dig up these other graves and see.”

Xu Huo said.

Li Jianye hesitated slightly.

Back in ’04, if you disturbed a grave in the countryside and didn’t handle it properly, even the police could get surrounded by villagers with no hope of escape.

But these were Wang Wei’s family graves.

He couldn’t even bring himself to think about the methods that man had used to kill.

Besides, Wang Wei had no other relatives. In other words, with him gone, his family line had ended.

So…

“Dig. Let’s start with one.”

Li Jianye grit his teeth.

He grabbed a shovel and began to dig, huffing and puffing with effort.

Meanwhile, Xu Huo grabbed a flashlight and, under the cover of darkness, squatted in Zhang Jiayu’s empty grave to examine the soil.

The soil showed signs of recent excavation. From the marks, it couldn’t have been long ago.

But the most recent residue left inside dated back several years.

‘So…’

‘This grave has been dug up many times, by many different people…’

Xu Huo was lost in thought.

‘Based on the residue, the body disappeared several years ago. It could have been five years ago, or even six years ago, not long after it was first buried.’

‘At the same time, the other burial mounds also show faint, minor signs of having been disturbed about six years ago.’

‘This means whatever happened to Zhang Jiayu’s body happened six years ago.’

‘So, for this most recent disturbance, besides the police, who else would have come here?’

For the moment, Xu Huo wasn’t considering *why* the body had disappeared.

Instead, he was thinking about who might have dug up the grave before the police arrived.

‘The surrounding mounds were also disturbed… it wasn’t a targeted search…’

In a flash, Xu Huo thought of someone.

He narrowed his eyes and looked over at Sun Jian.

“Police Chief Sun, take some men and check the nearby rivers and temples. See if you can find someone.”

He remembered that of the original four perpetrators including Wang Wei, two were dead, one was Shen Fei, and the last one was missing…

‘He went missing out of fear of Zhang Jiayu, so it’s highly likely he would return to the place where Zhang Jiayu was buried!’

‘If so, he would have seen “Zhang Jiayu,” come to the grave, dug it up, and discovered the body was gone…’

Xu Huo didn’t dare to imagine what a precarious mental state that person must be in now.

“Alright.”

Sun Jian nodded and quickly left with his men.

A while later.

As Li Jianye pried open a rotten coffin.

A startling discovery made everyone present fall silent.

The burial goods inside the coffin…

…were gone.

…

…

‘Who would be interested in the buried body of a murder victim?’

‘The police, the victim’s associates, the killer.’

‘Generally, that’s the list.’

‘But there’s also… grave robbers.’

‘Grave robbers don’t just target grand tombs. Only the masters of the trade dare to raid those ancient burial pits.’

‘Common, riff-raff grave robbers only target ordinary graves.’

‘They dig up people’s graves in the middle of the night and take whatever’s inside an old tomb.’

‘And a corpse… that’s a valuable commodity, too.’

「January 9th, morning.」

The police contacted Sun Jian of the “Flesh Processing Plant”—the biggest body broker in Jiangsan City, an arrested suspect who had monopolized ninety-nine percent of the city’s black market for corpses.

The answer they received was…

‘I remember it. A corpse reeking of resentment. Looked like a Murder, but once you stripped off the rotten bits, it was no different from any other skeleton.’

‘A couple of young punks brought it in.’

‘Heh, at first, those two didn’t dare dig up anyone else’s graves. They started by digging up their own relatives, bringing me the bones and burial goods of their own ancestors…’

So that was the answer to the missing body.

After his death, Zhang Jiayu’s body had been dug up.

Then, his corpse was sold.

The other old burial mounds had been excavated as well.

“As it stands, this case doesn’t really have a killer. Or rather, the killers were the victims themselves. They brought about their own deaths.”

“The ‘killer’ only exists in the psychological realm.”

“But…”

「January 9th, 10:30 AM.」

「Municipal Police Bureau, office.」

Xu Huo looked at the case file, his brow furrowed. He then looked over at Li Jianye and Zhang Liang.

“Shen Fei still hasn’t gone into that bedroom…”

“No matter how much we push or try to force him, he breaks down before he can enter that bedroom.”

“And based on the crime scene and our reconstruction, that bedroom is the origin point for everything—for the case six years ago and for the one now.”

The moment Wang Wei saw Zhang Jiayu, he knew he was seeing a ghost.

Because he knew what he had done to Zhang Jiayu.

And everything they did…

…is hidden in that bedroom.

Shen Fei had a complete mental breakdown. He’s lost his mind and would rather die than remember.

The source of absolutely everything, it could be said, is hidden inside that small bedroom.

“They…”

Xu Huo’s gaze was sharp as it swept over the others in the room.

“What exactly did they do to Zhang Jiayu?”

The source of it all…

…is right behind that door.

Behind a door, one with the ‘double happiness’ character pasted on it!