The runners saw so many corpses and quickly reported the matter to Prince Zheng's Mansion. Not long after, Marquis Zheng, Zheng Rui, led the penal officers, clerks, and coroners to rush over to Rouge Alley.
After Sanbao the Eunuch passed away due to illness, his adopted son inherited the title of marquis, with Yudu as his fief—hereditary and replacing generation after generation.
Zheng Rui was the marquis of this generation, an extremely steady person whose cultivation realm was unfathomable.
Yet, experienced as Marquis Zheng was, upon arriving at the crime scene, he could not help but gasp.
Corpses.
Corpses were everywhere.
Two courtyards, door to door. In one courtyard, three corpses were found, all of them women, and their states of death were exceptionally miserable. One woman had been killed with her laryngeal bone, blood vessels, and cervical vertebrae shattered; one had her brain pierced through by a writing brush; and the third woman had her neck crushed, her five viscera completely pulverized, and her back rotted away to nothing.
Yet Zhuge the Clerk said there were still two more women—one in the well, blown to smithry, and another reduced to nothing more than a pool of blood.
Marquis Zheng and the chief penal officer carefully examined the scene, finding only the bloodstains in the well. As for that puddle of blood on the ground, it was impossible to tell it was human, and they had no idea how Zhuge the Clerk had managed to see it.
"The criminal used a very strange spell to pull the victims into an infinitely cramped space and churned them to pieces."
Zhuge the Clerk pinched a clump of blood, rubbing it hard. Once the blood dried, he inspected the bone splinters inside, reaffirming his judgment. "This plasma is that victim."
They came to