The moment Trist pushed open the door, he smelled blood.
As a police detective, he often dealt with major crime scenes. Sewers, slop buckets, public restrooms no one cleaned—he had investigated them all and seen every kind of horror.
The most outrageous case had been a drowning in a public restroom on the outskirts of Jiangcheng.
A drunk had been drinking nearby. When he needed to relieve himself, he looked for somewhere to go and happened to spot a restroom, so he walked inside.
The restroom was only occasionally used by passersby and was almost never cleaned. Years of accumulated stench sobered the drunk up instantly. After vomiting for a while, he relieved himself and prepared to leave, only to discover that an eye was staring at him from within the pile of feces.
The drunk thought he had really encountered a ghost, so he crawled and stumbled his way out. Later, he told a friend about it, and the two of them decided to call the police.
Unexpectedly, they really did dig a person out of the cesspit. The man had been wearing a raincoat, and it did not look as though he had accidentally fallen in. Trist immediately determined that it might be a criminal case.
Fortunately, the body had not been dead for too long, so forensic examination was still possible. The results showed no obvious external injuries. The cause of death was suffocation.
After searching the foul-smelling scene again and finding a camera along with some equipment, Trist finally reconstructed what had happened.
The victim had put on a raincoat and brought recording equipment because of some unspeakable, unusual fetish. He had hidden in the restroom to spy on people, but he had not expected it to be so unbearably foul. Years of buildup had caused