Jiang Ying and San Gou, along with Uncle Ye's family, had all been fast asleep. They, too, were jolted awake in an instant.
Even though dawn was approaching, such a terrifying scream was enough to frighten anyone.
Uncle Ye's family were especially shaken. The long, bizarre night before had already left them as jumpy as startled birds. Hearing that scream in their sleep made them tremble all over.
Following the sound, Jiang Yue walked to the balcony and looked down.
It was already beginning to get light. Dawn had arrived.
With the first light of day, ghosts went into hiding.
At this hour, no matter how vicious a ghost might be, it shouldn't dare come out and cause trouble. At least, it made even less sense for one to show itself in a busy public place like a main road.
The person screaming downstairs was a middle-aged woman out walking her dog.
She got up early every day and took her dog around the neighborhood paths, making enough noise to show no concern for whether the other residents were still asleep.
At that moment, the woman was clearly terrified. Stamping her feet by the roadside, she screamed herself hoarse. "Someone's dead! Someone's dead! Somebody help!"
As she shouted, the Pekingese at her feet leaped about and barked incessantly.
The little dog seemed extremely agitated, barking nonstop at empty space as if some deadly danger were lurking in the air.
"Let's go take a look," Jiang Yue called.
Uncle Ye's family clearly didn't want to see what was going on. But with Jiang Yue heading downstairs, they felt uneasy staying home, so they had no choice but to follow him out.
"Huh? Second Brother, look. That handprint had clearly faded last night. How come it looks like it's back to normal?" San Gou stood by the security door, staring at it in surprise.
Jiang Yue looked closely. The handprint, which had been gradually fading, had indeed returned to how it looked before!
It was pitch-black, and radiated a suffocating terror.
He clearly remembered Officer Han saying the previous day that, once the matter had been taken care of, the handprint on Xiao Yi's shoulder and the one on the door had both started to fade. The change had been obvious.
So how had they returned to that dreadful, blue-black state overnight?
Had Director Luo really been so unreliable?
Jiang Yue suppressed his questions and hurried straight to the scene.
The Pekingese's barking gradually died down. Jiang Yue moved closer and saw a woman's corpse lying on its back in the bushes. She looked to be in her twenties, not yet thirty.
A car key had fallen nearby.
She was probably a resident who had returned home late in the night.
Jiang Yue quickly pulled Xiao Yi behind him. "Xiao Yi, you'd better not look."
He'd only glanced at the corpse, but the sight was already enough to make him uncomfortable.
A section of the woman's skull had been torn away. Her entire tongue seemed to have been yanked from her mouth, hanging outside. A distinct, blue-black strangulation mark encircled her neck, making the scene all the more eerie.
Most disturbing of all, there was a blue-black handprint on her bare shoulder!
That familiar, spine-chilling handprint!
Only a ghost could leave a mark like that!
It was the handprint of a vengeful spirit, one seething with resentment!
Uncle Ye's face had gone completely pale, as if all the blood had been drained from it.
Aunt Zhang immediately started gagging beside him.
Jiang Ying had a stronger stomach than most, but even she found it difficult to handle. She stepped back and pulled San Gou away.
San Gou was the calmest of them all. The corner of his mouth twitched as he muttered, "A vengeful ghost is here to claim a life!"
Jiang Ying saw more and more residents rushing over. Not wanting San Gou to get himself into trouble, she clapped a hand over his mouth. "Don't talk nonsense."
Jiang Yue was seething. Regardless of the hour, he dialed a number.
"Little Jiang, do you know what time it is?" Officer Han mumbled, rubbing his bleary eyes.
"Officer Han, did Director Luo really take care of that matter yesterday?"
Jiang Yue's voice was cold and stiff. It sounded like something terrible had happened, and Officer Han was instantly wide awake. "He told me it was taken care of. What's wrong?"
"What's wrong? There's another dead person!"
"What? Where? How did she die?"
"She's still in our neighborhood. She died the same way as the victim yesterday! Except there's an extra dark mark around her neck and a blue-black handprint on her shoulder."
"What does that mean?" A chill ran through Officer Han, and he couldn't help pulling his blanket tighter around himself.
"Someone copied the victim's manner of death. Yesterday's murder might have been human. This one was definitely the work of a ghost. That handprint on the victim was also on my neighbor!"
Jiang Yue wasn't blaming Officer Han. Director Luo had agreed to handle the matter, and Officer Han wasn't at fault.
"I'm coming over now." Officer Han hurriedly got dressed. He didn't even have time to wash up before rushing to the scene.
The situation there was more or less as Jiang Yue had described.
Officer Han hadn't been dispatched there as part of his official duties, so he couldn't do much investigating at the scene. He took a few photos and left the rest to the colleagues who arrived later.
"Little Jiang, are you sure a ghost did this?" Officer Han still wasn't certain.
"Why not go check the handprint on Xiao Yi, and the one on her family's security door?"
"That's not what I mean... I mean, could a murderer have done this on purpose to make it look supernatural?"
"Aren't your colleagues checking the surveillance footage?"
The neighborhood's surveillance footage was pulled up quickly. A little after three in the morning, the victim had driven home, parked her car, and walked along the path with her keys in hand. Everything looked normal.
Even when she passed the crime scene, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
The footage showed that she had passed the scene, but she never came back afterward.
From then on, there wasn't the slightest sign of anything unusual on the cameras.
It wasn't until the middle-aged woman walking her dog passed the scene that she discovered the victim's body.
It was bizarre—utterly bizarre.
The officer reviewing the footage replayed it over and over, but still couldn't find the slightest clue.
Officer Han's expression changed noticeably.
When he left the surveillance room, he found Jiang Yue waiting nearby.
"Well?"
"The cameras didn't catch anything unusual."
"If the cameras could capture a ghostly illusion, now that would be strange." Jiang Yue wasn't surprised in the slightest.
By then, no matter how hard it was for Officer Han to accept, he had no choice but to admit Jiang Yue's theory was right.
In truth, his difficulty accepting it came only from his long-held faith in scientific investigation and professional habit. Deep down, he had never doubted Jiang Yue.
"Little Jiang, you said last night to turn the corpse over. Did that really work?"
That was a difficult question to answer.
The suggestion had come from Spirit Intelligence. He'd spent thirty points to redeem it. If Spirit Intelligence would even cheat him out of that many points, wouldn't that be shameless?
Wasn't there supposed to be a basic level of trust between a person and the system?
No matter how unreliable Spirit Intelligence was, Jiang Yue didn't think it would deceive him about something this fundamental.
"Could Director Luo have made a mistake?"
"That doesn't seem likely! Knowing Director Luo, either he wouldn't do it at all, or he'd do it properly. How could he mess it up?"
"He told me himself that he'd turned the corpse over, locked the body-storage compartment, and put up a seal. He also sealed the entrance to the morgue. No one from the police had gone there, and no one was allowed to remove them!"
"Let's go check."
It was nearly full daylight now, and the danger had temporarily passed. Still, Jiang Yue told Uncle Ye to make sure they didn't stay alone and to remain where there were plenty of people.
The two of them drove to the morgue at Star City Second Hospital.
It looked as if the old gatekeeper had actually listened to the government and gone home to sleep.
As Jiang Yue and Officer Han approached, they saw that the morgue door was half-open. The seal had long since been torn off and thrown on the ground.
The chain securing the door had also been cut through by force and was still hanging off to one side.
They exchanged a look, both of them surprised.
They went inside and saw that all the body-storage compartments were intact, as if nobody had touched them.
But when they found the compartment holding the victim surnamed Su, they saw that the lock Director Luo had mentioned had already been broken.
Someone had clearly tampered with it!
Officer Han took photos as evidence all the way through.
Jiang Yue didn't hesitate. He stepped forward and pulled open the compartment.
The corpse was still there, lying cold and stiff.
Apart from the missing blue-black handprint, her other injuries were almost identical to those of the woman who had died that morning.
The key detail was—
Her face was up, and her back was down.
Someone really had tampered with the body.
All the evidence at the scene showed that Director Luo had definitely turned the corpse over, leaving it face down and back up. The details about the lock and seals matched too.
The problem was that someone seemed to have broken in afterward, torn off the seals, cut through the chain, forced open the lock, and turned the corpse back over!
With the corpse turned over, the resentment in its chest had been released once more.
The evil aura of the vengeful spirit had been allowed to continue!
That was why the handprint on Xiao Yi had returned, and the one on the door had reappeared too.
More importantly, the vengeful ghost had regained its ability to cause harm—and had finally succeeded!
Who had done this?
Who would do something like this in the dead of night?
Who had the ability to do it?
Who would dare do something so horrifying?
A thought came to Officer Han: Could that vengeful spirit have returned and turned the corpse over by itself?
Or had the corpse... turned itself over?
Before you continue