Qin Ran stepped forward.
He seemed not to see the entire row of morgue drawers before him, but... the drawers "saw" him approaching. After the slightest hesitation, they all shrank back again.
Clack!
With a rattle of mechanisms, the entire wall of morgue drawers parted to the left and right like a pair of inward-opening doors.
A huge hidden chamber appeared before Qin Ran.
A chair resembling an operating table stood in the center of the room. Blackened bloodstains covered the tiled floor around it, and severed limbs hung from hooks on chains suspended overhead.
Qin Ran swept his gaze over the long-rotted limbs.
They clearly were not the arms and legs missing from his assumed identity's wife, but remains from much earlier. The cutting technique was extremely crude: a single chop had left an arm or thigh still half attached to the torso, after which it had simply been torn off. As a result, half the wound was relatively clean, while the rest consisted of torn skin and muscle and jaggedly broken bone.
Torture?
The word naturally surfaced in Qin Ran's mind.
The torn wounds and snapped bones told Qin Ran that, had the person doing the cutting been serious, they could have removed the victims' arms and legs with ease.
But they had not done so.
Instead, they had chosen a more laborious method.
Qin Ran could think of no explanation other than deliberate torture.
Following the severed limbs with his gaze, Qin Ran looked at the reclining chair resembling an operating table. Several thick, extra-wide leather straps lay across it.
Without a doubt, all the cutting had taken place here.
But Qin Ran's attention was not on the chair or its leather straps. He was interested in something deeper.
Rip!
Qin Ran's fingertip slid across the chair's