Bo Yi walked into Room 404.
Ma Xiaochen lay facedown on the living room floor, his back to them. An unusually pungent, sour stench filled the entire room, overpowering even the smell of blood that should have been strongest-now Bo Yi knew why the three of them had stayed by the door instead of examining the body inside.
Covering his nose, he slowly approached Ma Xiaochen's body.
Ma Xiaochen's body had not yet gone completely stiff. His eyes were wide open, their vacant, lifeless orbs almost bulging entirely out of their sockets, as though he had seen something utterly terrifying. His mouth hung slightly open, exposing uneven teeth. Pale yellow stomach acid mixed with bile and food scraps still clung to the corners of his mouth. After further fermentation by the bacteria in his mouth, it gave off a suffocating, sour, rotten stench.
After examining the front of the body, Bo Yi carefully stepped around the large pool of acidic vomit on the floor and located the source of the bloody smell. Blood had flowed from the top of Ma Xiaochen's head. Apart from the scalds caused by the hot soup earlier, this was his only wound, and it was probably what had killed him. But compared with normal blood, the blood flowing from it looked somewhat... "thin"-
Something else had mixed into it, diluting the blood.
Bo Yi reached out and felt the top of Ma Xiaochen's head.
"Did you find anything?" Jiang Miaoyi came over, pinching her nose, and crouched beside him as she asked in a muffled voice.
"There's a sunken patch right in the middle of the top of his head..." Bo Yi felt the soft, distinctly depressed area. "And the bones here are completely shattered." The fractures in the surrounding bone formed a spiderweb pattern.