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墨書 Inktalez
It was evident that the homeless man was Li Cunzhuang. He consumed human flesh but did not kill anyone.
The Autopsy Report indicated that the deceased had engaged in sexual activity during her life. Although there was no direct evidence in the form of male semen, it at least proved that the homeless man, Li Cunzhuang, was not the true Murderer. Judging by the condition of her Lower Body, it was clear that this woman had been forced; after violating her, the Murderer had hung her on a barbed wire fence.
For reasons unknown, after hanging the body on the barbed wire, the Murderer vanished. Half an hour later, Li Cunzhuang saw the corpse illuminated by a flash of lightning. He climbed onto a chair and used his nails to tear open the belly of the corpse, beginning to feast on it for several minutes. After he had eaten his fill, he staggered away.
This entire process took less than an hour. Within ten minutes afterward, the Murderer had two tasks to accomplish: first, to clean up the mess left by Li Cunzhuang; second, to erase Li Cunzhuang's Footprints and take away the wooden boards and chair. Based on the timeline, ten minutes later, Circuit repair workers discovered the body.
How could someone erase all traces and remove both the chair and wooden boards in such a short span of ten minutes?
Is the world you live in truly what you see? You dwell in the light, yet some people's work belongs to the darkness. You are unaware that in the shadows, there are those who drive garbage trucks to collect refuse from street bins; you do not know that there are individuals who go into public restrooms to clean up waste; you cannot fathom how much transpires in darkness because it is not part of your world.
If a person can come and go without leaving a trace, they either live above ground or below it.
“There must be secret passages beneath the Railway that can quickly lead to both sides,” I said to Captain Shao and others. “Perhaps we should take another look at that area.”
By now, night had fallen, and Captain Shao decided to call for more personnel.
“Xiao Liu, bring in more people,” Captain Shao instructed one officer.
Xiao Liu nodded and muttered, “There have been so many incidents lately—there’s been a murder here, someone went missing over there, and several cases of brawls leading to death. The department is running low on manpower.”
Captain Shao patted Xiao Liu on the shoulder and said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Every city almost mandates that homicides must be solved; this is one of the key reasons why our country has one of the highest homicide clearance rates in the world. Cases involving brawls and missing persons would have to be put on hold for now. We mobilized nearly all personnel from the police department and headed back to the scene for a second time.
In the car, Mary said, “If we can really find this place…”
I continued Mary’s words, saying, “Then the Murderer is easy to identify.”
It hadn’t rained all day, and the muddy ground on both sides of the Railway had solidified considerably, at least preventing anyone from sinking into the muck. We discovered a strange shoe print a few hundred meters from where the body was found; there was only one print, and the mark on the right side was a hole.
This was evidence that Li Cunzhuang had indeed left; someone had cleared away the Footprints near the body, meaning that if there was a passage here, it must have been within this short distance of a hundred meters.
Captain Shao surveyed the scene again and said, “It was pitch dark yesterday, and our visibility was very limited. Now it seems that the Murderer left quite simply; if it had been daytime, we probably would have spotted it immediately.”
The Earth is round, yet those of us living on its surface perceive it as flat because it is so vast. The Murderer merely used a plank; he walked forward while dragging the board behind him. Each Footprint would be smoothed out by the plank, which is how he erased his Footprints.
If you stood back a bit and if last night’s light had been as bright as tonight’s, you would have noticed a long trace near the barbed wire, as if something had plowed through. You could follow that trace until you found an iron ring hidden in the mud.
Pulling open the iron ring would reveal an underground world.
Captain Shao sent some people to guard above while we turned on our flashlights and entered.
It was a dim corridor filled with dampness. Last night’s heavy rain had turned this place into a waterlogged channel, with stagnant water that could submerge a person’s calves giving off a foul odor. Floating above were the corpses of dead rats, each about the size of a kitten. If not for this rain, this place would still be their paradise.
Centipedes several centimeters long scurried across the water’s surface, startling to behold.
Although Mary had nearly ten years of police experience, she looked as if she had just bitten into something unpleasant. Captain Shao said, “You just wait here…”
Captain Shao, Gu Chen, and I were the first to enter the passage when suddenly we heard a splash. Turning around, we saw that Mary had also stepped into the water.
“What are you staring at?” Mary said. “When I was a cop, you were still wetting your bed.”
I shrugged and waded through the foul-smelling water deeper inside. The water mixed with dirt and debris was murky enough that I couldn’t see what lay beneath my feet. With each step, I felt my feet slipping as if I were stepping on cotton or something rotten.
The further we ventured inward, the darker the world became.
A rumbling sound suddenly echoed above us, deafening in the narrow passageway, as if the world itself was trembling. Mary let out a startled cry and fell backward into the filthy standing water. I quickly turned around and grabbed her arm, pulling her up from the muck.
Looking at her panicked expression, I chuckled, "It's just a train passing by. Look how scared you are."
But Mary had no time for banter; her eyes were wide with fear as she exclaimed, "There's someone in the water! They pulled at my leg!"
That statement sent chills down my spine, like a bolt from the blue. Someone was hiding in that filthy water and had grabbed Mary's foot? While I was still processing this, Gu Chen had already plunged into the murky depths. Moments later, he emerged holding a hand.
It was an extremely fat, pale hand, its palm and fingers wrinkled white from being submerged for who knows how long. Following that hand down, I saw an equally bloated and wrinkled arm. My flashlight continued to shine downward until a head came into view. Half of it was above the water's surface while the other half remained submerged.
This was no ordinary head! It was nearly as large as a cow's head, with a high forehead and a single eyeball bulging out, looking as if it could roll off into the water at any moment. Its lips were pale and curled outward, with a large portion of its tongue hanging out…
The sight of such a decayed corpse was something police often encountered. After last night's heavy rain, today’s muggy weather meant that a body left in such an unventilated and humid environment would become like this within just one day. I could bet that if you struck its belly with your hand, it would spew out its own viscera.
"You seemed to have drunk quite a bit of that water earlier…" I joked lightly to break the cold tension in the air.
Mary, who had been covering her mouth standing aside, could no longer hold it in upon hearing my words and retched loudly.
Once Gu Chen dragged the body out, we finally got a full view of it. The corpse was noticeably swollen; its clothes clung tightly to its body as if ready to burst. It wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, its limbs thickened and skin taking on a greenish hue, with greenish-purple veins clearly visible beneath.
The body was dressed in work attire; from the uniform, we could easily identify who he was.
He was a railway worker.
A team transported the body to the morgue for an autopsy while another team headed to the Railway Company to confirm the deceased's identity.
While waiting for the autopsy report to come through, we arranged for a pump to drain the water. Since there was one body in the passageway, there might be more things hidden within.
After Mary vomited twice more, the water in the passage was finally drained completely. The three of us ventured back inside, but this time Mary refused to go down again no matter what. Without the obstruction of standing water, we quickly reached the end of the passage and opened up a wooden panel overhead, discovering that we had arrived on the other side of a barbed wire fence.
We arrived on the other side of the Railway, not on the Railway itself.
Another train thundered in from the distance and soon vanished before us.
I had a vague feeling that I had grasped something, but some pieces still couldn't be strung together into a coherent line.
Before long, the Autopsy Report landed in Captain Shao's hands. The Rail Worker had died last night in the Early Morning, two hours after the woman was murdered. The cause of death was drowning, and a significant amount of alcohol residue was found in his blood, indicating that he had consumed a large quantity of alcohol before his death.
The conclusion was that this worker had either met with Accidental Death or had committed Suicide.
After the water was drained, we indeed found numerous bottles of liquor in the passage. Based on the timeline, we could deduce a fact: when the police arrived to investigate the body, beneath our feet lay a worker drinking. He leaned against the wall, drinking in the darkness.
Then he got drunk and lay down in the passage. The rainwater from Matchmaker flowed over his arms, over his face, and his nose, until it completely enveloped him. He died in his sleep right beneath our feet, without making a sound from beginning to end.
"Take everything from the passage back; check them one by one," Captain Shao said.
"Team Leader, we have identified the deceased," a police officer reported.
Luo Yongjun, forty-five years old, was a Rail Worker responsible for maintaining and servicing this section of railway in the Western Suburbs. His daily task involved leaving a simple hut and walking along the barbed wire beside the Railway Track until he returned at a tunnel entrance. He had been hammering away on the railway for twenty years; he could tell if there was an issue with this stretch of track just by listening to the sounds.
"There’s a makeshift little house in the distance where we found Luo Yongjun's work log."
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