Dissection And Inspection

Inside the room, Liao Xingjian’s body had defrosted. After his clothes were removed and his body was wiped down, the autopsy could proceed.

Song Caitang had to do everything herself since Qingqiao, her maid who was most familiar with what needed to be done wasn’t around.

She got someone to bring a ceramic pot in, threw the usual herbs in and lit them.

She opened up the boxes with everything she needed, took the items out one by one and placed them on the countertop.

After washing her hands with warm water and alcohol, she placed a piece of ginger in her mouth, put on the gloves and gown…

Finally, she picked out a scalpel that looked good to her among the neat row of sharp knives.

The preparation process was done at a speed that wasn’t too hasty or too slow, but a confident and steady one. The atmosphere in the room slowly began to change as she got everything prepared.

Nobody said anything, and nobody complained that things were moving too slowly. In fact, none of them even looked at another person to try and provoke them or suspect them.

Song Caitang was a woman who seemed to possess an ability to calm people down.

She was in a place like the Night Sanctum, and it was clearly an unfamiliar place to her. Yet, she was totally in control of the situation right now.

She pulled the white cloth over the body back, held up the scalpel as she calmly looked at the group in the room one last time. “I’ll begin then.”

Everyone subconsciously took a deep breath and nodded in unison.

The scalpel landed on the victim’s shoulder.

Song Caitang used the usual Y incision she always made, where the scalpel would start from the two shoulders and make an incision toward the chest.

When she first saw the body, she noticed something wrong with the livor mortis. And if that was the case, there would also be something wrong with the color of the blood.

The wound on the body was not large and the victim had not bled very much. The bloodstains on his clothing had already dried up and so she couldn’t see what color the blood was. But she would be able to see the color once she cut the body open.

There were poisons that could make livor mortis that resembled those on a body that had frozen to death, but they were not identical.

She had a gut feeling that since the chances that this man had frozen to death were very slim, the cause of death could be that sort of poison…

As her blade cut through the skin, some blood flowed out. It was a cherry red color.

It looked like the blood of a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning, but it was a little more on the pink side.

She was right.

Song Caitang squinted slightly.

She did not speak and her hands continued to work as they sliced through the body, cutting through the skin and the tissues beneath. She cut through rib and cartilage at an angle, cut through the muscle, then switched to a pair of scissors to cut through the ribs and exposed the chest cavity.

Her actions flowed as smoothly as water. She was very familiar with what needed to be done and worked at an astonishing speed. Before anybody even realized what was going on, the victim’s body had already been sliced open for all to see.

The smell of old blood and the stench of the rotting body hit their nostrils and the sight of the body itself was really shocking. The two women in the room reacted more quickly than the men. Ye Nan and Xi Rui covered their mouths with their hands and tried their best to control themselves.

Ye Nan’s body was trembling and her eyes were filled with tears. But she did not walk away and continued watching in silence.

But Xi Rui couldn’t take it anymore. She turned aside and hugged her shoulders as she sobbed quietly.

As more and more of the body’s insides were exposed, a unique smell was finally unable to hide itself any longer and wafted out.

It was the smell of bitter almonds.

Song Caitang shut her eyes.

When she first saw the body, she had vaguely detected this smell, but it was very faint. It might have been because the body was really frozen, so she wasn’t really sure the smell was really there. But now, she was certain.

She had not talked about this speculation of hers, which was the most probable, in her opinion, and only mentioned poisoning and freezing to death because firstly, she wasn’t sure herself, and secondly, she wanted to observe the reactions from the group.

Guan Wan stood at the entrance and helped to write the autopsy report, so she wasn’t near the body and the bloody scene on the table didn’t really affect her at all. But she liked to cook and had a keen sense of smell and taste that could detect all sorts of things.

She sniffed the air slightly and was the first one to speak up, “Hmm… what is this smell?”

“Smell?”

Everyone else started sniffing the air as well.

Perhaps men were not as sensitive, but Xin Yongwang and Zhuang Qingyu remained where they were as though they couldn’t smell a thing. But Ye Nan took two steps closer to the body and sniffed the air for a moment. “Smells like almonds…”

Song Caitang nodded. “That’s right.”

She scanned every person in the room. “The victim, Liao Xingjian, had bright red livor mortis, cherry red blood, water retention and excess blood in the esophagus, excess blood and erosion of the mucosal layer in the intestines – some of it is even rotten – and the smell of almonds in the body… he died by poisoning.”

Cyanide poisoning.

For some reason, the effects of poisoning were not obvious in the victim’s hands and nails. They were just slightly blue, like what happens when one has poor blood circulation.

But this era didn’t know what cyanide was and what it was called, so Song Caitang did not say this part out loud.

Ye Nan’s body stiffened and her expression suddenly became a little frightening. “What… sort of poison?”

“I’ll have to continue my inspection first.”

Song Caitang’s scalpel proceeded to slice through the layers of fat and through the blood vessels. She switched to a pair of scissors and retrieved the victim’s stomach.

As she did this, the rest of the room started arguing again.

Since the cause of death was poisoning, it meant that he had probably eaten something he should not have. The most suspicious one right now was Xi Rui!

She was the only one who had given Liao Xingjian something to eat. She admitted it herself!

Ye Nan couldn’t hold herself back and grabbed hold of Xi Rui’s collar as her eyes reddened. “Why? Why did you do such a thing! Wasn’t he good enough to you? As long as you wanted it, anything you wanted to eat with, anything you wanted to do; even when you insisted that he put aside his work to play chess with you, even when you threw tantrums, he went along with everything! He agreed to everything you wanted! Why were you still so dissatisfied?!”

“You’re only an ordinary person with no family or backers, so I could have killed you. But I didn’t, because I knew Xingjian would be upset… I already tried my best to control myself and to be kind to you, yet you turned out so ungrateful! So discontented! Why did you have to poison him?! Why!!”

Xi Rui did not know martial arts, so she couldn’t get Ye Nan’s hand off her and had to use her nails to scratch at her.

Once she managed to get Ye Nan’s hand off her, she glared at Ye Nan, “I didn’t! I didn’t poison him!”

She was also equally agitated and she bit her lips so hard that they were bleeding. Her hands were also trembling. “If there was poison, if he was poisoned to death from what I gave him, then you must have been the one who put the poison there! That’s right… that’s right! It must have been you! You didn’t want to marry him, but you wanted to remain the righteous, noble and untainted sect leader everybody thinks you are, so you couldn’t do something evil like that yourself… you framed me!”

Xi Rui glared at Ye Nan as though she was glaring at her greatest enemy. “You’re the one who’s trying to frame me!”

As they screamed at each other, Song Caitang took the stomach out, put it down and used an even smaller scalpel to gently slice it open.

An indescribable stench instantly filled the air.

The smell was so strong and hit everyone’s nostrils so hard, it was almost suffocating.

The two arguing women immediately stopped their argument and moved away.

Ye Nan wasn’t so badly affected. She just ran toward the window and took a few deep breaths. But Xi Rui couldn’t take it. She ran out and started puking as she held onto a pillar.

She didn’t run too far off and the open window helped with the smell. Song Caitang called out to her in a loud voice, “What sort of soup did you give the victim?”

Xi Rui felt a lot better after puking. She used her handkerchief to wipe her mouth, then responded sullenly, “Osmanthus flowers with glutinous rice.”

“It’s made with osmanthus nectar and fresh rice from this year’s crop. It’s very, very sweet, and very, very fragrant… he was already feeling so bitter inside, so I wanted to help him remember the sweet, wonderful times that we had… I thought he would feel better.”

Song Caitang used a pair of tweezers to dig through the things inside the stomach and came to a conclusion after a short while. “He didn’t drink any of the soup you gave him.”

“He didn’t drink it?” Xi Rui suddenly went into a daze. “Not a single bit?”

Song Caitang said, “Nope.”

Glutinous rice was hard to digest, and osmanthus flowers left their fragrance on everything they touched, so such food would be detected easily. But she couldn’t find any traces of either ingredient in the digestive tract and the stomach, so the victim probably didn’t take any of the soup at all.

“What poisoned him were these things…”

Song Caitang’s tweezers pulled out a few nut-like objects.

Some were bigger and some were smaller, but they seemed barely digested. The shape itself was extremely recognizable. These were almonds.

The entire room fell silent.

It was true that almonds could poison one to death.

That was common knowledge within the martial arts world. But it was hard for them, especially Ye Nan, to accept that Liao Xingjian would have died because of this.

“He ate almonds… I eat them sometimes too, but all of us know that you have to cook them first… that’s impossible, that couldn’t have been the reason why he died!”

Song Caitang sighed.

Almonds were not automatically harmless just because you cooked them.

She had read a report before about a healthy, young man who bought a bag of almonds from a store that specialized in healthy foods. The store said that as long as the almonds were roasted for more than ten minutes in a 300 degree oven, it would be safe to eat. But the man ate more than 40 almonds and ended up getting poisoned to death.

That sounded like a lot of almonds, but it was hard for people to stop themselves once they started snacking on such things and they would end up eating this many without even realizing it.

Song Caitang asked, “I assume everything found at the scene has been kept and sealed properly?”

Since these people had kept the study locked and made sure that nobody went in for no reason, she assumed they would have also thought of this.

She looked at Ye Nan.

Ye Nan was very agitated after learning the cause of Liao Xingjian’s death, but she was the rational young mistress of a sect, so she regained composure very quickly.

“Yes, we did… we kept everything we found. If they could be kept at room temperature, we left it at room temperature. If it couldn’t, we used ice to store it, because I felt that it would be helpful to solving the case.”

Song Caitang nodded. “Were any almonds found?”

Ye Nan shook her head. “No.”

“What about something along those lines, like a bowl or a little plate that could have held the almonds?”

“Also no.”

Song Caitang paused to think some more, then asked, “What about the soup that Madam Xi mentioned?”

This time, Ye Nan nodded. “Yes. One full bowl of it.”

Song Caitang turned toward Xin Yongwang and Zhuang Qingyu. “Both of you were the first to arrive at the scene of the crime. Did you notice anything to do with almonds?”

The effects of cyanide were very quick. If it was injected or inhaled, a person would die within a minute. But if it went in via food into the stomach, then it would definitely take effect in no more than half an hour.

Also, it was impossible to force feed a person after they had died or were unconscious, especially food like nuts. There were only two possibilities.

“Two possibilities,” Song Caitang’s gaze burned bright as she raised two fingers. “One, the victim might have been threatened. Someone had either held him down, or threatened to harm someone or something important to him, and forced him to eat the almonds. The second one is, the victim had not been in the study the whole time. He had left the room somewhere in between and ate almonds.”

Each possibility led to two different directions.

“If it’s the former, the killer would need to make it look like it’s a locked room murder. We need to find out how they did it and find out what the killer threatened the victim with, and we’ll be able to solve the case.”

“If it’s the latter, the killer wouldn’t have to do so much. It would be easier to make this look like a locked room murder, and they would be able to escape suspicion. But we’ll need a lot more information, like where the victim went, where the almonds came from, did he eat them himself, or did he eat them with other people and so on.”

Her words made everyone pause to think, but she did not stop there.

“The victim did not change out of his clothes and continued wearing clothing suitable for walking around inside the house, and soft soled shoes for walking in a room. His soles do not look especially dirty, so if he went out, he would have only gone out for a very short time, somewhere not too far from the study, and definitely not all the way to the outer house where it’s very dusty and muddy.”

“But… which room did he go to? And whose room was that?”