Dissect And Retrieve Stomach

“His ribs are broken, abdomen is bruised. Internal organs are damaged. The victim was badly beaten before dying.”

“Livor mortis patches are purplish red, color does not fade after being pressed. They do not move even when the body is shifted. All patches are at the back of the head, the back of the neck, the back, the back of the waist, and the thighs. The victim was lying on his back when he died and remained this way for a long time. This did not change even after the body was moved to this room.”

“Victim has a large area of scratch marks and wounds on his back. The scratch marks are thin and dense, and equally deep. Inside these marks are sand, soil, and…”

Song Caitang took her tweezers, then bent to pull out a small, translucent piece from the scratches on the victim’s back. It trembled in the wind and looked extremely fragile.

“The wings of a lacewing.”

Her expression was relaxed, and her black eyes seemed to gleam, “The victim must have died at night.”

Human witnesses could lie, but evidence could not.

It was already the second month of the year. A sudden cold spell had driven temperatures down for now, but before the cold spell arrived, there was a period where it was warmer, and many insects had come out of hibernation.

Lacewings were extremely attracted to light and were nocturnal insects, so the victim must have died at night.

“The victim’s fingers are red and swollen, the back of his hands are hurt, and his finger joints are slightly twisted. There’s a wound on his forearm from defending himself. That means that this was not a one-sided beating. The victim had fought with his assailant and fought very hard too. But he was still unable to defeat his opponent.”

Song Caitang continued listing her observations of the corpse in a confident and steady manner. She did not speak very quickly, but she covered many points with each sentence. As the one taking down notes, Wen Yuansi had to focus and write more quickly than usual in order to keep up.

After these observations were listed out, plus Song Caitang’s estimation of the time of death, along with Ma Sanniang’s statement, as well as the evidence gathered by the other officers from the place where the body was discovered…the time of death could be accurately determined to be on the night of the 8^th day of the 2^nd month, between 11 pm and 5 am. The scene of the crime was exactly where the body was discovered. There was no other possibility!

The crowd gathered outside the windows and doors, as well as those who managed to squeeze inside the room, had grown quieter now.

Could it be that this woman…really knew what she was doing?

Judging from her stance, her familiarity with the work – nobody could say that she was afraid of dead bodies or that she hadn’t done this before.

Some of them quietly started standing still to watch. They turned to exchange glances with the people they knew, then turned back to stare intently at Song Caitang.

They were waiting for her to go on. This was just a preliminary examination. There was a lot more to go! If she was so gutsy, then she ought to carry on!

Governor Zhang stroked his beard. There was a glint in his eye as he breathed a long sigh of relief in his heart.

Wen Yuansi hadn’t lied to him after all. This woman really did know what she was doing!

He, too, began to look very intently at Song Caitang. But while everyone else was hoping to jeer at her and reprimand her the moment she made any mistake, he wished he could just roll his sleeves up and yell at the top of his voice, “Miss Song! Do your best! Show these assholes what you’re capable of!”

“The wounds on the victim’s head…”

Song Caitang had completed her inspection of the body and had come to the head, which was the most important part of all. She narrowed her eyes slightly.

It had been too dark to see the night before, so she had been unable to see certain things.

She focused her eyes on Wen Yuansi.

Wen Yuansi noticed she had paused. His wrist hovered over the paper as he stopped writing. His gaze burned.

It felt as though…she had something really important to say about the victim!

He got rather excited and stared back at her.

She lowered her gaze and proceeded to check the injuries on the victim’s face carefully.

The victim’s face was so badly injured it didn’t look like anything. The flesh was mush, and one could see part of the skull. Yet, she wasn’t afraid at all and bent her head very low and went very near the body in order to take a good look.

“The skin around the wound does not have any signs of shrinking. The edges do not have bleeding under the skin and no swelling. No scar tissue was formed…the wounds on the victim’s face were probably inflicted after his death.”

Wen Yuansi narrowed his eyes.

The injuries were inflicted after death?

Could it be that the murderer was still dissatisfied after beating the victim to a pulp, so they decided just to smash the victim’s face as well?

Wouldn’t that be…doing something unnecessary?

Song Caitang did not wait for Wen Yuansi to finish going through his thoughts and went on, “The victim’s face is sunken in. The edge of the fracture has a greater curved, wavy profile. This was probably caused by someone using a rock of sorts to hit the face hard, and the face was hit several times too.”

“Based on the injuries on the chest and abdomen of the victim and the extent of the impact of each one, it is clear that the murderer was a very strong person. It would have taken them only one or two hits to smash the victim’s face to this state. So, why did this person hit the face so many times to produce this effect?”

Wen Yuansi stopped writing.

Something that could have been done with just one or two hits, yet the person hit the face so many times…

And the hits were done after the victim had already died.

That meant that the person who killed the victim and the person who smashed his face were two different people!

Wen Yuansi narrowed his eyes slightly.

This was very significant progress in the case. If these two people had done two different things to the victim one after another, their motives must have been different. The one who beat the victim to death must have had some feud with the victim. But it wasn’t so easy to point out what would have made the other person destroy the victim’s face.

This second person might have destroyed the victim’s facial features to make it hard for anyone to recognize the victim, so as to help the killer out, or just to make it difficult for investigations to continue. Otherwise, perhaps this second person had a greater feud with the victim and felt that he should have died a much nastier death.

Either way, it sounded pretty gross.

The victim wasn’t a local and didn’t know anybody here either. At Tianhua Temple, out of the three sworn brothers and one cook, one was dead, and one was missing. The second person was very likely to be one of the ones left behind.

Was it Ma Sanniang? Or the one who was still suffering a cold, An Pengyi?

And even more importantly, had this second person seen the murderer before? Did they know who the murderer was?

The thoughts that Wen Yuansi had in his mind were exactly the ones that Song Caitang was hoping to lead him toward.

She hadn’t gotten much information from her interrogation of Ma Sanniang the night before, but the victim didn’t know a lot of people at Tianhua Temple or locally. So, with this direction, it would become easier to crack the case.

Magistrate Zhang understood what she was driving at. This was a very important clue and an important direction to take!

Even if she didn’t get to dissect the body, this alone was a breakthrough in the case! Miss Song had done them proud!

He could sit up straight and puff his chest out now!

The aim of examining a dead body was not to show off techniques or for shock value. It was to calmly and quietly use every skill the coroner had learned in order to find every clue possible to provide the investigation with evidence and direction to crack the case.

Song Caitang had not gotten agitated or rash despite the mocking crowd. She felt that she had done a pretty good job so far.

But the crowd around her didn’t think so.

They had come to watch because they had been promised a dissection and joined in the mocking because it was convenient to do so. They didn’t care about the case or whether she had discovered any clues that could be helpful. They wanted to watch a dead body being sliced open!

Slice it open!

Or was she getting cold feet now?

The noise from the crowd began to grow in volume again.

Song Caitang narrowed her eyes. She stood beside the victim’s chest and abdomen, then held a hand toward Qingqiao, “Hooked forceps.”

Qingqiao was very alert and already had it ready. She passed the sharp and strange-looking tool that her Young Mistress had taught her over.

Song Caitang received it with her right hand, bent her head slightly, then used her left hand to touch the victim’s xiphoid process.

The xiphoid process was at the lowest point and center of the sternum. It was a thin piece of bone that resembled a sword pointing downwards. The ribs protected the organs until this point, followed by the soft abdomen section.

Song Caitang’s left hand moved down the body slowly and stopped between the xiphoid process and the navel. She held up the hooked forceps and used the sharp end to make a small cut in the skin.

Her fingers were very nimble. She used her index and middle left fingers to push into the cut made, then pulled them up slightly to cause the skin to split open a little more.

“Scissors.”

Qingqiao didn’t dare to look, so she kept her head low as she took the forceps back and exchanged them for small scissors.

Song Caitang took the scissors from her, put them in the hole she at created, and started snipping away without hesitation.

Dark red blood immediately started flowing.

The crowd felt their hair all standing on end.

The sound of scissors cutting human skin actually sounded like that!

It was smooth, a little slow, and came with the crisp sound of scissors blades moving…

And the blood – the color was extremely dark, very sticky, and came with a stench. It wasn’t the usual sort of bloody stench either. It didn’t smell like fresh blood at all, and the smell made one feel very uncomfortable.

As she cut more and more of the skin over the abdomen, the stench grew stronger and stronger.

The impact of the visuals and the smell made some instinctively clamp a hand over their mouths.

The room was finally silent.

Nobody spoke anymore.

There was no other noise besides the snipping.

Qingqiao was feeling a little unwell too, but she had taken that pill beforehand and didn’t feel so bad. But she was feeling more pride than nausea right now.

She glared at all the people who had gathered here to mock her Young Mistress.

These people had endless things to say just a moment ago, so why were they all silent now? Scared now, huh? Humph!

Song Caitang had been annoyed by the crowd earlier too, but she didn’t notice them anymore. Her attention was focused entirely on the body now.

She switched to a scalpel and began cutting into the muscle tissue at the edges of the ribs. She broke through the skin tissues and fat tissues to fully expose the abdominal cavity.

The smell was pretty okay since the body was still relatively fresh. It was just that…

There was a lot of blood.

The victim’s spleen was so broken it was almost unrecognizable. The liver was also broken and bleeding. That’s why it didn’t feel quite right when she pressed the outside earlier.

The intestines were actually quite alright, however. After all, the victim had been clearly beaten to death, and no sharp weapon had been used on him.

Her target was the stomach. She took a closer look at it. Once she was sure that it was fine, she proceeded to take the next step.

She used cotton wads to absorb the excess blood, then removed the spleen and other organs she could see so that she could see the abdominal cavity more accurately. She switched to another pair of scissors, cutting and slicing her way inside the cavity before finally dislodging the stomach and lifting it out from the body.

Her clean, fair face with clear, bright eyes paired with her hands covered in blood as they held up the victim’s stomach…

This visual effect was really shocking.

The smell was shocking too.

“AUGGHHH!”

Some people couldn’t stand it anymore and ran out to vomit.