Song Yang and I went back to the police station. Wang Dali rushed over and asked with concern, "Were you two hurt? I knew I should have gone with you, but you wouldn't let me."
Huang Xiaotao scoffed, "What could you have done if you went, tied the perpetrator's shoelaces?"
Wang Dali said unhappily, "Sister Xiaotao, why do you always have to bring up my weaknesses? That was a long time ago."
I prepared myself and then went to the morgue to examine the corpse found in the basement. When the body bag was opened, everyone present was shocked. The victim's body was covered in bruises, and could be described as battered beyond recognition. His expression was extremely twisted in pain, and large amounts of muscle and fat had also been carved away. It was hard to imagine what he had gone through before death.
"How cruel!" Huang Xiaotao frowned.
I began doing some routine checks. The victim was around 25 years old, male, medium build, healthy. He had been dead for about ten days, but there was no serious decay due to the cold environment he was in.
The victim's internal organs and bones were almost completely undamaged. The cause of death was shock leading to cardiac arrest. His injuries seemed to be from being beaten with a rod-shaped object. The perpetrator had slowly pounded every inch of his skin with a wooden stick, leaving no spot untouched. The surface was unbroken, but there was a large accumulation of blood under the skin.
It was these injuries that led to traumatic shock and eventual cardiac arrest. In other words, the victim was beaten to death.
After hearing my account, everyone fell silent. After a while, Huang Xiaotao asked, "Why did the perpetrator do this?"
"Same as the first two victims, for the delicious meat! I've heard that in the past, some high officials who ate pork didn't kill it with a knife. They had their servants beat the pig to death with a stick. This sealed all the blood under the skin, and the fiber was beaten soft and the tendons were severed. It made the meat exceptionally tender and delicious..." I looked at the corpse on the dissection table, "Treating a living person this way, I can't even imagine it."
"I want to run to the hospital right now and pull all that bastard's tubes out!" Huang Xiaotao cursed. "The meat on the victim was carved away after death?"
"Yes!" I replied.
Although the perpetrator had been caught, I still took fingerprints and palm prints from the corpse and body bag as evidence.
After the autopsy, I said to Huang Xiaotao, "It looks like nothing else today. I'll head back first. When Master Tang wakes up and you guys want to interrogate him, call me back."
"Are you going to interrogate him yourself?" Huang Xiaotao asked.
"No, I'm just a coroner. I won't overstep my bounds. There are some things I still don't understand, so I want to hear what he has to say." I explained.
"Alright!"
Huang Xiaotao saw us to the door and said, "Song Yang, thanks for today!"
"You're welcome, I should be thanking you."
"Oh right..."
"What is it?"
Huang Xiaotao blushed. By now it was dusk, and the golden sunset shone softly on her face and figure. She smiled and said, "It's nothing!"
Wang Dali was anxious to catch the bus and kept urging us, "Hurry up, why are you two suddenly acting all shy."
I walked some distance away, and looking back, Huang Xiaotao was still standing there seeing us off. Perhaps after witnessing so many ugly things these past days, her smile seemed especially beautiful.
In the days that followed, I returned to my normal life. The abrupt change left me a little disoriented.
For a long time after the human meat bun case, I lost my appetite whenever I saw meat, especially steamed buns.
When I was bored, I indirectly asked Wang Dali, "Hey, the other day I watched a movie where the male lead ended up with a policewoman. Do you think a relationship like that could be happy?"
Wang Dali said, "I think it depends on the person. If the male lead was also a cop and they spent a lot of time together, it would probably be fine. But if the male lead was a criminal, then it's hard to say."
"What about an ordinary person?" I asked.
"I can't say for sure. Cops are probably really busy, why don't you ask Sister Xiaotao? She would know for sure." Wang Dali said.
Of course I'd ask her instead of you if I could.
About a week later, Huang Xiaotao called to tell me they were going to interrogate Master Tang today. So I went to the police station alone.
Master Tang in the interrogation room was wrapped in bandages with an IV drip, looking rather haggard. Two policemen were interrogating him, with a clerk taking notes on the side. Huang Xiaotao and I observed through the monitor in the next room.
But to my great surprise, Master Tang claimed to know nothing about the whole affair, and acted very panicked, holding his head and crying, "I didn't kill anyone, I don't know anything. That bastard Jin Huo Ma dumped the corpse at my shop. I had no choice but to help dispose of it."
No matter how the police questioned him, this was all he said. Just as everyone was about to lose patience, Master Tang's expression suddenly changed. The interrogating officer tried calling his name, "Jin Huo Ma?"
Master Tang scoffed coldly, "Why are you calling me? Why doesn't the cop who stabbed me come interrogate me himself? Is he afraid to see me?"
No matter what the police asked, he just sat there with his arms crossed, aloof and indifferent, saying he wouldn't talk unless I came in.
Huang Xiaotao and I exchanged glances. She picked up the intercom and had the people inside leave. Then she said to me, "Let's go in together!"
"Are you okay after what happened last time? No lingering trauma?" I asked.
"Of course not, would cops be afraid of criminals?" Huang Xiaotao brushed her nose disdainfully.
"Alright, let's go in then."
When we entered the interrogation room, Master Tang immediately asked me for a cigarette. I said I didn't have any. Huang Xiaotao said, "Jin Huo Ma, the evidence against you is ironclad now. This interrogation is just a formality. Just come clean! Don't waste everyone's time."
Master Tang laughed derisively and said to me, "Since you're here, I'll come clean. Let me tell you my story."
It turned out Jin Huo Ma had owed Master Tang 100,000 yuan three years ago. At the time he really couldn't pay it back, so he suggested using meat as payment. Taking advantage of his job, Jin Huo Ma smuggled meat from the meat processing plant every day. Since they were from the same hometown, no formal agreement was made at first.
Over three years, Jin Huo Ma didn't know how much pork he had given Master Tang. The debt should have been paid off long ago. But unexpectedly, three months ago Master Tang urgently needed 100,000 yuan. He denied ever owing Jin Huo Ma anything, and demanded he pay up.
The two of them argued heatedly, and Master Tang threatened to expose Jin Huo Ma's dirty secrets from back then. Jin Huo Ma lost his temper and attacked. But unexpectedly, Master Tang was very strong and beat Jin Huo Ma to death.
Master Tang panicked when he came to his senses, afraid of going to jail if the body was discovered. He thought and thought, and decided to emulate the movie "Human Meat Buns", mincing Jin Huo Ma into meat buns to sell.
This guy who had never killed anyone actually made a whole person 'disappear' using this divide and conquer method.
Of course, human meat is different from pork. Master Tang was afraid customers would notice, so he added a lot of five spice powder. Still uneasy, he tasted each batch of buns himself after steaming. Once while eating, he unconsciously finished half a tray. When he realized what happened, he broke out in a cold sweat.
Like Jin Huo Ma back then, Master Tang had tasted the deliciousness of human flesh, and started to change...
Every night at 8 pm, the time Jin Huo Ma was killed, Master Tang's personality would drastically shift. He would madly devour the human meat buns he made, sometimes hugging buckets of raw mince and shoveling it into his mouth.
As he ate, an expression of satisfaction and eerie laughter appeared.
Gradually, another soul emerged within him - the dead Jin Huo Ma!
ive and Ruthless] Before his transmigration, Ye Xuan was playing a game called "Severing Emotions to Attain the Dao." The game's core wasn't about leveling up by fighting monsters, but about conquering various "bad women" with wicked personalities and cold, fickle natures. There was only one method to conquer them: stay unwaveringly by their side, then die at a critical moment, driving them to madness after losing the protagonist. The higher their level of regret, the higher the player's score. To dominate the server, Ye Xuan conquered all the bad women. In the early stages, he showered them with boundless tenderness, only to choose to sacrifice himself for them later, making them weep bitterly and drown in regret. Among them were: Xia Lengyue, the unfaithful immortal wife who chased after powerful men and discarded her husband like trash. Ye Qingcheng, the Demonic Venerable of the Joyous Union Sect, who appeared pure and innocent but was, in reality, promiscuous. Wu Lingxiao, the Empress of the Great Xia Dynasty, who lusted after men and loved maintaining a harem. Bai Qiangu of the Endless Demonic Sect: a bloodthirsty mass murderer. However, when the protagonist transmigrated into the game world, he made a horrifying discovery. Eight hundred years had already passed. The bad women he had conquered had now each become deities and revered ancestors. Faced with the endless stream of toxic women coming for him, Ye Xuan could only rely on his god-tier acting skills to carve a path of survival through this world of treacherous women.
m back to his original world. In the end, he realized he had overthought things. [Hey, why is Shen Manni, the female lead, acting strange? Shouldn't she be fawning over the male lead at this point?] [Zhou Qiaoqiao, are you sick? Weren't you supposed to break off your engagement today?] [Damn it! An Youyi, please do your job as an undercover agent and sell my information to the protagonist, you idiot!] ... At this moment, Xu Mo himself didn't know that these female leads had already heard his inner thoughts. Then they decided not to play by the rules. Xu Mo: Please respect my profession as the big villain!
grated, and just when he finally managed to get into an elite academy, he discovered that he actually had a system, and the way to earn rewards was extremely ridiculous. So for the sake of rewards, he had no choice but to start acting ridiculous as well. Su Cheng: "It's nothing but system quests after all." But later, what confused Su Cheng was that while he was already quite ridiculous, he never expected those serious characters to gradually become ridiculous too. And the way they looked at him became increasingly strange... (This synopsis doesn't do it justice, please read the full story)
e, Immortal Body, Transmigration, System, Progression Fantasy, Academy Setting, Third-Person Perspective. Alternate Title: Transmigrating into a High Martial World and Reading Live Comments. Bad news: I transmigrated. This is a terrifying high-martial world, and my original, pathetically weak body fell into a coma and never woke up. Good news: I got a Popularity Points system upon arrival. I can see live comments and even create an unkillable alternate identity. Starting out, the alternate identity has all stats at 1. The system tells me that to grow stronger, I must participate in the plot, gain popularity points to allocate stats and grow stronger, and ultimately awaken my original body. And so, carrying my original body on my back, I officially entered Huaqing Academy, where the story's protagonist resides. From that moment on, Chen Guan kicked the original plot to pieces. Live Comments: [Doesn't anyone find this mysterious coffin guy creepy? He can summon indescribable grey misty hands.] [Is this guy a hero or a villain? What kind of onion became a spirit?] [By the way, does anyone know who's in the coffin? Shouldn't the debt for saving his life be repaid by now?] [According to unofficial histories, the person in the coffin was Chen Guan's first love. Their love was once passionate and earth-shattering, but they were separated by life and death due to worldly circumstances. What a star-crossed pair.] ... Years later, the world knew of a demon god born from a coffin, shrouded in grey mist, impossible to gaze upon directly. His foremost divine emissary often wielded a scythe, reaping lives like the god of death. As war approached, facing former friends and a boundless sea of enemies, Chen Guan merely raised his scythe. "Would you like to dance as well?"
