Nine Chapters of Strange Cases

Chapter 362 Ghostly Figures in the House
Nanyuan Workshop is located in a corner of Chang'an City. Legend has it that the Mo family once lived here and created a wooden bird that could fly into the sky, hence the name "Yuan" (meaning "kite").

It was already curfew, and the night watchman, weak and listless, was calling out the time with his broken gong.

The footsteps of the Union patrol had already faded into the distance.

Xie Yunniang sat in front of the bronze mirror, carefully drawing her eyebrows with a charcoal pencil, humming a little tune as she drew, her cheeks flushing red.

She couldn't help but touch her slightly swollen lips, stomped her foot shyly, picked up the handkerchief next to her dressing case, covered her mouth, and laughed.

She laughed for a while, then patted her slightly flushed face, put the handkerchief back, and looked up at the bronze mirror on the table again.

Just as the charcoal pencil touched her eyebrow, her hand suddenly trembled, and the pencil went out of bounds, leaving a black mark on her forehead.

Xie Yunniang's mouth was agape, her face filled with terror.

In the bronze mirror, a human face had appeared out of nowhere. The face was as white as paper, with fine cuts all over it, as if it would bleed at any moment.

The face was right behind her, smiling eerily.

Xie Yunniang cried out and turned around abruptly, only to find that there was no one behind her.

At her shout, Chunling, the maid who was guarding the outer room, rushed in, rubbing her sleepy eyes. "Miss, what happened?"

Xie Yunniang's hands trembled as she looked around, but there wasn't a ghost in sight. She reached out and patted her head. "It's nothing. I heard too many strange tales from the teahouse, and at night I started having all sorts of wild thoughts and my eyes were playing tricks on me. When I was doing my makeup in front of the mirror earlier, I thought there was a ghost face stuck to my back! It gave me quite a fright."

Upon hearing this, Chunling smiled mischievously, "What you're thinking of isn't some funny face, it's clearly Yulang."

Xie Yunniang blushed immediately after being teased by her, and her previous fear vanished.

She gave the maid a reproachful look, "If you keep talking nonsense, I'll tear your mouth apart. Go and rest, I don't need your service, I'm going to sleep now."

Chunling wasn't afraid at all. She smiled, turned around, and went out to close the door.

The room fell silent again. Xie Yunniang looked at the bronze mirror with some apprehension, only to see that she was clearly the only one reflected in it. She shook her head with amusement, blaming herself for being overly suspicious. She wiped away the badly drawn eyebrows with a handkerchief and then lay down on the bed.

As she lay down, she opened her eyes wide in horror to see a bloodstained human face pasted on the bed curtains directly above her.

She felt a warm drop of liquid fall on her face and flow into her eyes, instantly turning the world before her eyes crimson.

Blood, that's blood, blood dripping from that human skin above.

Xie Yunniang opened her mouth to scream, but suddenly, her whole body tensed up, and she could hear breathing.

Right under her bed.

She felt numb all over and couldn't move. Just then, a large hand reached out from under the bed...

……

"General Su, Lord Zhou, while we were patrolling Nan Yuan Fang, we were stopped by a family surnamed Xie. They said their daughter had been murdered in her house... We went inside and looked, and the death was bizarre..."

Zhou Zhao looked towards the doorway and saw Han Ze clinging to the doorframe, eagerly peeking out.

His eyes were swollen, his nose was red, and he spoke with a nasal tone, looking somewhat dejected.

Zhou Zhao glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw Jing Yi, who had consciously hidden behind the door, walking towards the courtyard gate.

As an official of the Court of Justice, she couldn't just investigate her brother Zhou Yan's case. Now that there was a new victim, she had no reason to ignore it.

But she always felt something was off, as if things had gone too smoothly.

She put aside her many thoughts and walked up to Han Ze. "Didn't you used to call me Sister Zhao? Why have you changed your address?"

Han Ze leaned against the door frame like a timid little dog. He sniffed, his face practically screaming that my dad might be the murderer and that we were enemies.

Zhou Zhao shook his head speechlessly, said nothing more, went straight out the door, mounted his horse, and galloped towards the Xie family of Nan Yuan Fang.

When they arrived, Ah Huang and Min Zangzhi were already there. "Li Shen? What brings you here? You should be resting more."

Zhou Zhao lifted his foot to walk inside, but stopped in his tracks when he caught a glimpse of someone standing next to Ah Huang.

Fan Lishen looked much better than before. Although his face was still pale, he looked quite energetic.

"Ah Huang prescribed me some medicine, and I feel much better after taking it. I saw him come out to perform the autopsy, and I was thinking of seeing if there was anything I could do to help. Also, Ah Zhao, thank you. And Brother Changying, thank you."

Zhou Zhao's expression softened a bit, and she shook her head. "No need to thank me. That day, things were urgent, and I had to cut the rope between you and Uncle Fu in a hurry. You must have fallen quite badly."

"The Court of Justice is handling a case; you are not allowed to enter the crime scene and must wait in the courtyard for a while."

Zhou Zhao didn't say much and went straight into Xie Yunniang's bedroom.

Zhou Zhao carefully examined the ground. "There were no bloodstains on the ground, and no signs of a struggle inside the house. The body..."

As Zhou Zhao spoke, he walked to the bed curtains and couldn't help but tighten his grip.

On the bed lay a girl of about seventeen or eighteen years old. Her eyes were covered with a white cloth, and there were two obvious bloodstains on the white cloth near her eye sockets.

Her body was covered in bruises, making her look quite gruesome. A hole had been cut open in her abdomen, and something was stuffed into the bloody opening.

“Ah Huang…”

Zhou Zhao shouted.

Ah Huang nodded and began to carefully examine the body.

"There was powdered sedative and some white threads around the deceased's mouth and nose, indicating that someone had covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and knocked him unconscious. Because he was unconscious early on, no defensive wounds were found on his body."

He had only one fatal wound, in his abdomen…

As Ah Huang spoke, he carefully removed the object that was blocking the bloody hole in his abdomen.

Before Zhou Zhao and the others could even discern what it was, they saw a dark shadow fly out from the corpse's abdomen.

Seeing this, Su Changying, who was standing guard to the side, immediately swung his long sword and cut the dark figure in two almost instantly.

“It’s a sparrow…” Su Changying’s expression was not good.

Zhou Zhao looked closely and saw that a sparrow had been cut in half from the middle.

She crouched down and looked at the right half of the sparrow's corpse. On the sparrow's leg was a small golden ring.

Why would the murderer stuff a sparrow into a person's stomach?

Zhou Zhao was thinking when he heard Ah Huang say, "Ah Zhao, look..."

Upon hearing this, Zhou Zhao looked over at Ah Huang, only to see that he had already picked up the items that the group had chosen, unfolded them, and held them in his hands...

The thing was covered in blood, and at first glance, it was clearly a human face.

Standing to the side, Min Zangzhi couldn't help but gasp as she listened. "The deceased's face is still there, so how come there's another face? Could there be a second deceased person?"

Ah Huang shook his straw hat.

"This is pigskin. The hair on it hasn't been shaved off properly. Once you've handled it a few times, you can tell whether it's human skin or some other kind of skin just by touching it."

As Ah Huang spoke, he handed the face towards Min Zangzhi.

Min Zangzhi's face paled, and he took a step back. He had just been woken up from his bed, so he must not have been fully awake. Otherwise, how could he have seen such irresistible sincerity in a simple bamboo hat...

"I believe you, you're pigskin."

Aside from Ah Huang and Zhou Zhao, those two madmen who've gone completely mad, who would want to touch this!