“Aiyou, babe. Please, I’m begging you. Drop the act or at least stop acting like that. My mind can’t take it.” Shen Wei’s innocent facade was making Zhao Yunlan’s teeth ache. He went to the bathroom to wash up, one hand pressed to his waist, and slammed the door behind him.
Afterward, as Zhao Yunlan was about to take out his frustrations on his food, Zhu Hong called.
“Hello? Director Zhao? Daqing says you’re back. Are you all right?”
“Mnh.” Zhao Yunlan bit into half a fried dough stick. “What’s up?”
“Remember how Lin Jing went to check on that life-borrowing case? His ticket back was for last night. I was going to call him after midnight and see where he was, but his phone was out of range. At first I thought it was because the signal’s so bad in the mountains from all the tunnels there, but that train arrived on time hours ago and he still hasn’t shown up. And when I called just now, I still got a ‘not in service area’ message.”
Zhao Yunlan’s chewing slowed. “And he hasn’t contacted the office?”
“No.”
“Hm…” Zhao Yunlan’s brow creased.
The Special Investigations Department’s rules stated that, whether they were just evaluating a case or officially starting an investigation, no one worked alone. There always had to be at least two people. Daqing counted, of course. On the rare occasion when special circumstances forced someone to act solo, they had to contact the office at least twice a day to keep everyone advised of their location.
Lin Jing might not be the most reliable when it came to the little things, but he very rarely messed up anything important. He wouldn’t spontaneously decide to go AWOL.
Zhao Yunlan hung up and took his own stab at calling Lin Jing but unsurprisingly got the same message. He pulled out a Soul-Guarding Order and wrote Lin Jing’s name on it with a chopstick dipped in soy milk.
The Soul-Guarding Order acted like a compass. First it wavered from left to right, then settled on one direction. A fine thread of red extended slowly from Lin Jing’s name, but the further it reached, the duller the color grew. By the time it reached under the table, the line had turned nearly gray.
Then it snapped.
Shen Wei, who had been immersed in his lesson plan, looked up and exchanged a glance with Zhao Yunlan. Then he bent down and picked up the broken string. At that light touch, it crumbled away like ash.
Shen Wei withdrew his hand and carefully sniffed his fingertip. “He should be fine for now. There’s no scent of death or anything foul. He’s still alive. You just can’t reach him. Try not to worry.”
Zhao Yunlan stuffed the last bun into his mouth without really tasting it, then took a notebook from beneath the table. For all that his life was a completely chaotic, slovenly mess, he was surprisingly precise when it came to time management. There were three labeled dividers sticking out from the notebook: “urgent,” “important,” and “complete.”
The last section was blank. He’d clearly been in a state of terrible worry and busyness recently, with no time for anything unimportant.
The handwriting resembled that of a surgeon who was jumping up and down while riding on a rocket, but with great difficulty Shen Wei was able to read the only two items written under “urgent.” The first item was his own name, and the second read “Figure out how to evict that stupid bowl from Dad’s body.” The “important” category held a lengthy list of work-related things, some long and some short. Zhao Yunlan added a check mark next to “Shen Wei,” then added a third item under “urgent”: “Find Lin Jing ASAP.”
Zhao Yunlan kept writing as he spoke. “Lin Jing is actually descended from Bodhidharma.9 To be honest, none of my other people have a better or cleaner pedigree. Plus, he looks powerful and formidable enough that even his selfies work to ward off evil. He’s dependable. He wouldn’t stir up shit for no reason. To be honest, he’s normally the one I trust the most. In a simple life-lending case like this, I can’t help wondering if something fishy’s going on, so I have to go take a look. Are you coming?”
Shen Wei had been too preoccupied lately with his own plans to pay attention to what the people in the Soul-Guarding Order were busy with. Hearing this, he finally raised his gentle gaze from his own checked-off name on the notebook. A trace of a smile curved the corner of his mouth. There was no sign that he minded Zhao Yunlan writing his name as messily as a dog who’d been given a pen. “Hmm? Life-borrowing?”
Zhao Yunlan brought up Wang Zheng’s email on his phone. “This is it. Could the Great Immortal please take a look for us?”
Fossil that he was, Shen Wei had never used a smartphone before. His eyes swept over what Wang Zheng had written, and then he looked carefully at the photos of the scene. Being unused to touchscreens, he was unfortunately unable to figure it out even after a few attempts.
With a glance at Zhao Yunlan, who was currently gulping down his soy milk, he said, “Look away for a second. Don’t peek.”
Holding his palm above the phone screen, Shen Wei made a grabbing motion. The photo of the victim floated out of the screen, hovering in midair like a 3D projection. The visual effect was viscerally shocking. For a moment it was like the corpse, with its eggplant-purple face, was lying right there on the dining table.
Curiosity had kept Zhao Yunlan from obediently looking away, and now he was reaping what he had sown. He choked on a mouthful of soymilk, nearly spitting it all out onto the face of the corpse. This was a stellar example of feudal era superstitions triumphing over modern technology.
Shen Wei carefully examined the corpse’s face, then reached out to “pinch” the eyes. It was as if he’d turned the very air into a 3D touchscreen, enabling himself to zoom in and out on different parts of the image!
“He may not have died from a life-borrowing spell backfiring.” Shen Wei pointed at the corpse’s eyes, now magnified to the size of one’s palm. “Look at his eyes.”
“I just ate…” Zhao Yunlan held his stomach in agony. Following Shen Wei’s fingertip to the massively magnified eye, he saw that, upon closer inspection, the death-dilated pupil seemed to contain a person’s reflection. Zhao Yunlan froze, pressing down on Shen Wei’s hand. “Can you zoom in more?”
Shen Wei shook his head. “It’s just a photo. If I zoom in further, it won’t be clear anymore.”
“Mm. That’s fine.” Zhao Yunlan grabbed a tissue from beneath the table and briskly wiped his mouth, then peeled a sticky note from the back of his notebook. He roughly sketched out the shadow’s shape. “Still better than our shoddy moonlighting tech analyst could do.”
“Who’s that?” Shen Wei asked casually.
“Zhu Hong.”
The dining table’s leg creaked, dragging harshly against the floor. Zhao Yunlan felt a chilly gaze land on the back of his exposed neck. Pretending not to notice, he leaned over the table and carefully traced out the thing reflected in the corpse’s eyes with a gel pen. But with his back to Shen Wei, he secretly smiled to himself.
“People used to say that a killer needed to destroy their victim’s eyes after the deed was done or else the victim would retain the silhouette of the last person they saw, allowing the police to solve the crime,” Zhao Yunlan said, still tracing. “But that’s obviously impossible. If it were true, criminal investigators wouldn’t need anything but eyeballs to solve cases. Looks like that particular rumor didn’t sprout from nothing, though. Sometimes stories spread in the Mortal Realm for a reason. What’s the shadow in the eyes of the dead, then?”