He Jiangshan was in the air, seemingly standing on nothing— upon a second look, though, Shen Jing noticed something transparent like a glow. Extension of Bai Nian’s sword? Said man was right by, about one meter away from his disciple. His eyes glanced at Xuan Lang and Shen Jing and nodded, but then went back to what he was looking at— downstream the river, scanning for something.
"Where were you two? We had lunch without you. Did you get lunch on your own? That's not fair!"
Bai Nian might’ve tired of his disciple screaming at such close proximity, so he descended and set He Jiangshan loose. Leaping the last two meters or so down, He Jiangshan “hehe”d as he walked over. Xuan Lang fixed him a flat look. “We finished late,” Xuan Lang said. “Did you find something?”
"I found something indeed," He Jiangshan said with pride, the look sliding off him like water off a duck’s back. He reached for Shen Jing’s wrist before his hand was brushed off by Xuan Lang, so he settled on placing it on Shen Jing’s shoulder instead, tugging him upstream and away from the banks— it was to the line of trees dotting this side of the river. "Here, come check. There's been these odd breaks in some branches, like someone used it as a spring-off point. Shizun and I noticed some broken roof tiles on the victim’s neighbor’s house, then some more… it was like a trail.”
This was indeed what He Jiangshan found in the story itself. Shen Jing was wondering if the cracked branch was all he was going to see, which while it was an important clue in this case, it needed a bit more to sew the thing together. Looking up, Shen Jing noticed that one of the sturdier branches higher up was sagging a bit, swaying dangerously up and down when He Jiangshan shook the tree to make the damage clearer— it was easier to see from a few meters away, but there indeed was a widening crack where the branch met the trunk.
"But," He Jiangshan said, pushing himself away from the tree and holding up a finger, "But, then I saw this."
He led them further up to a large tree perhaps ten or so meters away. On the bark at about head height was a thin, deep scratch— and it was darkened. "At first I thought nothing of it, but when I dabbed at it with a damp cloth it smeared onto the fabric, and only then can you smell that it's blood."
<This kid works in incomprehensible ways.>
Shen Jing had to agree. First of all, how did he chance upon the thought of checking tree barks for scratches, and to sniff at them until he found blood?
“And clearly that tree was suspect, so I climbed it? It’s hard to see from down here, Xiao-shidi, are you fine with grappling up a tree? Here, like this.”
Of all things in this world, He Jiangshan pulled out a grappling hook. Standing a bit further back and listening attentively, Bai Nian’s eye twitched while Xuan Lang’s expression distorted a bit at that. Before anyone could stop him, though, He Jiangshan threw the hook over onto a sturdy limb, tugged, and turned to Shen Jing in satisfaction as he pulled the other closer. “Here, just grab onto the—”
“No need for that,” Xuan Lang intervened, pulling out Bishan. “Just get on the sword, Xiao-shidi.”
“Aww, Da-shixiong! But this is nice practice for if Xiao-shidi ever needs it! It might be some time before Xiao-shidi is ready to go to the Sword Mound, you know. Diversity of experiences is fantastic. Shouldn’t we teach him good things like that?”
Shen Jing stood in the middle. Paralyzed, he looked like he was on the verge of toppling over from fight-or-flight mode and all its tensions— in the end, Xuan Lang sighed and turned to Bai Nian. “Shizun?”
“Sword.”
He Jiangshan: :(
And just like that, the youngest disciple of Sword Saint Bai Nian recovered at a speed visible to the naked eye. He Jiangshan didn’t make a fuss, though, and hopped onto Bishan too to show Shen Jing what he’d found. It was only when they were three meters up in the air that Shen Jing thought to ask, why am I the one he’s showing this to?
“There,” He Jiangshan said, nodding at a place where it seemed like a branch was in the process of growing. The shifting, dappled shadows of the leaves swaying to the breeze made Shen Jing need a second look, but he spotted what was being pointed out to him.
“Threads. Someone fell and his clothes got snagged.”
They returned to the ground, He Jiangshan hopping off Bishan before it touched the ground. “Yeah. Which is why I somewhat wonder about the mark in the tree and the blood. It’s a bit high and I don’t know why. Do you suppose it makes sense that the person was brought here but fell? What do you think made the mark? It looks a bit big to be a sword, it looks wrong if one proposes an axe made that… Yao? Claws?”
“Yao,” Xuan Lang said. “Cat-like, if we take Xiao-Jiang’s words to be true. We might not know for sure until we ask the other girl, though; Xiao-Jiang’s mother explained to me that her son might’ve mixed things up with the stray cat that liked to sit in their yard and keep him company.”
“Huh, okay. Who’s Xiao-Jiang, though?” He Jiangshan, decidedly not small, asked as he pointed at himself.
"Xiao-shidi was comforting a child who reported that he and several other children might've seen the murders," Xuan Lang replied, ignoring the gesture. Both Bai Nian and He Jiangshan stared at them before their eyes lingered on Shen Jing. "It was a bit of a chance meeting. If it weren't for Xiao-shidi, I'm not sure the child would've talked in such detail.”
They fell silent after that, but then Shen Jing realized that they were looking at him. “Uh? Oh… It’s not really much. Xiao-Jiang also said that kids can’t be hurt, and Da-shixiong is apparently still in that category… I mean, the age group where he can’t be hurt, not that he’s a child, I’m sorry! But uh, yes, it just sounds like it has a distinct group of people it’s targeting.”
For a moment he worried that he might’ve revealed too much, breaking the much-needed introductory arc, but then he remembered that the ages and background of the victims all were laid out in the book they were each given. All the words he said would be easy to deduce; the victims were above the age of 30, and Xuan Lang was far under it. Xiao-Jiang’s mother looked old enough that she might pass for a thirty years old, though— not because of her features aging quickly, but because it could be hard to tell the difference based on looks alone along that age range.
“They’re all around early to mid thirties, yeah.” He Jiangshan nodded. “Do you think something happened that led them to be the target? Ooor, say… That they did something?”
All from middle class or well-off families, they all would’ve gone to the same school— they all could’ve been friends, so the connection between the victims were there. The question was, for what?
Bai Nian turned to glance at the town. “Ask Hualiu.”
____
They returned to the inn sometime after three o’clock, though that was based on what Shen Jing saw on the journal interface. Assistant 51C excused herself, saying that she needed to go AFK for several hours Shen Jing’s time; there was an AI-run backup system in her place, though, and Shen Jing could request a person to take over if he needed it. Shen Jing only nodded, stealing the opportunity when the others were distracted with their own things to take one of the cakes sitting untouched on the plates.
Ji Hualiu and Fang Xiaoxiao entered not long after; judging from their mannerisms, they must’ve found something too.
After sitting down, Ji Hualiu poured Bai Nian tea. Bai Nian nodded and said, “You first.”
“Earlier today, we walked in knowing that though everyone was certain something had happened to the victims, they haven’t found any bodies,” she started. Shen Jing stopped his munching, feeling like the honeyed cake lost all taste. It wasn’t that he was apprehensive of just corpses, all right? He couldn’t stop thinking about days-old decayed bodies. “Well, they have… found remains.”
Shen Jing rushed to gulp some tea to get his food down— he didn’t want to spit it out by accident.
Actually, Shen Jing was well aware that nurses tended to see a lot more… grossness than doctors did. Surgeons and ER physicians might see grotesque things, but what nurses faced were the more… mundane, less shocking ones, as far as he’d heard. He was still too early into his studies to internalize this, though, and his personality was never the bold sort. He had never and would not desensitize himself on his spare time.
But Shen Jing missed the relief in Ji Hualiu’s voice when she said, “There’s no need for us to personally inspect the body; it was only remains, as I mentioned. They identified it through what was worn.”
“Was it in the river?” Xuan Lang asked.
Ji Hualiu nodded. “They found the body downstream, several li down the river, beyond the rice fields. As it was, someone had built and abandoned a small, old dam, and the body was found there. From the report, the state of it… was unrecognizable in any case.”
“Unrecognizable?” Bai Nian asked.
“...The head was missing, and the body had decayed too much from being in the water for so long.”
Silence fell. Among them, bar Bai Nian, the only one with enough life experience outside of the sect grounds and all its safety was Xuan Lang; in the months he was roaming the lands with his shizun, he had seen and done many things. The rest, however, had only studied autopsy and the human body in this sense in passing. Much like any other compulsory schooling, what they were taught in classes fall short of what was actually needed to pull off work. Now Shen Jing was imagining a cultivation university.
“...But why the river?” Fang Xiaoxiao finally asked.
He Jiangshan rambled about the discussion they had by the riverside; at the end, though, Xuan Lang added, “There were no signs of digging nearby, there were no signs of the victim being taken elsewhere, was there? That meant the yao dropped its heavy load around that place by the river, did something to get rid of it, then went on to the Lower Quarters of the city. Unless we consider the yao eating the body, then the most likely guess was he discarded it into the river.”
And the river was murky, too; the victim could be heavy enough to sink low enough as well, and could pass through the farmlands without getting caught on things because it was too deep. Regardless of how its journey through the river was, the point was it wasn’t implausible.
“Why just now, though?” Fang Xiaoxiao asked, lips pursed. “They would’ve been looking for the bodies from the very start, right? If it’s just floating there…”
“If they don’t know where to look, it’s kinda hard for mortals to just ‘look everywhere’, yanno?” He Jiangshan said.
“And bodies float after about four days after death,” Shen Jing spoke up. Realizing that his voice was too loud, judging from the heads turning to look at him, he said in a smaller voice, “Upon death, the bact— the uh… Gases in the body would… expand… Uh, in short, it makes the body buoyant enough to rise to the surface. But the important part is, I guess, the rest might not be at that stage yet?”
That was a butchering of biology. Shen Jing wasn’t even sure that was passable in terms of what the people here would believe— though traditional medicine and its founding beliefs permeated societal understanding of health in pervasive ways, one, Shen Jing didn’t know if it’d fly in an ancient, cultivation setting given how surface level his understanding was, because two, he’d grown up with a largely-western-medicine-based doctor for a mother.
“You read quite a lot of strange books,” Ji Hualiu commented. She sounded a bit amused, though she was still serious. “It could also be that the body didn’t pass through the river entirely. In any case, they’re still looking for the rest. If we’re lucky, they’ll float to the surface somewhere without us having to comb through the riverbed.”
Shen Jing’s voice this time was even smaller; He Jiangshan almost didn’t catch it, given his cultivation level and hearing sensitivity— “Or… some of them… the fish… could’ve taken a nibble…”
Everyone, “......”
Thank you for the chapter!
Thanks for the Chapter.