Chapter 43: The scene

This thought made me a little nervous, so I quickly walked with Huigen and Chengzhen to the scene of the accident.

At this moment, the place where the accident happened had already been cordoned off by the police, and the cordon was in place. The crowd had gathered around the cordon, but they refused to leave, talking noisily.

The three of us finally managed to squeeze into the crowd and saw that the place surrounded by the police line was the small store where I met Huigen. At this time, the three-story building of the small store was surrounded by police, and several policemen were coming and going, not looking too good.

I saw that Hui Gen’er’s face had become ugly, so I turned to a passer-by and asked in a low voice, “What happened in the middle of the night?”

The man was a middle-aged man. When he heard me ask him a question, he turned his head with a somewhat surprised look and looked at me a few times, saying, “Are you from outside the city? I can tell from your accent that you’re not from here.”

“Well, I’m from out of town. I was going to go back to the hotel after I finished my business, but then I found out that…” I said casually.

The middle-aged man interrupted me with a sigh and said in a low voice, “Hey, people from other places don’t understand. Although our county is not big and the people are simple, there have been some bizarre murders in recent years, which has made people on our side panic. This time, I heard that the father and daughter who depended on each other in this small shop were killed.”

I was stunned. Dead? Killed?

Hui Gen’s face suddenly turned pale, and it took him a long time to chant a Buddhist mantra and say “Amitabha.” After a while, he whispered to me, “Brother, let’s try to go in and take a look. In fact, I noticed something was wrong from the beginning.”

“Wrong?”

“Well, I’ve only been able to see a little bit in the past year, and that is the fortune of people. I often stay in this store and find that the boss and his daughter have that kind of faint red light around them, so I stayed to see if I could help them. But my eyes are also sometimes clear and sometimes not. After three days, I found that the red light on them had faded away, so…” Hui Gen was a little agitated and said something incoherent.

But I understood what was going on. It is not possible to see a person’s luck with the Taoist heavenly eye, but with a special technique of physiognomy, and there are many restrictions.

However, there are two special cases where there are no restrictions. One is ghosts and spirits, which can “see” when a person’s luck is particularly obvious. The other is that the purer a person’s mind is, the more they can see through this luck with their eyes. When they reach a certain level, they can even break through the barriers of time and space and see the past and the future.

But this is just a legend. I didn’t expect Hui Gen to be able to see it by chance. It seems that Hui Gen’s heart has reached a certain level.

I looked deeply at Huigen, patted him on the shoulder, and said nothing more. Instead, I walked straight through the cordon and headed inside. Huigen followed me, and Chengzhen also followed me with a somewhat displeased look on his face, muttering, “Chengyi, I just came to see the fun. How could you go to a murder scene? How could you be so serious?”

I pulled Chengzhen over and whispered, “The dead man was familiar with Huigen, so I have to go take a look.”

Chengzhen didn’t say anything. Although his face was still ugly, he still looked at Huigen with a comforting glance. Huigen’s mouth was tightly pursed, and it was obvious that he was not in a good mood.

We had just taken a few steps inside when a policeman stopped us and said that martial law had been declared and that we should leave immediately.

Faced with this situation, I naturally had a way to deal with it. I took out a piece of identification from my wallet. This was a special document issued to me by the department where Hongzi worked after the ghost incident. However, the police station in this county did not recognize this kind of document. I said to him, “I am also a member of the public security organ, but the department I work in is relatively secretive. Can you take a look at the document and lend me a phone to use?”

The policeman looked at the document and was a little confused, but he still lent me the phone. I called a person from a familiar department directly. He had a relatively high status and belonged to the public security department. Then he explained the situation.

After a few phone calls, the policeman who looked at my ID finally got a call from their boss, and then looked at the three of us with an inexplicable look, and then let us in with a kind of “awe.”

“I didn’t expect an ID card from a department to be so useful! Next time I’ll get one too. I wonder if I can eat for free at the state-run guesthouse or canteen?” Cheng Zhen said to herself, completely inheriting the nature of Uncle Wang’s “stingy” character. Then she said, “Chengyi, you guys go in. I’ll wait for you here.”

I looked at Chengzhen in silence, and then walked into the commissary with Huigen.

In my impression, this small store was quite clean and tidy, but now it was a mess, with scattered goods and broken glass counters. It was obvious that the father and daughter of this small store had a fight with the murderer!

Turning into the back room, I saw a large pool of blood. Because it had been there for some time, the blood had already begun to coagulate and turn black, and the entire room was filled with a pungent smell of blood.

My face became ugly, and Huigen sang a Buddhist chant. There were two policemen carefully collecting evidence. I walked over and asked, “Are their bodies still here? How did they find out they were dead?”

The policeman looked at me strangely, obviously not knowing where I had come from. At this time, a voice came from beside me: “This is the leader from above. He happened to encounter this case. If you know anything, answer it well.”

I looked and saw that it was the policeman I had just borrowed the phone from. He had also followed me in, and it seemed that he had thought of everything.

A colleague spoke up, and the policeman was quite straightforward: “The body is still up there, so if you want to go and see it, you’d better be prepared. As for the person who reported the crime, they were a few neighbors who heard the fighting here, then came to see what was going on, found that no one was answering the door, kicked it open and found the fighting and bloodstains. They didn’t have time to look at the body before reporting it… There’s a backyard here, and it’s in a relatively remote location, so the neighbors couldn’t see what was going on. We think the murderer escaped from there.”

I am a Taoist priest, not a professional detective, and I don’t know any sophisticated logical reasoning. I just nodded when I heard this. If I were to find clues, I would only be able to start from the spiritual aspect. Of course, I would only be able to do so if there were traces to follow. If the ghost at the scene of the murder had already left, then I would be helpless. After all, ghosts must follow certain rules, such as reincarnation and being taken away, as described in the legends. I have no evidence in this regard and don’t know much about it.

“I hope they have already left, otherwise they will become vengeful ghosts or fierce ghosts. They will be restrained by some kind of energy field and not be able to leave, which is very miserable.” Hui Gen said softly.

At this point, we had already left the bloody room that looked like the first crime scene and were heading upstairs!

There was a long trail of blood on the stairs. Just by looking at it, I felt as if I had seen the bodies of the innocent father and daughter being dragged up the stairs, leaving a long trail of blood. But why did the murderer drag the bodies? I couldn’t figure it out.

Up the stairs, which were covered in bloodstains, was the second-floor room. Two doors faced each other, just like in a typical apartment building. At this moment, a police cordon had been set up here, and two policemen, with pale faces, were standing at the door.

“This is the leader from above…” The policeman who was following us started to speak again, saving me the trouble of explaining to them. After a while, one of the policemen kindly said to me, “It’s best not to go in and look. I’ve been a policeman for ten years, but I still can’t resist it. I vomited as soon as I went out.”

As he spoke, the policeman was a little embarrassed. After all, being scared at a murder scene or vomiting is a sign of poor psychological quality, and police officers have always been ashamed of it.

Another policeman also said, “Yes, in this series of cases, there are not many who can withstand it once a corpse is found.”

I had already planned to enter the house, but after hearing his words, I couldn’t help but frown and ask, “A series of cases?”

“Yes, a series of cases. It started three years ago. There have been six such cases, and counting the victim this time, eight people have died. Because the impact is too bad, the higher-ups have suppressed it, and we are under pressure to solve the case. The first few cases were fine. The locations of the crimes were all in the area near the county seat, and there was a certain distance between them, so the impact could be suppressed by the higher-ups. I didn’t expect the murderer to kill all the way to the county seat.” The policeman who was with me carefully and mysteriously explained to me.

I frowned and thought of the so-called information that Huigen had inquired about. I couldn’t help but associate it with the Lake of a Thousand Ghosts. Could there be a connection?

However, I was still thinking about it when Hui Gen’er, who had already entered the room, suddenly sang a Buddhist chant. I could hear that his voice was slightly trembling and excited. I could tell that he was a little angry.

I quickly rushed into the room. The lights in the room were blindingly bright, making it seem a bit blinding and unreal. I immediately saw the female corpse on the bed and the male corpse kneeling next to it, which was forcibly fixed. My stomach suddenly tightened!

The scene was like a hell, and I suspected that this was not something that humans could do!