Osteria's Method of Death

Lin An worked at the Federal Forensic Service in Osteria for three years and dissected 4,200 cadavers. One thousand, three hundred and seventy of them have no names. He thought it was just work. Until he discovered that those nameless corpses had one thing in common: they all fell below the same line before death - the low water line. That line is not in any law, not in any newspaper, but it is real, like an invisible machete, silently erasing those below it. He had a notebook that recorded the drought index of each unknown corpse. He thought this book would be evidence. But then he came to understand that in this country, the truth did not need to be suppressed, it only needed to be filed—filed into extra pages, filed into the basement, filed into the filing cabinet behind three locks. He is not a hero. He's just a forensic doctor. He just, finally, stopped pretending not to see it. This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.