On a rainy night, a male corpse was found in a meditating posture in an abandoned ancestral hall.
The skin on the back of the corpse peeled off like a snake's slough, and three pillars of incense sticks were inserted into the incense burner.
"It's a magic sacrifice!" The old detective asserted.
I squatted down and brushed my fingertips over the shed skin tissue on the back of the corpse.
"Sloughing? No, this is the layer of skin after the rupture of putrid blisters."
Opening up the ashes of the incense burner, the unburned yellow talisman revealed the printed factory logo.
The indigo fibers in the nails of the deceased pointed to the dyeing workshop thirty miles away.
When the technical department reported the DNA results, I pushed aside the dusty old case files.
Under the photo of a female textile worker who disappeared in 1992, the same indigo blue work clothes fabric was covered.
