Dissecting My Way to Immortality: A Lowborn Coroner Topples the Great Ning

The Corpse Reveals the Truth: A Lowborn Coroner Topples the Great Ning

The watch in his chest still bears Yuwei’s smile. Ling Chen opens his eyes to find himself beside a heap of corpses in a funeral home.

The stink of stale buns mingles with the smell of decay in his nostrils. Rough blue coroner’s robes chafe his skin. He has become A Jian, the lowest-born coroner in the Great Ning dynasty, a wretched soul who was fighting stray dogs for scraps just yesterday.

“The Li family was wiped out! Evil spirits are to blame!”

Magistrate Zhao’s roar makes his eardrums ache, and the fat man’s finger nearly jabs him in the face. Seventeen bodies lie bleeding in the courtyard. The official trusts only Taoist talismans, and won’t even let this “filthy thing” near the corpses.

But the dead don’t lie.

The middle-aged woman was stabbed with a kitchen cleaver, and the oily residue of almond tofu gleams between her teeth. The flesh beneath the child’s fingernails doesn’t belong to any family member. The angle of the male householder’s wounds shows that his killer was left-handed...

When he grabs the ancestral bone knife and cuts open the woman’s abdomen in full view of the crowd, Magistrate Zhao’s curses, the constables’ cudgels, and the onlookers’ gasps all fade into the background.

“The contents of the victim’s stomach show she ate almond tofu from Wang’s at a quarter past three in the morning. It poured all night, and Wang’s was the only shop in the city open until then.”

Murky fluid drips from the blade and splashes onto the flagstones. He looks up at the trembling cook, his voice colder than a corpse’s. “Tell me, who told you to deliver the late-night snack?”

From modern forensic pathologist to lowborn coroner in ancient times, he has never held just a bone knife. It is a thunderclap, cleaving through corruption.

The Great Ning needs a new way of life.