The raindrops hit the frosted glass door of the morgue of Qinghe County Funeral Home. The sound did not sound like rain, but like someone grabbing a lot of gravel outside and throwing it on the window with full force. The drainage pipes had long been blocked by fallen leaves and mud, and turbid rainwater poured down the walls into the corridor. The stench of the sewers that had been soaked for ten and a half months mixed with the smell of formalin that lingered in the funeral home all year round, and penetrated directly into people's nostrils.
Lu Chenzhou leaned on the chair next to the stainless steel dissecting table, playing with a rusty scalpel in his hand. The handle of the knife rotated in circles between his long, pale fingers, reflecting several cold lights from the old, sizzling incandescent lamp above his head.
It was already a quarter past eleven at night.
In this horrible weather, according to the rules of the older generation in Qinghe County, "Don't send dead bodies in the middle of the night, and don't light the soul-inducing lamps on rainy nights." In the middle of the night when it rains heavily, the gloomy atmosphere is the heaviest, and those things that have died uncleanly are most likely to be lifted up by the water vapor. But this is all old history. When Lu Chenzhou entered the career of an undertaker, he had already regarded the so-called taboos as bullshit. He only believed in the knife in his hand and the traces left on the dead body.
"Dingle bell--Dingle-ring--"
The old-fashioned landline phone in the duty room suddenly screamed at the top of its voice, making it particularly harsh in the empty corridor.
Without raising his eyelids, Lu Chenzhou slowly put the scalpel back into the pocket of his white coat, stepped outside through the water, and grabbed the microphone.
