Night Chase: Criminal Investigation

[Next up: a modern-era Republican China espionage romance, currently being drafted!]

[Echoes of the Abyss x A Chain of Silent Evidence] [Everyone Is Evil / Dark]

[Classic Detective Fiction x Physics x Chemistry] [Narrative deception in the latter half]

[PS: The dark characters' worldviews do not represent the author's.]

Death records become codes, and lividity reveals the silent truth.

On the xth day of lockdown, Ning Xiangwan discovers the yth body in an emergency passage. The pattern of lividity is displaced from the findings in the natural-death report released by the Epidemic Prevention Command Center.

During the city's lockdown, one bureau's system shows that death certificates issued have fallen 60% year-on-year, yet security footage from the morgue reveals that the number of hearse trips has secretly quadrupled.

As Gu Yunshu revises the same autopsy report again and again, the city's chief forensic pathologist, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, finds pale blue fibers from official stationery used by a certain department caught beneath the victim's fingernails.

What truth is hidden in Jinghai City's quarantine zone?

Nothing is known yet...

At three in the morning, in the autopsy room.

The lights in the dissection room cast their shadows on the wall.

Gu Yunshu's scalpel presses against the bloodied side of her neck.

Ning Xiangwan pulls off her glove and sneers:

"Forensic Doctor Gu, your hand is steadier than a killer's...

How many bodies have you cut open to master that trick?"

The gun barrel slowly lowers, pressing against the place where Gu Yunshu's heart lies beneath her white coat.

"Let me guess, how many hearts have you dissected here,

without ever touching a living person's?"

Her scalpel tip hooks open Ning Xiangwan's collar, exposing an old injury on her collarbone.

"Officer Ning's gun, on the other hand, seems very fond of the living."

She leans in and inhales the scent of blood.

"Three through-and-through wounds, two broken ribs. Didn't the police force teach you how to stay alive?"

She suddenly presses her bloodstained glove into Ning Xiangwan's palm.

"Why not hand over this battered body to me?

At least I can dissect it and leave it in one piece."

Reader's guide:

Love and hate x two formidable women

Reunion after a long separation x mending a broken relationship

Many clues and hidden threads

The setting is entirely fictional (with some original worldbuilding).

Not based on real events.

Theme: Live toward the sun