I Have a Special Crime-Solving Pose [1990S]

[Reader comments are open. Just bookmark the novel to join in, but please don't spoil anything! -3-] [Next novel available for pre-order: My Husband, Who Died in Battle, Has Returned. The blurb is at the very bottom ↓↓] Blurb: Zhou Mo, a police academy student, gets hurt while stepping in to help someone and is ambushed by a criminal. She transmigrates into a minor villainess with the same name in a period crime novel. The original Zhou Mo was a rich heiress who had been secretly in love with the older boy next door since childhood. She followed him all the way to police academy and was assigned to the same unit as him after graduation. Just as she is about to confess her feelings, she learns that he has been secretly dating a female forensic technician in the Criminal Technology Division for a year. Her unrequited love comes to nothing, and the original Zhou Mo is devastated. Distracted at a crime scene, she accidentally gets herself tangled in the rope the victim used to hang himself while collecting evidence. Newly transmigrated Zhou Mo: ??? Um, could someone come and help me? [Beep! Congratulations, Host, you are now bound to the “Magical Justice” System!] * After binding with the System, Zhou Mo discovers that as long as she can recreate the victim's pose at the time of death, she can obtain a crucial clue. Whether this System is just is debatable, but it really is “magical” :) [Beep! Host has successfully recreated the victim's death pose and obtained one crime-scene memory fragment.] [Beep! Host has successfully climbed into the suitcase used to dump the victim's body and obtained one clue about the murder weapon.] [Beep! Host has successfully stuffed herself into the giant iron pot in which the victim's dismembered body was cooked. However, the number of body parts doesn't match. Please keep trying! (*^▽^*)] Zhou Mo: !!! Does solving a dismemberment case mean she has to mince herself into meat filling too? * Everyone in Huacheng's police force knows that Zhou Mo, the new policewoman at the Nanguan Precinct, is a “little spirit medium.” Rumor has it that if you let her “communicate” with the deceased at a crime scene, she'll find clues that the living can't uncover. At first, no one believed it. Wasn't this just superstition? Had she really become a medium? But then Zhou Mo went on to solve a grain-spying case, a university poisoning case, a body hidden in a dog cage case, an art forgery case, and more... Whenever everyone else is at a loss, Zhou Mo sees straight through the clues, pinpoints the heart of the matter, and exposes the biggest flaw in the culprit's story. She rises from a rookie officer to one promotion after another, earning a second-class personal merit award and recognition as an outstanding member of the political and legal system. She travels to the provincial capital to receive awards and to the department headquarters to give speeches... She is the undisputed “Light of Huacheng” and “Snowland Detective,” celebrated in newspapers and on television. The criminal underworld even privately dubs her the “Female Yama of the Bailiang River,” and the crime rate plummets. Don't mess with her, don't mess with her! The Female Yama really can communicate with ghosts and spirits. She has yin-yang eyes and has come to claim our lives! * Ying Shuyan, director of the Huacheng Forensic Center, is a brilliant doctoral graduate who studied abroad. He's highly skilled and technically gifted, but cold and solitary. He spends all twenty-four hours of every day in the autopsy room and is unwilling to say more than a few words to his colleagues. Until the day he lifts the white sheet covering a body and meets a pair of bright, sparkling almond eyes. Zhou Mo gives an awkward laugh. “I was just trying to solve the case by immersively experiencing the victim's state of mind. Do you... believe me?” Ying Shuyan: ...I don't understand, but I respect it. .jpg Later, he watches the young policewoman grow more and more “eccentric.” She climbs mountains and wades through rivers, crawls into holes and pots, and gets herself filthy in the name of solving cases. Then, in the next moment, she beams and waves excitedly. “Found it!” She even takes things a step further, tying herself up and guiding his hand to hold a scalpel, then making him stab her in the heart. “Director Ying, your hands are steady and your cuts are precise. Help me out.” Reader's guide: 1. Set in 1990s Northeast China, with no specific real city as a model. Some details come from the author's childhood memories and stories told by older relatives, so they may not be entirely accurate. They're mainly here to serve the plot, so you can treat the setting as fictional. 2. Zhou Mo x Ying Shuyan. The plot comes first, but the male lead is not just a background character (firm nod). 4. The heroine is the strongest, but promotions and pay raises take time and growth. There's a little of everything: daily life, family, career, and romance. Supporting characters aren't just plot devices, and there's a touch of an ensemble cast. 5. The golden finger is very powerful. The professional knowledge about criminal investigations was learned from various sources, including research and documentaries. Please point out any errors. If something is a plot clue or the real-world details are intentionally vague for the sake of the story, I'll explain in the comments. 6. Read or drop it as you like. Please don't offer writing advice. Don't divide good and bad people by gender. I won't change the wording. I'll add anything else that comes to mind later ^_^ The initial inspiration came in August 2024. The blurb was posted on May 29, 2025, and a screenshot has been saved. -----Blurb for My Husband, Who Died in Battle, Has Returned----- A soft, resilient concubine-born young lady x a seemingly proper and aloof, but actually unscrupulous, obsessive, and shameless top scholar [Watch the refined and proper top scholar become a stand-in for love, pretending to be her dead husband and climbing through the window in the middle of the night.] - Xu Shizheng is the fourth daughter born to a concubine in the household of the Vice Minister of Rites. Born with skin like jade and beauty like a flower, she can only hide beneath her legitimate elder sister's radiance, carefully scraping by in the inner quarters. At sixteen, her stepmother arranges for her to marry the promising young General Zhou, the Empress's nephew. Everyone in the capital praises Madam Xu for her virtue. Only Xu Shizheng feels uneasy. General Zhou was the husband her stepmother painstakingly chose for her legitimate daughter. How had he suddenly become Xu Shizheng's husband instead? - On their wedding day, the border is under attack, and the groom is ordered to the front before he can even lift the bridal veil. A month later, news arrives that he has died in battle. Xu Shizheng is widowed just after entering the household. The emperor posthumously enfeoffs General Zhou as Marquis of Zhenbei, making Xu Shizheng a marquise. She must provide an heir for her late husband, and can never return to her family and remarry. On the forty-ninth night after her husband's death, Xu Shizheng is hiding under the covers, quietly crying over her miserable fate, when the back window suddenly opens. “Madam, I'm back.” Xu Shizheng has pastry crumbs on her face that she hasn't had time to wipe away... Has he come back from the dead? - By day, Xu Shizheng manages the marquis household and matches wits with the Zhou family's awful relatives, while trying to fit into the capital's upper social circles. At night, she has to be close and intimate with her “dead husband,” who appears and disappears mysteriously while carrying out secret missions for the emperor. She hasn't had a full night's sleep in ages. She lies across the bed, yawning again and again, her voice soft and broken with tears as she asks her husband when he can come home openly. He keeps moving, gently brushing his fingertips over her hair and back as he says, “A Yuan, bear with it a little longer. It'll be soon.” - Until one day, she catches sight of a red official robe on the street and a profile so breathtaking that it steals her gaze. Someone says it's Xue Lin, the only son of the Princess Royal and the capital's new top scholar. Xu Shizheng frowns. Why does the top scholar look so much like the husband who sneaks into her room every night? - Before her engagement, Xu Yining has a dream. In it, she marries General Zhou and is widowed. Unable to bear the loneliness, she secretly meets another man, but her mother-in-law catches them and reports her. The Empress is enraged and confines her to a country estate outside the capital, where she suffers until she dies of cold and hunger. Meanwhile, the timid concubine-born younger sister who had always been the least noticeable girl in the family is casually married off by their father to a newly graduated scholar. She leaves the capital with him when he is posted elsewhere. A few years later, he earns great merit for his work on river management and is repeatedly promoted. Before he turns thirty, he becomes a second-rank River Commissioner, outranking even their father by two ranks. Xu Yining does everything she can to switch marriages with her younger sister. Sure enough, not long afterward, news arrives that General Zhou has died at the border, and she laughs aloud at home. But she waits and waits, and not only does she never see her younger sister suffer the misery of widowhood, she watches her thrive in the capital as a marquise. Until the day of the court assembly, when the Princess Royal's only son, the new top scholar, disregards his friendship with General Zhou and asks the emperor to let him marry her widowed younger sister. Xu Yining falls apart. After being posted away, she hounds her husband every day to make something of himself. Go fix those rivers! Her husband is completely baffled. He spent more than a decade studying by lamplight. What does he know about water management? - Reader's guide: Swapping marriage partners between sisters / possessive love / stole his brother's wife / identity reveal, then the husband pursues his wife to win her back Romance-focused, with the heroine's career gradually developing in the later part of the story Theme: Pursue justice at any cost