Nine Serious Cases of the Ming Dynasty

The Archives Pavilion in Jingchuan County is always filled with the smell of old ink and blood rust. Yu Junshuang's fingertips wandered among the yellowed documents, and every crease was an unhealed wound. The banging of the hammer in the middle of the night could not dispel the chill in the morgue, and the glass lamp illuminated the frozen panic in the corpse's pupils. The indigo corpse spots spread out on the rice paper, very much like the "dragon spitting out beads" phenomenon recorded in the county annals. The looms in the dyeing workshop are still running, and the cinnabar-dyed satin is soaked in night dew and unfolds to reveal the outline of a human figure. The abacus beads in the warehouse were scattered all over the floor, and dents of varying depths were carved on the blue bricks, which were connected to the direction of the mountains outside the city. The thin coffin in Yizhuang is always moved before dawn, and the incense ash on the bottom of the coffin is exactly the same as the altar under the century-old locust tree in the backyard of the county government office. The autopsy sheet he made is always fresh, but he remembers the cause of death twenty years ago. The yamen servant's waist knife was three inches out of its sheath, with copper shavings from the lock cylinder of the secret room remaining on the blade. The record of the night of the crime is always missing from the watchman's night patrol route map. Yu Junshuang's abacus beads jumped on their own, and the same indigo juice that was in the throat of the deceased oozed from the cracked cracks in the thirteen-level sandalwood. Regular tapping sounds came from under the floor tiles of the county government office, which completely matched the earthquake cycle recorded in the county annals. The ice cracks on the study window lattice will form a complete autopsy grid on a full moon night, and the name strokes of all the deceased can just fill in the blank genealogy in the Yufu ancestral hall.