Chapter 133: The Five Elements Poisonous Classics (1/2)

Captain Xing took us to a hotel near Nanjiang Medical School. I suddenly remembered that Sun Tiger’s daughter, Sun Bingxin, was a student there, but I’d never visited her here.

“Are the couple medical students?” I asked.

“No,” Captain Xing shook his head. “The man is a rich man’s son. His father is the owner of East Asian International Corporation. The victim was a model.”

“Whoa!” Dali cried with his mouth open. “You mean the dude’s father owns the East Asian Mall?”

“Yup,” Captain Xing answered. “That’s the one.”

The East Asian Supermarket was a large national supermarket chain. It ranked among the top five in the domestic retail industry. I heard that their headquarters was in Nanjiang! In addition to the retail industry, the East Asia International Corporation was also involved with hardware, household chemicals, food, clothing, and other industries. Half of the goods in their supermarkets were produced by themselves.

In short, the guy involved in this case was no small fry. Compared to him, even Ye Shiwen was just another ordinary guy.

“Why would these people stay in a small hotel near the college?” I asked. “Would a rich guy stay at a cheap place like that?”

“I’m not sure either,” Captain Xing answered. “But it was the model’s name that was filled in on the check-in form.”

There were a lot of police cars parked around the hotel and some passing students started to crowd around trying to find out what was going on. I glanced around, for fear that I would bump into Sun Bingxin here. We were childhood friends after all, and all these years not once did I pay her a visit, even though we had been studying in the same city.

Dali had no idea what went through my head, so he smiled naughtily at me and teased, “Dude, these girls are on another level, aren’t they? I’m kind of regretting not studying medicine right now.”

“Didn’t you hear about that murder case in the news?” I asked. “There’s a medical student who stabbed her boyfriend for cheating on her. She knew exactly where to stab so he’d die a painful death, but in the end all she got was a manslaughter charge. Do you want a girlfriend like that?”

“Can you not spoil the mood?” Dali snapped.

We crossed over the police line and entered the hotel. The murder scene was up on the fifth floor. I saw a room with its door ajar and with policemen standing near it, so I went in immediately. There was a body on the bed covered with a white sheet and a handsome young man looking distraught talking to the police.

As soon as Dali saw the corpse, he gasped and grasped my shoulder tightly.

“Calm down!” I whispered.

All eyes in the room turned to us. Many of the police officers had met me before, and they smiled when they saw me.

“This is Special Consultant Song Yang,” Captain Xing announced. “You’ve all heard of him before, haven’t you? I asked for his help to solve this case.”

When one of the police officers who knew me heard it, he immediately lit up and said, “Now that Song Yang’s here, this case is practically closed!”

“Whoa, dude, you’re famous!” Dali crowed with a grin on his face. “Aren’t you proud of yourself?”

“Shut up!” I spat. Then I turned to Captain Xing and asked, “Can I take a look at the body now?”

“Sure!” he replied. He then told everyone to get out of the room because it was getting really crowded in there.

I pulled up the white sheet and saw the corpse of a woman lying on her back on the bed. She was clearly very attractive when she was alive, but now, she was no different from any other corpse.

I put on the latex gloves and pried the victim’s eyes open to check the pupils. I then pressed the skin with my fingers, then moved the joints. I found that the cornea of her eyes had turned cloudy, rigor mortis had set in, and livor mortis had appeared but it still dissipated when I pressed on the skin. This meant that the time of death should’ve been about two to three hours ago.

Captain Xing nodded as he heard my conclusions, telling me that these were the same things that Coroner Wu had told him. The coroner was not here at the moment because he had to run to the nearby hospital to do some testing on a few pills that were found at the scene at one of their labs.

At that moment, I noticed that the blood vessels on the victim’s body were dark brown and her nails were blue.

In truth, Traditional Coroners tested for poisons too. They used silver needles to test for poisons. They were ridiculed nowadays as quacks and pseudoscientific, but in fact, silver would react with arsenic—a common poison in ancient times—and turn black.

As time passed, new poisons continuously emerged, and with that, Traditional Coroners adapted accordingly. The first edition of The Chronicles of Grand Magistrates listed about two hundred poisons in one of its chapters. By the time the book was passed down to Grandpa, the list had grown to 4,600 poisons. That might sound like a huge number, but currently there were over thirty thousand known toxic substances in the world. In other words, I must admit that poisons were a major weakness of mine.

Fortunately, I was able to guess the exact poison used in this case. All I had to do now was verify it.

I asked Dali to turn the body over to see if there were any signs of trauma and poisoning. Dali’s face turned red as he approached the corpse, so I whispered to him, “Are you seriously blushing in front of a dead body? You’re not a necrophile, are you?”

“Shut up!” he retorted. “You’re the weird one! What red-blooded man wouldn’t blush when they see a nude body? How can you be so calm?”